Thesack of Baltimore took place on 20 June 1631, when the village ofBaltimore inWest Cork,Ireland, was attacked bypirates from the Barbary Coast of North Africa – the raiders includedDutchmen,Algerians, andOttoman Turks. The attack was the largest byBarbary slave traders on Ireland.[1][2]
The attack was led by aDutch captain fromHaarlem,Murad Reis the Younger, who had been enslaved by theBarbary pirates and set free following hisconversion to Islam. Murad's force of the regency of algiers was led to the village by an Irish Catholic fisherman ofOld English descent named John Hackett – the captain of a fishing boat that had been captured shortly before the raid – purportedly in exchange for his release, although dark conspiracy theories regarding Hackett,Sir Walter Coppinger, and Murad persist. Hackett was subsequently hanged from the cliff-top outside the village for conspiracy.[3][4]
Murad's crew, made up of Europeanrenegades[a] andAlgerians, launched their covert attack on the remote village of Baltimore on 20 June 1631.[5][2] They captured at least 107 villagers,[6] mostly English settlers along with some local Irish people (some reports put the number as high as 237).[7] The attack was focused on the area of the village known to this day as the Cove.[5] The villagers were put in irons and taken to a life ofslavery in Algiers.[8]
Some prisoners were destined to live out their days asgalley slaves, rowing for decades without ever setting foot on shore[9][10] while others would spend long years in aharem or as labourers. Only three at most of the slaves ever returned to Ireland.[11][10] One was ransomed almost at once[citation needed] and two others in 1646.[12] In the aftermath of the raid, the remaining villagers moved toSkibbereen, and Baltimore was virtually deserted for generations.[13]
In his bookThe Stolen Village, Des Ekin theorizes thatSir Walter Coppinger, a wealthyRecusant lawyer andmoneylender ofHiberno-Norse descent fromCork — who had become the main landowner in the area after the death ofSir Thomas Crooke, 1st Baronet, the founder of the English colony — secretlybribed the Barbary pirates to attack the village in collaboration with thederbhfine of deceasedIrish clan chief,Sir Fineen O'Driscoll.[14] It was theClanO'Driscoll that rented Baltimore and its lucrativepilchard fishing grounds to the EnglishPuritan settlers, in return for the prematurely ended regular payment ofblack rent, on 20 June 1610. The lease for the land was for twenty-one years at the end of which the title for the land was set, as collateral for Sir Fineen's debts, to transfer to Sir Walter Coppinger on 20 June 1631.[15]
Coppinger, before the time was over on the lease, tried by an assortment of means to evict the Puritans from Baltimore and gain early access to the highly valuable fishing trade.[16] After a long period of legal wrangling and harassment, it was decided in 1630 by the courts that the settlers could not be evicted because of the large amount they had invested in the development of the town and Coppinger was ordered to rent the land to the Puritans in perpetuity.[17] Ekin suggests that Coppinger secretly usedaristocratic O'Driscoll exiles inHabsburg Spain as go-betweens and hired Murad Reis to enslave the English Puritans of Baltimore. While Ekin acknowledges that there is no concrete proof of this theory, however, he does believe the raid happening on 20 June 1631—the exact date the Baltimore lease was to expire—was no coincidence.[14]
On the other hand, Murad may just as easily have planned and executed the raid without any need for Coppinger's encouragement or help. Baltimore was not only a profitable center ofcommercial fishing, but was also in the early 1600s evenmore profitable as a base forprivateering and even forpiracy. Despite official discouragement and orders to the contrary fromKing James I, all local judges, as Coppinger had found, and even thevice-admiral ofMunster were complicit in the Baltimore commerce raiding trade. The town's entire population were also alleged to be involved; all the Puritan women of Baltimore were reputed to be either the wives ormistresses of pirates.[18] Murad Rais and his crew may well have chosen to attack Baltimore, therefore, in order to eliminate competition and/or to punish the local population for commerce raids against Ottoman shipping.
According toCervantes scholar andHispanic studies professor María Antonia Garcés, surviving accounts by former enslaved Christians inOttoman Algeria, such as the posthumously published 1612Topographia of Algiers byAntonio de Sosa, provides yet another lead. Sosa later recalled that the Muslim community and pirate crews of Algiers included former Christians from every imaginable ethnicity of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the New World. He also made repeated references to Algiers, intriguingly, having a community of Irish "New Muslims" and "Turks by profession", who had alsobeen captured and enslaved, chosen to buy their own freedom throughconversion to Islam, and joined local crews of theBarbary pirates.[19] Furthermore, it is well-documented that the authorities had advanced intelligence that Murad planned to attack a port town along theCounty Cork coast, althoughKinsale was incorrectly thought to be the target rather than Baltimore.[20]
The truth soon emerged and he was hanged from the cliff top outside the village for his conspiracy
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link){{cite book}}:ISBN / Date incompatibility (help){{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link){{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)51°29′00″N9°22′18″W / 51.48341°N 9.37168°W /51.48341; -9.37168 (Sack of Baltimore)
