Pirates
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Pirates

True Tales of Notorious Buccaneers

Henry Gilbert

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Pirates

True Tales of Notorious Buccaneers

Henry Gilbert

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About This Book

The practice of piracy dates back thousands of years. This riveting chronicle provides a glimpse into the vivid history of `sea thieves,` from ancient Greek, Roman, and Norse brigands to the pirates of the Golden Age—the infamous seventeenth century buccaneers of the Caribbean’s Spanish Main.
Delve into the true adventures of notorious seadogs whose stories are as compelling as any legend. Meet the dastardly band of pirates who once captured Julius Caesar . . . the powerful Viking plunderers of the Saxon shores . . . and such well-known scallywags as Captain Kidd, Henry Morgan, Blackbeard, and Barbarossa.
A rich gallery of historical figures and fascinating real-life tales, this saga of the seven seas will captivate armchair sailors, adventure enthusiasts, and historians alike!

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IV. The Corsairs of the Mediterranean

I. The Punishment of a Crime

It was the summer of the year 1491. There was fierce fighting about the walls of Granada, in Spain. For ten long years there had been war: the chivalry of Christian Castile was ranged against the Moslem chivalry of the Moors. It was seven hundred and seventy-seven years since the Moslems, having beaten the last king of the Goths, had conquered the peninsula of Spain, bringing its Christian peoples under their sway. But as the centuries had rolled by Christian princes had wrested from the Moorish conquerors province after province, until by the middle of the fifteenth century only the kingdom of Granada remained in the hands of the Moslems. Even this had been left in their possession only on condition that they paid tribute every year to the sovereign of Castile and Leon. This tribute was to be two thousand pistoles of gold, and sixteen hundred Christian captives, or an equal number of Moors to be used as slaves.
Then came a day when Ismael, the King of Granada, died, and was succeeded by his son, Muley Aben Hassan, a man of fiercer temper, whose blood had boiled at the pride and arrogance of the Christians when once he had seen them receive the tribute from his father. When, therefore, a haughty knight at the head of a flashing cavalcade had ridden up to the gateway of the palace, and, having been brought into the great Hall of Ambassadors, had demanded that the tribute then in arrear should be paid, the Moorish monarch had smiled with a bitter curl of his lips and, falling back upon his silken couch, had insolently replied:
“Tell your sovereign that the Kings of Granada who used to pay tribute in money to the Kings of Castile are dead. Our mint at present coins nothing but blades of scimitars and heads of lances!”
These proud words had been uttered in 1478. War had broken out three years later. Muley Aben Hassan was now dead, and his son, Boabdil el Chico, had been made king. Town by town, by dint of furious fighting, their land had been wrested from a brave warrior people, whose knights rivalled those of the Christians in deeds of reckless daring. But all their high courage and resource was in vain: disaster dogged them; step by step through the years they were pushed back nearer the sea, until their ancient monarchy was limited to the lovely city of Granada, climbing up its two lofty hills, one crowned with the splendid palace of the Alhambra and the other stern with the frowning fortress of the Alcazaba. About this last jewel of the Moorish crown the white tents of the Christian army were now drawn like the links in a steel chain; troops of knights in shining armour and foot-soldiers in helmet and cuirass marched to and fro at the sound of drum and trumpet, forming to the assault of some outwork of the doomed city.
Again and again the Christians rushed to the attack; again and again the Moslem knights made desperate sallies, sweeping with death and fire into the heart of the Christian camp. Every garden and orchard became a scene of deadly contest; every inch of ground was disputed by the Moors with an agony of grief and valour. Every advance made by the Christians was valiantly maintained, but never did they advance except at the cost of severe fighting and great loss of men. In repeated charges Boabdil, the Moorish king, aided by the flower of his chivalrous knights, endeavoured to wrest away the points of vantage gained by the Christians, but always the God of the Christians seemed to be more powerful than the God of Mahomet, and again and again the Moors were driven back, their ranks rent and bloody, into the city.
Chief of Boabdil’s knights, famous for his gallantry and for his loft spirit, was Muza ben Abel Gazan, a young man of royal lineage, of a proud and generous nature, who with his nobility of race had inherited a deadly hatred of the Christians. He was a magnificent horseman, and his skill in the use of all warlike weapons and his observance of all knightly courtesies had endeared him to the hearts both of the Moorish ladies and of the youthful cavaliers.
Even the Christians who had met him in tourneys and jousts confessed that he was a mirror of chivalry and an example of lofty martial virtues.
