WHITE BRITISH SLAVES

The song Rule Britannia proclaims, Britons never will be slaves. But, there was a time when many Britons were made slaves. For over two hundred and fifty years, the coastline of southwest England was at the mercy of the Barbary pirates from North Africa.

It’s understood the years between 1530 and 1780, in Europe the figure could have been around 1,250,000. This is just over a tenth of the Africans removed as slaves to the Americas from 1500 to 1800, but a substantial figure nonetheless.

Henry Hammon, a seafarer from London, was on the Long Robert ship of London. On his journey, the ship was taken by Barbary pirates. Henry and the crew were taken to Tunis in Barbary. Held in great misery, Henry’s ransom was set at eighty pounds, which the unfortunate man and his friends could not raise.

Established in the harbours of Tripoli, Algiers, and Tunis. Their members comprised not only North Africans but also Dutch and English privateers. Their intention was to seize slaves for the Arab slave markets. Pillaging on land and sea, in the summer of 1625, the pirates invaded Mount’s Bay, Cornwall and captured sixty men, women and children, and took them to slavery in Africa.

In 1626 vessels out of Penzance, Looe, and other Cornish ports were boarded and their crews taken captive. Their unoccupied ships were then left to drift in the sea. It was feared that there were over sixty Barbary men-of-war stalking the Cornish and Devon coastlines. The attacks were happening almost on a daily basis. After snatching the residents, they peddled them off as slaves or for ransom payments. Some hostages were even forced to convert to Islam.

In the first part of the 1600s, pirates from the Barbary Coast of North Africa were authorised by their governments to attack the shipping of Christian countries. In their lantern-rigged vessels, they took ships and seamen and sold the seamen into slavery. Admiralty archives show that during this time the pirates pillaged British shipping at will. Merchants were frequently complaining about the doings of the pirates. The pirates took 466 vessels between 1609 and 1616, and 28 more vessels from Plymouth in 1625. In 1624 alone, it was stated that over fifteen hundred were incarcerated by pirates. Many families had trouble raising the ransom payments and made pleas for help.

The pirates ventured near the English coastline and attacked ships, which had sailed to Newfoundland and Virginia. The Mayor of Poole in 1625 wrote to the Privy Council demanding that security be delivered to the ships returning from America or they would be taken by the pirates. He testified that twenty-seven ships and two hundred crewmen had been taken by pirates in ten days.

Fishing boats were defenceless, so the King and Parliament attempted to organise protection for these areas and to raise cash for the ransoms, but the prevailing Civil War stalled any significant answer to the problem. After the restoration of Charles II, there was a much-improved British navy and the coastal raiding stopped.

After the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15, some European powers decided upon the need to defeat the Barbary pirates completely. Several attacks were made against the Algiers but they all underwent defeat until the decisive French attack in 1830 as the complete Algerian battery was at war in Navarino, Greece.

The white slaves in Barbary came mainly from poor backgrounds and had no chance of buying back their independence. It was the same as the Africans who were taken to the Americas. Most of them would end their lives as slaves in Africa, dying of hunger.