Pirate Killers

The Royal Navy and the African Pirates

Graham A. Thomas

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Maritime
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781844683581
• Topic: Tecnología e ingeniería
• Subtopic: Transporte marítimo

One hundred and fifty years ago the Royal Navy fought a daring campaign against ruthless pirates and won, killing The King of the Pirates, Bartholomew Roberts off the coast of Africa and capturing his fleet. Scores of his men were executed by the Admiralty Court. On the Barbary Coast of North Africa pirates preyed on shipping in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic as they had done for centuries and they terrorized the populations of the coastal towns. To them, piracy was a way of life, and the great sea-powers of the day couldnt stop them. Then, in one of the most remarkable and neglected anti-piracy operations in maritime history, the Royal Navy confronted them, defeated them and made the seas safe for trade. This is the subject of Graham A. Thomass compelling new study of one of the most pernicious episodes in the history of African piracy. As he tells this compelling story, he uncovers the long tradition of piracy and privateering along the African shore. Vividly he describes attacks not only in the Mediterranean but also on the other side of the continent, along the shores of West Africa and around Madagascar. But perhaps the most telling sections of his narrative concern critical engagements that stand out from the story the daring rescue of the British merchant ship The Three Sisters by HMS Polyphemus in 1848 and the actions of the battleship HMS Prometheus against the Rif pirates a few years later. His account is based on documents held at the National Archives and other original sources. It gives a fascinating inside view into the way in which the Royal Navy responded to the menace of piracy in the nineteenth century.

Chapter 1

First Blood: The Seventeenth Century

The 23rd came in here the Mary of Cork from Nantes, most of her lading salt, for Waterford. The Master reports that the Wednesday before about 10 leagues off Ushant they met an Algerian man-of-war who took them several boxes of wrought silks, ribbons and hats to the value of about 1,000l., although they were hid in the salt for fear of men-of-war. They showed them the Lord Lieutenant’s pass, but they said they would not take notice of it. The same day came in to Helford the Elizabeth of Falmouth from St. Martin’s with salt, who reports that the same day the same Algerian man-of-war came on board him and searched all though his salt, but finding nothing worth carrying away left him and boarded the said vessel and he saw several packs and cases on the deck, but, the wind blowing fresh, he made the best of his way. The man-of-war he judges to be of 30 guns and she has an orange-tree in her stern. Wind S.W.¹

For England, the clashes and wars with the pirates of the Barbary Coast did not really begin in earnest until the seventeenth century. Prior to that there had been some skirmishes but few were recorded.

The Barbary States, as they were known in Christian Europe, were made up of three North African regencies: Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli. According N A M Rodger, in his book The Command of the Ocean, these three states were part of the Ottoman Empire but behaved as semi-independent states at perpetual war with the European states and their Mediterranean neighbours. While many historians have written that their motives for war were religious, Rodger states that there were other factors involved. In the middle of the seventeenth century these factors were similar to the ones faced by Oliver Cromwell.

In 1654 after the establishment of the Protectorate, Cromwell had 160 ships, eighteen foot and twelve horse regiments to maintain. The Civil War was over and Cromwell faced opposition from Parliament over the question of what to do with the military. He had two problems. The forces that Cromwell had at his disposal needed to be maintained and paid for but they were too weak for him to stay in power by sheer naked force. To make matters worse, the campaigns against Scotland and Ireland were costing more than could be raised by extra taxes.

In August 1654 Parliament demanded that the military be reduced. At the time the navy was subservient to the army and the three key players in the naval forces were the Generals at Sea, Colonel Robert Blake, Cromwell’s brother-in-law Major-General John Desborough and the former vice-admiral William Penn. While Desborough concentrated his efforts in administration ashore, the other two men were active commanders at sea.

In October 1654 a petition was sent to Cromwell from the ships’ companies of the Channel Squadron commanded by Vice-Admiral John Lawson, complaining about long overdue pay and poor conditions. While Lawson and his captains sympathized with the plight of their men, this act of sending a petition to Cromwell was a political one, a subtle threat that wasn’t lost on Cromwell. If he dismissed Lawson, an extremely popular commander, then that threat would explode into full-scale mutiny, so it was even more urgent to find something for the navy to do that was as far away from Whitehall as possible. Disaffected senior officers and unpaid soldiers and sailors could start meddling in politics and this petition was one step towards that action. There was only one answer – a foreign war.

