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� Abdal-Hakim
Murad, January 2003
Were they pirates, or were they warriors for
Islam?
For centuries,
historians have debated the significance of one of the most stirring episodes in
the history of Britain�s
Muslim minority. Men such as Captain John Ward of
Kent
astounded their compatriots by proudly adopting Islam to fight the Inquisition
and the expansionist powers of Europe. Contemporaries called
such men �corsairs�; they themselves considered themselves mujahidin. Some were among the most pious Muslims this
country has yet produced. Others were famous drunkards and
lechers.
Ward and his
likes were described by the adventurer John Smith. Later to be Disneyfied thanks to his romance with Princess Pocahontas,
Smith was one English traveller who saw these Muslims at first hand, having
spent some years in the Ottoman army before sailing to New England. He wrote a book, the
True Travels and Adventures, to describe the European Muslims who were fighting
for the Crescent against the Cross. Leading the list were men of Holland and
England, who, disgusted by religious wars in their own countries, and unpersuaded by Trinities and Vicarious Atonements, �took the
Turbant of the Turke�.
�Because they grew hateful to all Christian princes,� Smith observed, �they
retired to Barbary.�
Smith was firmly
of the opinion that the pirating lifestyle was introduced to the
Barbary
States by these Europeans, �who
first taught the Moors to be men of war.� His compatriots were well aware of the
names of the seaborne mujahidin, particularly Captain
Danseker and Captain Ward, among the most skilled
seamen in the annals of English history, who placed their gifts at the disposal
of emirs and sultans, and whose swashbuckling exploits Smith was able to retell
in hair-raising detail.
Until the
arrival of these European adventurers, the coastal ports of
North Africa had been unused to war. They had, however, found new prosperity as
the home of Spanish Muslims expelled by King Phillip III in 1610, an event that
was perhaps the greatest act of racial brutality seen in Europe prior to the Nazi
Holocaust. Most Moors knew little of the sea, and still less of the infernal
arts of gunpowder; but they welcomed Muslims from the Mediterranean lands, and
from the seafaring nations of the North, who were willing to accept Islam in
exchange for military service with the Spanish exiles. By the middle of the
sixteenth century, English Muslims were at the forefront of this movement,
ranging the seas to capture first Spanish, and then any Christian ship,
enslaving the crew, and selling the cargo as spoils of
war.
Horrified
priests regularly emerged from the churches of Algiers, Tunis and
Sale, to witness the
regular conversion celebrations in the streets. They report that slaves who
converted would accept Islam in a simple ceremony in a mosque; but free men and
women would do so at the tomb of a local saint, to which they would be led in a
great public procession, preceded by a military band. Riding a horse, and
holding an arrow in his hand to symbolise commitment to the Jihad, a
newly-circumcised Englishman would then learn the basics of the Qur�an, and apply himself to his new vocation. Only a
minority took to the sea; others are known to have made a living as tailors, or
butchers, or even as imams of mosques. To this day there is a building in the
Moroccan town of Sale known as the
�Englishman�s Mosque.�
Most of these
individuals took the secret of their lives with them to the grave. Thanks to the
Spanish Inquisition, however, historians have access to information about a good
number of them. Those who returned to a seafaring life ran the risk of recapture
and interrogation by the Inquisition�s priests, and it is from the Inquisition�s
meticulously-kept records that we know the details of their conversion, and,
often, their tragic fate.
One Inquisition
court, in the year 1610, investigated no fewer than thirty-nine Britons. Twelve
of them were from the ports of the West Country. Ten were Londoners; six were
from Plymouth, and others
originated in Middlesbrough, Lyme, and the Channel
Islands. In 1631, the Inquisition in the
Spanish city of Murcia tried one
Alexander Harris, who as Reis Murad had become a
prominent Muslim seafarer. He was convicted, forced to convert to Catholicism,
and sentenced to seven years as a galley-slave. Another unfortunate Englishman
was Francis Barnes, who admitted to the inquisitors that he had faithfully
prayed and fasted �in the Mahometan manner� while
working as a ship�s pilot at Tunis, where he was
captured by Spanish raiders. In 1626, Robin Locar of
Plymouth, also known
as Ibrahim, was captured by Tuscan galleys and
convicted of practising Islam. Captain Jonas of
Dartmouth, known as
Mami al-Inglizi, was yet
another victim of these dreaded Spanish raiders.
An interrogation
by the Inquisition was meant to be terrifying. One survivor, the Plymouth Muslim
Lewis Crew, described how the priests, after using various forms of torture,
would ask the Muslim captive whether they would accept papal teaching on six
issues. Firstly came the Trinity, as the main point at
issue between Islam and Christianity. Second was the perpetual virginity of
Mary. Third was the Immaculate Conception. Fourthly, questions would be asked
about the doctrine of Purgatory. Fifthly, the accused would be required to
demonstrate his orthodoxy on the doctrine of papal supremacy. Finally, the
Sacraments of the Catholic Church would be the subject of a complex
investigation, which no doubt confused the simple sailors who made up the
majority of the Inquisition�s convicts. Like many others, Crew had steeled
himself for a religious debate of the kind held in public between converts and
Christians in Algiers; he found,
however, that the Inquisition was interested only in enforcing orthodoxy, not in
justifying it.
