by Gerald Boerner
We have all seen the news items recently about the pirates operating out of Somalia in the region of the “horn of Africa.” These pirates are not a new or recent phenomena in North Africa. Such raids started during the 9th century and continued almost non-stop through the 19th century.
What ended that threat to American and European shipping? The beginning of the end started while Jefferson and Adams were representing the new American nation in the Court of St. James. When Jefferson became the third U.S. President, he sent in the Marines to break the terror wielded by the Moslem leaders in North Africa.
Thank goodness for that phrase in the Marine Corps hymn: “From the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli…” This basic attitude was carried forward with Teddy Roosevelt in his policy of “…walk softly but carry a big stick!” GLB
“Barbary economy and society rested on slavery, and slaves could be found in practically every occupation.”
— Angela Sutton
“…both white and black slaves in North Africa lived more diverse lives, and sometimes much freer lives, than the majority of plantation slaves in the Caribbean or American South.”
— Angela Sutton
“When I first read about the Somali pirates, I almost did a double take and turned to my wife at the breakfast table and said, ‘This is déjà vu,’ ”
— Frank Lambert
“When they sprang to the deck of an enemy’s ship, every sailor held a dagger in each hand and a third in his mouth, which usually struck such terror in the foe that they cried out for quarter at once.”
— Thomas Jefferson
“…the “avowed Islamic” pirates who were part of “a medieval autocracy whose credo was piracy and terror,” and who “professed to despise Christians.”
— American Stereotype
“…while the Barbary War resembles today’s war on terror tactically and strategically, it resonates most deeply in its assertion of free trade, human rights, and freedom from tyranny and terror.”
— Joseph Wheelan
The corsairs were “operating within the limits of then current international practice, much like their contemporaries in America, Britain, France, Holland, Italy and Malta, among other places,”
— Accepted policy of Pashas
“In this work, I have most attempted a full description of the many hellish torments and punishments those piratical sea-rovers invent and inflict on the unfortunate Christians who may by chance unhappily fall into their hands…”
— John Foss
Thomas Jefferson and the Barbary Pirates
The Barbary Corsairs, sometimes called Ottoman Corsairs or Barbary Pirates, were Muslim pirates and privateers who operated from North Africa from the time of the Crusades (11th century) until the early 19th century. Based in North African ports such as Tunis, Tripoli, Algiers, Salé, and other ports in Morocco, they sailed mainly along the stretch of northern Africa known as the Barbary Coast. Their predation extended throughout the Mediterranean, south along West Africa’s Atlantic seaboard, and into the North Atlantic as far north as Iceland, and they primarily commandeered western European ships in the western Mediterranean Sea. In addition, they engaged in Razzias, raids on European coastal towns, to capture Christian slaves to sell at slave markets in places such as Algeria and Morocco.
Pirates destroyed thousands of French, Spanish, Italian and British ships, and long stretches of coast in Spain and Italy were almost completely abandoned by their inhabitants, discouraging settlement until the 19th century. From the 16th to 19th century, pirates captured an estimated 800,000 to 1.25 million Europeans as slaves, mainly from seaside villages in Italy, Spain, and Portugal, but also from France, Britain, the Netherlands, Ireland and as far away as Iceland and North America. The most famous corsairs were the brothers Hayreddin Barbarossa (“Redbeard”) and Oruç Reis, who took control of Algiers in the early 16th century, beginning four hundred years of Ottoman Empire presence in North Africa and establishing a centre of Mediterranean piracy.
Following the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna in 1815 as well as the involvement of the United States Navy in the First and Second Barbary Wars interceding to protect US interests (1801–5, 1815), European powers agreed upon the need to suppress the Barbary pirates and the effectiveness of the corsairs declined. In 1816 a joint Dutch and British Fleet under Viscount Exmouth bombarded Algiers and forced that city and terrified Tunis into giving up over 3,000 prisoners and making fresh promises. Following a resumption of piracy based out of Algiers, in 1824 another British fleet again bombarded Algiers. France colonised much of the Barbary coast in the 19th century.
18th Century
In 1783 and 1784 it was the turn of Spaniards to bombard Algiers. The second time damage to the city was so severe that the Algerian Dey asked Spain to negotiate a peace treaty and from then on Spanish vessels and coasts were safe for several years.
Such punitive expeditions were never pushed home, and the aggrieved European state almost always agreed in the end to pay money to secure peace. The frequent wars among European states gave the pirates many opportunities of breaking their engagements, and they always took advantage of that.
