BARBARY CORSAIR SHIPS AND TACTICS – PART 1

Barbary corsairs employed two basic sorts of ships: oared galleys (which hunted the Mediterranean) or square-rigged ships (which plied the Atlantic littoral). Both types were armed with cannons of various calibers. Galleys mounted their cannons in the prow.

The image below depicts a corsair galley.

As you can see, a corsair galley was a long, low ship with a covered pavilion at the stern (where the captain and officers stayed), rows of enchained oarsmen packed along the sides, soldiers packed in wherever there was space for them, and a narrow projecting beak on the prow. If you look carefully at the illustration, you can make out a cannon mounted at the base of the beak. Since there was no available space along the sides of a galley to mount cannons, they had to be placed in the prow. Like other ship’s guns of the period, these forward-pointing guns could not really be swiveled effectively, so to aim the guns, the captain had to aim the ship.

Square-rigged ships had their cannons mounted mostly along the sides.

The illustration below depicts an engagement at sea between two seventeenth century warships (an English and a Dutch; the English is on the left).

You can make out the gunports along the English ship’s port (left) side. This English ship is firing a broadside (from its starboard side) against the Dutch ship, resulting in the billowing cloud of gunsmoke—as all the guns along that side of the ship fire at once.

Square-rigged ships had the potential to be much more heavily armed than galleys, since they could line the entire side of the ship with guns. Depending on the size and armament of the vessel, a square-rigged ship could employ anything from half a dozen to thirty or even forty or more guns per side.

Because of the movies, we tend to imagine corsair attacks as violent and brutal affairs: a series of devastating broadsides followed by a horde of men swarming aboard, knives clutched between their teeth, brandishing cutlasses and blunderbusses, hacking people to pieces and blowing holes through them.

A dramatic image, but not really a very accurate one.

The illustration at the top of this post depicts the kind of violent confrontation we normally imagine. Such violence did occur, of course, and it makes for great spectacle in a painting, but it was not the norm. From the point of view of the corsairs, the very last thing they wanted was ferocious combat.

The enterprise in which Barbary corsairs engaged—capturing ships, goods, and human beings—was often referred to as the corso (the word derives from various romance language versions of the Latin root word “cursus,” to run and, by extension, to chase). Whatever else it might have been, the corso was a business enterprise. If your aim is to gain booty which you can sell at a profit, there is little point in destroying that booty when you encounter it—whether that booty be merchandise or human beings.

Plus… corsairs—like pirates in general—were essentially predators. Like predators everywhere, they sought vulnerable victims. Whether you are a pirate, a cheetah, a weasel, or a trap-door spider, if you injure yourself attacking your prey, you are in trouble; if you injure yourself badly enough, your chances of survival become slim. So being a predator means playing a game of risk and reward. Successful corsair captains would have developed a very fine-tuned sense of what risks were worth taking and what were not.

So Barbary corsairs made careful and limited use of the firepower available to them. Their aim was to intimidate their intended prey—to thoroughly cow the crew and passengers aboard any ship they intended to capture—rather than to engage in battle and destroy things. Every one of their own men killed or injured, every part of their own ship damaged reduced their chances of continued success. Every piece of ruined cargo aboard a captured ship, every potential captive killed or crippled was a potential loss of profit.

So a corsair galley would usually employ its forward-pointing cannon to fire warning shots across the bows of a vessel it planned to capture rather than to directly target the vessel itself. A square-rigged corsair ship might indeed fire off a broadside, but it was more for show than destructive effect. Often the encounter between a corsair ship and its prey resulted in a chase, with the prey ship desperately trying to flee, the corsair ship in pursuit, neither vessel interested in direct, violent confrontation. Corsair ships were typically quite fast, though, and so they usually caught their prey.

There were exceptions, and brutal clashes did occur, but often the final confrontation resulted in the prey ship surrendering without a shot being fired.

Aside from this sort of outright intimidation, Barbary corsairs also employed subterfuge.

Ships of this period flew flags to declare their nationality. Barbary corsair ships often flew false flags, posing as countrymen or allies of those aboard a ship they intended to capture. If the corsairs were in a European-style square-rigged ship, from a distance there was no sure way to know if they were genuine or not. And since corsair crews often included renegados (men who had converted to Islam and joined the corsairs) from a variety of European countries, there was likely to be one or more men aboard who spoke the language of their intended prey and could engage in conversation shouted from ship to ship… as the corsair ship all the while edged closer and closer.

Barbary corsairs stayed well clear of warships—for obvious reasons—and attacked merchant vessels instead. Since the whole point in shipping goods across the sea was to make a profit, the crews aboard merchant ships were kept as small as possible to help bring down shipping costs. Corsair vessels, on the other hand, had crews as large as possible—for their intimidation value. So if a corsair ship (with three quarters of more of its crew hidden below decks) could use the ruse of a false flag to draw close enough to a prey ship… it was all over. To the horror of those aboard the prey ship, the decks of the supposedly friendly vessel were suddenly swarming with heavily armed pirates, and it was too late to mount any sort of effective resistant—even if they wanted to.

There was yet another stratagem that Barbary corsairs employed, more devious than the others.

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For more on this stratagem, and for a first-hand account of what it was like to be deceived and boarded by Barbary corsairs, see the next post in this Barbary Corsair Ships and Tactics series.