Rough Seas, Smooth Sailing

Pirates from the Barbary Coast of North Africa, also called Ottoman Corsairs, pillaged the length of Mediterranenan and north along Europe’s Atlantic coastline for centuries. Their ship was the rowed galley, easy to sail and row near the coast and yet heavily armed. Because in the relatively calm waters of the Mediterranean merchant vessels could easily be overcome by the pirates’ galleys. The favoured tactic of the them was to creep up behind  a ship, heave over grappling hooks and ropes and rapidly clamber aboard. The outcome of these encounters was almost invariably a swift victory for the pirates.

Spanish Men-of-War Engaging Barbary Corsairs, by Cornelis Hendricks Vroom 1615

These pirates were not only interested in loot, but also in slaves, and so the men of the captured ships who were not killed were made slaves. So also happened in April 1641, Revd. Devereux Spratt joined the vessel John Filmer which was carrying 120 passengers across the Irish Sea to England. They had not even lost sight of land before they were carried off by Barbary pirates as slaves. Spratt was lucky- he was ransomed after two years and was able to return home. Most of those snatched away suffered cruelly, chained to the oars in galleys, or forced into unremitting physical labour ashore, eventually meeting wretched deaths. No Chritian nation was immune.

Such was the extent of the Barbary terror hat parish churches in Spain and Italy kept locked collection boxes marked for the poor slaves. England even set aside an Algerian duty from customs income to finance redemptions. In 1646 Edward Casson headed a large- scale ransoming that freed 244 slaves, but these concerted efforts were rare- for most there was little hope. The Barbary slave trade even features in Samuel Pepys’ diary, in an entry from 8th February 1661:

‘…went to the Fleece Tavern to drink; and there we spent till four o’clock, telling stories of Algiers, and the manner of the life of slaves there! And truly Captn. Mootham and Mr. Dawes (who have been both slaves there) did make me fully acquainted with their condition there: as, how they eat nothing but bread and water. … How they are beat upon the soles of their feet and bellies at the liberty of their padron. How they are all, at night, called into their master’s Bagnard; and there they lie. How the poorest men do use their slaves best. How some rogues do live well, if they do invent to bring their masters in so much a week by their industry or theft; and then they are put to no other work at all. And theft there is counted no great crime at all…’

British sailors boarding an Algerine pirate ship, by John Fairburn 1825

In the 17th century they even raided the English coast from time to time which resulted in several hundred people being forced into slavery. From 1530 to 1780, a quarter of a million Christians are thought to have been in slavery.

Famous Corsairs

This kind of fighting technique and carping can be seen from time to time in privateers, which is why historian Adrian Tinniswood believes that the pirates were mostly renegade europeans who had learned their trade on privateers and warships. Therefore it is not surprising that there were actually Europeans who had made a name for themselves there.  

The Barbarossa Brothers

Oruç and Hızır Hayreddin were of Albanian Greek origin, who made a name for themselves as successful pirates. Oruç conquered the island of Djerba for the Ottoman Empire in 1502 or 1503. He frequently attacked Spanish areas on the coast of North Africa; in a failed attempt in 1512, he lost his left arm to a cannonball. The oldest Barbarossa also raged in Algiers in 1516 and conquered the city with the help of the Ottoman Empire. He executed the ruler  of Algiers and everyone he suspected would oppose him, including the local rulers. Finally, in 1518, he was captured by the Spaniards, killed and put on display. Hizir, who was mainly acting from land, several of him occupied many important coastal areas and was appointed chief admiral of the Ottoman Sultan’s fleet. Under his command, the Ottoman Empire was able to gain and maintain control of the Mediterranean for over thirty years. Barbaros Hızır Hayreddin Pasha died of a fever in 1546.

Stephen Decaturs conflict with Algerine of Tripolis 1804, by Alonzo Chappell

Sayyida al-Hurra

She was a Moroccan princess of Tetouan born 1485. In Morocco, she gathered a crew consisting mostly of Moors living in exile and started pirate expeditions against Spain and Portugal to avenge the Reconquista, protect Morocco from Christian pirates and seek wealth and fame. Together with her allies, the Barbarossa Brothers, she founded the Barbary Corsairs. Sayyida al-Hurra became so rich and famous that the Sultan of Morocco, Ahmad al-Wattasi, made her his queen.

