The Coming Of The Corsairs
by David Stanton

Stand atop Hengistbury Head and look out over the bay and you will be gazing on the scene of countless true-life episodes you can read about in the history books. For you are looking at a stretch of coast that has long stood in the front line of Britain’s history. The history books record men sailing, landing, and fighting battles along the coast here from the Romans onward - the Saxons, the Viking raiders, the Spanish Armada, and later the smugglers and their many battles with the authorities. However one chapter has been omitted so far from the standard histories – that of the Barbary corsairs. The usual reason given for this is that since it deals with slavery, the subject is politically touchy. Yet there is another reason: the sheer scale of the story makes it hard to believe today, for it was not a single event but a drama that lasted two centuries.

‘Britons Never Shall Be Slaves….’
‘Rule, Britannia, Britannia, rule the waves / Britons never shall be slaves’ goes the patriotic song, written in 1745 for a play about Alfred the Great. Alfred’s sea-battles against the invading Danes in The Solent, in Studland Bay and elsewhere along the south coast made him official founder of the Royal Navy, and the song has since become the RN’s instant-recognition ‘signature tune’, used in countless Hollywood films from Mutiny On The Bounty through Pirates of the Caribbean.
However it was not until the 19th century that the Royal Navy in any real sense began to ‘rule the waves’. To quote the online Wikipedia: ‘It is important to note that at the time it appeared, the song - recalling the era when, under Alfred the Great, the British ships outdid the Danish - was not a celebration of an existing state of naval affairs, but a hope and aspiration for the future. Though the Netherlands, which in the 17th Century presented a major challenge to British sea power, were obviously past their peak by 1745, Britain did not yet "rule the waves". The time was still to come when the Royal Navy would be an unchallenged dominant force on the oceans, protecting Britain and her burgeoning Empire from "haughty tyrants" and "foreign strokes".’
In the 18th century the line ‘Britons never shall be slaves’ would be very much a particular hope for the future. For over the preceding century, thousands of Britons had been snatched from the coast, taken to the slave markets of "haughty tyrants" to suffer ‘foreign strokes’ as they spent the rest of their lives under the lash as galley slaves of the Barbary corsairs. It was a situation that would only change in the next century when Britain built herself up into a world-class naval power – partly in response to this threat.

‘The Turks Are Coming!’
In the early 17th Century, the crews of fishing and merchant vessels began to vanish from the south coast. At first the reason for the disappearances was a mystery, for their boats were later found still afloat. But in 1617 the cause became clear. Every year, a Dorset fishing fleet set sail for the rich fishing grounds off Newfoundland. On its way back to Poole, the 1617 fishing fleet was attacked and nearly all the crews captured by a fleet of thirty foreign warships that survivors described as Turkish.
    Turkey was indeed a naval power, but these were not official Turkish forces. Their 16th century predecessors had been, but in 1581 the Sultan in Constantinople gave up the idea of occupying Italy, and disbanded his invasion force. The survivors and their descendants were not simply left to survive as pirates, but had the status of corsairs - the Islamic version of the European ‘privateers’. Privateers, although pirates in all but name, operated under the protection of a license to plunder (called a letter of marque) issued by a monarch, Drake being an example of an English privateer (and slave-owner). Essentially they were authorised to operate against the monarch’s enemies, seizing their ships, cargoes and crews, to disrupt their trade and weaken them economically and militarily. The corsairs were authorised to raid all the coasts of Christendom.
To do this, they were allowed their own city-states, ruled by beys or local regents. Known collectively as the Barbary States, these existed along the stretch of North African coast that is now Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. Along this ‘Barbary Coast’ stood a series of well-fortified ports: Derne, Tunis, Tripoli, Tangiers, Salè or Sallee (Rabat), and most powerful, Algiers. From these bases, the corsairs soon ruled the western Mediterranean and routinely took Europeans captive for ransom. In 1585, Dorset’s MP, the Elizabethan courtier and sailor Sir Walter Raleigh, had reported English captives held for ransom on the Barbary Coast.
    By 1619, they had captured over 300 ships off the south coast. To quote Gerald Norris's West Country Pirates And Buccaneers, after 1620 "often the south-western coast was practically blockaded by them." They halted the local fishing fleets along with the Newfoundland fleet on which Poole depended for its prosperity. The Victoria History Of The County Of Dorset says that in 1622 Weymouth and Lyme complained of economic ruin due to so many of their sailors being held to ransom on the Barbary coast. In 1625 Devon and Cornwall lost a thousand men to the corsairs. The population of England was then only a fraction of its present level, and the Mayor of Poole warned the King that in two years England would have no sailors left. In 1636, Poole, Weymouth and Lyme complained to the king that the coast was "infested" with "Turks" who had recently taken 87 ships and 1,160 men. Dorset historian David Burnett reports that in 1638, the corsairs even pillaged Poole. Altogether, an estimated 20,000 people would be snatched from the south coast - men, women and children. Most simply vanished, with no word as to their fate, but a few were ransomed by missionaries and returned to tell their tales. The men and boys were used mainly as galley slaves, around 200 per ship, chained to their oars till they died. The women and girls met a different fate, as servants or in the harems of the sultans or wealthy merchants.
There was little the government could do, for the early Navy was not equipped to destroy the corsair bases. As early as 1620 an English naval squadron under Sir Robert Mansell had been sent to ransom captives but found this to be impractical – he discovered there were 25,000 of them, with ransoms set at £200-300 each. In 1655 Cromwell sent Admiral Blake to bombard Algiers and Tunis, but the naval firepower of the time could make little impact on the Barbary fortresses. England at that time was divided by political schisms that would lead to civil war, and abolition and then restoration of the monarchy. On the one hand, there was no money to maintain a navy; on the other, the political situation led to many young men fleeing England to make a living elsewhere. These exiles or fugitives would prove the missing factor which explained what seems literally far-fetched about this episode - why and how corsair fleets were managing to sail all the way from the Mediterranean, seize entire fleets or even church congregations (as at Penzance), and return.

