THE STORY OF THE HORNACHEROS AND THE FOUNDING OF THE CORSAIR REPUBLIC OF SALÉ – PART 4

(This post is a continuation of The Story of the Hornacheros and the Founding of the Corsair Republic of Salé – Part 3. If you haven’t done so already, it’s best to read Parts 1, 2, and 3  in this series before continuing on here.)

During the last couple of decades of the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth, the English and the Spanish were locked in a series of messy conflicts. The numerous battles—both land and sea—of the Anglo-Spanish conflict took place not only in and around Europe but also in the New World. Spain was the world power among European nations at the time. The Spanish colonies brought in huge wealth, much of it in the form of silver and gold. All that wealth had to be shipped across the Atlantic. The English did their best to intercept that shipping and to harass the Spanish colonies where it originated. Trying to accomplish this presented a problem, however. The English didn’t have the naval resources to properly prosecute the war against Spanish shipping in the Atlantic and the Caribbean. To solve this problem, they employed privateers.

Privateers were a sort of legalized pirate. They were equipped with official authorization from their government to attack enemy shipping, which made their predatory behavior legal. The benefit of privateers from the point of view of the English Crown was that they required no initial outlay—the cost of equipping a privateering expedition were born entirely by the backers of individual ships—but the profits were split between the private backers and the government. The use of privateers thus allowed the English government to increase the number of armed ships available for the conflict against Spain without having to incur the extra expense of permanently enlarging the navy.

Over the nearly twenty years of the Anglo-Spanish conflict, English privateers hunted successfully throughout an enormous area, ranging from the English Channel down along the Atlantic coasts of Spain and Portugal to Morocco and the west coast of equatorial Africa, across to the northeastern coast of South America and the Spanish Main in the Caribbean, up to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, and back across the North Atlantic. Over the years of hunting in this expanse of water, they gained a vast amount of experience, both as sailors and navigators, and as pirates and men of war.

But then the Anglo-Spanish war ended, and the extensive English privateering network was officially disbanded by royal decree. Many English privateers quietly returned to ordinary lives once again. A significant number, however, did not. Overnight, the status of these men changed from legal privateers to outlaw pirates. As a result, they could no longer operate out of English ports and had to find new ones.

It is an easy thing to overlook, but without suitable ports, pirates simply could not survive. They required two things from a port: merchants to whom they could sell their booty, and merchants from whom they could purchase the necessary supplies to revictual and refit their ships. These merchants had to not only be able and willing to buy stolen goods; they also needed to have extensive enough trade networks to export those stolen goods and to import the range of supplies required to refit the pirate ships.

Irish ports were the first ones English pirates turned to. Ireland in those days was a sort of maritime ‘wild west.’ English control was tenuous, small harbors and ports were plentiful, and the local people and their English overlords saw the profit in dealing with pirates, both in victualling their ships and entertaining their crews (who had ready cash to spend) and in buying the stolen goods they offered at cut-rate prices.

The multiple small ports and cooperative population that Ireland offered were convenient enough, but some English pirates required more. Men who ranged the entire span of the North and South Atlantic needed better markets for their booty and better sources of supply than those the little backwater Irish harbors could provide, no matter how convenient and hospitable these harbors might have been. Plus, English naval forces began to harass the Irish ports. So the pirates went south in search of larger, better supplied, safer ports along the North Africa shore.

These homeless English pirates started showing up everywhere along the North African Mediterranean coast from Tripoli to Algiers. For those who continued to operate out in the Atlantic, though, Mediterranean ports were too distant to be practical. That left the Atlantic coast of Morocco. Many of the ports along that coast were in the hands of the Spanish. Not all, though. The two most important non-Spanish-controlled ports were al-Araish (modern Larache) and al-Ma’mura (modern Mehdya). Both were close to the Strait of Gibraltar.

Due to the sustained exploitation of the New World during the sixteenth century, there were now large numbers of ships conveying merchandise to and fro across the Atlantic. There was also an increase in secondary shipping rerouting New World wealth. Many of the shipping routes funneled into the bottle neck of the Strait of Gibraltar, either to the Spanish ports near it or to ports beyond it in the Mediterranean. All this shipping provided a continuous and reliable prey population that could support a relatively large number of predatory pirates. Having a base near to it was crucial.

Al-Araish was the closest of the two ports (about 50 miles/80 kilometers south of the Strait), followed by al-Ma’mura (about 125 miles/200 kilometers south). Salé was also a possible option, but with these two ports available, there was little need to make use of Salé (which was 45 miles/72 kilometers further south than al-Ma’mura).

The Spanish took control of al-Araish in 1610, however. So that port became closed to English pirates. This left al-Ma’mum as the major port of choice. By 1611, there was a total of about 40 ships and 2,000 English pirates using al-Ma’mura as their home port. To serve such a large pirate population, an extensive and efficient black market (dominated by merchants from Livorno, Italy) developed to process the stolen goods the pirates had to offer and to sell them the merchandise they required.

But al-Ma’mura did not last either.

In the summer of 1614, the Spanish sent a flotilla—an armada, almost—of ninety-nine ships and 5,000 men against the town. Most of the English pirates were out cruising at the time. Those few who remained in the port set fire to their ships where they lay at anchor in the harbor and escaped inland as best they might with what booty they could carry. The Spanish took the town.

This left Salé as the only major pirate-friendly port on Morocco’s Atlantic coast not under Spanish control.

For how the of conjunction the English pirates and the Hornacheros led to the creation of the (in)famous corsair republic of Salé, see the last post in this series: The Story of the Hornacheros and the Founding of the Corsair Republic of Salé – Part 5.