Crossed Bones (51 page)

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.

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