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Updated: June 17, 2025
No sooner was our war with England over than our navy began to make a reputation for itself in the Mediterranean. In his letter of August, 1815, Irving dwells with pride on Decatur's triumph over the Algerine pirates. He had just received a letter from that "worthy little tar, Jack Nicholson," dated on board the Flambeau, off Algiers.
There was one winter when I was small that I had the scarlet-fever, and was very slim for a long time afterward, and I used to keep along o' gran'ther, and he would tell me stories. He'd been a sailor, it runs in our blood to foller the sea, and he'd been wrecked two or three times and been taken by the Algerine pirates.
A small vessel called the "Intrepid," which had been captured some time previously, was manned with a crew of over eighty men, commanded by Lieutenant Decatur, who, years after, finished the Algerine war.
Well, one night we come in our friggit to anchor in bay of Algiers. I gits leave go ashore wi' tothers, runs right away to our Dey, who gits awrful waxy, sends for Breetish cap'n, 'splain that I's the son of a Turk by a Algerine moder an' wery nigh or'er the cap'n's head to be cutted off." "You don't say so?" "Yis, it's troo.
Still no sound of battle, as she proceeded to lash her bows to those of an Algerine brig lying just within the mole. This done, her crew gave three cheers, as well they might. Then the stolid, unaccountable apathy of the barbarians ceased, and three guns in quick succession were fired from the eastern battery.
Accordingly, one fine morning three hundred vessels belonging to the Algerine pirate entered the neighboring port of Villefranche, and presently the whole country was filled with a horde of turbaned freebooters. Cimiez, Montboron, Mont Gros and a hundred other villages and hamlets were soon alive with French marauders and Turkish pirates, who presently proceeded to bombard the city itself.
If the executive had experienced such difficulties while the Algerine cruisers had captured only one or two vessels, and were confined to the Mediterranean by a Portuguese squadron, how much less prospect was there of success after they had captured a considerable number of ships, were likely to capture many more, and were at liberty to cruise on the Atlantic to the very coasts of the United States?
Prisoners had been taken in such abundance, that to show their worthlessness, they were publicly sold in the market-place at Algiers, at an onion a head. For nearly a century after this, little occurs of note in Algerine history except a constant system of piracy. In 1655 the British Admiral Blake gave them a drubbing. The French were the next to attack these common enemies of Europe.
The horror of Algerine slavery was considered as the ne plus ultra of human misery; but it has so happened, that we have many sailors returned again to their country, who have been enslaved at Algiers; and have been impressed and detained on board British men of war, and afterwards thrown into their prison-ships.
In 1782, whilst he was on a visit to some of his relations in the Island of Sardinia, being on a fishing party some distance from shore, he was, with his companions, captured by an Algerine felucca, and carried a captive to Algiers. Here he turned Mussulman, and, until 1790, was a zealous believer in, and professor of, the Alcoran.
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