The Stomach-Churning Things Barbary Pirates Did To White Slaves

Pirates from Africa armed with cutlasses went door to door taking men and women. The coastlines of Europe were no longer safe places to be. The Barbary Pirates rocked Europe’s most preeminent powers of the maritime, taking people as cargo and rendering coastal defenses useless. A slave trade flourished from this activity, and the impact on the people was unimaginable. Welcome to History on Fleek; today we examine the stomach-turning treatment of white slaves by the Barbary Pirates across the 16th to 19th centuries. Pirates from North Africa were joined by Ottoman Empire Raiders as they captured and enslaved people across the coastlines of Europe, called the Barbary Pirates as they operated out of the Barbary Coast, a region of North Africa’s coast including modern-day Tunisia, Libya, Morocco, and Algeria, also known as corsairs. Their main area of operations was in the Mediterranean, hitting coastal towns and formative ports, usually raiding the villages for slaves, motivated by an opportunity and desire for wealth. The pirates would take the captured back to North Africa for sale, most prominently to the Ottoman Empire. The thousands of enslavements that took place under the pirates were a devastating trauma upon individuals and communities. This effect would be felt in the long term over decades. Make no mistake, the Europeans lived in fear of the rampaging Barbary Pirates. So effective and potent were they in their coastal raids, the Barbary Pirates can be credited with the start of defensive forts on coastlines and even the development of European navies.

The pirates from the coast of North Africa were a force to be reckoned with. Their plunder on the coasts of Europe reached a legendary reputation. Coastal towns and merchant ships for some time were more or less fodder for the well-armed and swift pirate fleets. Writings from around the time give an insight into just how overwhelmed the shores of Europe appeared. Following a raid on the coast of Cornwall in 1625 that captured some 60 men and women into slavery, the vice admiral of Devon, Sir John Elliott, would comment that the seas around England seemed theirs. Raids were commonplace across the 1600s. Ireland’s southwest coast of Baltimore was plundered by some 200 pirates, to the tune of 107 Irish natives being captured and taken back to Algiers. By 1640, it was understood some 3,000 to 5,000 English people were captured in Algiers, and a parliamentary committee for the British Parliament was created. The Committee for Algiers set up charities and united local fishing communities to raise money between them to liberate their captured peoples. Evidently, the initial action against the Barbary slave trade didn’t take. By 1650, the English fishing industry was under threat. So regular and affecting were the pirate attacks, English fishermen became reluctant to take to the sea and leave their families ashore vulnerable and unprotected from the potent pirate force.

When captured by the Barbary corsairs, the immediate future was bleak. Surviving the long voyage from Europe back to North Africa was no guarantee; many would die on the way from a lack of food or water or the onset of disease or illness. Should one survive the mortality-breaching journey, the next stop would be standing at a slave market for hours, being inspected by buyers before the sale at an auction. Accounts for those who had survived being enslaved were wholly telling. Samuel Pepys’s diary included accounts of talking to slave survivors of the Barbary trade in 1661. Pepys’s account includes them speaking on how they were given nothing but bread and water to eat and how they were beaten at liberty on their stomachs and the soles of their feet. Following a purchase, slaves were put to labor and work in a variety of ways. The work of male slaves working the manual labor of heavy construction efforts and quarries was the norm. For women, enslaved housework and servitude of the sexual variety was the course. Chillingly, at night, slaves would be kept in overcrowded prisons known as banyos. Though laborers or concubines for the Ottoman Empire were hardly fates to be desired, there was one worse fate enforced by the Barbary pirates: slaves could be assigned to work the oars in the galleys of the very Barbary ships plundering and bringing back slaves to Africa. Shackled to their seats, slaves turned rowers were never allowed to leave. Astonishingly, this meant a life almost in its entirety consigned to sitting at an oar; eating, sleeping, urinating, and defecating all took place at the position of the oar. Be assured, in this inhumane setting, any lapse, slip, or sign of insubordination was met with a whip across the back. The Barbary slave trade would be felt far and wide, even crossing over the rich literary culture of the time. The author of the iconic novel Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes himself, was captured and enslaved by the pirates from 1575 to 1580; it would take a raised ransom from the Trinitarian Catholics and his parents for him to be a free man again.

