This week, we continue with a series of excerpts from Northern Captives, a book Karl Smári Hreinsson (my Icelandic colleague) and I published last year about the Barbary corsair raid on southwest Iceland in the summer of 1627.
Last week, a rowboat containing eight Icelanders rowed out to the Salé corsair ship where it lay at anchor in the harbor at Grindavík. They thought they were going to have a comfortable chat with the captain and crew of a merchant ship or a whaler passing through. Instead, as they set foot on the deck, they were immediately swarmed and taken prisoner.
Barbary Corsairs typically kept their captives in chains down in the hold of their ship, and this was the fate that awaited these men. First, though, they would have to be interrogated.
Such interrogations of new captives were standard practice. They could be—and often were—brutal. Corsair captains, after all, were ruthless men. Murad Reis was no exception. In the days when he was operating out of Algiers, he is reported to have tortured a captive to death during an interrogation. So he clearly had no hesitation about employing brutal tactics to get the information he wanted from his captives.
The Algiers corsairs who plundered the East Fjords and Heimaey, in the Westman Islands, conducted just such a ruthless shipboard interrogation with Reverend Ólafur Egilsson, one of the Icelanders they captured on Heimaey. Here is his description of the experience:
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I was called to the stern of the ship and commanded by the pirate Captain to sit down. At once, two of the Turks took my hands and bound them tightly together while others bound my feet. The Captain then beat me, striking and kicking me along my back while I screamed helplessly with the pain of it. I do not know how many blows he gave me, but he beat me as hard as he could until I was too hoarse to scream any longer.
Then a man was brought forward who spoke German. He asked me if I knew about any money that might be anywhere. I said forcefully that I knew of none, and wanted only that they beat me to death quickly and be done with it. They left me alone then, raised me up, and ordered me back to the bow of the ship. I could hardly stand or walk, so badly had they hurt me.
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The effectiveness of these brutal tactics varied. Some men were tough enough to withstand such a beating without cracking Others were not. A French nobleman who was captured by Algiers corsairs in 1641, penned an account of an interrogation of two men he witnessed—an interrogation with quite different results:
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Our ship’s captain was brought before the corsair Admiral and thrown to the deck. He was then cruelly beaten on the soles of his feet to force him to reveal every detail about the ship’s cargo. The captain handled himself well, declaring that there was nothing aboard the ship except wheat, and that he could prove that by showing the ship’s cargo manifest. Nevertheless, the Admiral commanded that the captain be beaten again. The captain cursed and loudly protested that he knew of no other cargo… The constancy of our captain saved him from further maltreatment.
His first mate, however, acquitted himself less well. The corsairs threatened to lash the soles of his feet with a length of well tarred rope, an instrument which they habitually use when questioning new captives. The poor man trembled at the first hint of such brutality and, without further pressing, confessed that, in addition to the wheat listed in the ship’s cargo manifest, there were four small bundles of fine hardware hidden in the hold, as well as three bags containing a thousand pieces-of-eight each.
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Murad Reis might indeed have brutalized his new captives and beaten the information he needed out of them. He might have tried another approach too, though.
Several years after the Iceland raid, in the summer of 1631, Murad Reis led an attack on Baltimore, Ireland, where he captured more than 100 people, mostly women and children. During the course of that raid, he persuaded a local man, whom he had captured, to guide the Algiers corsairs into the harbor at Baltimore—not by brutalizing the man, but by offering him his freedom as a reward.
So Murad Reis did not necessarily maltreat all of the eight men who had rowed out to his ship. Instead, he might have offered a deal: information for freedom. Since he later released two of the eight men who had rowed out to his ship, it seems likely that he tempted them into providing the information he needed about the local situation in exchange for their release rather than simply beating it out of them.
Whatever the case, Murad Reis clearly got the information he was after, for his next move was to send thirty men across to the Danish merchant ship moored in the harbor, each man armed with a musket, a pistol, and a sword. Since the only person on board was the captain, taking that ship proved to be a simple, quick process. The corsairs then offloaded whatever supplies they wanted and transferred them to their own vessel. Food—if there was any on board—was a priority at that point, for the Salé corsairs had been at sea for over a month, and they would likely have been in serious need of whatever new supplies of food they could get.
Having secured the Danish ship and chained up their newly acquired captives in the dark hold of their own vessel, Murad Reis and his men now prepared to go ashore to raid the Grindavík area—where the inhabitants were still entirely unaware of what was happening.
For more on the Barbary corsair attack on Grindavík, see the next post in this series.
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For those who may be interested…
This incident of Murad Reis torturing a captive to death can be found in a report to the States General written by Wynant de Keyser, the Dutch Consul in Algiers at the time, dated September 21, 1619: “Furthermore, several incoming corsair ships have captured Dutch vessels and stolen from them victuals, sails, cables, and other things, and captain Jan [i.e., Murad Reis], on one of Soliman Reys’s ships, captured a Dutch vessel and stole its canons and other things, and he tortured and killed a crew member in order to get his money, it being his intention to make off with everything that was of any value and take it to Salé.” De Keyser’s report can be found in K. Heeringa, ed., Bronnen tot de geschiedenis van den levantschen handel (Sources for the History of the Levant Trade), Deel (Volume) 10, p. 814. These events happened while Murad Reis was still operating out of Algiers, but this report makes it clear that even back then he already had links to Salé.
Reverend Ólafur Egilsson’s description of his beating by the corsair captain comes from Karl Smári Hreinsson & Adam Nichols, The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson: The Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on Iceland in 1627, Catholic University America Press, pp. 15-16.
The French nobleman’s description of the shipboard interrogation can be found in René du Chastelet des Boys, L’Odyssée ou diversité d’aventures, rencontres et voyages en Europe, Asie et Afrique (The Odyssey, or a Diversity of Adventures, Meetings, and Trips in Europe, Asia, and Africa), La Flèche: Gervais Laboë (a publication consisting of the sections of L’Odysseé that recount Chastelet des Boys’ adventures in Algiers, taken from the serialized version of L’Odyssée that appeared in a scholarly journal, titled Revue Africaine, in the 1860s), pp. 15-16.
Details about Murad Reis’s raid on Baltimore can be found in an official report from Ireland by the Lords Justices and Council to the English Privy Council concerning the raid. Among other details, the report states: “Hacket, a fisherman of Dungarvan, was seized by the Turks and piloted them into Baltimore… He has been condemned and executed as an enemy to his country” (Robert Pentland Mahaffy, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Ireland, 1625-1632, p. 645). While the Lords Justices’ account does not explicitly say so, it is clear that Murad Reis let Hacket go in return for piloting the Algiers corsairs safely into the harbor at Baltimore—which is why the Lords Justices were able to get their hands on Hacket and execute him for this betrayal of his countrymen (though Hackett, it must be said, was a Catholic Irishman, while the inhabitants of Baltimore were Protestant immigrants newly settled there).
The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson
The story of the Barbary corsair raid on Iceland in 1627
Amazon listing