Of course there are more, but they don’t fit in here anymore due to lack of space.

Action Between the Dutch Fleet (merchant convoy) and Barbary Pirates,  Lieve Pietersz Verschuier, 1670

The End

Sometimes people get the impression that the pirates of Barbary were the only pirates and slavers in the Mediterranean, and everyone else was trying to trade peacefully, poor things. And I cannot stress enough how that is NOT the case. At the height of Barbary’s power, maritime raiding was normal, casual, and basically the default for pretty much everyone who sailed that sea, while buying stolen goods (including people) from pirates was a fundamental part of the economy.

Like, the English ship that carried the new ambassador to Istanbul and the ascension gift for the new sultan in ~1600 kept delaying “to take prizes, including some belonging to Ottoman subjects" – which is freaking hilarious. That’s how casual it was. Or, around the same time, the Grand Master of the Order of Saint John (aka the Knights Hospitaller) wanted to give a gift to the Pope, and offered 100 Turkish slaves, taken by piracy. No sweat.

Now, to be fair, the Barbary pirates (or corsairs – it’s complicated) made a living almost exclusively from piracy, whereas Venice and the Ottoman Empire etc also traded normally, and exported their own goods and all that. So a good comparison would be with the aforementioned Knights Hospitaller, who were sitting atop a massive slave market in Malta, and other than raiding ships and coastal settlements, did absolutely nothing productive. Of course, they had the pretext of holy war. But then again, so did Barbary, and neither was as adamant to protect their own and only fight infidels in practice as they were in theory.

Here are the reasons why we have (still!) a biased narrative where evil Barbary pirates disrupt Mediterranean trade all by their lonesome:

Eurocentrism, duh

The primary sources are extremely uneven, for both facts and perspectives.

Perspectives: Western sources include many memoirs and testimonies of people who were enslaved by Barbary pirates, and then were freed or escaped. (Like Cervantes.) We have zero such memoirs by Muslims, and yet we know they were enslaved and sold and bought, ending up as slave workers in agriculture, or domestic slaves, or galley slaves. Same thing for memoirs of corsairs themselves. First person narratives are a huge deal.

Facts: So hey, you know how court documents are a super important source for anything crime-related? For that to happen, the courts need to keep documents, and they generally only do that when there’s a concept of legal precedents, and jurists/judges need to reference them later. Well, the Ottoman legal system held legal precedents SO high, that scribes scraped all the factual information off court cases (who did what to whom, where and when) and kept only the result that judges would need ("when Ottoman subjects of Christian faith fall prey to Ottoman pirates of Muslim faith, the state must compensate them by so-and-so”). And poor historians try to piece together what the heck happened to result in such a guideline. It ain’t easy!

Language: Comprehensive histories of piracy in the Mediterranean were written by people who couldn’t read Ottoman and Arabic documents at all, and didn’t have access to translations either.

Orientalism, duh. As Said summarised it, it’s all “Oriental despotism, Oriental splendour, cruelty, sensuality”, oh my.

There’s an emphasis on late 18th-early 19th century (when the Eastern Question ™ arises, the Ottoman Empire has basically started to collapse and doesn’t even know it, and Barbary is like a relic stuck to practices that make increasingly less sense in the new balance of powers) – but you can’t extrapolate from that particular mess back to previous centuries, when the balance of powers was a giant clusterfuck.

So, to illustrate WHO exactly was committing piracy in the Mediterranean, I wrote a little song for you (with apologies to Cole Porter).

Turks do it, Greeks do it Pirates and privateers do it Let’s do it, let’s raid some ships

In Spain the best upper sets do it Arabs, Englishmen and French do it Let’s do it, let’s raid some ships

In Malta Knights of Saint John do it Not to mention corsairs Folks from up north do it Think of the renegades

Some Genoese in the breeze do it People say in Venice even fish do it Let’s do it, let’s raid some ships

Tunisians in Barbary do it Ottomans in the White Sea do it Let’s do it, let’s raid some ships

Fishermen, lords, rich and poor do it Christians, Muslims and Jews do it Let’s do it, let’s raid some ships

Corsicans in the Big Blue do it It will shock you, I know The navies too do it Isn’t that what they’re for?

