CALAFAT HASSAN – THE TALE OF A CORSAIR REIS: PART 1

During the age of the Barbary corsairs, successful corsair captains were not only wealthy and important men; they were folk heroes. In ports like Algiers, they walked—swaggered, rather—though the streets as lords of all they surveyed. People would point at them and whisper. Tales were told of their daring exploits, and of how they bravely met their end: one captain’s legs were blown away by a chance cannon ball during an attack; another suffered fatal musket wounds but insisted on having a chair brought to him and sat in it shouting clear orders to his men to the last; a third escaped capture by beaching his ship and marching away inland with his crew, only to succumb to wounds received while battling a local militia.

Corsairing was a violent, dangerous business, and few captains died peacefully in their beds.

But the stories kept being told—and kept their names alive.

One of the names that have come down to us is that of Calafat Hassan. He was the corsair Reis (Captain) described by João Mascarenhas, the Portuguese soldier captured by Algerine corsairs when the ship he was traveling on (the Conceição) was set afire and sunk. Calafat Hassan Reis was the captain who led his men swarming aboard the Conceição in a daring but unsuccessful attempt to take the ship, losing his own ship in the process. He barely escaped with his life by leaping into the sea and swimming to safety.

For the next few posts here in this blog, we will look at then career of Calafat Hassan Reis.

In his heyday (the 1620s), Calafat Hassan Reis was one of the most famous corsair captains of Algiers. Like so many others of his generation, he was a renegade—a European Christian who forsook his own religion, converted to Islam, and took up a new life. He had originally been Greek, from a poor family. Before he began his career as a corsair, he worked as a calker, somebody who filled in the gaps between the planks of a ship’s hull to make them watertight. One of the words for a calker is “calfateur,” and the story is that he kept this name as a sort of ironic homage to his past.

He was a wildly brave and wildly successful Reis. Like so many other corsair captains, though, he did not end up retiring peacefully. In fact, his end was quite… Shakespearean.

This series of posts recounts the tale.

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In the summer of 1626, Calafat Hassan Reis was hunting in the waters along the southern coast of Italy and on into the eastern Mediterranean, leading a fleet of seven heavily armed, square-rigged sailing ships and several oared galleys (Algerian corsairs, like corsairs in general, often hunted in packs during this period).

Things began well in a modest way, and they took several small prizes. Then, one morning, they spotted a large Venetian merchant ship. Calafat Hassan Reis sent four of his galleys and his lightest, fasted sailing ship to chase after the Venetian. The wind was light, and the galleys—which relied in manpower at the oars rather than the wind—quickly overhauled their prey.

The plan of attack in a situation like this was a standard one: the galleys would fire a few shots from their bow cannons as they drew near, to make sure the men aboard the ship they were after kept their heads down. Then the galleys would crash up against the ship’s hull and the soldiers crowded onto the galleys’ decks would swarm the ship, shrieking and shouting, brandishing cutlasses and pikes and pistols.

This time, it didn’t work out that way.

In a situation like this, many European vessels would have simply surrendered. The Venetian ship did not. Instead, it loosed off volley after volley of witheringly effective cannon fire and drove the galleys back. Eventually, it took Calafat Hassan Reis’s entire fleet to overcome the Venetian. It was not until they had reduced the merchant ship to a wreck—the masts shattered, the sails ripped to shreds by cannon balls, dead men littering the deck—that the corsairs were finally able to board it. The corsairs lost a lot of men. No more than a couple of dozen remained alive aboard the Venetian vessel.

At first, Calafat Hassan Reis was furious. This paltry return was not worth the men he had lost of the damage his feet had sustained. But then he discovered that there were three Capuchin friars aboard the Venetian vessels, passengers on their way to the Holy Land. This was good news, for Catholic priests could often be ransomed for very high prices. They alone made this capture worth the effort.

The friars were transferred to Calafat Hassan Reis’s ship and chained up in the hold, and the fleet moved on in search of new prey.

After taking a further couple of small prizes, the fleet stopped at the port of Modon (modern Methoni, located on the southwest corner of the Peloponnese Peninsula; Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire at this time) to repair, refit, and revictual. Calafat Hassan Reis was in the process of selling the three Capuchin friars locally—selling them to a local dealer who could then negotiate the ransoms for them was faster and easier for Calafat Hassan Reis than hauling them all the way back to Algiers. As he was in the midst of negotiations, though, word came of a large merchant ship out at sea passing nearby. He grabbed up the friars, had them flung back into the hold of his ship, and launched his entire fleet as quickly as possible.

The large merchant ship turned out to be French, large indeed, and loaded down with valuable cargo. Like the Venetians, the French fought, but there was little they could do to prevent the inevitable. Calafat Hassan Reis’s ships overwhelmed them, taking the ship, all the men aboard, and all the cargo.

This was the beginning of six weeks of continued and astonishing successes. The fleet raided along the coast of Sicily, making incursions inland to abduct people—men, women, and children—from towns and villages near the coast. They took several more merchant ships at sea, including a Dutch ship. The Republic of the Netherlands had a treaty with Algiers at this time, so Algerian corsairs were supposed to leave Dutch shipping alone. Calafat Hassan Reis, however, claimed that the cargo the ship carried was from Naples, and since Naples hadn’t signed any treaty with Algiers, the cargo was his to take—which he did.

By the time the summer season began to turn, Calafat Hassan Reis’s ships were stuffed with captives and booty—including the three Capuchin friars still chained up in the hold of Calafat Hassan Reis’s ship.

It was time to consider returning to Algiers.

Calafat Hassan Reis did not make such decisions lightly. In fact, he didn’t really make them at all. Rather, he let them be made for him through the divinatory properties of the Koran. This practice of divination had given him a reputation as a sorcerer among Europeans.

Calling upon the Koran, Calafat Hassan Reis went through the divinatory process—which involved, among other things, the juggling and shifting about of arrows as well as the use of the holy book. The end result was clear: it was not yet time to return to Algiers.

So Calafat Hassan Reis ordered his fleet northwestwards, towards the southern coast of Sardinia, to do a last series of raids there before returning in triumph to Algiers.

What he didn’t know, however, was that news of his depredations had spread, and a coalition of European powers was, at that very moment, preparing an expeditionary force in hopes of hunting him down and destroying his fleet.

For more about this European force and about the confrontation between them and Calafat Hassan Reis’s fleet, see Calafat Hassan – the Tale of a Corsair Reis: Part 2 here in this blog.