People went missing, fishing industries were tanking, and budding navies felt humiliated. The powers of Europe would strike back across the 17th to 19th centuries. The western states whose coastal towns had been under siege would wage war with the Barbary pirates. The United States went to war with the Barbary states not once, but twice. The first was fought against the Barbary states of North Africa from 1801 to 1805. The second war would come 10 years later. In 1816, a brief war with the Barbary state of Algiers would encapsulate the state of naval politics at the time. Following this war with Algiers, the U.S. would end its tribute payments, which were supposed to protect the U.S. from pirate attacks. The European coasts would also gather forces and mount attacks on the pirate states. In 1675, with a Royal Navy squadron behind him, Sir John Narborough was able to negotiate at least a temporary peace with Tunis. British bombardment was the method chosen to bring peace with Tripoli also. Yet the fighting over supremacy of the seas would continue over the coming centuries. Algiers would be a focal point of the conflict, attacked from the sea by French, Spanish, British, and yes, American warships. 1816 appears a seminal and conclusive year for the war on the Barbary pirates. Amidst war with the U.S., an attack from Dutch and British fleets led to the liberation of over 4,000 Christian slaves, and finally, the Barbary corsairs were in decline from then on. Ultimately, the legacy of the Barbary pirates is not a simple matter; the power and efficiency they had, the dominance they showed over the maritime’s most potent forces, have been both romanticized and vilified across history. What is undebatable is the impact their raids and slave trading had over the people and regions they targeted.

The legacy of the Barbary pirates is a remarkable one and an insight into the world at the time, oft forgotten. While the Barbary slave trade would lose steam from the 17th century and would be essentially disbanded following the French conquest of Algiers in 1830, its impact was profound yet also timely. The slave trade of the Barbary states is hand in hand with the 16th to 19th century Atlantic slave trade. While rarely spoken, this is context: the Barbary slave trade was an arm of the Ottoman Empire at a time where empires were warring in the maritime, taking slaves with a grim part of the battle for global supremacy across their four active centuries as slavers. Some academics estimate that the number of Europeans enslaved by the Barbary corsairs likely tops over 1 million. There can be no clean comparison between the Atlantic slave trade and the Barbary slave trade. However, people captured as slaves by the Barbary pirates were to be sold in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire. This being said, the corsairs also enslaved people of color and non-Christian whites from Eastern Europe; it was not a clear-cut case of Muslim and African enslavement of Christian whites, as the reverse can be true of the Atlantic slave trade. Furthermore, there are many instances of the corsairs’ most effective operators being European. Many of the most notorious Barbary pirates were privateers from Europe who sailed to the Barbary Coast in peacetime purely to earn a pocket independently. Outcast European renegades were able to bring the most current naval knowledge to the Barbary slave trade, explaining raids as far from North Africa as Newfoundland and Iceland. Last but not least, parallels between the Barbary and Atlantic slave trade diverge radically in terms of outcomes. Typically, slaves of the Barbary trade could be sold to wealthy individuals and families in the Ottoman Empire, converted to Islam, and afforded an affluent education and a chance at respected roles in the royal guard or harem. The Atlantic slave trade left no such chance of social mobility or chances of elevation for the individual; surviving the Middle Passage was trauma followed by years of trauma. Finally, slavery is slavery; either trade is littered with continual instances of sexual slavery and woeful record and decimating women’s autonomy. Curiously, despite the Atlantic and Barbary slave trades having a similar timeline, the European perceptions of North Africa and the Muslim world were indelibly dented. European literature and art would reinforce negative stereotypes about the people in the region. To this day, we can witness the long-standing miscomprehension and conflict between Europe and North Africa and the Muslim world and how this continues to shape cultural attitudes and global politics. This is History on Fleek, and we’ll see you next time.