Two pirate ladies off on an adventure~

Elizabeth Morgan by Othon Nikolaidis

Game card illustration for the board game “Απόδραση απο το Νησί των Πειρατών” (transl. “Escape from the Pirate Isle”). Elizabeth turned her back on her noble heritage, in favor of an adventure-filled life at sea, as captain of a pirate ship of course… Still some connections with her previous life are secretly maintained …

I have finally managed to gather some material that will be able to give you some informations. Unfortunately this topic has not been edited or even published so this is rather incomplete, but maybe it gives an insight into the topic. As soon as I have more I will add it. And a big apology to @qsy-complains-a-lot​ , for having waited so long. Well, maybe you can do something with it. 

The loss of a ship was often connected with loss of life, material and cargo. Therefore they tried to salvage the material and the cargo early on, as it was often of high value. In 1658 Albrecht von Treileben tried to recover the valuable cannons with the help of a diving bell. The problem here is that the men only sat in the bell and were supplied with fresh air filled barrels. Therefore only a few cannons could be salvaged. He was more successful there already 1663-1665 when he used divers as well as the diving bell. Besides the valuable cannons, many a ship still has a lot to offer and it was no wonder that many people tried to get hold of the treasures that a ship had supposedly loaded wisely. In 1687 Sir William Phips was in the Caribbean to rescue a Spanish treasure ship from its cargo. By building an improvised barrel and using pearl divers to recover the treasures. For this he was later even knighted, but it was already loudly denounced as immoral.

Illustration from a treatise on salvaging from 1734, showing the traditional method of raising a wreck with the help of anchors and ships or hulks as pontoons, basically the same method that was used to raise Vasa in the 20th century.

And so it was that many in England tried to bring ships to capsize with the help of false signals to get their cargo. In 1735 the actions of these wreckers were punished with death.

As you can see here it was always tried to recover only material but not the whole ship. As long as the wreck did not represent a great danger, it was always marked with a buoy and left where it was. This changed when the Royal George sank in the middle of the Spithead off Portmouth. Not only was her fate a cruel sight, she sank in the middle of the Navy anchorage. And just lay there in the way, she had to go. That’s why they use the salvage hulks. These were old, worn-out warships - preferably ships of the line, they were large and heavy enough. These were connected with planks and now everything possible was tried to move this big ship. Divers dived down to attach ropes and then the three were to be pulled together by other ships. It just didn’t work as well but she made at least 30 yards.

The Attempt made to Salvage the HMS Royal George, c.1783, here they show two normal ships but they used hulks to move her

Working on HMS Royal George 1832

This technique is still used today. Eventually their masts were cut off and they remained where they were until 1832, when the two divers John and Charles Deane, using helmet divers, managed to carry out successful salvage operations and lift 30 cannons. Further work was carried out from 1839 onwards by the army officer Charles Pasley, under whose direction the wreck was largely demolished until 1845, when he and his divers blew it up piece by piece and lifted the remaining guns.

A Representation of H.M.S. Royal George of 108 Guns now lying sunk…. at Spithead, having been under water fifty one years. Mr Deane equipped in his newly invented Diving Apparatus…. in August 1832

The salvage hulks were still used to lift small ships with the help of steamers and their engines. Air was pumped into the wreck while smaller steamships supported the hulks at the sides to prevent them from falling into the water. And so the wreck could be salvaged and transported to the broken up. But there were also cases of ships that were tried to be saved, such as the HMS Euryidice that sank in 1878. They tried everything to save her but unfortunately she was so damaged that she had to be destroyed.

The attempt to raise HMS Eurydice, here they place the first hulk.

Here you can see very well how the paddle steamer supports the Hulk to lift the Eurydice

The raising of HMS Eurydice

“MoodBoard” - Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag - E3 Walk-through mood exploration and moodboard

So, if there is no objection from the Collective, This evening I’ll begin the process of rebuilding what was destroyed as a leadership figure. I’ll need a list of all active collective blogs, as the original list is no more, and I will have to start from scratch.