Jefferson's War (6 page)

 

Europe's ruinous losses were the agencies of Barbary's unprecedented good fortune. In 1616 alone, the take exceeded 3 million livres—hundreds of millions of dollars in today's currency. The corsair chiefs lived like pashas, and the pashas like sultans. Algiers's population exceeded 100,000, making it one of the most populous cities on earth at the time. European pirates and Moriscos, Moslem and Jewish immigrants from the Levant, went on a spending binge, building palaces and stuffing them with loot and slaves. Wrote Diego de Haedo of his visit to Algiers in 1612: “... They have crammed most of the houses, the magazines, and all the shops of this Den of Thieves with gold, silver, pearls, amber, spices, drugs, silk, clothes, velvets, &c., whereby they have rendered this city the most opulent in the world: insomuch that the Turks call it, not without reason, their India, their Mexico, their Peru.”

Algiers's lavish public baths had steam rooms, hot and cold water, and masseurs. After being kneaded and steamed, washed and dried, the sleek Algerian businessmen, corsair captains, and government officials might enjoy coffee or sherbet, and perhaps a pipe of opium. They went home to their nouveau riche palaces, decorated ostentatiously with mirrors from Venice; silks and velvets from Lyon and Genoa; Delft porcelains; carved Italian marble; Bohemian glass; and English clocks. Their worldly needs more
than met, the new rich tried to secure their places in heaven as well. The Algiers skyline sprouted minarets as the corsair captains attempted to outdo one another's noblesse oblige with bigger and better mosques; the city soon had more than 100.

Admiral Ali Bitchnin, commander of Algiers's sixty-five corsairs, was the apotheosis of showy extravagance, with his two palaces in the city, a suburban villa, and several thousand slaves. He traveled with a large bodyguard. His sense of religious and civic obligation impelled him to build a mosque and a sumptuous public bath. The hazards of his busy trade, including the possibility of his own capture when he was kidnapping and robbing Christians, caused him to keep two captive Knights of St. John as human exchange currency at the ready.

There were many like Ali Bitchnin who believed in giving back to the community. Consequently, expensive, ornamented fountains, drinking troughs, and public latrines sprouted in every major city. With its pirate lucre, Tunis built a slave mart, the Berka, and repaired the Roman aqueduct at Carthage. Merchants prospered buying and selling corsair loot. Some of the wealth even reached the pockets of the lower classes. But for the most part, the peasants, craftsmen, and workers lived as simply and frugally as before.

 

 

 

An abundance of European slaves magnified the atmosphere of unbridled opulence; there were so many slaves that the middle and upper classes enjoyed unparalleled freedom from every sort of drudgery. Father Pierre Dan, one of the “Redemptionist” priests who negotiated ransoms for captives, estimated in 1634 that the city of Algiers alone was the unhappy home of 25,000 Christian slaves, mostly Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. Europeans rightly
feared captivity in Barbary as though it were death; it often was worse. As soon as they fell into the raiders' hands, the captives were stripped of their clothes, given rags to wear, and either were put in irons or made to work the ship. The pashas had their pick first. The youngest, handsomest male slaves were usually chosen as palace pages, and the prettiest women were sent to Constantinople as gifts to the sultan.

The rest were auctioned in the slave mart. Algiers's “zoco” was in the middle of the commercial district. Potential buyers examined the prisoners carefully, as they would any domestic animal they were considering purchasing. They checked over their teeth, walked them back and forth to see if they limped, poked and prodded them, made them jump, stripped them naked and felt their hands for calluses, a reliable indicator of their worth as manual laborers. Young boys and girls were prized above all, of course. For strictly pecuniary reasons, noblemen, army officers, and government officials also were valued highly, for they might be ransomed to their countrymen for a good price. Skilled workers were coveted, too, especially if their specialty happened to have anything to do with gunnery, seamanship, or shipbuilding.

The slave marts were stages for heart-wrenching scenes. Father Dan happened to witness an Irish family sold piecemeal into slavery, never to see one another again. Their inconsolable grief moved even hardened onlookers to tears. “It was a piteous sight to see them exposed for sale at Algiers, for when they parted the wife from the husband, and the father from the child; then, say I, they sell the husband here, and the wife there, tearing from her arms the daughter whom she cannot hope to see ever again.”

