This week, we continue with the narrative of João de Carvalho Mascarenhas, the Portuguese soldier who was captured at sea by corsairs from Algiers in 1621. We ended last week, remember, with the Conceiçam—the ship aboard which Mascarenhas was travelling—sailing away from land and once again encountering the corsair ships that had assaulted them.
As soon as we saw the enemy and realized that he was intent on attacking us, the Captain summoned the captive Turk whom he had in his power since the day before and who was still alive. He told this Turk that he was personally going to pay for the harm that his people intended to do us.
This was, in truth, a cruel gesture, for after a fight, and in a war where there are prisoners on both sides, you do not kill anyone in cold blood.
Summoning a Pole whom he had brought with him from Hormuz, and who had been many years a prisoner of the Turks, the Captain handed the Turk over to him and told him to kill him before the ships of his people reached ours. The Pole immediately tied the Turk’s hands behind his back, and, taking up a scimitar, he whispered to the Turk to come forward because, on the Captain’s order, he was going to cut off his head.
The Turk answered not a word. No sadness appeared on his face. Moving forward with the assurance and courage of a brave soldier (Turkish men are extremely brave), he went to sit near the gunwale, his face turned towards the sea, and, so that the scimitar could reach him more easily, he lowered his head without a word, and without it being necessary to say anything to him, as if he were indifferent to death and did not regret life.
The Pole gave him two blows with the scimitar, which completely tore off his head and made it fall into the sea. His headless body remained there for a moment, but the Pole gave this body a kick which made it take the path of the head.
The Turks learned, after they captured our ship, that the Pole had cut off the head of this man, and yet they did him no harm.
The enemy ships advanced in single file, one behind the other, following their flagship, all sails out, with their battle flags showing. Only the flagship flew white flags. As soon as, having gained to windward, he was within cannon range, he fired a blank shot, which meant, like the white flags, that we had to surrender.
However, we were not in a mood to give ourselves over to him, and so we responded with a salvo of cannon balls. When the enemy understood our determination, they first sailed in the same direction. Then, turning towards us, they took down the white flags, replacing them with red flags, and they furled their lower sails as well as their spritsail. All the other ships did the same, and they passed in front of our ship at a distance, firing cannons and muskets at us.
We attached less importance to such an attack than on the day before. The first cannonballs of a battle are indeed those that one fears the most, and as we were no longer so afraid, we responded to their attack so forcefully that they were obliged to move off from us.
They regrouped around their flagship about a league from us. That flagship was a very large vessel. Its Ra’is (that is what they call the Captain) was Cara Mostafa. They immediately held a council. There, as we learned later, Tabaco Arrais, the Captain-General of the squadron, said that he wanted nothing to do with our ship, and intended to return to Algiers. He was content with the nineteen English vessels he had already taken, all captured in one morning, and which had cost him only one shot from the blank cannon, after which all had lowered their flags. He took most of the English with him, and he had sent their captured ships ahead two days earlier.
However, that dog Calafate Hassan—he who had escaped our ship by swimming—responded that he had lost his vessel, that four hundred Turks and Moors he had brought with him had perished, and that it was not honorable for the Turks of Algiers, or for himself, to return having lost a ship and all it contained, and to have suffered so many casualties, without having taken such a valuable prize, or at least to set it afire and sink it.
It was, he argued, only one ship, and they had sixteen. “Give me command of a ship,” he declared, “and if that Portuguese ship, after a new assault, refuses to surrender, I will set it on fire!”
The words of this renegade Greek prompted another man of the same nation, his comrade Abibi Arrais, who was one of the bravest men in Algiers, to persuade all the others that they must attack, and that he alone would set fire to our ship or die in the attempt.
Very reluctantly—for he is better known for his luck than for his courage—Captain-General Tabaco Arrais had his squadron assume the same formation as before, and in the same order. They again raised their colors and passed us within cannon range, though without a single shot being fired from any of the ships.
After passing by our ship with their red banners waving and with numerous bastard trumpets blaring, they saw that the courage of our people did not weaken, and they then surrendered to the inevitable.
They moved their flagship towards us, and the others followed in the same order, approaching so close that their spars and ours almost touched. Each of them, one after the other and without stopping, fired a broadside, and, finally, the ship commanded by Abibi Arrais approached very close to our stern with the intention of setting our ship on fire.
As he drew near When he was near our stern gallery, which, according to custom, was covered, because of the rains, with a tarpaulin, he took off his turban, made of a piece of muslin, and broke a flask of brandy over it. This brandy had been mixed with linseed oil, sulfur, and gunpowder, a mixture that, when it catches fire, can only be extinguished with vinegar.
He then bound a strip of his turban, soaked with the brandy mixture and set afire, at the end of an arrow which he fired into the tarpaulin of the gallery. The fire caught easily and became so violent that it was no use pouring water on it. Our carpenters had no trouble breaking the railing of the gallery apart with their axes and heaving the burning tarpaulin into the sea, but it was impossible to beat the fire back.
This pirate dog made his ship advance until it was side to side with ours. edge to edge with the mother-of-pearl. He set fire to the main deck, which began. At the same time, in the forecastle, which was very well defended, for we did not want it to be taken again as it had been the day before, somebody fired a musket at Abibi Arrais. The ball took him in the chest and laid him on the stern deck of his ship. He only had time to swear that he would let all the Christians aboard own ship burn to death, since he himself was dying. Upon this, his cursed soul sank away to Hell. He may have burned our ship, but he lost his own vessel, and he lost his very life as well.
For the next installment of João Mascarenhas’ narrative, see the next post in this blog.
The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson
The story of the Barbary corsair raid on Iceland in 1627
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