'Turning Turk' - The Renegadoes
Some of those fleeing England were political exiles willing to offer aid to England’s enemies. They could have been convicted felons sentenced to transportation to the Caribbean as indentured labour – in effect as slaves. After the abortive 1685 Monmouth Rising, dozens of Dorset men against whom Judge Jeffreys could not find evidence to hang them at his Bloody Assizes were sentenced to this type of slavery simply for being – suspiciously - absent from their place of work. Others might be sailors, perhaps seized by navy press gangs to provide years of forced labour aboard His Majesty’s ships, who had managed to desert in some foreign port. These exiles were the answer to the question, how did the corsairs find their way safely here and back? How did they know where to land to obtain water, food and other necessary supplies?
    With different tides (and this area has a double tide), hidden rocks and shallows, coastal navigation is always treacherous, so that foreign vessels usually employ a local pilot to steer the ship. This is where the exiles came in. They had one marketable asset to sell: they knew where there were rich pickings to be had on an unguarded coast, and they knew the coast’s landmarks, its tides, its hazards, its bays and anchorages. These men who allied with the corsairs became known as renegadoes – the original of our word renegade. The BBC History article ‘British Slaves on the Barbary Coast’) estimates the number of renegadoes by 1680 at 15,000 - including half the corsair captains.
    The Victoria History Of The County Of Dorset adds that "they found Swanage and Studland convenient haunts." This suggests the English renegades and their Moorish associates were not just guiding the corsairs here but bringing them ashore – and getting a friendly welcome ashore at local inns. The area had a history of ‘victualling’ pirates, and associated lawlessness. (An interesting historical footnote is that in the 19th century, Poole residents would refer to Swanage residents ‘Turks,’ commenting on their suspiciously ‘swarthy’ looks.) The Victoria History Of The County Of Dorset adds "The inability to deal with these human vermin was only one indication of the general rottenness of administration."
    Others made captive by the Barbary corsairs could escape life as a galley slave by “turning Turke”. This involved learning the Koran, converting to Islam, being circumcised, adopting a Muslim name, and working with the corsairs. Whether willing or not, the renegadoes were instrumental in the rise of the corsairs, for they assisted them not only as pilots but as ship-builders. Corsair vessels were originally old-style oared galleys, rowed by slaves, and not designed for Atlantic voyages. Many of the original renegadoes were from Holland, a rival mercantile power with whom England was then at war. In 1617, when the first major raid was mounted, the admiral of the Algerian corsair fleet had the Islamic-Dutch name of Süleyman Reis De Veenboer (reis meaning admiral). They also used small sailing vessels called xebecs, the remains of one sunk in the 1630s being found 600 yards off Salcombe in the 1990s. The 7-year underwater excavation of its remains (cannons and gold pieces) was the subject of the 2003 BBC-TV ‘TimeWatch’ documentary White Slaves, Pirate Gold ( ), the archaeologists’ conclusion being it had been captained by a Dutch renegado.
    The earliest notable English renegado on record was Captain John Ward (c.1553-1623?), alias ‘Issouf Reis’, an ex-Navy petty officer who became the equivalent of a millionaire as the "arch-pirate of Tunis." After his fleet was attacked at Tunis by a joint French-Spanish force and his offer of £40,000 in exchange for a pardon from James I was refused, he “turned Turke.” It was this conversion to Islam that ballads and plays about him focussed on, but his real importance to history is indicated by his Dictionary Of National Biography entry. It comments it was he who “introduced the Barbary corsairs to the advantages for piracy of the berton or heavily armed square-rigged ship.” It was the use of these larger seagoing vessels that now allowed the corsairs to sail as far as northern Europe.



