THE DUTCH CONNECTION: PRIVATEERS, PIRATES, CORSAIRS 6

Last week, we looked at the life of Claes Compaen, the Dutchman who began his piratical career as a licensed privateer attacking—and looting—Spanish shipping but then turned pirate.

This week, we look at why other Dutch privateers turned to outright piracy and how they wound up in North Africa—as Barbary corsairs.

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Privateering, remember, was a perfectly respectable profession in the seventeenth century, and universally practiced throughout Europe. It was a consequence of the times.

As the Eighty Years’ War (the Dutch War of independence from the Spanish/Habsburg Empire) ground on, the carefully regulated Dutch privateer enterprise ground on with it, producing consistent profits and training several generations of seafarers in the rough business of attacking and looting ships. There may have been disgruntled privateers who took off on their own and launched careers as pirates, but in general Dutch privateering proved itself to be a successful business model.

And then everything changed.

In 1609, the Republic of the Netherlands and Spain signed a truce—the Twelve Years’ Truce—and hostilities between the two countries ceased. As a result, Dutch privateers were no longer needed.

The whole enterprise collapsed.

This was a devastating turn of events for everyone involved, but especially for the privateers themselves. All their lives, the Republic of the Netherlands had been at war. They fought in that war; their fathers fought in it; in some cases, their grandfathers fought in it. War defined life, one way or another, for their whole generation.

When the truce came into effect, most privateers bowed to the inevitable and returned to their home ports and took up life as merchant seamen—though likely with misgivings, for their future was uncertain, and also no doubt with a certain amount of regret, for they stood a far better chance of earning real money as privateers than they ever did as ordinary sailors.

A significant number of privateers, however, did not give up their trade.

This wasn’t really all that surprising.

Privateering may have been officially a legal enterprise, but it still involved robbery and destruction and so was in essence piratical. No matter how much it might have been regulated, the corroding influence of such a violent life, and the naked greed that the acquisition of treasure inevitably provoked, corrupted those involved. Once a man had entered deeply enough into the violently piratical (and lucrative) life that privateering offered, it was hard to go back to ordinary, placid (and poverty stricken) life.

Also, returning to life as an ordinary seaman wasn’t a particularly appealing prospect. There’s an old proverb about the sea: He that would go to sea for pleasure would go to hell for a vacation.

Why go back to the merchant marine with all its accompanying discounts? And for paltry pay at that?

Here is how one pirate captain put it:

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In an honest service [i.e., the merchant marine], there are thin rations, low wages, and hard labor; in this, plenty and satiety, pleasure and ease, liberty and power. Who would not see the benefit of this, when all the hazard that is run for it, at worst, is only a sour look or two at choaking.[1]

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Whatever their individual reasons might have been, a smallish, but still significant number, of Dutch privateers were unwilling to return to ordinary life when they were called home. Instead, they stayed out at sea and became outlaw pirates, indiscriminately attacking whatever ships they came across.

These new pirates had a problem, though.

It is an easy thing to overlook, but without suitable ports, pirates simply cannot survive.

In order to make their enterprise profitable, they needed to be able to sell their booty, and they had to regularly revictual and refit their ships and repair any damage they sustained at sea. So they had to have access to merchants who were not only able and willing to buy stolen goods but who also had extensive enough trade networks to export those stolen goods and to import the range of supplies required to outfit the pirate ships.

All this meant, of course, that the local port authorities—if there were any—had to be willing to cater to pirates, or at least turn an official blind eye to what was going on.

The outlaw status of these new Dutch pirates prevented them from using ordinary European ports, so they had to search for new ones.

As we saw in the case of Claes Compaen, for a time, the Dutch used Irish ports. Ireland in those days was a sort of maritime ‘wild west.’ English control was tenuous, small harbors and ports were plentiful, and the local people and their English overlords saw the profit in dealing with pirates, both in victualling their ships and entertaining their crews (who had ready cash to spend), and in buying the stolen goods they offered at cut-rate prices.

The new Dutch pirates also made use of La Rochelle, on the Atlantic coast of France, a Huguenot port allied with the Republic of the Netherlands that Dutch privateers had been frequenting since before the Eighty Years’ War.

The multiple small ports and cooperative population that Ireland offered were convenient enough, but they contained limited facilities, and the Dutch pirates needed better markets for their booty and better sources of supply than those the little backwater Irish harbors could provide. Plus, English naval forces began to harass those Irish ports.

La Rochelle, too, had its problems (it would eventually be besieged and captured by Catholic French forces).