Captain William Bainbridge paying tribute
to the Dey of Algiers, circa 1800
Until the Declaration of Independence in 1776 British treaties with the North African states of Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli protected American ships from the Barbary corsairs. Morocco, which in 1777 was the first independent nation to publicly recognize the United States, became in 1784 the first Barbary power to seize an American vessel after independence. That action got the attention the sultan sought; it followed several years of fruitless diplomatic efforts to get an American emissary to come negotiate a treaty. Thomas Barclay, American consul in France, went to Morocco in 1786 and negotiated a very satisfactory treaty based on the draft he had carried from Paris and requiring no future tribute or gifts. Experience with Algiers was different. In 1785 two ships (the Maria of Boston and the Dauphin of Philadelphia) were seized, the ships and cargo were sold and the crews were enslaved and held for ransom.
Sultan of Morocco, by Eugène Delacroix.
In 1786, Thomas Jefferson, then the ambassador to France, and John Adams, ambassador to Britain, met in London with Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, a visiting ambassador from Tripoli. The Americans asked Adja why his government was hostile to American ships, even though there had been no provocation. They reported to the Continental Congress that the ambassador had told them “it was written in their Koran, that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave,” but he also told them that for what they considered outrageous sums of money they could make peace.
American ships sailing in the Mediterranean chose to travel close to larger convoys of other European powers who had paid tribute to the pirates. Payments in ransom and tribute to the Barbary states amounted to 20% of United States government annual expenditures in 1800. In the early nineteenth century, President Thomas Jefferson proposed a league of smaller nations to patrol the area, but the United States could not contribute. For the prisoners, Algeria wanted $60,000 (equivalent to millions in 2009 dollars), while America offered only $4,000. Jefferson said a million dollars would buy them off, but Congress would only appropriate $80,000. For eleven years, Americans who lived in Algeria lived as slaves to Algerian Moors. For a while, Portugal was patrolling the Straits of Gibraltar and preventing Barbary Pirates from entering the Atlantic. But they made a cash deal with the pirates, and they were again sailing into the Atlantic and engaging in piracy. By late 1793, a dozen American ships had been captured, goods stripped and everyone enslaved. Portugal had offered some armed patrols, but American merchants needed an armed American presence to sail near Europe. After some serious debate, the United States Navy was born in March 1794. Six frigates were authorized, and so began the construction of the United States, the Constellation, the Constitution and three other frigates.
19th Century, United States-Barbary Wars
One American slave reported that the Algerians had enslaved 130 American seamen in the Mediterranean and Atlantic from 1785 to 1793. Isolated cases of piracy occurred on the Rif coast of Morocco even at the beginning of the 20th century, but the pirate communities which could only live by plunder vanished with the French conquest of Algiers in 1830.
This new military presence helped to stiffen American resolve to resist the continuation of tribute payments, leading to the two Barbary Wars along the North African coast: the First Barbary War from 1801 to 1805 and the Second Barbary War in 1815. It was not until 1815 that naval victories ended tribute payments by the U.S., although some European nations continued annual payments until the 1830s.
The United States Marine Corps actions in these wars led to the line “to the shores of Tripoli” in the opening of the Marine Hymn. Because of the hazards of boarding hostile ships, Marines’ uniforms had a leather high collar to protect against cutlass slashes. This led to the nickname Leatherneck for U.S. Marines.
Bombardment of Algiers by Lord Exmouth
in August 1816, Thomas Luny.
After the general pacification of 1815, the European powers agreed upon the need to suppress the Barbary pirates. The sacking of Palma on the island of Sardinia by a Tunisian squadron, which carried off 158 inhabitants, roused widespread indignation. Other influences were at work to bring about their extinction. The United Kingdom had acquired Malta and the Ionian Islands and now had many Mediterranean subjects. It was also engaged in pressing the other European powers to join with it in the suppression of the slave trade which the Barbary states practiced on a large scale and at the expense of Europe.
The suppression of the trade was one of the objects of the Congress of Vienna. The United Kingdom was called on to act for Europe, and in 1816 Lord Exmouth was sent to obtain treaties from Tunis and Algiers. His first visit produced diplomatic documents and promises and he sailed for England. While he was negotiating, a number of British subjects had been brutally treated at Bona, without his knowledge. The British government sent him back to secure reparation, and on August 17, in combination with a Dutch squadron under Admiral Van de Capellen, he administered a significant bombardment to Algiers. The lesson terrified the pirates both of that city and of Tunis into giving up over 3,000 prisoners and making fresh promises. Within a short time, however, Algiers renewed its piracies and slave-taking, though on a smaller scale, and the measures to be taken with the city’s government were discussed at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818. In 1824 another British fleet under Admiral Sir Harry Neal again bombarded Algiers. The city remained a haven for and source of pirates until its conquest by France in 1830.
