OF PIRACY, PROFIT, AND PRUDENCE — PART 1

In its heyday as a corsair capital, the city of Algiers had one major economic driver: piracy. Legally speaking, Algerian corsairs were actually privateers rather than pirates. That is, they were officially authorized by the government of their city to attack ‘enemy’ shipping and coastal areas, and any captives or booty they returned with had to be shared out in a carefully prescribed manner both with the city authorities and among themselves. None of this altered the fact, though, that what they were engaged in what was for all intents and purposes piracy: the violent seizure of people and property.

There was an element of jihad to the Algerian corsair enterprise—the corso, as it was sometimes referred to—but, above all, it was a business, an extremely profitable business that everybody wanted in on. There was a time in the history of America when, if a young man wanted to go out into the world and ‘seek his fortune,’ he was told “Go west, young man. Go west.” If a young man in Algiers wanted to seek his fortune, he went to sea in corsair ships.

There is a story about one such young man.

His name was Mustaffa, and he was a Turkish soldier stationed in Algiers. In fact, he wasn’t really so young anymore. He had been on numerous corsair expeditions, serving as part of the assault force that all Algerian corsair ships employed. Corsair captains preferred subterfuge whenever possible rather than direct frontal assault, but if subterfuge failed, they sent in the soldiers to swarm the ships they attacked and overwhelm the crews. It was, of course, dangerous work. Mustaffa had done it for some years, risking his life in the hopes of earning enough money from his share of the spoils to enable him to finance a better, more secure future for himself.

In order for his modest share to ever be large enough to enable him to change his life, though, any ship he served on would have had to take a monstrously profitable prize—a Spanish galleon filled with silver and gold returning from the New World, for instance.

For Mustaffa, nothing of the sort had happened. The corso was a game of chance as much as anything. In the vast expanse of the Mediterranean (vast if you’re in a sailing ship or an oared galley) you had to run into the right ships at the right time in order to be able to capture them. Corsair captains who did so were considered lucky. Crew flocked to them. Investors lined up to bankrole their excursions.

Mustaffa had never had the luck to sail with such a captain.

Over the years, however, he had managed to amass 200 pieces of eight. Though that sum was nowhere near enough to enable him to embark on a new life, it was still a respectable amount of money.

Enough to buy a small ship.

With a ship of his own, he would be a captain, and a captain earned 50% of the take from any successful corsair expedition.

So Mustaffa decided to take the risk. In the spring of 1639, he bought a small ship, so small that it didn’t even have decks. It was s solid, seaworthy little craft all the same, though. His 200 pieces of eight were enough to both buy her outright and outfit her for a cruise, including not only rigging and tackle and victuals for the voyage, but also muskets—the boat was too small to mount cannon, but his crew needed to be armed.

Mooring his new ship in the harbor near the Mole (as the long breakwater that enclosed the Algiers harbor was called), Mustaffa raised a flag indicating that he was looking for crew. Soon enough, he had attracted a collection of sixteen men, both Muslims and renegados, who were willing to sail with him for a share of any booty they took.

They left Algiers at the beginning of the summer—the corso season—and sailed westwards across the Mediterranean and through the Strait of Gibraltar. These were dangerous waters, patrolled by Spanish warships, but they manage to slip through. Then they began to cruise along the Spanish coast near Cadiz, looking for prey.

They got lucky.

By chance, there happened to be a group of merchants in Cadiz at that very moment who were trying to smuggle a considerable quantity of silver out of the country. During this period in Spain, it was a capital offense to export silver without a royal warrant. So the merchants had to do it clandestinely, making secret arrangements with an English ship to smuggle sixty bars of silver onto it.

The plan was that a hired band of eighteen men, armed with swords and four muskets, would convey the load of silver ingots quietly through the streets in the dead of night, load it aboard a boat waiting in the harbor, and convey it out to the English ship.

These men collected the silver, hauled it across town without incident (and without being discovered by the King’s Officers of Justice), and loaded it into the waiting boat. Then, in dim pre-dawn light, they set off across the harbor and out into the choppy waters beyond, in search of the English ship.

Mustaffa and his crew spotted them as they emerged from the calmer waters of the harbor. He brought his ship close and ordered his men to fire a volley. The Spaniards immediately returned fire. Mustaffa realized, however, that they had far fewer muskets that his own crew. So he kept firing, making multiple passes just within musket range, raking the Spanish boat with volley after volley.

After an hour of this, they had killed four of the Spanish and wounded quite a number of others.

The Spanish surrendered.

Mustaffa and his crew had been desperate. Despite all their cruising of the Spanish coast, they had so far been unable to take a single prize. They had sustained their attack on the small Spanish boat partly because its size made it vulnerable, but also because they felt they had to take some sort of prize, even if it didn’t amount to much.

So they boarded the Spanish boat without much in the way of expectations. Weary and still with the jitters from the fighting, they quickly took the surviving occupants of the boat prisoner, binding them so they couldn’t cause any trouble, and began transferring them to their own small ship.

And then found the silver.

See Of Piracy, Profit, and Prudence — Part 2  for the rest of Mustaffa’s story.