In these last fights about the walls of Granada Muza was always the first to sally out at the head of his cavalry and the last to return. Men fighting at the point of exhaustion against overwhelming odds still found they had a reserve of strength left when his strong voice rang out near them. “Allah Achbar!” was his cry. “God is great! Death to the Christians!” And those lying with glazing eyes and ebbing breath, seeing the gleaming lines of Muza’s knights sweeping by with the young hero at their head, lifted themselves, and with the young hero at their head, lifted themselves, and with their last words blessed and cheered him as he passed.
But all was in vain. Famine and disease began to stalk through the doomed city. The summer months of stifling heat went by; autumn arrived, but the harvests had been swept off the face of the country and no aid could pierce the Christian lines. Gloom and despondency settled upon the Moors, pent up between the walls of their beautiful city, that was now becoming a sepulchre for thousands. There were no more daring sallies from the gates, and the tuck of drum and the blare of trumpets sounded but seldom, like the last dying notes from the horn of a stricken hero. The people began to clamour. As Boabdil the King and his knights and councillors walked through the streets women threw themselves on their knees and held out their emaciated babes, crying for food for them, or men pointed to the weakened frames of beloved little sons and daughters and demanded that their misery should cease.
Boabdil summoned a council, and the despair upon the faces of his advisers gave their unspoken decision. The dreadful tale of the people’s extremity was soon told by the governor of the city: “Our granaries are nearly empty; the fodder for the warhorses is needed for the men; the steeds themselves are killed for food. Of seven thousand horses which once bore knights into the field, but three hundred lean creatures remain. Our city has two hundred thousand people, every one of whom has a mouth which is ever crying upon me for bread.”
The young King hesitated. He had once hoped relief might come from the Sultan of Egypt, or the kings of the Barbary States, but all such hope was past now: neither food nor forces could reach them. His councillors urged that he should surrender, asking what availed further defence—what alternative remained but to surrender or to starve to death in thousands?
One voice alone rose in opposition, that of Muza ben Abel Gazan.
“We need not yet surrender,” he said. “Our means are not exhausted. We still have the forces of despair, which may win us the victory and crush our foes. Let us rouse the mass of the people, put weapons in their hands, and lead them against the Christians. There they will find food, revenge, or death. I am ready to lead the way into the thickest of their squadrons. Rather would I be numbered among those who fell in the defence of Granada than among those who survived to yield.”
Muza’s words were the words of a noble despair, but they failed of effect, for they found no echo in the minds of brokenhearted and dispirited men. It was decided that the governor of the city should be sent to the Christian King, Ferdinand, to obtain terms. This was done, and the terms proposed were merciful. They were accordingly accepted by the Moors. Muza still strove to dissuade his friends; his fevered eyes shone with the passion of despair as he urged the King not to sign the treaty of surrender; rage and indignation rang in every tone of his voice.
“Do not deceive yourselves,” he cried, “nor think the Christians will be faithful to their promises, or that their King will be as magnanimous in conquest as he has been victorious in war. Death is the least we have to fear. Surrender means the plundering and sacking of our beloved city, the profanation of our mosques, the ruin of our homes, the ill-treatment of our wives and daughters; cruel oppression, bigoted intolerance, whips and chains; the dungeon, the faggot, and the fire. Such are the miseries and indignities we shall see and suffer; at least those grovelling souls will suffer them, who now shrink from an honorable death. For my part, by Allah, I will never witness them!”
These words, containing prophecies which for a hundred years and more men were to remember and to mark as forecasting the bitterest truths, were the last which Muza gave in that great council hall. He strode away gloomily through the Court of Lions and through the outer halls of the Alhambra without speaking to any. He went to his dwelling, spoke a few farewell words to his dead wife’s father, Taric ben Abbu, and charged him with the care of his little son, Sidi. Then, arming himself at all points, he mounted his favourite war charger and issued forth from the city by the gate of Elvira.
A few hours later, in the twilight, a party of Castilian cavaliers, about twelve in number, were riding along the banks of a stream in the beautiful plain below the hills on which Granada stands. Suddenly before them in the gathering dusk they beheld a Moorish knight approaching, locked from head to foot in steel of proof. His visor was closed, his lance in rest, his great black steed was cased like himself in armour. The Spanish knights challenged him, demanding his name.
The Moslem made no answer, but like a panther he dashed at the nearest Spaniard, with levelled lance, spitting the man upon the spear and bearing him struggling from his horse. Wheeling round, he drew his scimitar, which gleamed blue in the twilight. He dashed at this and that knight, raining furious and deadly blows upon them, careless of the wounds he himself received, so that his scimitar gave death to others. He was fighting, not for glory, but for death. Nearly half the Spaniards fell before he received a disabling wound, and his horse, pierced by a lance, fell to the ground. Admiring his valour, the Christians would have spared the life of their adversary, but he would not have it. They withdrew a little, but he crawled after them on his knees, thrusting and stabbing with a long Fez poniard. Finding that the Spaniards would not kill him, he rose to his feet and, staggering to the brink of the stream, threw himself into its swift current, and his armour sank him instantly to the depths.