Literature and the Redemptionist religious orders commonly depicted the Moslems as heartless, barbaric captors. True, some
corsair captains made a practice of slicing off and collecting the noses and ears of their galley slaves. One reportedly bit off a Spanish slave's nose and ears for singing while he rowed. However, such atrocities were exceptions.

Christians usually were treated no worse than Moslem captives in Christian hands. It was in the owners' interests to keep slaves healthy for ransom or labor, although they rarely gave them much more than bare-minimum subsistence. To guarantee faithful service, slaves were loaded with chains weighing up to sixty pounds. At night, they were chained to stanchions or iron rings embedded in the floors of their squalid dungeons. “Our beds were nothing but rotten straw laid on the ground, and our coverlets peaces of old sailes full of millions of lice and fleas,” wrote Sir Anthony Sherley, a seventeenth-century slave in Morocco. Ships docking in Algiers were required to remove their rudders and oars so would-be escapees wouldn't be tempted to commandeer them and sail to freedom.

Christian slaves toiled in the fields and vineyards, mined copper, carried water, chopped wood, took the place of fourlegged beasts in the traces of carts and wagons, and quarried stone under extremely dangerous conditions. The fortunate few chosen as secretaries and interpreters, and the lucky ones employed as shipbuilders and carpenters—excellent, prestigious work—faced one immense drawback: They were so prized that their redemption often could not be purchased at any price. Surgeons were another valued class of worker, excused from all but professional duties. They wore three-corner hats and military clothing. Any captive who had ever sewn up a wound claimed to be a surgeon.

Seventeenth-century captives were largely spared the horrors of the galley ships, where before the advent of sail many Christian
slaves ground out their days in abject misery. Chained naked to their rowing benches, six abreast, galley slaves pulled on a fifteenfoot oar as two boatswains with long, coiled whips paced a bridge overhead, watching for slackers. Sometimes they toiled twelve to twenty hours without rest—sleep was never really restful, for the slaves never slept stretched out full-length—with a sailor shoving wine-soaked bread into his mouth for sustenance. If they collapsed, they were flogged until they died or passed out and then were pitched overboard. For the pitiable galley slave, death might have come as a relief

Among the slaves lacking special skills, a few lucky ones landed in good situations. One was Germaine Mouette, a privately owned French captive in Morocco from 1670 to 1681. Initially assigned to grind corn with a hand mill, Mouette found the work too arduous and deliberately ground the corn coarsely so that it was inedible. He was given easier work—watching over his master's young son. The boy became so attached to Mouette that before long the slave became a de facto family member. His ubiquitous twenty-five-pound chain was discarded and his diet improved radically from thin gruel and hard black bread to white bread, honey, and butter. Eventually ransomed, Mouette and his captors parted with tears and regrets.

While most captives were not as severely abused as the Redemptionists claimed in their dreadful accounts—which, after all, were intended to encourage donations to their ransom funds—cruelty was commonplace enough. At the rock quarries, slaves were harnessed to sleds and, under the lash of their “drivers,” forced to drag huge boulders to the quays and shove them onto barges that hauled them to the harbor fortresses and breakwaters. Two thousand slaves built the Moroccan city of Meknes during the last
quarter of the seventeenth century; some were burned alive operating lime kilns. Slaves were bastinadoed—the soles of their feet and their buttocks flailed with inch-thick sticks—flogged, halfstarved, tortured, burned, and skewered. As punishment for the capital crime of killing a Moslem, a condemned Christian faced the unspeakable fate of being cast from a parapet upon gleaming hooks cruelly protruding from the city walls and, impaled, dying a slow, agonizing death that could last for days.

 

Redemptionist priests like Father Dan of the Order of the Holy Trinity and Redemption of Captives enabled many slaves to return to their homes and avoid dying in chains. Jean de Matha founded the order in 1199 to ransom Crusaders from the Moslems. Recognizing Matha's good services, Pope Innocent III bestowed upon his order the Convent of Saint Mathurin in Paris, and it became the order's headquarters and shorthand name, the Mathurins, the name by which the friars were known as they spread throughout France. When they put down roots in Italy and Spain, they were called Trinitarians. The friars raised ransom money in their parishes and journeyed to North Africa with full purses to barter with the Moslems for the return of the enslaved Christians.

