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Updated: June 11, 2025
Up to the fourteenth century the Christians were the chief pirates of the Mediterranean, and dealt largely in stolen goods and slaves. Then the growth of large commercial fleets discouraged the profession, and very soon we begin to hear much less of European brigandage, and much more of Moorish Corsairs.
By turns a commercial voyager, an explorer, a privateer's-man, or an admiral of war-fleets, in days when sharp distinctions between the merchant service and the public service, corsairs' work and cruisers' work, did not exist, he had ever proved himself equal to any emergency a man incapable of fatigue, of perplexity, or of fear.
These pirates in old times extended their depredations into the Atlantic as far as the British Channel. They swarmed in the Mediterranean, not only belonging to Algiers, but Tunis, and other ports on the coast of Barbary. Their corsairs making descents on the coasts of those countries which border on the Mediterranean, pillaging the villages and carrying off the inhabitants into slavery.
Should they turn corsairs; capture a sailing ship; set the Indians ashore on their own coast, or leave them the galley to do as they pleased with it? The two men could not make up their minds. The next day the same thoughts came to the rest of the Europeans, and they were heard discussing their chances of ultimate escape.
The corsairs, packed closely together, were unable to avoid them, and, as I told you, eleven of their ships were burnt, four were run ashore to avoid the flames, while six, trying to make their way out, were captured by the galley, aided by the three prizes that were taken and which the knights had caused to be manned by Sards." "The ways of Allah the All Seeing are wonderful," the merchant said.
It was captured by the Spaniards in 1614, and retaken by the Moors in 1681. The Corsairs formerly took refuge here. It is now a weak and miserable place, commanded by an old crumbling-down castle. There are five or six hundred fishermen, occupying one hundred and fifty cabins, who make a good trade of the Shebbel salmon; it has a very small garrison.
The intrepid corsairs, who had rendered every sea insecure, now clustered round the coasts of their native island.
They were not in danger of an attack from below the Danube. Moreover, the Spanish fleet had been achieving considerable successes on the Barbary coast, having seized La Roche, and one or two important citadels, useful both against the corsairs and against sudden attacks by sea from the Turk.
Icebergs were strong, Spaniards were strong, and storms, and corsairs, and rocks and reefs, which no chart had then noted they were all strong; but God was stronger, and that was all which they cared to know.
The privateers or corsairs, which began to swarm from every port in Holland and Zealand, and which found refuge in all those of England, sullied many gallant exploits by instances of culpable excess; so much so that the Prince of Orange was forced to withdraw the command which he had delegated to the lord of Dolhain, and to replace him by Gislain de Fiennes: for already several of the exiled nobles and ruined merchants of Antwerp and Amsterdam had joined these bold adventurers; and purchased or built, with the remnant of their fortunes, many vessels, in which they carried on a most productive warfare against Spanish commerce through the whole extent of the English Channel, from the mouth of the Embs to the harbor of La Rochelle.
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