Thus died the valorous young Moorish warrior, pattern of chivalry and mirror of knighthood, Muza ben Abel Gazan.
Granada was delivered up to the Spanish King, and Boabdil and many of his people were given a kingdom in the mountains of Alpuxarras. But thousands of the Moslems left the country, streaming southward to Barbary, settling in Tangier, Tunis, Algiers, and other towns along the coast of Africa. Then by a piece of treachery Boabdil was deprived of his kingdom and retired to the lands of his kinsman, the King of Fez. For a time the treaty with the Moors who were left in Spain—Moriscoes, as they were termed—was honourably kept. Then it was urged by a high-placed bigot that to keep faith with infidels was to break faith with God, and persecution and oppression were let loose upon them.
The choice was, baptism or exile. The mosques were closed, Moorish learning was stamped out, and the Moors themselves were beaten and insulted. They rebelled, and the rising was repressed with savage fury. Half a century of smouldering hatred succeeded. The Moriscoes feigned to be Christians, spoke Spanish, and had Spanish names; but in their own homes they spoke Arabic and were intensely themselves. The more they seemed to yield so oppression increased, until the tortured people rose in revolt again, and the fair lands of Granada and Andalusia were once more drenched with blood. The lovely valleys of the Alpuxarras, with their numerous villages, were the home of many thousands of peaceful Moriscoes. The place was one great garden of blossom and fruit, for the thrifty hands of the Moors made every inch of ground yield its produce, and their scientific methods of irrigation made the desert fertile. These lovely lands were laid waste; a fierce and bloody struggle swept through them, in which a narrow fanaticism strove with a vengeful spirit that had a hundred years of insult and persecution to wipe out. No quarter was given: men, women, and children were butchered in cold blood under the eye of the Christian leader; the mouths of caves to which refugees had fled were heaped with burning wood, so that not one of the miserable creatures survived; and so thorough was the house-to-house slaughter that whole villages which once had been the homes of peaceful and industrious people were transformed into reeking shambles in which not a living being remained.
Those who survived were doomed to slavery or banishment. Thousands spent the remainder of their sad lives with iron upon their limbs; thousands fared to Africa, there to beg their bread in a state of abject destitution.
Is it to be wondered at that for such a crime as the inhuman persecution of the Moors in Spain there should be a fitting punishment? The Moors while they ruled in Spain had been the most learned people in Europe. They had tolerated the Christian religion and had not oppressed their Spanish subjects. Their habits of thrift and industry, refinement and cleanliness, were known all over the continent. But when they became outlaws in none did the spirit of revenge ever burn more fiercely. The word went forth: henceforth it was to be war to the knife with the accursed Christian. Spain was the enemy, and no mercy was to be shown her. This was the penalty that Spain was to pay for her pride, her barbarity, and her ignorance.
One day, some twelve years after the death of Muza, a party of some two dozen men, young for the most part, ran a long row-boat down the shingly beach of Oran. As the stones leaped up beneath their swift feet and the waves dashed before the prow of their frail craft as it took the water none of the reckless men about her thought what might be the outcome of the adventure on which they were about to put forth. Their minds saw only the pleasant prospect of rich prizes of merchants’ ships which were to be theirs, with ample cargoes of silks and spices from Persia, gold from Egypt, worked vessels and carpets from Spain, and, perhaps, occasionally, the person of some rich lord or merchant prince who would pay a heavy price for ransom. These were to be the wages if success came their way; but if perchance they were captured by the fierce Christian Knights of St. John, or by some war-galley of France, Spain, or Italy, then there would be years of misery spent beneath the whip of the slave-master as they tugged their hearts out at the heavy oar, chained with other miserable galley slaves to the bench, forced to aid their masters in fighting against their own people.
This was the first venture of their reis, or captain, Sidi ben Muza, son, as they had heard, of the valiant Muza, who had been one of the great heroes of their people in the old days when they ruled in Spain. Sidi was but eighteen, but already he had the name of a bold and daring mariner, as expert with the bow, the sword, and the boarding-iron as with oar and sail. Hitherto he had formed one of the crew of the galleys sailing under the flag of Hajji Reis, a reckless and successful corsair, but now, with the share of booty earned under Hajji, and the money and jewels left him by his grandfather, Taric ben Abbu, he had bought the brigantine which had just been launched, resolved to begin his own career in the campaign of hatred and spoliation against the Spaniards, the enemies of his people.
