ENGLISH PRIVATEERS – cont’d

As we saw in a post in this blog back in December 2024 (the one on Captain John Smith, excerpted from my book Corsairs & Captives), English privateers who were put out of work by King James I’s proclamation against piracy turned to Norther African ports:

As they [English privateers] found themselves more and more oppressed, their passions increasing with discontent. This made them turn pirates.

Because they grew hateful to all Christian princes, they retired to Barbary, where although there be not many good harbors but Tunis, Algiers, Salé, Marmora, and Tetouan, there are many convenient roads, or the open sea, which is their chief lordship. For the best harbors within the Straits of Gibraltar—Alcazarquivir, Oran, Melilla, Tangier, and Ceuta—are all possessed by the Spaniards. Beyond the Straits, they have also Arzilla and Mazagan. Marmora they have likewise lately taken and fortified.

Marmora (aka al-Ma’mura, modern-day Mehdya) is a small seaport town located about 18 miles (30 kilometers) northward up the coast from Salé, on Morocco’s Atlantic littoral. In the excerpt above, when Captain Smith says, “Marmora they have likewise lately taken and fortified.” He is referring to the Spanish military takeover of Marmora in 1614.

The Spanish considered it absolutely necessary to take Marmora at that time because it had become a nest of pirates—English pirates.

A deposition taken from several English sailors at Plymouth in July of 1611 makes reference to the English pirates at Marmora before the Spanish takeover of the place:

They [the sailors] say that there is in all of this kind of vermin [i.e., pirates] to the number of 40 sail and 2,000 men, all English. Their common rendezvous is at Marmora in Barbarie, where they have merchants of all sorts that trade with them for all kinds of commodities, especially those from Leghorn [Livorno].

So if the testimony of these English sailors is accurate, Marmora was the home port for no less than forty English pirate ships with an average crew of fifty men each—all serviced by an extensive network of merchants, many of whom came from Livorno, in Italy.

Marmora was, in other words, a pirate haven of considerable size for the era.

The number of English pirates (2,000) using Marmora as a home port give us a sense of just how many English pirates there were. After all, Marmora may have been one of the main—perhaps even the main—haven for them at this time, but it was not the only one. So there must have been several thousand English pirates knocking about the Mediterranean and beyond in the early decades of the seventeenth century.

The Spanish took Marmora in August of 1614, while the English pirates were all out hunting prey and the place was virtually deserted. When the pirates returned, they discovered—to their shock—that there home port was no longer theirs. As a result, they ended up dispersing throughout North Africa.

This background helps illuminate the significance of another observation by Captain Smith:

Being mixed in with the French and the Dutch (but with very few Spaniards or Italians), commonly running one from another, they [the English pirates] became so disjointed, disordered, debauched, and miserable that the Turks and Moors began to command them as slaves and force them to instruct them in their best skill, which many an accursed renegado, or Christian turned Turk, did, till they made those Sallymen [the corsairs of Salé] or Moors of Barbary as powerful as they be, to the terror of all the Straits.

At Marmora, the English were in control—through sheer strength of numbers. Once having become scattered, however, they lost all cohesion as a group and led such wild, self-indulgent lives that they became easy prey for their Muslim hosts.

Just how wild were these English pirates? Here is a description of one of the English pirate captains:

John Ward, commonly called Captain Ward, is about 55 years of age. Very short, with little hair, and that quite white; bald in front; swarthy face and beard. Speaks little, and almost always swearing. Drunk from morn till night. Most prodigal and plucky. Sleeps a great deal and is often on board when in port. The habits of a thorough ‘salt.’ A fool and an idiot out of his trade.

(See the illustration at the top of this post for a possible depiction of how Captain Ward might have looked.)

So there you have it. The English went from being legally licensed privateers, to outlaw pirates, to debauched slaves in only a few decades. They weren’t all enslaved, of course. Many ‘turned Turk’, converted to Islam, and joined the ranks of the Barbary corsairs. Many died in sea battles or of disease back on shore (outbreaks of plague regularly ravaged North Africa during this period; Captain Ward himself died of plague). By the end of the third decade of the seventeenth century, the English had basically ceased to exist as a separate piratical group in the Mediterranean basin and environs and had been absorbed into the larger Barbary corsair enterprise.

Such were the times.

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For those who may be interested…

The quotes from Captain John Smith come from page 97 of my book Corsairs and Captives (from the chapter titled “Captain John Smith on Pirates and Renegades”).

The deposition of the English sailors taken at Plymouth in 1611 comes from Pierre Cenival et Philippe de Cossé Brissac, éds., Les sources inédites de l’histoire du Maroc, première série, dynastie saadienne : archives et bibliothèques d’Angleterre, tome III, (The Unpublished Sources of Moroccan History, Series 1, Saadian Dynasty, Archives and Libraries of England, vol. 2, p. 464.

The description  of Captain Ward comes from Horatio F. Brown, ed., Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts Relating to English Affairs Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice, and in Other Libraries of Northern Italy, Vol. XI, 1607-1610, entry #268, pp. 140-141.