So the Dutch pirates went in search of new ports out of which they could operate.

They found those ports along the North Africa shore.

In fact, it was a natural choice.

Since the beginnings of the Eighty Years’ War, the Republic of the Netherlands and the North African Ottoman Regencies—Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers—and Salé (which eventually became an independent republic) had shared a common enemy: Spain. And though ships from the Dutch Republic and the Regencies and Salé regularly attacked each other, the relationship was not a purely antagonistic one.

On the principle of “the enemy of my enemy is my ally,” privateers/pirates from the Dutch Republic and Barbary corsairs had sometimes operated, if not as outright allies, at least as fellow combatants against a common foe. Moreover, Dutch privateers who had gone rogue and been outlawed had been making use of North African ports all along (as Claes Compaen had).

So the choice was an obvious one, especially because the influx of Dutch pirates was welcomed in North Africa. Since the Dutch pirates had, so to speak, burned their bridges behind them, many converted, were absorbed into the fabric of North African Muslim society, and began new lives as Barbary corsairs.

Despite their dark reputation, Barbary corsairs were not simply pirates. Like the Dutch, they too were privateers.

Each Barbary corsair captain carried a letter of marque from the official authorities of his home port authorizing him to attack and loot ‘enemy’ shipping and to bring back booty to be auctioned off. As with the Dutch, corsair expeditions were financed by consortiums, booty had to be adjudicated and declared legal before it could be sold, and profits were shared out on a pro rata basis to financial backers and the state.

This system was entirely familiar to the Dutch ex-privateers, and they fit right in—plying their old trade but with a new sponsor.

These emigrant Dutch pirates had an outsized influence on the Barbary corsairs, for they inevitably ended up sharing their expertise. From them the corsairs learned not only how to build, sail, and navigate European style square-rigged sailing ships, but also how to utilize such ships effectively in naval warfare.

This changed everything.

The oared galleys the Barbary corsairs had been using were highly effective in the Mediterranean, but they were unsuited for the rough waters of the open Atlantic. With square-rigged sailing ships now at their disposal, and with a new understanding of naval tactics, the Barbary corsairs burst out of the confines of the Mediterranean and began raiding all along the Atlantic littoral of Europe.

English privateers had gone through a process similar to the Dutch one when their country signed a truce with Spain in 1604, and a number of them became outlaw pirates. They too ended up in North African ports, and they too shared their expertise with the Barbary corsairs and taught them how to utilize European-style sailing ships. The Dutch were more numerous and more influential, though. During this period, they made up over a third of the corsair captains operating out of Algiers, for instance.

Theirs was a unique generation. The war of independence against Spanish Habsburg rule had created a cohort of captains, officers, and ordinary seaman who had inherited several generations’ worth of hard-won privateering skill and knowledge. Throughout the conflict, there had always been a number of privateers who went rogue and became pirates. And though the Twelve Years’ Truce was temporary, it forced men into making irrevocable decisions. Those who would not—or could not—abandon their trade took the only clear path open to them.

All of this meant that for a period of twenty or thirty years, there was a population of skilled Dutch pirates who knew—or wished—no other way to make a living. The ones who survived had learned hard lessons and were very good at what they did. Most of them did it for the rest of their lives.

And in the process, radically changed the dynamics of the Barbary corsair enterprise.

[1] Charles Johnson, A General History of the Pyrates, from their first Rise and Settlement in the Island of Providence to the present Time, pp. 272-273. This quote is attributed to a pirate captain named Roberts, who was not a Dutchman but who expresses nicely the darkly enterprising spirit of the Dutch privateers who turned their back on legitimacy and struck out as pirates. Roberts is described as “a tall black man, near forty years of age… of good natural parts and personal bravery” who made “a gallant figure” dressed in “a rich crimson damask waistcoat and breeches, a red feather in his hat, a gold chain round his neck, with a diamond cross hanging to it, a sword in his hand, and two pair of pistols hanging at the end of a silk sling flung over his shoulder” (p. 271). Dashing figure though he many have been, Captain Roberts met a decidedly undashing end: he was killed in a battle at sea when some grapeshot struck him “directly in the throat.” A less than heroic demise it might have been, but at least he avoided being caught and hanged as a pirate—the “choking” he refers to. A General History of the Pyrates was published in 1724, and I have updated the original spelling and capitalization and lightly edited both the quote that appears in the text and the lines excerpted in this note to make them clearer for modern readers. Some scholars are convinced that Daniel Defoe (of “Robinson Crusoe” fame) was the actual author of A General History of the Pyrates.