The sight of the Redemptionists in their resplendent white robes, emblazoned with blue-and-red crosses on their breasts to signify the Holy Trinity, debarking in Algiers and Tunis cheered the pashas and corsair captains. The well-meaning friars actually helped preserve terrorism, kidnapping, and slavery as profitable enterprises. In the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, the Redemptionists were a permanent feature of the Barbary landscape, like the forest of moored, square-sail pirate corsairs and the frenzied slave marts. The pashas allowed the friars
to open prison hospitals staffed with nurses, cooks, and chaplains. Moslem slaveholders contributed to their upkeep so their slaves could receive good medical care. During eighty-two redemption missions between 1575 and 1769, friars bought the freedom of 15,500 captives. By no means were these the only redemptions; between 1520 and 1830, an average of 2,000—3,000 slaves were sold each year just in Algiers's zoco. The white slave trade was enormously profitable.

 

During the first half of the seventeenth century, Europe was absorbed by its own internal bloody religious and civil wars. No royal embassies were sent to treat with Constantinople; no expeditions were mounted; no appeals were made to free the slaves. While the Europeans pitted their warships against one another, the Barbary corsairs had free rein. The captives' countrymen bore the burden of paying what ransoms they could.

Europe futilely attempted to temper Barbary's attacks on its shipping by going to Constantinople to parley with the Ottoman sultan, who ostensibly controlled the regencies in Algiers, Tripoli, and Tunis (but not Morocco, never an Ottoman province). But the negotiations, even when concluded successfully, failed to scale back the depredations.

Then, in a radical departure, England opened direct negotiations with Algiers's pasha in 1622, in effect recognizing Algiers's autonomy from the Ottoman Empire and bypassing Constantinople. England had accurately assessed the drift in Ottoman—Barbary relations in recent decades. While the sultan continued as before to appoint the pashas of Tripoli and Algiers, increasingly those rulers operated independently, and Tunis began its own succession in 1591, when janissaries—Turkish soldiers—
revolted and put one of their own in power. It wasn't long before Tripoli and Algiers founded family dynasties.

England's 1622 treaty with Algiers forever changed the relationship between Europe and Barbary. Henceforth, Europe would bargain with the Barbary States as equals and not depend on Constantinople to force their compliance with treaties they scarcely even acknowledged. Other European nations lined up to sign treaties with Algiers and Tunis. Holland was first.

But even with a treaty, Dutch ships were still being seized by corsairs. Dutch officials sent a punitive squadron. Admiral Lambert appeared in Algiers's harbor in 1624 with several Algerian corsairs he had captured. He demanded the release of all Dutch captives and a new treaty, or he would hang the several hundred captive Algerian crewmen. The pasha and his officers refused, disbelieving that Lambert would carry out his threat. Lambert hanged all the captives from the ships' spars and sailed away, leaving Algerians convulsed with horror, shock, and lamentations. Soon Lambert's squadron reappeared with a fresh inventory of captured Algerian ships and their crews. When the admiral repeated his demands—and his threat—the Algerians released all their Dutch slaves and captured Dutch ships with alacrity, and signed a new treaty.

 

The Thirty Years' War ended in 1648, the year, too, that Holland won independence from Spain after eighty years of war. England, France, Spain, and Holland built towering new men-of-war of 100 guns or more for the next round of hostilities, and kept them in fighting trim by sending them to the Mediterranean when the corsair raids cut too deeply.

English Admiral Robert Blake reached Tunis in 1655 to negotiate
at Oliver Cromwell's behest. England had recently beaten the Dutch navy and now was busy fighting Spain, which Tunis took as a signal to step up its seizures of English merchant ships. Should Tunis refuse to negotiate, Blake's orders were to “assault them either by land or sea and fight with, kill and slay all such persons as shall oppose you.”

The Tunisians stated their bargaining position bluntly by firing on Blake's ships. Blake sailed to Porto Farina in the Gulf of Tunis to commit mayhem on the corsairs anchored beneath the fortress guns. “The Lord, being pleased to favor us with a gentle breeze which cast the smoke on them ... facilitated our attack.” Blake sank or burned nine Tunisian corsairs with heavy loss of life, at a cost of just 25 English killed and 40 wounded. From Tunis, Blake sailed to Algiers for further “talks.” The sobering news of Blake's punitive attack on Tunis preceded him, and the pasha was delightfully conciliatory, eagerly reaffirming his nine-year-old treaty with England.