In the Barbary States the situation was similar. A foreign war was the best way to prevent the army from interfering in politics. ‘The resulting system of warfare,’ Rodger writes, ‘was not piracy but public, declared war waged largely by private interests.’ Their kind of war consisted principally of raiding other nations, usually Christian cities, towns, villages and ships, for slaves which they would either ransom back or sell but they didn’t forget their Christian neighbours in the Mediterranean region. Indeed they made treaties with some while they fought others. They had to have markets for selling the slaves and some diplomatic relations with countries they were not at war with in order to ransom back the people they’d captured.

Rodger tells us that Cromwell had two options for his foreign war, France and Spain. There was an unofficial war with France and so Cromwell sent Blake to the Mediterranean with a full squadron. The presence of the English ships stopped the French from mounting an attack against Naples. Instead of fighting the French, Blake was drawn into a war with Tunis.

In general, the Barbary States adhered to the treaties they made with Christian nations but because these formal agreements were often broken by both sides, they would go to war with their treaty partners. In Blake’s case the war was fought over the fact that an English merchant ship had sold Tunisian passengers into slavery in Malta, which infuriated the Tunisian authorities. Their retaliation was Blake’s excuse for attacking.

We hear that a frigate has been sent back express to General Blach with orders to remain off the coast of Barbary and continue to insist boldly upon the pirates of Algiers and Tunis releasing the English slaves and granting the other demands. It is to be hoped that the English will not succeed in this because of the advantage to Christendom if Blach were obliged to punish their temerity.²

During Cromwell’s time, the Levant Company carried a quarter of all English woollen exports. Other goods traded by the Levant Company included the export of dried cod from the Newfoundland fisheries to Iberia and the Western Mediterranean. One of the main imports from the same area was dried fruit and wine. The company ships were more exposed in the Mediterranean than anywhere else. The threat came from the Barbary pirates operating out of Tunisia, Algiers and Sale (the main port of Morocco).

The Barbarians didn’t keep to the Mediterranean; their ships were found in the Atlantic and the Channel. Indeed, in 1687 two small Algerine packets were sent to Holland where they carried off a hundred people for the white slave trade.

Protecting the trade was a haphazard affair with a mixture of convoys, cruisers and direct attacks on Barbary ports. ‘The best policy for a Christian trading power was to make itself sufficiently annoying as an enemy, and sufficiently attractive as a friend, to be elected as an ally of the Barbary States – and, equally important, to preserve those alliances by a faithful observance of their terms.’³ Once alliances had been formed, the pressure on the other Christian states with which the Barbary States were still at war would be a benefit for England. ‘This simple realisation was to become one of the essential bases of British commercial and naval operations in the Mediterranean throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’, writes Rodger.

A passenger onboard the merchantman Merchant Delight, which was sailing to Barbary to sell large amounts of cotton and other goods, reported that he saw the English fleet near the bay of Porto Farina or El Bahira in Tunis. The fleet was under the command of General Blake who knew that attacking the well-fortified city of Tunis would have been suicide but attacking the bay was a different proposition altogether. ‘Left London with 30 ships, all merchantmen, bound to different parts and we voyaged to Barbary for the disposal of a considerable quantity of cloth and other things. We found the English fleet there, of 25 vessels, with ten others in company.’

As Blake’s fleet approached he spied several warships under the cover of the shore batteries. It was 4 April 1655 and Blake manoeuvred his ships into the best firing position. The gun crews from the ships in his squadron scrambled over their decks, making the final adjustments. Blake ordered his ships to open fire and the bay was filled with the roar of English cannon belching smoke and flame.