The thoroughness with which the French conquered and colonized Algeria put an effective end to piracy from the Barbary coast.
Barbary Slaves
While Barbary corsairs naturally looted the cargo of ships they captured, their primary goal was to capture prisoners on land or at sea and turn them into slaves. Once captured, the slaves were often sold or put to work in various ways in North Africa. “It has been estimated that between 1530 and 1780 some one million, or one and a quarter million Europeans were captured and made slaves in North Africa, principally in Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, with further captives in Istanbul and Sallee.” The high point of slave trade was between 1605 and 1634, when there were 35,000 captive slaves at any given time in Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. Furthermore, because of the high mortality rate in slaves, there was always a constant demand for more.
The clever corsairs would raid ships or coastal areas and grab as many people as they possibly could. Then, they would come back a few days later and sell the villagers their own people back. If the families of the captives could not afford their family member back, merciless financiers would come and offer the families the extra cash they needed in exchange for their houses and land. If the families could not meet the deadline to get their family member back, it was of little concern to the corsairs, who knew they could sell the captives for a lot more money in the North African slave markets. However, they benefited from getting the family’s ransom because it meant instant cash for them.
Being captured was just the first part of a slave’s nightmare journey. Many slaves died on the ships during the long voyage back to North Africa due to disease or lack of food and water. For the “lucky” ones that did survive the journey, they were made a spectacle of as they walked through town on their way to the slave auction. The slaves would then have to stand from eight in the morning until two in the afternoon while buyers passed by and viewed them. Next came the auction, where the townspeople would bid on the slaves they wanted to purchase and once that was over, the governor of Algiers (the Dey) had the chance to purchase any slave he wanted for the price they were sold at the auction. During these auctions, the slaves would be forced to run and jump around to show their strength and stamina. After purchase, these slaves would either become slaves for ransom, or they would be put to work. There were a wide variety of jobs slaves had, from hard manual labor to doing housework (the job that almost all women slaves got). At night the slaves were put into prisons called ‘bagnios‘ that were often hot and overcrowded. However, these bagnios began improving by the 1700s, and some bagnios had chapels, hospitals, shops, and bars run by slaves. Here, slaves were treated a little more fairly and were given the opportunity to run small businesses, and in some cases, make a small profit.
Freedom for Slaves
Barbary slaves could hope to be freed through payment of a ransom. Despite the efforts of middlemen and charities to raise money to provide ransoms, they were still very difficult to come by. Just as charity funding for slave ransoms increased, North African states kept increasing the amount of money that each slave was worth. However, lack of money was not the only problem standing between slaves and their freedom. Slaves would often need to notify their families that they were captive and inform them of the ransom price, and they would also need to pay the hefty mailing charge (which few slaves could afford) and wait several months for the mail to be delivered.
For the slaves and their families who were able to come up with the money, actually returning home was not guaranteed either. Redeemed slaves often went through a port to wait for the ransom to be finalized, and in some cases in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, slaves were kept at these ports as a quarantine due to fear of the plague.
Clearly, not many barbary slaves could depend on being rescued by ransoms, and instead had to look for the chance to escape. This was obviously easier said than done, since only a handful of slaves were actually able to escape. The most famous of runaway slaves was Thomas Pellow, who had the story of his journey published in 1740. After several failed attempts (which nearly resulted in his death), Pellow was finally able to escape to Gibraltar in July 1738.
Other Events on this Day
- In 1804…
Lt. Stephen Decantur leads a daring naval raid into Tripoli harbor to burn the U.S. frigate Philadelphia, which had fallen into the hands of the Barbary pirates. - In 1852…
Henry and Clement Studebaker found a wagon-making business in South Bend, Indiana, that eventually becomes a famous automobile manufacturer. - In 1937…
Wallace H. Carothers, a research chemist for Du Pont, receives a patent for nylon. - In 1945…
American troops recapture the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines almost three years after the infamous Bataan Death March.
Dates and events based on:
William J. Bennett and John Cribb, (2008) The American Patriot’s Almanac Daily Readings on America. (Kindle Edition)
Background information is from Wikipedia articles on:
Wikipedia: Barbary Corsairs…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_Pirates
Web Sites and Blogs:
Angela Sutton in DarkMatter: Atlantic Orientalism: How Language in Jefferson’s America Defeated the Barbary Pirates…
http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2009/12/20/atlantic-orientalism-how-language-in-jefferson%E2%80%99s-america-defeated-the-barbary-pirates/
The New York Times: Lessons From the Barbary Pirate Wars…
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/weekinreview/12gettleman.html
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