The Inquisition�s writ
counted for nothing in Protestant England; but even here, those Muslim sailors
who returned to their homes could face interrogation and martyrdom. Sir Walter
Raleigh, commenting on the gravity of the problem, recorded that �Renegadoes, that turn Turke, are impaled�, and this seems to have been the usual
punishment for such men. Three English martyrs are known in the year 1620, while
in 1671, a Welshman was put to death by impalement after refusing to reconvert
to Christianity. Archbishop Laud was so concerned by the Muslim presence that he
instituted a miniature English version of the Inquisition. His �Form of
Penance�, enforced in 1637, laid down strict rules to ensure the sincerity of
reconversions to Christianity, including the use of
penitential robes and white wands borrowed directly from Catholic
practice.
Despite the best
efforts of the inquisitors, the corsair cities continued to thrive. By the end
of the sixteenth century, the number of Englishmen and other Europeans who had
joined this adventure had become enormous. Diego de Haedo, a Benedictine priest, estimated that by 1600, half of
the population of Algiers was made up of
European converts and their descendents. Later, Voltaire was to remark on �the
singular fact that there are so many Spanish, French and English renegades, whom
one may find in all the cities of Morocco.�
Most of the corsairs
were of humble origins. A few, however, were well-known in their own lands. One
such was Sir Francis Verney (1584-1615), who �turned
Turk in Tunneis�, and was later captured and served
for two years as a galley slave as a punishment for his
conversion.
But perhaps the
two best-known English corsairs were the celebrated sea-dogs John Ward and Simon
Danseker. A seventeenth-century ballad heard
throughout the taverns of England sang
that
All the world about
has heard
Of
Danseker and Captain Ward
And of their proud adventures every
day.
Ward, in
particular, rose in the public eye until he became the best-known English pirate
since Sir Francis Drake. Born at Faversham, he spent his teenage years working
the fisheries. Late in the reign of Queen Elizabeth he joined the Navy, where
his rebellious temperament impelled him to the unofficial capture of a ship
rumoured to be carrying the treasure of Catholic refugees. The ship turned out
to be empty of treasure, but the enterprising Ward used her to capture a much
larger French ship off the south coast of
Ireland, and
to vanish from the Navy for good.
It was in this
ship, which he called the Little John to drive home his image as a kind of
latter-day Robin Hood, that he sailed to Tunis, hoping to join
the campaign against the Catholic nations of the Mediterranean. He found favour
with Kara Osman, the commander of the local janissary
garrison, and at some point joined Islam.
His maritime
prowess soon put him, according to a French report of 1606, in command of over
five hundred Muslim and Christian volunteers. Among these were Captain Samson,
in charge of prizes, Richard Bishop of Yarmouth (Ward�s first
lieutenant), and James Procter of Southampton, who served as his
gunner. Perhaps his greatest seaborne achievement was the capture of the
Venetian galleon Reinera e Soderina, displacing 1500 tons, whose treasure amounted to
over two million ducats.
By the second
decade of the seventeenth century, Ward was master of the central
Mediterranean. Another ballad has him send the following message to James
I:
Go tell the
King of England, go tell him this from
me,
If he reign king of all the land, I will reign king at
sea.
Life in
Tunis, as in the
Muslim world generally, was more refined and comfortable than its equivalent in
Europe,
and despite several offers, Ward showed no sign of yearning for his home shores.
He built a palace, described by William Lithgow, the Scottish raconteur who
passed through Tunis in 1616, as �a
fair palace beautified with rich marble and alabaster stones. With whom I found
domestics, some fifteen circumcised English renegades, whose lives and
countenances were both alike. Old Ward their master was placable and diverse times in my ten days staying there I
dined and supped with him.� Another visitor, Edward Coxere, reported that Ward �always had a Turkish habit on,
he was to drink water and no wine, and wore little irons under his Turk�s shoes
like horseshoes�.
When Ward died
of the plague in 1622, England
seemed to be in two minds about him. There were many who hailed him as the
scourge of the Papist navies, or as a man of humble origins who rose to humble
the rich and powerful. Others found it harder to accept him, because of his
voluntary conversion to Islam, and his adoption of Turkish ways and values. He
was �the great English pirate � it is said that he was the first that put the
Turks in a way to turn pirates at sea like himself�. But he was not soon
forgotten. Later generations of English Muslims, both at home and in North
Africa, admired him as a superb mariner, fearless in battle, and a doughty
warrior for the Crescent against those who expelled the Moriscos, and sought to impose their implacable and cruel
customs on the free lands of the South, where church, mosque and synagogue
coexisted for centuries, and where humble birth was no barrier to
glory.
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