Author’s Note

  Crossed Bones is a work of fiction, though it is based on historical fact.

  Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Barbary corsair raids on the south coasts of England have been increasingly well documented over the past few years, although when I grew up in Cornwall they were never mentioned, and most people are still ignorant of this particular bloody chapter in England’s history. The corsairs of Salé, known in England as the Sallee Rovers, have a particularly fascinating history. Driven by religious fervour, they plundered far and wide to the extent that one corsair fleet was able to raise its skull-and-crossbones flag over Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel in the early summer of 1625, from which they launched innumerable raids on south-west shipping and coastal towns.

  The historical document prefacing this novel, that is, the letter from the Mayor of Plymouth to the new King’s Privy Council in the spring of 1625, warning of the likelihood not only of corsair raids (which had become a regular summer threat to shipping) but for the first time of attacks on coastal settlements, does not, in the usual bureaucratic fashion, appear to have resulted in raised security.

  The attack I have described on the church in Penzance is based on a reference in the state papers to an event in July 1625 when ‘sixtie men, women and children were taken from the church of Munnigesca in Mounts Bay’ (my italics). No one to this day is sure what ‘Munnigesca’ refers to. Some have speculated that it is the church on St Michael’s Mount, but I cannot believe that to be true, since it would have meant that Sir Arthur Harris, who was the Master of the Mount at the time, and his family would have been among those sixty captives, and they never suffered such a fate. Sir Arthur died at home in 1628 at Kenegie Manor; his last will and testament is included in the local parish papers. The only two large-enough settlements likely to generate such a congregation at the time, according to Carew and Leland, would have been Marazion, then known as Market-Jew (a corruption of Marghasewe), or Penzance. I decided on the church at Penzance, which would have stood where St Mary’s does today – on a promontory overlooking the bay. It would have been clearly seen from sea, thus presenting an attractive target for attack. It is curious that the Mount did not see and fire upon the corsairs (there is no mention in the CSP of any attempted defence); but Sir Arthur Harris had indeed been lobbying for funds to rearm the Mount for several years.

  The smuggling, however, of four cannon destined for the rearmament of Pendennis and St Michael’s Mount by Sir John Killigrew to the Sidi al-Ayyachi is my own invention.

  I am no great expert on embroidery; however, I have researched the methods and styles of the time as well as I can, and am greatly indebted to the works of Caroline Stone, who knows a great deal more about the embroidery of North Africa, and specifically Morocco, than I ever shall.

  It was a great disappointment to me to discover that no records of the captives taken by the Sallee Rovers in 1625 remain in Morocco. A number of first-hand accounts of English captives’ misfortunes and experiences have, however, survived; although few from as early as 1625 and none by a woman of that time. I have read many of these accounts and borrowed details here and there for authenticity; though taken with a healthy pinch of salt, since the temptation for captives to embellish their hardships with lurid detail was great, commercial pressures in the seventeenth century being all too similar to those of the twenty-first.

  I have listed below some of the key texts that proved invaluable to me in my research. I must also thank a number of individuals, without whom I could never have written this novel. First, my mother, for reminding me of this long-buried family legend; secondly, my climbing partner Bruce Kerry, who accompanied me on my first and crucial research visit to Morocco; thirdly, Emma Coode, friend and colleague, who read the text chapter by chapter as I wrote and provided me with both encouragement and the perfect audience. I must also thank my wonderful agents Danny Baror and Russell Galen for their passionate encouragement, my publishers Venetia Butterfield and Allison McCabe for their invaluable support and suggestions, and Jenny Dean and Donna Poppy for their meticulous help in honing and polishing the text. Finally, and most importantly, I want to thank my husband, Abdellatif Bakrim, who has been the most extraordinary source of Berber, Arabic and Moroccan history, culture and language; he has helped me with the translation of foreign texts and provided me with a sounding board for all the Moroccan material. He was also, before I knew him well, the inspiration for the raïs. Since I have come to know him, I cannot imagine him making a ruthless corsair captain or zealot; and for that I am profoundly grateful.
 

A Short History of Piracy: The Barbary Corsairs in Context

  I don’t pretend to be a historian, and so my research for this novel has had to be rather more thorough than if I were already an expert. I spent over two years researching the historical background to Crossed Bones before starting to write the story, and it proved to be a fascinating and eye-opening task. I will attempt to skim a little of the cream off the top of that research here, in order to place the Barbary corsairs in some sort of context, but if you are interested in further detail then please come and visit the Crossed Bones website, www.crossedbones.co.uk.

  Ever since men took to the sea in ships there has been piracy. Sea robbers menaced the trade routes of ancient Greece more than two thousand years ago. Phoenician traders armed themselves against pirates; Roman ships were robbed of their cargoes of olive oil, wine and grain. The Vikings perfected the art, pillaging both sea lanes and coastal settlements. Piracy flourished throughout the medieval period, as well as throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, finally peaking in the ‘golden age’ of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Wherever there were trade routes and goods and gold to be plundered, there were pirates. Buccaneers were the scourge of Spanish shipping in the Caribbean; and privateers were granted letters of marque by their governments, that turned them into official state pirates. The coffers of Queen Elizabeth I were regularly swelled by the predations upon Spanish treasure ships of such privateers as Sir Francis Drake.

