The Pirate Invasion of England?
By Gary Oswald.
As I talked about in a previous article, many of the Moriscos (residents of Islamic Spain) expelled from that country became Barbary Corsairs. Based in North Africa, they raided land in Spain for both treasure, which they would sell in Amsterdam and London, and slaves, which they sold in Morocco, Tunis and Algiers. The Barbary Corsairs had existed since the 11th or 12th century as raiders from North Africa attacked Christian Europe, but the 17th Century saw them increase their ambition, attacking outside the Mediterranean for the first time. They hooked up with English and Dutch renegades who refused to stop attacking Spanish ships once their own countries made peace and so converted to Islam to keep doing so. These renegades, sailing out of Muslim ports and with some Muslims in their crew, raided the UK, Ireland, the Canary Islands, Iceland and North America.
One of the most famous of those renegades was Jan Janszoon van Haarlem or Reis Mourad the Younger. A Dutch privateer during the Eighty Years War against Spain, Janszoon was captured by an Algerian fleet in 1618 when it sacked Lanzarote, a target Janszoon was also aiming for. He converted to Islam and joined his captors, spending a year sailing out of Algiers. In 1619, however he left Algeria to join the Morisco port of Salé near Rabat, Morocco. The Moriscos formed their semi-independent corsair state, Republic of Salé, in 1619 and Janszoon was elected its first president and grand admiral – a position that the Sultan of Morocco, Zidan Abu Maali, confirmed in 1624.
Janszoon is documented in involving himself as a diplomatic link between the Dutch Republic and France on one side and Morocco and Algiers on the other. He is also noted for raiding land from Cyprus to Majorca in the Mediterranean. But he is most famous for his raids in the Atlantic Ocean, where his Dutch square-rigged boats could travel larger distances than the oar driven galleys of Algiers.
In 1627, Janszoon's men raided Iceland in the 'Turkish Abductions' which saw close to 400 Icelanders captured and sold into slavery, the most famous being Guðríður Símonardóttir (Turkish Gudda). Guðríður was eventually ransomed by Christian IV of Denmark after a decade in slavery, though her son was not freed, and she was deeply mistrusted back in Iceland for fear that she had picked up Islamic habits during her time in bondage.
Janszoon left Salé in either 1627 or 1629 thanks to disputes with the other corsairs and started working in Algiers again. But this didn't prevent his ambitions being in the Atlantic. In 1631, Janszoon raided Baltimore, a protestant settlement in Ireland, and captured at least 107 villagers there. Ireland, like Iceland, had never been hit by Islamic pirates before and would not be again. What made Janszoon unique was his ability to hit areas that, unlike Spain and Italy, were not prepared for Corsair raids.
Janszoon was captured in turn by the Knights of Malta in 1635 and spent five years as a slave there, before being freed in 1640 by a corsair attack. He was given a government job in Morocco upon his release, with him being too sickly to sail anymore, and died shortly after.
But perhaps the most notable claim about Janszoon is none of this, but rather the one made by Angus Konstam in Piracy: The Complete History, that Janszoon captured the Island of Lundy in Devon in 1628 and held it until 1633.
Lundy, an island in the Bristol Channel, had long been a refuge for pirates. It's both close to the Bristol ships to raid and hard to capture. In numerous peace treaties between England and Scotland wherein the kings each bound their subjects not to attack the other, Lundy was explicitly named as an exception as everyone knew the English monarchy had no control there. In 1596 this was so notorious that Elizabeth I wrote to Barnard Grenville, the main landowner in Lundy, to take him to task for his inability to deal with the pirates there. As she put it:
"Whereas if you neglect that place her majestie shall have cause to take the Island wholly into her own hands and to make her own proffitt of it for the defence of the same'.
This changed nothing. In the 1630s English pirate John Nutt was often active there, with his vice admiral almost captured there in 1632. Likewise French, Spanish and Dutch pirates used it as a base. In 1628 four French pirates are reported to have rifled the shore of Lundy, in 1633 another Frenchman named Meggor killed a Lundy resident called Mark Pollard, and later that year a Captain Brundiville is noted to have robbed various ships around Lundy.
What you may note we're not seeing is a five-year occupation. Why is Mark Pollard still there and not in a slave market in Algiers if Janszoon owns the Island?
Well, there is simply no mention of that occupation in any of the English state papers, which otherwise do a thorough job of covering pirate activity in the Bristol Channel. Moreover, other things were being reported during that timeframe. Bevil Grenville was building a dock there in 1631 and received an offer to buy the island in 1630, and then another offer in 1636. If it was under Corsair control, the people there don't seem to have noticed. Konstam also claims that Janszoon's attack on Baltimore in 1631 came from Lundy but the only firsthand witness report specifically mentions the ships coming directly from Africa.
We do however have two references to Algerian pirates on Lundy, in the calendar of state papers. In 1635, the year Janszoon is captured by Malta, we get a report of Algerians using Lundy as a harbour and shelter, and in 1625 there is a report that they have captured Lundy. This could well be Janszoon, so maybe Konstam just got the years wrong and it's 1625 rather than 1628. Except the 1625 report is of a government inquiry into whether or not this has happened and the main witness is Thomas Harris of the HMS Phoenix who basically goes to Lundy and can't find any corsairs there at all. The only other witness is Mr. Nicholas Cullen who says that “the Turks continued at Lundy a fortnight. I saw the Turkish ship lying off the road off Lundy.”
So we've now gone from five years in 1628 to 1633, to two weeks in 1625 and a week in 1635; and from an occupation to a single ship harbouring there.