‘White Slavery’
The July 2000 Radio 4 documentary “Turks On The Coast” put the number of captives between 1600 and 1800 at over 100,000, but a more recent estimate by an American historian has put the number of Europeans enslaved 1530-1780 at 1.25 million. Pressure grew on politicians to act as ‘captivity narratives’ and other accounts began to circulate, of suffering, degradation, enforced conversion of Christians by ‘heathen’ Moors, circumcision and even castration. (In 1808, a group of soldiers who had been captured by the Turks visited Dorset exhibiting how they had been castrated, Dorset historian Rodney Legg’s theory being this was an outcome of England’s disastrous 1807 attempt to land troops at Constantinople.)
    The response of England and other European powers to the corsair depredations was a mixture of negotiation, bribery, and naval threat. A search of the online version of The Dictionary Of National Biography using the keyword ‘Barbary’ turns up a hundred references to English naval officers and diplomats of the era involved in some aspect of the problem. These evidence an endless cycle of diplomatic meetings, treaties, ransoming captives, paying annual tributes, and when the treaties broke down, sending naval squadrons down to launch futile bombardments of heavily-fortified Barbary ports.
    Despite the Christian horror at the idea of ‘white slavery’, slavery itself was an established part of British history. Britain’s recorded history had begun with the Romans arriving and enslaving the Celtic Britons, something traditionally been regarded by English historians as a beneficial civilising event on the grounds the Celts were then ‘only’ natives. And now, in the 18th Century, the English aristocracy were beginning to trade in slaves themselves on an even larger scale. The first of what would become a total, between 1500 and 1800, of over twelve million slaves from West Africa were already being shipped westward as forced labour for the new colonial plantations in the Caribbean and America, to harvest crops of rum, tobacco, and sugar. The leading journalist of the day, William Cobbett, once said he never partook of these three commodities as all were the products of slave labour. Along the local seafront, the land-owning Rose family whose family seaside villa was ‘Sandhills’ (now HQ of the caravan park on Mudeford seafront) had interests in a Caribbean plantation, as did Captain Marryat, the naval hero and writer of nautical fiction who stayed at his brother’s house along the coast at Chewton Glen.
    England’s Protestant Reformation, her colonial wars with its European rivals, the American and French revolutions, and the wars with Napoleon had kept the Navy preoccupied with other threats from the time of the Armada though to Waterloo in 1815. These conflicts had also forced England into a naval arms race, and after 1815 the Royal Navy was finally freed from other European wars to tackle the long-standing issue of the corsairs.
The corsairs were then still very much in the public mind. In 1814, when Byron published his poem "The Corsair", all 10,000 copies sold out in a day. Coast raids had become less common in the 18th century (the last recorded is in 1760), but the problem of men being seized at sea remained, and was of local concern, Dorset having a strong sea-faring tradition. Poole was the commercial ‘capital’ of Newfoundland colony, and a number of senior Navy men were from Dorset: three of Nelson’s captains at Trafalgar were Dorset men, including his flag-captain Hardy. Prime Minister Pitt’s advisor Sir George Rose, Christchurch’s chief landowner and MP, was a former Royal Navy midshipman who had been wounded in action. It was Rose that Nelson dined with the evening before he sailed for Trafalgar. Pitt also came down to visit Rose, and there is little doubt one of the issues they would have discussed here was the possibility of the Navy tackling the corsair bases.
    At the time, America had also opted for a naval solution to the corsairs issue. It had already been forced to pay over $2 million in tributes since 1783 (when it had ceased to be under British protection). With ransoms running at several thousand dollars a head, President Jefferson determined in 1798 to form a proper Navy to besiege the corsairs. While the European powers battled Napoleon, the new US Navy went into action, blockading Tripoli from 1803 to 1805. Their new Marine Corps would also acquire battle honours in this campaign, referred to in the US Marine Corps hymn, “…to the shores of Tripoli,” when in 1804 they sent a force overland to seize it commando-style. The US Navy also besieged the other chief Barbary stronghold of Algiers in 1812.
Some US historians have since claimed this 1804 raid and 1812 siege put a permanent end to the Barbary slave trade. They have also claimed Algiers was a British puppet state, incited by British “perfidy” to only seize the ships of Britain’s enemy, America (in the War of 1812). The US claim however is somewhat overstated, as any warning sent out by the 1804 military intervention was undermined by a political decision to continue paying tributes. And in 1812, on payment of a legal settlement of compensation and the return of some captives, the US Navy left Algiers intact enough to carry on as a slave port, capturing slaves from around the Mediterranean states. America would continue paying tributes to other Barbary states until 1816.