From his earliest years the mind of the lad had been impressed by his grandfather, Taric ben Abbu, with the imperative duty of revenge. The words of the Koran were continually dinned into his ears: “You shall take a vengeance equal to the injury which hath been done to you; the free shall die for the free, the servant for the servant, and a woman for a woman,” and it was told him that inasmuch as injury, death, and dishonour had been done and were still being done upon his own people in Spain, so should he exact vengeance upon all who fell into his hands, belonging to that detestable and iniquitous nation.
Sidi ben Muza, seated at the tiller, directed the course of the brigantine toward the Spanish coast. The term brigantine did not then have anything like the meaning now attached to it. The pirates of the Barbary coast used the word to denote a large rowing-boat, carrying from sixteen to twenty-six or thirty oars. A mast could be stepped and a sail hoisted when conditions were specially favourable, but the boat being hardly fit for the open sea and all chances of weather it was the ambition of every young pirate to seize or purchase a galley, to be manned by Christians captured in a raid, who would be chained three or four to a bench, and would be whipped if the heavy oars which they had to pull were not served smartly enough. Some twenty-four worked the oars of the brigantine, but there were some twenty more fighters who took turns with them, who were lodged in the rambades or prow, and Sidi with his five subordinate officers lived in a little cabin on the poop.
Sidi knew of several inlets where he could lie in hiding, ready to pounce out on merchant galleys or lumbering sailing-ships. For some days he thus lay perdu in various creeks along the Andalusian shore, but nothing offered that was within the power of his little band of fifty men. On the evening of the third day, as twilight began to fall over the wide waters, the company held a council of war, and it was resolved that they should go ashore and, under cover of night, attack the tower of a Spanish lord whose estate was situated some three miles inland. Strange would it be if they could not, by the sudden terror of their attack, bring off some rich booty, together with the Spanish lord himself, his wife and daughters, for slaves or ransom.
Even as they sat, each man on his thwart, eating his evening meal of dates and bread, the look-out man came running down from the sea watch.
“Reis,” said he, “there is a boat rowing from the land to the north. It is no larger than ours and has the look of a Spaniard.”
Instantly there was a rush to the high rock where the look-out was kept, whence a boat could be seen being rapidly rowed south and east. The keen eyes of the corsairs, even in the fading light, knew it for a Spanish vessel, with some dozen rowers aboard, who were pulling as if for dear life.
“Maybe some escaping Moriscoes, from the speed they are making,” said Sidi; “but we will overhaul them, whoever they are, and know why they are in such haste.”
Swiftly the men launched their boat, and Sidi turned the nose of the brigantine to cut off the other vessel. The pirates bent to their oars with a will, for each was glad of something to do, so long as it was in the way of a chase. The other boat soon became aware that it was being followed and its crew redoubled their efforts, but in vain: the pirate boat swiftly overhauled the stranger and raced alongside.
“Hola!” cried Sidi. “What do you here at night, rowing so fast from land?”
The crew of the strange boat had ceased rowing, and now whispered together.
“If ye are Spaniards and come anigh us,” came a fierce, breathless voice, “we will not be taken alive. And ye shall not all escape harmless.”
“We are no Spaniards,” replied Sidi, and spat at the name. “Who are you?”
“We are Moriscoes,” came the reply, with some eagerness. “The lord Cuerva would sell and enslave us, and we are therefore seeking to fly.”
The boats came together, and in a little while Sidi had heard all the simple but horrible tale. Don Ferdinand Hurtado de Olas y Cuerva owned much land and three Morisco villages in the district near by, and after oppressing his people, selling some of their daughters and sons as slaves, casting others into prison, and branding many fathers of families, he had at length threatened to get rid of all these pestiferous heretics within his lands. Some weeks had passed and he had done nothing to put his threat into execution, while all the poor villagers had gone in fear and trembling, wondering what their fate was to be. Then that very afternoon, into the little landlocked bay beside one of the Morisco villages had come a big galley, which at that very moment was moored a cable length from the shore. The Moriscoes saw the captain of the galley go off with several of his officers, and later they heard that they had gone to the house of Don Cuerva. Their worst fears and suspicions were now aroused, and they felt sure that on the morrow they would be driven on board the galley and taken away to another part of Spain, or even to France, to be sold into slavery.
Determined to forestall the terrible fate in store for them, some of the Moriscoes, as soon as darkness had fallen, had seized a small galley belonging to Don Cuerva and placed their wives and children in it, with a few goods, resolved to...

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