  However, not all piracy was motivated purely by human greed, either personal or royal. For many, piracy was vindicated by religion, and its practitioners were termed ‘corsairs’, rather than pirates, a word that etymologically derives from the Italian word corso, meaning ‘chase’, a corsair being ‘one who gives chase’. Maltese corsairs were granted licence to attack the ships of the Muslim Turks by the Christian Knights Templar, the Knights of St John. And, conversely, the Barbary corsairs, operating out of the North African states of Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli and Morocco, were in turn authorized by their rulers to attack the ships of Christian countries, to kill the infidels and render their goods unto Islam. Barbary corsairs, therefore, were seen as religious warriors and defenders of their faith; they were referred to as al-ghuzat, which was the term used to denote those who had fought beside the Prophet Mohammad.

  The predations of the corsairs operating out of Rabat-Salé, in northern Morocco, were further fuelled by revenge.

  The Moors – originally Berbers from Morocco – had occupied Spain since their general, Tariq ibn-Ziyad, conquered the Iberian peninsula in AD 711. Over the centuries they had become concentrated in Granada (leaving behind them such exquisite creations as the Alhambra palace and hundreds of mosques and public baths). But the rising tide of Catholicism in the sixteenth century resulted in a steady exodus of Moors back to their native North Africa, largely as a result of religious persecution. The crux of this pogrom occurred around 1609, when the Catholic King of Spain, Philip III, decided to expel definitively all those of Moorish extraction from Spanish soil, no matter how long they had been established there, no matter whether they had at any stage converted from Islam to Catholicism. The expulsion was both abrupt and violent, involving the worst brutalities of the Spanish Inquisition.

  Over one million Moors were expelled, with many fetching up on the bleak northern coast of North Africa and in the ruined city of Rabat, a desolate place previously abandoned on account of ‘wild beasts’. Some were now reduced to penury; but some had anticipated the expulsion decrees and managed to smuggle their worldly wealth out of Spain with them. These latter were the Hornacheros – from Hornachos in Estremadura – and they also brought with them a fighting spirit, a ruthless instinct for independence and a determination to re-establish their fortunes and wreak vengeance on those who had insulted and maltreated them.

  They refortified the ruined city of Sale (including the beautiful and now-tranquil Kasbah des Oudaias, which bewitched me on my research trips to Rabat), vowing revenge on Christendom, and specifically on Spain. From their new base, they forged alliances with the pirates of Algiers and Tunis, who had been preying on Christian shipping in the Mediterranean for over a century. All manner of brigands and cut-throats – many of them Europeans turned Turk (having expeditiously converted to Islam) – converged upon New Salé to train the Hornacheros and other expelled Moors in the art of piracy. The refugees learned fast, driven by righteous indignation and jihadi fury. In 1617 a Dutch captain wrote ‘a year ago the Moors didn’t have a single vessel; now they own a quarter of the sea: they will become extremely powerful if we do not take care.’ How prescient he was.
 

The Salé corsairs ranged far and wide, their ambitions limited only by their technology. Galleys and xebecs, the small, shallow-drafted vessels used to raid shipping in the calmer seas of the Mediterranean, soon gave way to the big square-riggers, mastery of which enabled the corsairs to raid along the Atlantic coasts of Spain, Portugal, France and England, and further to Newfoundland, Ireland and Iceland. At first it was only cargoes that were plundered; from 1620 to 1630 Cornwall and Devon lost a fifth of their shipping to corsair attacks. But it was soon realized that the taking of slaves was a far more lucrative option, and during that same period more than a thousand Christians were taken captive. The raid on the church in Mount’s Bay, which forms the basis for Crossed Bones, was the first recorded attack in which captives were taken from English shores.

  From 1627 to 1641 the Sale corsairs had absolute independence, paying neither tithes nor taxes to the Sultan and ploughing all their riches back into what was rapidly becoming a significant business. Their audacity was extraordinary: they established a base of operations on Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel, raising the pirate skull and crossbones over the island and launching raids on the West Country coast. In a single day in 1636 they were to raid two hundred slaves from Plymouth; soon more than three thousand Christian sailors were held in the prisons of Sale. Fewer than a quarter of captives returned home. Many died in transit or in the mazmorras or on war-galleys, from disease or other hard treatment. Others turned Turk and stayed to make their fortunes, often adding their expertise to pirate crews.

  The European maritime nations had no answer to such rapaciousness: the corsairs were swift, ruthless and expert. The West’s attitude to the corsairs, however, could be duplicitous. In public, the predations of the corsairs were loudly deplored, and action was called for in terms that echo modern calls for a war on terror. In private, it was conceded that the larger European powers gained considerable commercial advantage from the corsairs’ actions, since the maritime interests of smaller nations were significantly damaged by such attacks. At one time or another England, France and Holland all made treaties with the Barbary states to gain immunity for their own merchant fleets in their waters. It was a shameful period for England in particular, which until this time had boasted of ruling the seas – a period soon to be conveniently forgotten when history books were written.

