"But too true it is," wrote Monson, "that since that time our poor English, and especially the people of the West country, who trade that way daily, fall into the hands of those pirates. It is too lamentable to hear their complaints, and too intolerable to suffer the misery that has befallen them."[27]
By 1625 the Turkish pirate ship was "a common object of the seashore" in the West. There were at least a score of them in the Channel. They captured the Island of Lundy, and, "Hun-like", threatened to burn Ilfracombe unless a large sum was paid as indemnity. They landed in Cornwall one Sunday, surrounded a church while divine service was proceeding, and carried off sixty men from the congregation into slavery. Some months earlier it had been officially reported that there were nearly 1400 Englishmen captive in Salee alone, "all, or greatest part, taken within 20 or 30 miles of Dartmouth, Plymouth, or Falmouth. When the winter takes, then the Sally men-of-war go to Flushing and Holland, where, having supplied all wants, and the winter past, they go to sea again. If they want men in the places with the Dutch, they are furnished."
Perhaps the most celebrated coastal raid was that made by Murad Reis upon the village of Baltimore, on the Munster coast, on 31st June, 1631. Piloted by a traitor from Dungarvon—one Flachet by name, who, it is consoling to learn, expiated his crime on the scaffold—the "Turks" sailed into the little harbour in the dead of night and descended on the sleeping village like a "bolt from the blue". Completely surprised, the Irishmen could oppose no resistance to the dark-skinned demons and their blacker-hearted renegade comrades. Those who were not fortunate enough to be slain on their own doorsteps were herded on board the corsairs with all the weeping women and children of the village, even babies in arms, and carried off into a captivity worse than death itself. The total "bag" amounted to 237 men, women, and children. Baltimore was then a thriving fishing centre, but it has never recovered from this raid. The south coast of Ireland and the Bristol Channel seem to have been a favourite hunting-ground at this period. Murad had already been harrying the English coast before he carried out his coup at Baltimore. The year before the "Turks" had taken six ships near Bristol, and had something like forty ships operating in English waters. But the Government of King Charles was so feeble and so incompetent that even the Sack of Baltimore failed to rouse it to the necessary action.
The navy was willing enough to deal with the pirates, but it was in a very poor way itself, its men robbed, starved, and stinted, its ships and many of their commanders anything but efficient. It is even stated that two of the King's ships lying at Kinsale had word of Murad Reis's attack, but did not attempt to intercept it. Apparently all that was done was to set up additional alarm-beacons on the coast. Captain Richard Plumleigh wrote from Waterford in October of the year following, reporting an engagement he had had with "the arch-pirate Nutt", and adds, "Nutt has 2 Turks with him and his consort. . . . I never saw people in whom one disaster had settled so deep an impression as the Turks' last descent hath done in these Irish: every small fleet they see on the coast puts them into arms, or at least to their heels."
There would appear to have been something like a permanent, though inefficient, watch in St. George's Channel about this time, for in 1634 Sir John Plumleigh, another naval officer, writes from the Isle of Man, after "scouring" those waters, "Of the Turks as yet we hear nothing, though the general bruit runs that they intend hither this year, as some prisoners from Algiers have written over to their friends". So enterprising had the pirates become that not long before this it was represented very strongly to the Mayor of Barnstaple that "unless vigorous steps are taken for the suppression of these marauders" there was great danger that "they will fall upon our fishing shippes both at Newfoundland and Virginea, for they desire both our shippes and men".
The "Turks" were, in fact, insatiable. At this time it was reported that they had 25,000 Christian slaves in Algiers alone, besides 8000 renegades, among whom were over 1000 women. The petitions to the Government from coastal towns, from merchants, from the friends and relations of the unhappy captives, were legion—but nothing practical was done. The celebrated Robert Boyle writes of his passage from Youghal to Bristol in 1635, that he accomplished it safely, "though the Irish coasts were infested with Turkish galleys".
THE RELEASE OF CHRISTIAN PRISONERS AT ALGIERS
The bold and aggressive Turkish pirates were for long the terror of merchantmen. So successful were they in their raids that at one time they were reported to have 25,000 Christian slaves in Algiers alone.