Expedition after expedition was sent to argue, to remonstrate, to threaten, with literally no result. Ambassador after ambassador came and went, and made useless treaties, and still the Algerines maintained the preposterous right to search British vessels at sea, and take from them foreigners and goods. Sir Robert Mansell first arrived in 1620 with eighteen ships and five hundred guns, manned by 2,600 men; and accomplished nothing. As soon as they turned their backs the pirates took forty British ships. Sir Thomas Roe made a treaty, which turned out to be waste paper. Blake frightened the Corsairs for the moment. The Earl of Winchelsea, in 1660, admitted the right of search. Lord Sandwich in the following year cannonaded Algiers without result from a safe distance. Four times Sir Thomas Allen brought his squadron into the bay, and four times sailed he out, having gained half his purpose, and twice his desert of insult: “These men,” cried ’Ali Aga, “talk as if they were drunk, and would force us to restore their subjects whether they will or no! Bid them begone.”[89] The only satisfactory event to be reported after fifty years of fruitless expeditions is Sir E. Spragg’s attack on the Algerine fleet, beached under the guns of Bujēya: like Blake, he sent in a fireship and burnt the whole squadron. Whereupon the Janissaries rose in consternation, murdered their Aga, and, carrying his head to the Palace, insisted on peace with England.
It was a very temporary display of force. Five years later Sir John Narborough, instead of bombarding, was meekly paying sixty thousand “pieces of eight” to the Algerines for slaves and presents. In 1681 Admiral Herbert, afterwards Lord Torrington, executed various amicable cruises against the Algerines. In 1684 Sir W. Soame with difficulty extorted a salute of twenty-one guns to His Britannic Majesty’s flag. And so the weary tale of irresolution and weakness went on. Admiral Keppel’s expedition in 1749 is chiefly memorable for the presence of Sir Joshua Reynolds as a guest on board the flagship; and it is possible that two sketches reproduced by Sir Lambert Playfair are from his pencil: the drawings were the only fruit of the cruise. James Bruce, the African traveller, as agent or consul-general in 1763, put a little backbone into the communications, but he soon went on his travels, and then the old fruitless course of humble remonstrances and idle demonstrations went on again. Whenever more serious attempts were made, the preparations were totally inadequate. Spain, Portugal, Naples, and Malta sent a combined fleet in 1784 to punish the Algerines, but the vessels were all small and such as the Corsairs could tackle, and so feeble and desultory was the attack that, after a fortnight’s fooling, the whole fleet sailed away.
FOOTNOTES:
[78] Broadley, Tunis, i. 51.
[79] Several Voyages, 97.
[80] Ibid. 104, note.
[81] London: Smith and Elder, 1884.
[82] Up to 1618 Algiers was governed by a Pasha directly appointed by the Sultan; from 1618 the Pasha was chosen by the Janissaries and other militia subject to the veto of the Sultan; in 1671 the Janissaries first elected a Dey out of their own number, every soldier being eligible, and their Dey soon made the Sultan’s Pasha a lay figure; in 1710 the two offices were united in a Dey chosen by the soldiery. These parvenus were by no means ashamed of their origin or principles. Mohammed Dey (1720), getting into a passion with the French consul, exclaimed with more frankness than courtesy: “My mother sold sheeps’ feet, and my father sold neats’ tongues, but they would have been ashamed to expose for sale so worthless a tongue as thine.” Another time the Dey confessed with dignified naïveté to Consul Cole: “The Algerines are a company of rogues—and I am their Captain!”
[83] Several Voyages, 111 ff.
[84] See his descendant Adm. Spratt’s Travels and Researches in Crete, i. 384-7.