  From such a synopsis one might suppose the North African slave trade to be an especially vicious anomaly; but it is worth remembering that the institution of slavery extends back before recorded history and that most of the world’s civilizations had their foundations sunk deep in such human misery. Slavery was well established in Homer’s Greece; the Roman Empire thrived on its slave trade; references to slavery appear in the ancient Babylonian Code of Hammurabi; and slave labour was used in Egypt to build temples and pyramids.

  Slavery went through a particularly savage revolution in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Explorations of the African coast by Portuguese navigators resulted in the taking of thousands upon thousands of African slaves, and for nearly five centuries the predations of slave raiders along the coasts of Africa generated a lucrative and important business carried out with terrible brutality. Yet it was not in Europe that African slavery was eventually to render up the greatest profit but in the Americas. The British, Dutch, French, Spanish and Portuguese all engaged in this trade. Indeed, British ‘heroes’ John Hawkins and his cousin Francis Drake made three trips to Guinea and Sierra Leone, enslaving between them 1,200 and 1,400 Africans. Hawkins (later to be knighted following the defeat of the Spanish Armada) made such a huge profit from selling slaves that Queen Elizabeth I granted him a special coat of arms bearing the image of a bound African slave.

  Which all goes to show that history is a morally murky business. I have tried to be fair-minded in my portrayal of events and characters in Crossed Bones and as faithful as I can be to what pass for historical facts; but four hundred years away from those times, who can know where the real truth lies? In the end we are always left with more questions than answers, and in the gaps between knowledge and ignorance lies plenty of space in which a storyteller may weave a lively tale.

  Source Material and Further Reading

•   The Tragicall Life and Death of Muley Abdala Melek, John Harrison (Delph, 1633)
•   The Crescent and the Rose, Samuel C. Chew (New York, 1937)
•   Les Corsaires de Salé, Roger Coindreau (Paris, 1948)
•   The Lands of Barbary, Geoffrey Furlong (London, 1966)
•   The Barbary Slaves, Stephen Clissold (London, 1977)
•   The Embroideries of North Africa, Caroline Stone (London, 1985)
•   Corsari nel Mediterraneo, Salvatore Bono (Milan, 1993)
•   Nine Parts of Desire, Geraldine Brooks (London, 1994)
•   The Berbers, Michael Brett and Elizabeth Fentress (Oxford, 1996)
•   Islam in Britain, Nabil Matar (Cambridge, 1998)
•   Piracy, Slavery and Redemption, ed. Daniel J. Vitkus, intro. Nabil Matar (New York, 2001)
•   Captives, Linda Colley (London, 2002)
•   The Pirate Wars, Peter Earle (London, 2003)
•   ‘Ward the Pirate’, Abdal-Hakim Murad (internet article, 2003)
•   Infidels, Andrew Wheatcroft (London, 2003)
•   White Gold, Giles Milton (London, 2004)
•   The Sermons of Christopher Love (internet sources)
   

• p105   By the Way
• p107  Medieval Gildhouse, Poundstock
• p110 An Estate Account Book
• p120 Loggans - a History of Transport
• p129 Down tot he Sea
• p131 Notes on the Hain Steamship Company
• p133 Trevassack Manor, Hayle
• p139 Book Reviews
• p140 The Cornish Coif
• p142 Whitstone

Title: Old Cornwall vol.VIII, no.3, Autumn 1974

Author Name: The Federation of Old Cornwall Societies

Location Published: The Federation of Old Cornwall Societies: 1974

Binding: Paperback

Book Condition: Good

Type: Book

Categories: Cornwall and Devon

Seller ID: 19070518-54

Keywords: cornish coif, cornwall, hain steamship company, hayle, loggans, poundstock, trevassack manor

Table of contents—articles particularly relevant to West Penwith.

Volume VII

 9. Autumn 1971

• p398. Morvah—John Casley (1883–1968) Curiously this article is not in the table of contents.
• p403. An amazing rescue—Stanley Cock Alix Kartz from S. S. Congress by the St. Ives lifeboat.
• p424. John and William Pearce of St. Ives; Men with problems during the Commonwealth period (Part II)—J. C. A. Whetter

• p388 William Pryce, M.D.
• p403 An amazing Rescue
• p405 The Budges of Linkinhorne
• p411 West Cornwall Husbandman
• p419 Wreck of the Survic
• p424 John and William Pearce
• p430 A Cornish Club

Old Cornwall vol.VII, no.9, Autumn 1971

By: The Federation of Old Cornwall Societies

Price: £5.00

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Title: Old Cornwall vol.VII, no.9, Autumn 1971

Author Name: The Federation of Old Cornwall Societies

Location Published: The Federation of Old Cornwall Societies: 1971

Binding: Paperback

Book Condition: Good

Type: Book

Categories: Cornwall and Devon

Seller ID: 19070513-54

Keywords: budge, cornwall, john pearce, linkinhorne, william pearce, william pryce