It is a little-known historical fact that for the best part of three hundred years, corsairs sailing from ports on the Barbary Coast preyed upon civilians living along the Mediterranean coastline, attacked cargo boats from non-Islamic nations, carrying their crews off into slavery, and as we shall see, carried out devastating attacks on towns as far away as Baltimore in Ireland and Grindavik, Lón and Djúpivogur in Iceland.
One of the earliest records of English sailors being captured by privateers from the Barbary Coast can be found in the calendar of state papers for 1567, which records that on 13th July of that year, Bishop Edmund Grindall, then the Bishop of London, wrote to William Cecil, the chief advisor to Queen Elizabeth I, asking him to “further the suit of the bearer for a licence to make a collection for ransom of certain Englishmen, captives in Algiers.”
According to the National Maritime Museum in Cornwall, ships from the Barbary Coast were seen off the south-west coast of England as early as 1623. The privateers soon began to attack seagoing vessels anywhere they found them. The crews of these English boats were abducted and taken back to North Africa, where they were enslaved.
On 18th April 1625, Sir James Bagg, the Vice-Admiral of South Cornwall, wrote to George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, to inform him that three Cornish fishing boats and another ship bound for Newfoundland had been attacked by North African privateers. In August 1625, the slavers had even come ashore at Mount's Bay in Cornwall. The people in the village had run to their local church and shut themselves inside. This was all to no avail, for the corsairs cared nothing for the sanctity of a church. They entered the building without a qualm and dragged some sixty people outside, then forced them aboard their rowing boats. These unfortunate Cornish men and woman were taken aboard the waiting ships, whereupon they were transported back to the Barbary Coast, where the slave markets awaited. That same month, the Mayor of Plymouth wrote to the Privy Council and told them that in just ten days, twenty seven ships had been taken by the privateers, and the crews who were aboard had all been enslaved.
As the years passed, the raids continued. In 1634, two ships sailing from Somerset to Ireland were attacked and had their crews taken. In September 1635, six privateers acting together as a “wolf-pack” attacked a ship sailing west of Cornwall. In May 1636, three fishing boats were attacked by the corsairs, and twenty-seven fishermen were taken away as slaves. In June 1636, fishermen who had been sailing between England and Ireland reported that “five of their company were taken by the Turk, and their men, being six or seven in each boat, were carried away.” Seven more boats were attacked by the privateers while fishing between St. Keverne and the Lizard that same month. According to Richard Plummer, the skipper of a barge that was berthed at St. Keverne, “There was no news heard of either men or boats, so that it goes for an absolute truth thereabouts, that they were all surprised by the Turks and carried away.” The situation on the south-west coast of England was so bad that the Justices of The Peace for Cornwall wrote to King Charles I on 14th July 1636:
Beg his Majesty to receive advertisement of complaints lately received from the sea coast of Cornwall, and particularly from East Looe and West Looe. About two months since, three barks of the said towns, on a fishing voyage upon the coasts, were taken by the Turks, and 27 persons carried away into miserable slavery, which loss falls the more heavy upon the said towns, by reason of their former losses in two preceding years, wherein they lost four barks and 42 persons, whereby the said towns are not only impoverished, but by means of the wives and children of these poor captives (being above 100 persons) are so surcharged, as they are likely to fall into great decay, and through the terror of that misery whereunto these persons are carried by these cruel infidels, the owners and seamen rather give over their trade than put their estates and persons into so great peril, there being now 60 vessels and about 200 seamen without employment. In other parts the Turks have taken other vessels, and chased others so that they have run on the rocks, choosing rather to lose their boats than their liberty. These Turks daily show themselves at St. Keverne, Mount's Bay, and other places, that the poor fishermen are fearful not only to go to the sea, but likewise lest these Turks should come on shore and take them out of their houses. Such being the condition of these parts, the justices beseech his Majesty to take the same into his consideration.
On 20th June 1631, a fleet of ships led by a Dutchman who had “turned Turk,” with crews augmented with over two hundred janissaries, sacked the village of Baltimore in Ireland. The man leading the raid had been born in the Dutch city of Haarlem as Jan Jansen round about 1575. He had been a privateer working for the Dutch, and had been captured by Barbary corsairs some time between 1613 and 1618. Taken as a slave, Jansen had adopted the religious faith of his captors and thereby obtained his freedom. Jansen, who was now going under the name Murat Reis, ended up in Algiers where he served as first mate aboard an Algerian privateer before moving to Salé and embarking upon his own career as skipper of his own boat. Reis was so successful that he became Admiral of the fleet of privateers at Salé.
