CAPTIVES ABOARD CORSAIR SHIPS

When Barbary corsairs captured a European ship, or raided come coastal settlement, they took as much booty as they could carry away with them. That booty included people—who would be sold at auction in the slave markets of North Africa.

Transporting booty was a simple enough procedure. It simply had to be stowed aboard the corsair ship. Transporting captives, however, was more complicated.

For the corsairs, there were two conflicting priorities.

The first was security. Captives had to be kept securely imprisoned during the journey back to the corsairs’ home port—a journey that could take anything from a few days to several weeks. The solution to this was to chain the captives up in the ship’s hold.

A ship’s hold was located deep in the interior of the hull—in the bowels of the ship, as the expression was. Such holds were designed as an area in which to store cargo, not human beings. A few oil lanterns might be hung from the low beams overhead to create some light for the captives, but holds were dark, malodorous, claustrophobic spaces. Chained up there as they were, it was hard for the captives to move around, find a comfortable position, or relieve themselves.

The corsairs’ second priority was the health of their captives—surprising though this might seem on the face of it. The whole point of taking captives, remember was to bring them back and put up for auction at the slave markets. Sick or injured captives fetched lower prices.

So captives needed to be fed regularly, and fed as well as possible.

Food aboard seventeenth century ships wasn’t especially nourishing, though. Without any sort of refrigeration, fresh food spoiled rapidly. The European shipboard diet consisted mostly of hardtack biscuit, salted meat, and warm beer. Barbary corsairs had a slightly more varied diet at sea, including olives, olive oil, vinegar, bulgar, cous cous, as well as hard bread.

The longer a ship was at sea, the worse the food became.

Here is an English captive’s description of what it was like to be a confined as a captive aboard a corsair ship:

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New slaves are put into irons in the hold and are not able to stand on their legs, nor suffered to come on deck, being confined either to sit or lie down, without the least provision of bedding to ease themselves. In this sorrowful case we found ourselves, and we were almost weary of our lives. You may imagine that the food we had to sustain nature was answerable to the rest of their kindness; and indeed, this generally was only a little vinegar (about five or six spoonfuls), half a spoonful of oil, and a few olives, with a small quantity of black biscuit and a pint of water a day.

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Keeping their captives continuously chained up in a dark and oppressive tomb, where the only light came from sputtering, smoky oil lamps—and without any sort of toilets—would have seriously harmed the captives’ health, even if they were fed properly. So the corsairs regularly allowed them to spend time strolling about on deck, bringing them up in small groups to walk about, get some fresh air and sunshine (weather permitting), to sluice themselves with seawater, breathe fresh air, and generally decompress. These outings might have prevented their health from deteriorating too drastically, but the inevitable return to the dark, foetid hold must have been acutely distressing. A Scotsman who was captured by Salé corsairs had this to say about his experience in the hold of their ship:

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We lay in a miserable condition, oppressed with many inconveniences. I especially remember the stench and nastiness of our lodging [down in the hold]. Sometimes in the day we were permitted to come above deck, to suck in a little fresh air, and to wash ourselves, but this small comfort was soon forgot by returning to our irons.

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Added to the captives’ physical discomfort, of course, was what must have been a constant state of dread. Hunched together down there in the dark and claustrophobic confines of the hold, chains clanking dully with every shift of an arm or leg, every heave and shiver of the ship, with nothing to do but dwell—or try not to dwell—on the unguessed horrors that awaited them… The hours down there must have seemed interminable, and their time on deck in the sunlight and fresh air all too short.

It was a practical necessity for the corsairs to keep their captives chained up most of the time in order to demoralize them and to ensure that they did not make any sort of group attempt to overwhelm the crew and take over the ship—such things did happen sometimes to corsairs who allowed too many captives up on deck at once.

Strange as it might seem, though, beyond confining them to the hold much of the time, corsairs typically treated their captives with reasonable solicitude. It was common sense and self-interest that prompted this rather than any sort of compassion. Conflict of any sort aboard a ship was to be avoided at all costs, for it threatened the ship’s very survival, and abusing the captives more than was absolutely necessary just lowered their sale price in the slave market.

So the days aboard a corsair vessel would have been a strange and unnerving one for the captives, chained up most of the time in the uncomfortable confines of the dark hold, suffering from periodic hunger and thirst and a relentless, gnawing dread, but also occasionally allowed up on deck to stroll about, observe the corsairs, and interact with some of them.

One of the outcomes of these deck outings was that something akin to friendship sometimes emerged between some of the captives and some of the corsairs.

Neither the captives nor the corsairs—most of whom served as fighters rather than sailors—had anything to do aboard ship. In the stultifying boredom that they endured, day after day after day… people ended up talking to each other. It was a sort of maritime version of Stockholm syndrome, perhaps. Nevertheless, some of these interactions grew into genuine friendships that lasted after the corsair ship reached port.

People, after all, are people, and it’s hard to maintain a rigid animus towards somebody—to keep thinking of them as the evil enemy—if you have to live intimately with them aboard a crowded ship for a month.

One of the ironies of the times.

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For those who may be interested…

The first quite about conditions in the hold of a corsair ship comes from

Joseph Pitts, A faithful account of the religion and manners of the Mahometans, published in 1731, p. 6.

The second quote comes from

Adam Elliot, A Modest Vindication of Titus Oates the Salamanca-Doctor from Perjury: Or an Essay to Demonstrate Him Only Forsworn in Several Instances, 1682, p. 4.