Naval Engagement
That same year, almost two centuries after the first raid on the Dorset coast, the Royal Navy finally took decisive action, with the two Algiers expeditions of Captain Pellew, Lord Exmouth. If on July 25th, 1816 you had been able to stand atop Hengistbury Head, you would have seen passing along the horizon the Royal Navy task force that would end this threat to the south coast, headed for the Mediterranean, finally with a clear mandate to destroy, as an example to the others, what Lord Exmouth called ‘the most violent’ Barbary state. 
This task force was a specially-formed squadron of 19 ships, manned by nearly a thousand volunteers, including local smugglers. There were three heavy frigates, two light frigates, five ‘gun-brigs,’ four of the new ‘bomb’ vessels carrying Royal Marine artillery, and carried on board the ships were a flotilla of launches fitted out as gun-, rocket-, and mortar-firing auxiliaries. Last came five great ‘line-of-battle’ ships, including two of the new three-deckers – the dreadnoughts of their day, of which Nelson’s flagship HMS Victory is a surviving example. Nelson himself had said 25 of these wooden battle-cruisers would be needed against Algiers, and the Admiralty had offered unlimited resources. But Exmouth insisted that this smaller and more manoeuvrable force of mixed-armament vessels was what he need to fulfil his plan.
    For this was actually the sequel to his diplomatic and reconnaissance mission to Algiers earlier that year. Then, he had conducted diplomatic negotiations and received concessions including the release of many prisoners, at Algiers and Tunis. But he had been unable to obtain a treaty putting an end to the practice of enslaving Christians, and he himself had been threatened with death. He had no authorisation to mount an attack at that time, but knew that reconnaissance was seldom wasted. He had thus ordered a secret survey plan be made of the Algiers fortifications, to plan what fire-power would be needed for an effective bombardment – hence the specialised force he now brought back with him.
The great Moorish fortress of Algiers was defended by over 500 fixed cannon, with a resident corsair squadron in its harbour of nine frigates and corvettes and three dozen gunboats, and a garrison of 40,000 men. Exmouth had his 19 ships, plus 5 Dutch Navy frigates which had joined him at Gibraltar. Using his intelligence sketches of the fortifications, he stationed his 24 ships where the enemy’s fixed cannon were least effective. His own cannon, artillery, rockets and mortars were thus able to rain destruction on the port for nine hours until it was in ruins and ablaze. HMS Impregnable, Albion, Superb, Glasgow, Diana and the other men-of-war fired over 50,000 rounds of cannon shot while the Royal Marines on-board artillery bombarded the harbour with nearly a thousand shells, rockets and bombs.
Out of a naval force of a thousand men, over a hundred were killed and most of the rest wounded, but when they made ready to begin a second day’s bombardment, the enemy surrendered unconditionally, having already lost some 7,000 men. It was then an unparalleled bombardment, his biographer noting the Battle Of Algiers was still recognised, in the 1850s, as “the most memorable occasion on which men-of-war have attacked fortifications.” Altogether, Exmouth’s two expeditions freed over 3,000 slaves, for he was commissioned to act on behalf of other European states, and the treaty he now imposed permanently abolished the seizing and ransoming of any Christians.

Epilogue
The long campaign against the Barbary corsairs is today largely a forgotten episode. The corsairs' final appearance on English soil in 1760, as captives themselves (the result of a shipwreck off Penzance) would be turned in 1880 into a famous comic operetta by Gilbert & Sullivan, with the story sanitized so that the ‘pirates’ became noblemen in disguise. But the corsairs are about to return to the spotlight. Hollywood is making a $100 million adventure film, starring Keanu Reaves, dramatising how the war against the corsairs was really won by America, marking its emergence as a world power via its new Navy and Marine Corps. Tripoli will dramatise the US Marine Corps’ pioneering 1804 overland mission. For there is an obvious modern parallel here with events in the mid-East since the 1970s Iran and Iraq hostage-taking episodes, and with America’s current military presence in the region. The Marines’ land attack on the Libyan capital was indeed the precedent for now-familiar American global strategy. It represented the debut of a newly ascendant military power determined to pursue a strategy of invading other countries when diplomatic solutions fail to produce the desired result.
In the end, the war with the corsairs would mark the beginning of a new world order.