En route to the southern coast of Ireland, Reis had attacked several other boats and taken their crews as slaves. The skipper of one of these boats, Edward Fawlett, had decided to assist Reis, probably in order to avoid both an immediate bout of torture and a long-term future as a slave in North Africa. Another of these skippers, John Hackett, did likewise. As the slavers anchored off Baltimore and rowed closer to the shore in small boats to reconnoitre the town, Fawlett is known to have accompanied Reis, and to have used his local knowledge to explain the layout of the town, and to point out the houses of anyone who might resist the slavers. The slavers landed and attacked the houses in the part of the town known as “The Cove.” They lit torches and thrust them into the thatched roofs, then accosted the residents as they ran from their houses. Two of the locals, Tim Curlew and John Davys, tried to resist, but were cut down by the waiting janissaries.
After the slavers had captured approximately one hundred people from this part of the town, they moved to the main part of the town and started breaking into the houses there. However, only around ten people from this part of the town were captured, because some of the residents realised what was happening and had managed to escape. From beyond sight of the slavers, one of the townsfolk, a man named William Harris, started firing his rifle, and someone else started to beat on a drum, which led Reis to believe that a military detachment could be in the area. The slavers quickly gathered their newest captives (all of whom were white) and made for the sea.
As bad as the raid on Baltimore was, it could have been worse. Some four years earlier, Murat Reis had participated in a raid on Iceland. The Dutch renegado was the skipper of a ship that landed at Grindavik on the south-west coast on 20th June of 1627, where he and his crew captured around thirty Icelanders and Danes. On July 5th, three slave ships from Algiers had carried out a series of raids on the south-west coast, taking eighteen Danes and over a hundred of the local Icelanders captive, before heading for the Westman Islands, just off the southern coast. On this occasion, with no fear of interruption by military forces (real or imagined), the corsairs had embarked on a violent rampage not unlike the terrorist attack on southern Israel that took place on 7th October 2023.
According to one account, the slavers invaded the island and drove everyone towards the shore. Anyone who did not move quickly enough was beaten to death on the spot - pour encourager les autres. The corsairs set fire to the islanders’ homes, and in one particularly gruesome incident, they threw a mother and her two year old child into one of the newly lit fires, laughing as they forced their victims deeper into the flames with their spears. One of the locals, a man named Bjarni Valdason, was beaten by the corsairs until he died. When his wife fell down beside him, she was dragged away from her husband, and had to watch as the body was cut into pieces before her. Another man, Erlendur Runólfsson, was stripped naked and made to stand at the edge of a cliff, where he was shot at until he fell to the rocks below. The bodies of people who had been murdered lay on the ground everywhere. Many of the female bodies lay in a state of nakedness that spoke to the depravity of the perpetrators. As a final declaration of hostility towards the islanders' religion, the local church was deliberately set aflame. The captured men, women and children (all of whom were white) were then forced aboard the slavers' ships. When the corsairs began the journey back south to North Africa, they had approximately 380 new slaves on board. In addition, it is estimated that between thirty and forty people had been murdered by the corsairs.
Another notable incident in the history of the Barbary Coast is the capture in 1716 of a young man named Thomas Pellow, who was taken by privateers whilst sailing on the return leg of a trip to Genoa aboard the Francis, a boat skippered by his uncle, John Pellow. After Pellow finally managed to escape (after some twenty three years) and make his way back to Britain, he wrote an account of his life as a white slave in North Africa, so the story of Pellow's capture became quite well known. After the Francis had completed the trip to Genoa and they were heading home again, Pellow wrote:
And now, indeed, the unhappy part of my life draws near. For having made our voyage, our cargoes out and in, and by God's providence bound home, we were off Cape Finisterre very unhappily surprised by two Sallee rovers, and, together with Captain Foster, of Topsham (after such small resistance as we could both make), taken and carried prisoners on board of the infidels, as was also the next day Captain Ferris of London, in a ship of much greater strength, having twenty men, eight swivel and eight carriage guns, though they behaved in the bravest manner, fighting ten hours, and with a noble resolution, putting the Moors off, after boarding them three times, and killing many of them; but being overpowered by a superior force they were also obliged to submit, and to become our comrades.
The corsairs did not limit their attacks to boats from countries that lay east of the Atlantic. American boats fell victim to these privateers from the Barbary states too. In July 1785, the Dauphin was sailing off the coast of Portugal when she was approached by another vessel. The unsuspecting American skipper, Richard O'Brien, allowed the foreign vessel to get too close to his own, and before the crew knew what was happening, an armed raiding party was coming aboard. The attackers of the Dauphin turned out to be privateers, sailing on behalf of the Barbary state of Algiers. O'Brien and his crew were taken back to North Africa and thrown in a slave pen. Together with the crew of another American ship, the Maria, they were forced to break rocks, then drag massive sleds containing the pieces down to the harbour where the rocks and rubble were used to construct a new breakwater. Many of these Americans would die as slaves - worked to death under the heat of the North African sun.
