AUTHOR’S NOTE
Classicists won’t be surprised to learn that the idea for this book sprang from the events leading to the outbreak of the Second Punic War. I probably have more classicists among my readers than most other writers, but even so I doubt they’re a majority.
Though that was the germ of the novel, the business of the book is more concerned with piracy. Pirates have become a big deal in recent years, but even when I was a kid there were plenty of child-accessible books about them. I particularly remember a big volume with what I now suspect were N. C. Wyeth plates. An image which is still vivid with me was of buccaneers in a small boat closing on the stern of a Spanish galleon.
As I got older, I read quite a lot more about pirates—but these were the pirates of the West Indies and the East Coast of North America. There were pirates other places too—Captain Kidd operated in the Indian Ocean—but they were pretty much the same: They captured ships and stole the cargo, behaving with greater or lesser brutality to the crews and passengers.
There were also the Barbary Pirates in the Mediterranean. I knew about them because one of the first steps the newly United States took on the international stage was to mount an expedition against them in 1801.
A catchphrase of the day was, “Millions for defense but not one cent for tribute!” Pirates from North African ports were capturing American ships and holding the crews for ransom unless the US paid tribute to Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, and the Kingdom of Morocco, as most European nations did. Instead, the US sent a naval squadron.
Much like the 1968 Tet Offensive, the expedition had a considerable effect on public opinion back in the US, but considered simply as a military operation it was an expensive failure. There were quite a lot of heroic endeavors by American sailors—and I read about them with delight—but in fact the expedition’s major success was to burn one of its own ships in Tripoli harbor after the pirates had captured it. This was truly splendid exploit, but burning your own vessels isn’t a good way to force an enemy to change its ways.
The Barbary Pirates continued to operate until France conquered the region later in the nineteenth century, but that’s another matter. The crucial thing, which I didn’t realize until I visited Algiers in 1981, is that the Barbary Pirates weren’t in the business of looting ships: They were capturing slaves.
I’m not the only one who was ignorant on the subject. A few years ago I commented to an intelligent friend that the pirates captured European slaves in numbers comparable to the numbers of African slaves shipped to the Americas. (The real figure is more like a tenth, but this is still about a million European slaves.) He accused me of getting my facts from Fox News.
Well, no. I’d noticed the wonderful tile work in many of the older buildings in Algiers (and since many such buildings have been converted to public use or into foreign missions, this isn’t as hard as it may sound). When I asked about it, I learned that charitable organizations in European countries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were set up to buy back enslaved sailors.
The Dutch, as one of the greatest trading nations of the period, provided a large number of both slaves and charities. Much of the ransoming was done with goods rather than gold, and the pirates turned out to be very fond of Delft tiles. The evidence is right there today for any visitor to see.
When we visited Iceland a few years later, I learned that Barbary Pirates had captured the city of Vestmannaeyjar and carried the profitable part of the population off as slaves. (Old people were burned alive in the church.) Piracy was definitely big business, in North Africa as surely as in the Antebellum South.
There’s quite a lot of information about the slave-based economies of the Barbary States. I prefer to get my history from primary sources—the history really isn’t as good, but it gives the reader a much better notion of how the culture felt, and that’s important from my standpoint. There are the accounts by ransomed slaves, by free Europeans working in the Barbary Kingdoms (generally in specialist trades like medicine or gunnery), and by European officials representing citizens of their nations in the kingdoms. I found a great deal of material.
It’s important to remember that slavery was a business. The pirate kingdoms weren’t civilized by modern standards (or even by those of the Antebellum South), but there were laws, and the trade in slaves was regulated by both law and custom.
My purpose, as always, is to tell a good story. I hope I’ve done so here. But readers who recall that the human interactions I describe are neither invented or pre-invented (which is how I tend to think of Fox News) may learn some things they didn’t previously know.
Dave Drake
david-drake.com