THE SCOTS EMPRESS OF MOROCCO
Captured by the feared Barbary pirates and sold in the slave market at Algiers, Scottish teenager Helen Gloag went on to become a head of state before her mysterious disappearance. Richard Bath investigates.
The epic tale of teenager Helen Gloag who was sold as a slave in Algiers, but went on to become a head of state
Starting in 1500, for over three centuries the clash between the Christian and Islamic worlds saw huge numbers of white Europeans enslaved by the Ottoman Empire and the Islamic states of the Barbary coast. Between 1450 and 1700 an estimated 2.5 million slaves flooded into Istanbul from the Caucasus and shores of the Black Sea, plus a further two million from Russia, Poland and Ukraine. With the Mediterranean infested by a fleet of several hundred North African pirate ships, slaves were captured along the Mediterranean coast of Spain, France, Italy, the Aegean and Greece in such vast numbers that the coast between Venice and Malaga was almost completely depopulated.
Nor was Scotland unaffected. In his wonderful book White Gold, author Giles Milton says that over a million Europeans along the Atlantic and North Sea coasts were captured by Barbary pirates – known as Corsairs – before being transported back to the Islamic states of North Africa to be sold as slaves in what is today Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and western Libya.
The pirates’ reach was extraordinary. They plundered towns and villages along Europe’s Mediterranean coast, also capturing fishing and merchant vessels, whose crew would be sold into slavery, while the merchants were ransomed. But they also roved the Atlantic, menacing shipping and coastal communities as far afield as America, Brazil and the entire west coast of Africa, plus heading northwards to Iceland, the Netherlands and northern Europe. So rapacious were their landing parties that countless coastal communities – such as Baltimore in Cork, Ireland, which had its entire population seized in 1631 – were abandoned.
Britain and the west coast of Ireland were particularly badly affected, with corsair raiding ships waiting in the Bristol Channel (at one stage occupying the island of Lundy) and picking off fishing boats and merchant ships as they passed. Between 1609 and 1616, England alone lost 466 merchant ships to Barbary pirates, and in 1625 the Mayor of Poole wrote to the Privy Council, complaining that ‘twenty-seven ships and 200 persons had been taken by Turkish pirates in ten days’.
Just how completely this episode has disappeared from our common memory was demonstrated by the recent Last Night of the Proms furore over the
Over a million Europeans along the Atlantic coast were captured and enslaved by marauding corsairs
words ‘Britons never, never, never shall be slaves’ in Scotsman James Thomson’s anthemic Rule Britannia. Written in 1740, the song celebrated the fact that, after a long period of inaction following the Civil War, Britain had finally assembled a navy capable of stopping the slave raids of the Barbary Pirates.
The white slave trade fell away when the navies of the USA (who, before Jefferson became President, had at one stage been paying 25% of America’s national budget in ‘tribute’ to the Barbary states to prevent attacks), Sweden and Sicily defeated the North Africans in the Barbary Wars of 1800-15. For good measure, the navies of the USA, British and Dutch navies pounded Tripoli and Algiers into submission before the French conquest of North Africa from 1830-47 finally killed the European slave trade for good.
Before that time, nowhere was immune from these raids – especially not a maritime nation with a huge coastline like Scotland. One famous attack occurred in 1645 when Andrew Gray, a Scottish sailor who had been captured and became a corsair, led a Barbary pirate raiding party into Leith, and then onto plague-ridden Edinburgh where he demanded – and got – a ransom from the Provost, Sir John Smith of Groat Hall.
That day, which is commemorated by the presence of a Moorish statue at ‘Morocco Land’ on the Royal Mile, is not the only Scottish chapter in the Barbary Pirate tale. Perthborn Peter Lisle was also the admiral of the huge Barbary fleet in Tripoli after being enslaved and converting to Islam (or ‘turning Turk’ as it was then known). Another seventeenth century Scot, William Lithgow of Lanark, travelled extensively in North Africa, only to be kidnapped and tortured horribly for six years, an episode he wrote about in the snappily titled The Totall Discourse of the Rare Adventures and Painefull Peregrinations of Long Nineteen Yeares Travayles from Scotland to the Most Famous Kingdoms in Europe, Asia and Affrica.
But by far the most remarkable interaction between the Scots and the feared corsairs is the tale of Helen Gloag, a blacksmith’s daughter from rural Perthshire who attempted to emigrate to America, only to be captured by Barbary pirates before eventually rising to become the Empress of Morocco.
Her story begins with her birth on 29 January 1750 at Wester Pett near the village of Muthill. Born to blacksmith Andrew Gloag and his wife Ann Kay, as a child Gloag’s mother died and her father remarried a stepmother with whom she came into daily conflict. When the teenage Helen – said to be a lively girl with a penchant for card games – started up a romantic liaison with an older man, local farmer John Byrne, the level of friction with her stepmother was so intense that she decided in May 1769 to emigrate to the Carolinas, a popular destination for Scots leaving for the new world.
However, travelling with several of her friends and just two weeks into the
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Just two weeks into her journey from Greenock to Carolina a set of sails appeared on the horizon
50-day journey from Greenock, a set of sails were sighted on the horizon. Within hours their ship was surrounded by a shoal of Barbary pirate ships from the city of Sale, near Rabat in Morocco, their corsairs boarding Gloag’s ship and slaughtering all of the men before transporting the women back to Algiers for sale in the slave market.
A statuesque 19-year-old with alabaster skin, flowing red hair and green eyes, Helen stood out from the crowd and was soon snapped up. Her purchaser turned out to be a wealthy Moroccan merchant who gave her as a gift to the ruler of Morocco, the Alaouite emperor Mohammed ben Abdellah. Fair skin and red hair were both prized in Morocco (Sale, the twin city of Rabat, still has a high instance of both as a result of numerous raids on Ireland) and the Scotswoman immediately joined his harem, eventually becoming his fourth wife.
The Emperor was clearly besotted with his beautiful Scottish bride, who in short order became his principal wife, delivered him two sons, and was rewarded with the title of Empress of Morocco. The sultan was a reformer who wanted better relations with the European powers and the USA, and in this he was encouraged by his new consort. In 1777 he signed a friendship pact with the USA (its oldest unbroken friendship treaty) and in 1787 Morocco became one of the first nations to recognise the newly independent USA.
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A statuesque 19 year old with alabaster skin, red hair and green eyes, Helen stood out and was soon snapped up
Gloag was also apparently able to persuade the emperor to soften the treatment of European slaves, with increasing numbers of British seafarers and captured women being released unharmed and without having been forced to convert to Islam. As Jim Hewitson and Ian Black note in Skull & Saltire, their book on Scots pirates, ‘from then on, stories began to filter back from Morocco of the legendary white queen and unexpected releases, especially of those females in captivity’.
Such was her exalted status that her brother Robert, a seaman, was able to start trading with Morocco, visiting regularly and bringing back gifts such as fine china from his sister to her family and neighbours (including old flame John Byrne).
But then suddenly, in 1790, more than twenty years since her ship was captured mid-Atlantic by Barbary pirates, Gloag’s world came crashing down when her husband died. The details are sketchy, but it appears that Gloag tried to install one of her two sons as the new emperor, only for the throne to be seized by Mulai Yazeed, the sultan’s son from his marriage to a German concubine. Gloag sent her sons to the port of Tetouan, near Gibraltar, but they were overtaken by Yazeed’s troops and executed.
Gloag is said to have fled before being given sanctuary in a monastery, yet that is where her trail goes cold and her story ends. But what a story it is…