Captain Crapnell commanding the Merlin wrote that ‘Many hundred guns were fired on both sides, and from the Turks’ castle but few English were killed or wounded.’ For hours cannon fire rained down on both sides but while the enemy’s guns did little damage to the English ships, English cannon balls ripped into the port, smashing into buildings sending splinters in all directions. ‘The Turks seldom or ever heard such a peal before’, wrote Captain Crapnell.⁴

Under the cover of the smoke and cannon fire, Blake ordered the enemy’s fleet to be burnt. He sent his fireships into their midst and watched as the flames leapt from the fireships onto the enemy vessels. Soon several enemy warships were blazing, flames licking across their decks, men diving overboard to avoid the fire.

General Blach has taken a number of slaves, released many, and captured 14 guns, in addition to the 9 ships burned. It is said that he keeps inflicting serious losses on them and has sailed with the fleet to another port named Suza with the intention of burning ships taking refuge there. Upon this news the merchants of the Levant Company went to the Protector to recommend their interests in the Levant, pointing out that if the Porte took any revenge on the goods of Englishmen at Constantinople it would mean the ruin of a great many families of his most obedient people. The Protector promised them his protection always, but said he could not help supporting the courageous forces of England under General Blach. It is said that his Highness intends to order Blach to sail to the Levant to protect the interests of the nation in case the Turks commit any violence against them.⁵

On the surface this could be seen as a triumph but, as Rodger writes, ‘the strategic profit of the victory was less than nothing, as the Dey of Tunis afterwards explained to Blake, with sardonic amusement as the ships belonged to his overlord the Sultan whose local power he was not sorry to diminish’. To make matters worse, the success of the Levant Company’s trade in Ottoman ports rested on the goodwill of the Sultan which had now been severely tested by Blake’s attack.

This is illustrated in a letter from the Venetian Secretary in England to the Venetian Ambassador in France dated 5 June 1655:

Last week four merchants representing the Levant Company came to me. After telling me about General Blach’s operations against the Tunis pirates, which had prevented them from proceeding to the East to serve the Grand Turk, and had thereby rendered a good turn to the most serene republic, they handed me the enclosed memorial, containing four articles, setting forth the grievances of the Company, for me to forward in order to obtain the redress and justice that they look for from his Serenity. They make this appeal to the supreme authority of Venice before laying their complaints and petition for justice before the Lord Protector who would not deny them his powerful advocacy.⁶

Blake left Tunis having seriously damaged English interests and sailed for another Barbary Coast port in the Mediterranean where he could victual and water – Algiers. Here, instead of sailing in as a conquering hero, he kept the peace. Indeed, he paid well above the market price for ransoming some English captives who had been enslaved by the Barbary States.

Despite the loss of the nine warships, pirates from Tunis and Tripoli continued to attack English merchant shipping for the next three years until Captain John Stoakes was able to negotiate a peace. By a mixture of treaties and attacks, the English were able to extract some concessions from the Barbary States. But their successes were short-lived as the Algerines broke the treaty that had been previously established under the promise of the Grand Turk.

Uncertain also is the issue of the explanation that will be demanded by this crown of the Algerines for their breach of faith, in violating the last peace ratified by Vice Admiral Alen and the league of friendship which by the previous treaty established under the promise of the Grand Turk they ought to observe inviolate. These corsairs have recently searched and carried off from an English ship belonging to the Company of the Indies 14,000l. Sterling in hard cash.⁷

To deal with the problem Vice-Admiral Sir Thomas Allin (Alen) was sent to the Mediterranean in 1669 and ended up blockading Algiers and declaring war. In a letter dated 19 April 1669, addressed to the Venetian Senate, the Venetian Ambassador to England stated:

Admiral Alen has meanwhile arrived in port here, having missed the written instructions to proceed to Algiers. They will give him additional powerful frigates, at least twelve of them, and he will go with resolution to the port of the Algerians to enforce their rights. Yet it will be difficult to recover the money, which passes from hand to hand, or to redeem prisoners, for once they are sold they cannot be ransomed with double the amount. In this connection, in converse with the ministers, I will urge them to generous resolutions and I only hope that just revenge may stir his Majesty and that a bitter war with these corsairs may divert them from helping the Grand Turk.

By August of that year Allin had twenty well armed friga...