OF PIRACY, PROFIT, AND PRUDENCE — PART 2

(This post is a continuation of Of Piracy, Profit, and Prudence — Part 1. If you haven’t done so already, it’s best to read that post before continuing on here.)

Sixty bars of silver was a lot of silver. Mustaffa and his crew must have stood there on the rocking boat staring at the stacked, dully gleaming ingots in utter astonishment. After which, no doubt, they all sent heartfelt prayers of thanks to Allah.

With a prize like this, they didn’t need to stay out any longer. They abandoned the Spanish boat and let it drift, with the dead sprawled stiffly in it. Then they raised sail and headed out, threading their way safely through the Strait of Gibraltar and onwards until they reached the harbor at Algiers.

Dividing up booty was a formal process. The Basha (the Ottoman Governor of the City) was entitled to one eight of all captives and merchandise, and any captive ships brought into the city were his and his alone. There were also port taxes and fees.

Mustaffa would have paraded his captives through the streets to the Basha’s residence, for, by long custom, the Basha got first pick of any captives. It wouldn’t have made much of a parade, though, compared with what larger expeditions could produce: Mustaffa and his small crew and a dozen or so limping captives, some of whom were suffering from musket-shot wounds. It’s likely that they didn’t generate much of a crowd. It’s likely, too, that the Basha himself didn’t pay much attention or have much in the way of expectations. After all, Mustaffa was returning from his first corso expedition, in a small boat, leading a paltry number of captives. The most the Basha could have expected for his one-eight share would have been perhaps two captives, in bad shape, possibly wounded.

And then he—and everybody else—learned about the silver.

Mustaffa became an overnight sensation.

As captain of his own ship, remember, he was entitled to half of all the proceeds from the expedition. The other half was divided among the crew. On larger ships, where the crew was composed of men with varying tasks—soldiers, gunners, seamen, carpenters, etc.—there were elaborate formulas that determined what share each sort of crewmember was eligible for. In a small ship like Mustaffa’s, no doubt the crew received equal one-sixteenth shares.

All this was calculated after the Basha had taken his one-eighth share of everything—both captives and silver.

When it was all over, Mustaffa’s share amounted to a value of thirty thousand pieces of eight. That may not sound like a huge amount by modern standards, but it was the equivalent of about $1,000,000 today.

Captain Mustaffa had become a seriously wealthy man.

That was how he was now referred to: Mustaffa Reis (Captain Mustaffa). He was everybody’s darling. The city’s important merchants all wanted to marry their eligible daughters to him. Freelance crew all wanted to serve on his next expedition. The wealthy backers who financed corso expeditions entertained him with sumptuous dinners, offering him ships and crew and seed money for his next cruise.

For Mustaffa had shown he possessed the one crucial quality that all successful corsair captains needed: luck.

Having demonstrated that, he could now launch an entirely different sort of life than he had first intended. He could become a corsair captain. If his luck held, he could become a famous corsair captain, celebrated by one and all, a man of wealth and importance.

If his luck held.

It was one of those watershed moments in a man’s life. Two roads… One led to a life of excitement, danger, and, if he succeeded, riches and fame. The other led to a quiet life in a villa somewhere with a wife and children and, perhaps, a garden.

The wealthy backers were pressing him for a decision.

“Mustaffa,” they said, one evening over dinner. “Allah has smiled upon you. Take our ship, pillage the infidels. Make us all rich.”

Mustaffa leaned back, looking at them. They were well dressed men all, sleek and comfortable. Most had never set foot on the ships they financed. “As a soldier,” he said to them, “I endangered by life many times. Now you are suggesting I do so again?”

“You are a lucky man,” one of the wealthy backers said. “A brave man. The danger will be as nothing to you.

“Think of the fame!” one of the others said.

“You could become head of the Taifa,” suggested a third (the Taifa was the official organization of Algerian corsair captains).

“You would become an important man!”

Mustaffa nodded. “All you say is true. A new life beckons me, a life of wealth and importance.”

“Yes!” the wealthy backers all agreed.

Mustaffa paused. “But… I have sufficient money now to maintain myself for as long as I live. Why should I go to sea again? I have endangered my life enough. I think I shall spend the rest of my days ashore and laugh at the dangers of the sea.”

Which is exactly what Mustaffa did.

He married the pretty daughter of a wealthy Morisco merchant and bought a small but elegant villa in the countryside outside the city. There he lived a quiet life with his wife and children, watching the sun rise and set and the seasons pass, with seldom a thought for the sea. He grew older; his beard whitened. Occasionally one of his old crew would visit. He would serve the man tea and they would reminisce about their famous exploit. And then the man would go, and Mustaffa would stroll through the green aisles of his garden, listening to the songbirds, until dinner was ready.

 

§§§

 

Mustaffa’s story is a reminder of something important: people are people. Barbary corsairs—like their European counterparts—practiced a violent profession that included armed robbery, abduction, and human trafficking. But they didn’t practice this profession because they were inherently evil people. They did it for… many reasons, some good, some bad. Such men were products of the time and place in which they lived.

This is not to say that armed robbery and human trafficking is excusable. But history, if it is to rise above the level of dry dates and lists of events, is about people, individual people and the lives they led. Those individual lives offer a means to understand the past in a direct way. More importantly, perhaps, they can act as a counterweight to overly simplistic broad generalizations about the past.

Barbary corsairs, like people everywhere, were people.

People, like people everywhere, are people

 

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This story of the life of Mustaffa is based on Relation XXIV, “De la prudente retraite d’un corsair” (“Of the Prudent Retirement of a Corsair”), in Emanuel d’Aranda’s Relation de la captivité et liberté du sieur Emanuel d’Aranda jadis esclave à Alger, (The Story of the Captivity and Liberation of Sir Emanuel d’Aranda, once a slave in Algiers) published in 1656.