In March 1876, the two men who would become the second and third Presidents of the United States, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, met together in London. Adams was at that time serving his government as the first American ambassador to Great Britain, and Jefferson was acting as minister to the government in France. Adams had visited the home of Sidi Haji Abdrahaman, the ambassador from the Barbary state of Tripoli, a few weeks earlier. The meeting had gone well, with the two men smoking pipes together. Adams thought that another meeting with Abdrahaman could be helpful, as the American politicians wondered what to do about the enslaved sailors.
Adams and Jefferson duly met with Abdrahaman at the home of the Tripolitan ambassador, and the conversation soon turned to the American slaves currently being held in North Africa. Abdrahaman informed the two Americans that it would take the exorbitant sum of 30,000 English guineas, the equivalent at that time of approximately 120,000 dollars, for Tripolitan privateers to no longer attack American shipping. The United States would also have to reach separate agreements with the other Barbary states of Tunis, Algiers and Morocco. To all intents and purposes, these Islamic states were running a protection racket that would today be recognised as a criminal enterprise, with one hand wielding a sharpened scimitar, and the other outstretched in the expectation of payment.
According to a letter sent later that month to John Jay, who was at that time the American Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Adams and Jefferson thereupon “took the liberty to make some enquiries concerning the Grounds of their pretentions to make war upon Nations who had done them no Injury.” The response the two men received is noteworthy:
The Ambassador answered us that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman [Muslim] who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.
The conditions that Christian slaves had to endure at the hands of their Muslim owners were well known to Joseph Pitts, an Englishman who was captured by Barbary privateers in 1678, when he was sailing aboard the Speedwell off the coast of Spain. Pitts wrote a book after his eventual escape, one of several such literary efforts in the genre of the “captive narrative.” Taken by their captors to Algiers, the dey (ruler) of the city took one in eight of the slaves for himself, and the rest were taken along to the badistan (slave market) where, as Pitts describes it:
There we stand from eight of the Clock in the Morning, until two in the Afternoon (which is the limited time for the Sale of Christians) and have not the least bit of Bread allow'd us during out Stay there. Many Persons are curious to come and take a view of us, while we stand exposed to sale; and others, who intend to buy, to see whether we be sound and healthy, and fit for Service.
The life of a slave in North Africa could be precarious, to say the least, with thousands dying of the plague, or being sent to row aboard the Algerian galleys, where they were permanently chained in position below decks and given the poorest food imaginable. Thousands of white Christian slaves from all over Europe were sentenced to lives of hard labour, either on the construction of the harbour's defences or other buildings. Beatings were commonplace, as described by Pitt:
Within eight and forty Hours after I was sold, I tasted of their Barbarity; for I had my tender Feet tied up, and beaten twenty, or thirty Blows for a beginning; And thus was I beat for a considerable time, every two or three Days, besides Blows now and then, forty, fifty, sixty at a time. My Executioner would fill his Pipe, and then give me ten, or twenty Blows, then stop, and smoak his Pipe for a while, and then he would at me again, and when weary stop again; and thus cruelly would he handle me till his Pipe was out.
In Thomas Pellow's account of his years as a slave, we read of his treatment at the hands of his owners. Pellow had been “given by the Emperor to Muley Spha, one of his favourite sons,” and was tortured so that he would become a Muslim.
My business now, for some time, was to run from morning to night after his horse's heels; during which he often prompted me to turn Moor, and told me, if I would, I should have a very fine horse to ride on, and I should live like one of his best esteemed friends. To which I used to reply, that as that was the only command wherein I could not readily gratify him, I humbly hoped that he would be pleased, of his great goodness, to suspend all future thoughts that way, for that I was thoroughly resolved not to renounce my Christian faith, be the consequence what it would. Then said he, in a most furious and haughty manner, “Prepare yourself for such torture as shall be inflicted on you, and the nature of your obstinacy deserves.”
Pellow then gives an account of being held prisoner by the emperor's son and being bastinadoed. This is the form of torture that is described by Pitt in his account of being held as a slave. In Pellow's case, this was not inflicted upon him purely out of sadism. Muley Spha kept asking Pellow (as he was beating the soles of Pellow's feet) to renounce his faith and become a Muslim. Pellow refused to do so, and somehow managed to endure the bastinado, which did not please his torturer. Pellow wrote later that “now is my accursed master still more and more enraged, and my tortures daily increasing; insomuch, that had not my uncle, and some other good Christians [. . .] privately conveyed me some refreshments, I must have inevitably perished, my prison allowance being nothing but bread and water; so that I was, through my severe scourging, and such hard fare, every day in expectation of its being my last.”
