David Hebb's Piracy and the English Government, 1617-1642

[Daniel]

Piracy and the English Government: 1617-1642. David Hebb.

Hebb studies how the English government handled the rising threat of the Barbary corsairs, who expanded beyond the Mediterranean to raid the shores of England in the 17th century. Hebb builds the story around two major anti-pirate expeditions: Mansell’s attack on Algiers in 1620-21, which ended in humiliating failure, and Rainsborough’s blockade of Sallee in 1637, which succeeded remarkably.

The Barbary corsairs’ reach expanded because they adopted tall ships instead of galleys, whether by developing themselves or by adopting them from Christian renegades like Simon Danser or John Ward. King James I passionately hated pirates, and since he deliberately avoided fighting any wars in Europe, his navy was free to concentrate on the corsairs. It still didn’t work out.

Getting money to build and fit out the ships was one of James’s biggest problems. The corsairs were seen as the merchant shipping interests’ problem, and the Privy Council went to the merchant companies and the port towns to ante up the money for the anti-corsair fleet. The merchants refused to cough up more than £40,000 to attack Algiers, which was pretty stingy considering that the country sustained at least £1 million worth of losses to the corsairs. Still finances only delayed the attack on Algiers; they didn’t cause it to fail.

James also had trouble getting other countries to cooperate with him. It was agreed from the start that England couldn’t suppress the pirates alone. Only the Dutch and the Spanish were considered potentially useful allies (special points for anybody who knows why Portugal wasn’t considered!) Unfortunately, the Dutch and the Spanish hated each other and their truce was about to expire. The Dutch didn’t want to destroy the corsairs at all, because they figured that Spain suffered worse from their attacks than the Netherlands did. The Dutch pretended to want to help England anyway, because England had been their best ally against Spain and they were worried that an Anglo-Spanish pact against the corsairs could draw England onto Spain’s side, but when it came their turn to put up naval forces, the Netherlands folded.

Spain eventually agreed to cooperate, which was more important because Spanish ports were needed to supply and repair any blockading force in front of Algiers. But Spain and England never worked out any plan of joint naval operations, so when the English admiral Mansell finally arrived at Gibraltar to meet the Spanish fleet, he just left the Spanish to patrol the western side of the Straits and went on to Algiers by himself.

What really doomed Mansell’s mission, though, was that he had the wrong ships for the job. Not only were half of them unseaworthy, but they were big, lumbering warships, too slow to catch pirates on the open ocean, and too deep-draughted to properly blockade Algiers; the Algerines could simply sneak into and out of port in the shallows along the coastline, where Mansell’s ships could not follow. Worse still, the Algiers harbor was so open and unsheltered that Mansell didn’t dare try to ride out any serious storms there.

Interestingly, Mansell apparently thought he could negotiate a diplomatic cessation of the Barbary raids on English ships. The pasha of Algiers negotiated with him, but it was just a ploy for time. Mansell tried a direct assault and a fire ship attack, but both were costly failures. After months shuttling ineffectively between Spanish ports and Algiers, Mansell ran out of supplies and had to return ignominiously to England.

This failure was redeemed by some surprisingly successful diplomatic negotiations with Algiers the next year, with the help of the Ottoman government, which England successfully maneuvered into ordering the Barbary ports to cease their attacks. England managed to successfully ransom all English prisoners at a much lower cost than a naval expedition. Realizing that the Algerines would not long honor a treaty that called for them to simply sit in their ports and starve, English diplomats encouraged them instead to focus their attacks on France. This worked well for several years, but eventually France reached its own accommodation with the corsairs and turned them back against the English, even allowing the Algerines for a short time to operate out of France’s Channel ports and march their captives overland to the Riviera to be shipped across the Mediterranean!

When Algiers became reconciled to England, many corsairs in search of plunder moved to Sallee, which by the 1630s became a threat to rival Algiers. Because Sallee lay on the west side of the Straits of Gibraltar, Sallee ships could not be confined to the Mediterranean as easily as Algerine ships, and the town was full of Moriscos, Muslims and Christian converts from Islam who had been expelled from Spain after the 1587 rebellion and were thirsty for revenge. As England began to suffer increasingly from their attacks, pressure began to build for a new expedition.

Rainsborough’s blockade of Sallee in 1637 was much more successful than Mansell’s attack on Algiers. He correctly calculated that a smaller force than Mansell’s would be more effective, because it would use fewer supplies and thus could be kept at sea longer. He used ship’s boats, Spanish galleys, and eventually specially built English pinnaces to interdict the coastal shallows either side of the port. But mostly, he just kept on obstinately being there every day, month in and month out, until Sallee got sick of him. The old-timer inhabitants overruled the Moriscos and sued for peace with the English. Rainsborough got back all the English prisoners, except the ones who had already been sold to Algiers or Tunis, and a peace treaty. Sallee predictably broke the treaty after some years, but never posed the same threat again.

It’s tempting to imagine that the Barbary corsairs ultimately caused the English Civil War, by forcing Charles to impose the hated “ship money” taxes that helped provoke the war. The reality is a bit more complex than that. Charles’s government used the Barbary raids to justify ship money, but he didn’t actually use ship money very much on anti-corsair activities. Most of the funds went to huge warships like the Sovereign of the Seas that were intended to overawe, deter and defend against continental powers, but were much too big and slow to catch corsairs.

There’s also a lot of information about life in Barbary captivity. It was not all being chained to galleys; you could be used for a lot of different jobs in the city or the countryside, and you could well be sold far across North Africa. But wherever you ended up, it was pretty brutal; not quite as bad as being a black slave in Guinea or the Americas (no human sacrifice as in Dahomey and no mention of deliberately torturous executions), but plenty bad enough. Overwork, beatings and tortures were routine, and the captors commonly raped men and women both. Many ransomed prisoners reported efforts to force them to convert to Islam, and while some of those reports may be intended to cover up willing conversion (converts were treated much better than Christians, and compelled conversion is forbidden by the Qur’an), it’s clear that many, probably most, of the reports were true. Being ransomed was no picnic either. If you did “turn Turk,” you couldn’t hide it, at least if you were male: converts were circumcised. Repatriated prisoners who had accepted Islam in captivity, or had been forced to convert, were subjected to public humiliation by their churches and excluded from communion at first; Archbishop Laud later made up a penitential ritual specifically for ransomed prisoners to cleanse them and bring them back into the Anglican church.

I highly recommend this book. It is very well researched, clearly written, and the author is delightfully pugnacious, eager to take on other historians. It is, of course, well pre-Golden Age, but the tactical, technological and financial nature of fighting piracy in the early 17th century is similar in some ways to that of the early 18th century, and the risk of Barbary corsair attacks was still a reality in our period.

Edited June 9, 2011 by Daniel