TERROR COMES ASHORE
cozening his friends and neighbours… by receiving of stolen goods, by consorting with pirates.”
Similar problems existed in Wales in the Middle Ages where the Marcher Lords – nobles entrusted to guard the border between Wales and England – provided safe havens for “ship thieves”. In the 1590s, Sir John Perrot, the Vice Admiral of Pembrokeshire, actively encouraged pirates to sell their stolen goods in Cardiff.
ENEMIES ON ALL SIDES
Such pirates normally attacked foreign shipping, but in the Middle Ages enemies could be found very close to home with the Welsh, Irish and Scots at various times all at war with the English, as were the French, Spanish, Dutch and Hanseatic League, among others. But maritime violence and theft was not restricted to wartime. Indeed, the opposite was often the case; in times of peace the coasts became flooded with sailors, trained in war but now with no job, no pay and no prospects. Using their skills to take what they could (and give nothing back) was all too appealing.
In such circumstances, ships became prey – whatever the colour of the ship’s flag or the language of her sailors. In 1314, during the reign of Edward II, a ship in the king’s service was robbed by a fleet led by a man who, until recently, had been an English admiral. It could even happen near London. In 1586, a coastal vessel was sailing down the Thames when, just below Woolwich, “five or six persons in a wherry laid [her] aboard… with swords drawn and robbed the hoy”. No one was safe, not even a king. In 1406, James I of Scotland was captured by English pirates and held captive by Henry IV for 18 years.
For centuries, therefore, the sea around the British Isles was livid with domestic pirates operating from bases on private land and sailing with the blessing of the wealthy and politically connected landowners. Lulworth Cove and Studland Bay in Dorset were particularly notorious, as was Baltimore and Crookhaven in south-west Ireland, and the Western Isles of Scotland, where the English warship the Mary Willoughby was sent in 1533 to punish the piracies of the “wild Scots” – but was captured by those same wild Scots. In 1578, one of Queen Elizabeth’s own ships was plundered by pirates at Newport in Wales.
Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel briefly became a pirate ‘kingdom’ in 1610, having been seized by West Country pirate Thomas
“In times of peace, the coasts became flooded with sailors with no job, no pay and no prospects”
Salkeld who declared himself its king. And in 1627, the island was occupied for a full five years by Barbary pirates from Morocco.
The advent of these Barbary pirates in the
17th century marked a sudden turn for the worse. They sailed from the north African regencies of Tripoli, Tunis and Algiers in open warfare with England. Originally part of the Ottoman empire, they had successfully claimed their independence and now survived through a mixture of trade and piracy. In the 1670s, Algiers operated a particularly ruthless fleet, at least half of which was captained by Christian renegades who had ‘turned Turk’. They knew the coasts of England, Wales and Ireland like the back of their hands and now whispered to their new masters of the defenceless lands from which they had come.
The Barbary pirates sailed north, into the English Channel and Irish Sea – even as far as Iceland – chasing down and capturing shipping. But they also brought with them a new tactic: they raided coastal villages, seizing men, women and children, hauling them back to
Algiers to sell their human booty into slavery. Between 1616 and 1642 some 7,000 English and Irish were taken in this way. In one single raid in Penzance in 1625, an entire congregation of 60 men, women and children was captured from a church; six years later, 109 were taken from the coastal village of Baltimore in Ireland.
Such visible weakness of coastal defences and the outrage it caused prompted a slow process of eradicating piracy from the British coasts. Laws were passed and enforced and the Royal Navy grew in order to protect trade, customs and coastal communities. What followed, from 1650–1730, became known as the Golden Age of piracy, when piracy flourished anew and as never before in the unpoliced waters of the Caribbean and Indian Ocean.
Yet coastal communities in the British Isles still suffered from foreign enemy raids, while the near-constant stream of wars with European powers meant there was a regular threat of seaborne invasion. So, although the British coasts were largely free of pirates, they remained a dangerous place to be, and a significant cause for national anxiety. A far cry from the happy seaside assocations we have today.