Muley Spha was driven to such extremes that the young Pellow eventually succumbed, in order to live. “My tortures were now exceedingly increased, burning my flesh off my bones by fire; which the tyrant did, by frequent repetitions, after a most cruel manner; insomuch, that through my so very acute pains, I was at last constrained to submit, calling upon God to forgive me, who knows that I never gave the consent of the heart though I seemingly yielded, by holding up my finger; and that I always abominated them, and their accursed principle of Mahometism.”
If any of the slaves decided to “raise the finger” as Pellow did, then they may have avoided a terrible fate in the short term, but their home countries would no longer pay a ransom to set these unfortunate slaves (for slaves they remained) free. As Pitt explains,
’Tis an Error among some too (I find) that as soon as ever a Christian turns Turk, he is emancipated, or becomes free (and so some think of Turks who become Christians, that they also are Freemen;) but as for those Christians who turn Turks, it is not so; for it lies wholly in the Patroon’s Breast to dispose of them as he pleaseth. I have known those who have continued Slaves many Years after they have turn’d Turks; nay, some even to their Dying-day. And many, I am sure, have been as little respected by their Patroons after the changing of their Religion, as (or less than) before. For my part, I remain’d several Years a Slave after my Defection, suffered a great deal of cruel Usage, and then was sold again.
The capturing of slaves by privateers from the Barbary states was neither an opportunistic nor a short-lived phenomenon. The ransoms that were sometimes paid for enslaved passengers and crew, the cargoes taken from the captured boats and the “tributes” that were paid to the Barbary states (Morocco, Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli) by the leaders of different European nations as they tried to persuade the terroristic privateers to not attack their citizens formed a significant part of the revenue that was generated by these Islamic states. The practice of enslaving white people was not only a way to make money, it was part of the culture in the Barbary states.
Hayreddin Barbarossa is known to have used white slaves to build a breakwater at Algiers after he took over the city in 1529, and white sailors were still being abducted and enslaved in North Africa almost three centuries later, long after the British government had passed the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807.
The story of hundreds of thousands of white Christian slaves being abducted and enslaved in North Africa may not be well known today, but these events are significant because they directly refute the assertion that only people with white skin engaged in slavery.
The historical fact that hundreds of thousands of white Christians were abducted and enslaved by Muslims from the Barbary States; the actions of men like William Wilberforce, John Newton, Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson, all of whom strove to put an end to slavery; the signing of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act on 16th March 1807 and the subsequent formation of the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron, which was in action for almost sixty years, are being erased from history.
The enemies of free speech who have infiltrated our society are attempting to access the hard drive of human history and delete these folders. They would like nothing better than to overwrite those memory locations with ones and zeroes, so that the files can never be retrieved. Before they are able to do this, each of us needs to remember that as an individual human being (who has the right to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers), we have the ability to open up the recycle bin of history, click on the folders about white British men doing everything they could to end slavery, and the folder containing all of the information that has been recorded about the Barbary States, and restore them all.
Sittason, Andrew. Living In A Salt Land (pp. 106-107). Andrew Sittason. Kindle Edition.
Reading Material/Sources Calendar of State Papers, 1567, p. 295, https://archive.org/details/statepapersmary01greauoft/page/294/mode/2up?view=theater
Dr. Jo Esra, Heer will be noe fishing: 17th Century Barbary Piracy and the West Country Fisheries, Troze, The Online Journal of the National Maritime Museum Cornwall, https://nmmc.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Barbary_piracy_and_SW_fishing.pdf
Calendar of State Papers, Preserved in the State Paper Department of Her Majesty's Public Record Office. 1636 - 1637 · Volume 10, Justices of the Peace for Cornwall to the King, 14th July 1636, https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Calendar_of_State_Papers/UYM9AAAAcAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=justices+of+the+peace+for+Cornwall+1636+John+Bruce&pg=PA60&printsec=frontcover
Giles Milton, White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and North Africa's One Million European Slaves
Thomas Pellow, The Adventures of Thomas Pellow, Penryn, Mariner: Three and twenty years in captivity among the Moors
Des Eskin, The Stolen Village: Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates
The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson: The Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on Iceland in 1627
Simon Webb, The Forgotten Slave Trade: The White European Slaves of Islam
Brian Kilmeade and Don Yaeger, Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates: The Forgotten War That Changed American History
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, American Commissioners to John Jay, 28th March 1786, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-09-02-0315
Paul Achterlonie, Encountering Islam: Joseph Pitts: An English Slave in 17th-century Algiers and Mecca; A critical edition of Joseph Pitts of Exeter’s A Faithful Account of the Religion and Manners of the Mahometans, 1731
Stephen Clissold, The Barbary Slaves