But we do have another version of this story. Ian Hernon, in his book Fortress Britain, says the following when talking about the well documented devastating corsair raids upon British villages and shipping in the 17th century:
“Oliver Cromwell, aware that the corsairs were crippling his South West ports and drastically raising insurance costs for the entire merchant fleet, decreed that any Arab taken in those waters should be taken to Bristol and slowly drowned. He commissioned Robert Blake and William Penn, both of solid Westcountry stock, to clear the corsairs off Lundy Island, which they had made their operations base. They bombarded the makeshift enemy stronghold and those not killed or captured fled back to Barbary.”
So that puts it much later than 1628 if Oliver Cromwell, who came to prominence in the 1640s, is in charge. Fairyjo, a devon website, gives a version set in 1645 in which Robert Blake and William Penn captured 466 ships and 20,000 prisoners when freeing the island, which is an unrealistically huge set of numbers but is otherwise compatible with Hernon's version.
Except this is also not mentioned in the state papers and what is mentioned in them is what happened to Lundy during the First English Civil War. It was held by royalist Thomas Bushell and he didn't surrender until 1647 after every other royalist in England had done so. He was the last holdout. There's no way Cromwell could have attacked the corsairs in 1645 and yet let Bushell hold out for two more years. Now, you might argue that Bushell might have made common cause with corsairs, but we have letters from 1645 from citizens to North Devon thanking Bushell's royalists for preventing pirates landing at Lundy by fortifying it against the roundheads.
So Hernon's story also doesn't hold up. Essentially secondary sources repeatedly mention the occupation of Lundy but give completely different dates as to when it happened, and primary sources don't mention it at all but do mention other things that are happening on Lundy during those time periods.
But this is an AH site. Just because it probably didn't mean happen, didn't mean it couldn't have done.
What can we change to make this story true? In the Caribbean Corsair article, I talked about how corsair interest in the Atlantic could translate into a corsair colony there. Why couldn't corsair interest in Lundy likewise result in an Islamic Republic in 1630s Devon?
So let’s pick up Janszoon's story when he leaves Salé and instead of going to Algiers, he goes to Lundy. Now traditionally pirates have followed two paths, they've either based themselves out of the way (Madagascar, Salé, the Bahamas) where there's no local forces of overwhelming strength. Or they've worked for a powerful state (going to Ottoman ruled Algiers or taking a pardon and re-joining a European fleet). So you need a reason why Janszoon instead moves closer to enemy fleets and further from protection.
Now Lundy is a good pirate territory and Janszoon almost certainly knows about it and can find it, if he took harbour there in 1625. But it has one major disadvantage, which it's miles away from all the people he's selling slaves too. If Janszoon does his OTL raids and captures slaves in Baltimore and takes them to Lundy, great. But no one in Lundy is buying white Christian slaves. He'll have to sell them in Algiers. Which means he's still having to make a voyage from Lundy to Algiers and not get intercepted. He's gained nothing in terms of safety.
Now he's got far more free movement, there's no sultan watching him, he can do what he likes, but he's living in a tiny, underdeveloped island right next door to the royal navy, not in the relative luxury he had in North Africa. Why would Janszoon do that? For me the only real answer is if he was exiled there.
Let’s imagine that whatever drove him out of Salé goes worse and he has also burned bridges elsewhere big time. Maybe Morocco successfully captured Salé in the 1620s when they besieged it and ended their semi-independence, and maybe the Dey of Algiers is an enemy or rival of Janszoon. We need a situation where he knows if he stays with Salé or Algiers, then his rivals will have his head, and also that the European powers likely won't offer him a pardon. In the cutthroat environment of corsair politics, that's not impossible.
So that changes things, he's in exile and using his slaves as labour on Lundy or to trade with visiting corsairs for goods. He's not sailing back to Algiers, the Algerians are sailing to him because they can't meet him in their home ports.
Now it might take a while for the English to realise how serious the problem is, assemble a large enough force to deal with it and then invade, but probably they don't need more than local forces. Most likely John Penington, who was the naval office in charge of dealing with pirates in Southwest England, just deals with him in short order. Holding an island is a lot harder than piracy, the corsairs succeeded by being difficult to track down and raiding where the navy wasn't, not by winning stand up fights with armed men. Most fought with swords as they lacked guns and cannons. Janszoon is going to be hugely outmatched here.
If he's very lucky, he might win that first battle and then survive through Charles's attempt to rule without parliament from 1829 (due to a lack of funds for the King to prioritise that) and then carry on into the various civil wars starting in 1639, but it feels like a huge longshot. Charles is not going to tolerate this and anti-piracy shouldn't require the same funds as to fight a full out war against a peer, you'd imagine local lords in Devon will fund such an expedition themselves.
If Janszoon does make it to the English Civil War in 1642 he might be left alone for the same reason Bushell was, Lundy is difficult to attack and not worth it when the war or lost is won elsewhere. But as soon as one side gets the upper hand I think he's either killed or, at the very best, offered a position in England on condition of him freeing his slaves and reconverting to Christianity. A slave state on the English coast taking English slaves just won't be tolerated by any English government and there's no local patron powerful enough to back him against them. Moreover, his presence and the fact he's ruling over English citizens he's using as slaves will enrage a lot of English and maybe even mean an earlier civil war if Charles tolerates it.
I found the idea of a short-lived Islamic Corsair island raiding the Christian countries around it possible, if unlikely, in the Caribbean, but the idea of the same in the British Isles just feels too difficult to get to. Even though a lot of history books will try and tell you that it happened in OTL.
Gary Oswald is the editor of the Grapeshot and Guillotines, Emerald Isles, and If We'd Just Got That Penalty anthologies.
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