Review by New York Times Review
IN the early 19th century, the United States Navy and Marines played a small but significant part in the demise of the Barbary corsairs, the pirates who terrorized the Mediterranean from their bases in Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli and Morocco. As a result, we Americans have tended to view this history through the lens of our own past. Adrian Tinniswood's dramatic narrative, "Pirates of Barbary," reminds us that the corsairs had preyed on Europeans long before the United States arrived on the scene. Indeed, they reached the height of their power in the 17th century, not long after the pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock. Because the Barbary states were Islamic, and their victims predominantly Christian, the conflict was understood on both sides as a clash of civilizations. In the Islamic world, the corsairs were hailed as "mujahedeen" who had devoted themselves to "sea-jihad" against Christian encroachments. Europeans deplored "Mahometan tyranny" and conflated Islam and piracy as if they were one and the same - "the present terror of the world." But once the veneer of religious purpose was stripped away, Barbary piracy was a commercial enterprise, offering a handsome livelihood to those dusty, sundrenched city-states for the better part of three centuries. The four seaports were well situated to prey on passing ship traffic. Their harbors, enclosed by perilous shoals on a lee shore, could not be blockaded except at great risk and expense. Their small, heavily manned, fast-sailing vessels could sally out, attack unprotected merchant ships and retreat to safety behind their shore guns. Ships and cargoes could be seized and sold, but the most fantastic profits lay in slave-raiding for men, women and children, who were stripped, beaten and transported back to port in chains, where they were put to hard labor, ransomed for extravagant sums, conscripted into private harems or sold at auction. When captured ships did not produce the desired head counts, the corsairs descended like latter-day Vikings on defenseless coastal communities in Italy, Greece, France, Spain and even as far away as Ireland and Iceland. Tinniswood, the author of several works of English history, explains that for all the talk of a confrontation between Christianity and Islam, the most notorious corsairs were European renegades who had learned the trade on "privateers," or private warships commissioned by a government to prey on enemy merchantmen. European wars tended to drag on for decades, providing a stable living to privateersmen - but whenever peace arrived, as it periodically did, it threw thousands of these professional sea warriors on hard times. Not surprisingly, many turned pirate. In the early 17th century, the Mediterranean swarmed with pirate ships manned by blue-eyed Caucasians who spoke English, Dutch or Cornish. In Barbary, they found convenient bases to outfit their ships, as well as ready markets for their booty and slaves. Tunis, especially, was an international rogues' gallery in which Arabs, Berbers and other African nomads assimilated with Turks, Greeks, Spaniards, Italians, Dutchmen, Englishmen and ethnically Greek or Balkan Janissaries, elite soldiers who owed allegiance to the Ottoman throne. In midnth-century Tunis, the lofty posts of pasha and dey were variously occupied by a Greek, a Venetian, a Genoan, a Corsican and an Albanian. The supreme admiral of the Tunisian fleet was often a European outcast. Their descendants were born into Islam, and their bloodlines ran together. Who were, these people? Fatefully, the European outcasts brought previously unknown seafaring expertise to the business of Barbary piracy. In the prior century, the corsairs had gone to sea in galleys propelled by oars. The renegades fit out state-of-the-art sailing ships that could spread terror well beyond the Strait of Gibraltar, and they often returned to the waters they were familiar with - off Ireland, Britain and Northern Europe - where the sea lanes offered no shortage of fat, opulent targets. They even found bases of support in western Ireland, where stolen cargoes could be bartered for weapons and provisions and the seaports offered "a good store of English, Scottish and Irish wenches." A few pirates grew homesick and tried to bribe their way back into the law's good graces. One almost sympathizes with the English pirate Richard Bishop, who declared, "I will die a poor laborer in mine own country, if I may, rather than be the richest pirate in the world." King James I of England, despairing of stopping the corsairs' marauding along his shores, issued a blanket pardon to all his subjects who returned to the fold. Whatever their crimes, the pirates possessed coveted skills, and it was better they should serve their country as privateersmen or naval officers than remain corsairs or (worse) auction their services to a rival crown. One pardoned ex-pirate, Henry Mainwaring, became a pillar of English society. He was knighted, elected to Parliament, appointed vice admiral of the navy and hired onto the Oxford faculty as a "doctor of physic." Piracy is as old as seafaring, but it was these pirates - the salt-stained desperadoes of the 17th century - who first inflated a literary-cultural bubble that has yet to burst. Poets, playwrights and pamphleteers regarded them with equal parts horror and fascination, blended with a telling dollop of admiration. Tinniswood approaches these sources with healthy skepticism, warning the reader when he suspects dramatic embellishment -but he also allows his pirates to shine through the narrative in all their roguish glory. John Ward, an English "archpirate" based in Tunis, is described by a contemporary as "bald in front, swarthy face and beard. Speaks little, and almost always swearing. Drunk from morn till night. Most prodigal and plucky." Reading Ward's alleged declaration, "Here's a scurvy world, and as scurvily we live in it," one imagines the words on the sneering lips of Geoffrey Rush. REFRESHINGLY, Tinniswood does not tell us that the Barbary corsairs were the original Islamic terrorists, a recurring marketing hook for books on this topic. He acknowledges the more plausible analogy between the corsairs and modern-day Somali pirates, but even here he is commendably skeptical. It is too easy to say that nothing has changed. A lot has changed. The Somali pirates are not working hand in glove with renegade foreign naval officers; they do not sign treaties with foreign governments in exchange for lavish annual payments of tribute; they do not descend on faraway shores and carry away hundreds of innocent civilians at a time. "Pirates are history," Tinniswood writes, and whatever lessons that history has to offer are best extracted with a surgeon's scalpel, not a bulldozer. Above all, "Pirates of Barbary" reminds us that history, whatever else it is, is also a genre of literature. It always has been, ever since it was first written down by the ancient chroniclers. You can scour it all you like for insights, arguments and conclusions. But it's still worth reading if only because it's bloody good entertainment. For all the talk of a conflict between Christianity and Islam, the most notorious pirates were Europeans. Ian W. Toll is the author of "Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy." He is writing "Pacific Crucible," a trilogy about the Navy in World War II.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 12, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review
For those who think of pirates as one-eyed rogues proclaiming shiver me timbers while flying the Jolly Roger, this interesting and exciting work will be full of surprises. Tinniswood has concentrated this account on the seventeenth century, when pirates based on the shores of North Africa consistently plundered European ships and seized captives, either enslaving or holding them for ransom. But these pirates were far from the freewheeling mold of Long John Silver or Jack Sparrow. They operated with the full support of the so-called Barbary States of North Africa Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers. Those states owed nominal allegiance to the Sultan in Istanbul, and the government there saw piracy as a useful tool against the Christian West. Surprisingly, some of the most prominent pirates were English-born sailors who turned Turk and converted to Islam. Tinniswood shows a certain admiration for the dash and raw courage of these men, but he doesn't minimize their ruthlessness or the suffering of their victims.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Forget the pirates of the Caribbean: their Old World brethren were an altogether more colorful and fearsome lot, according to this swashbuckling study. Historian Tinniswood (The Verneys: A True Story of Love, War, and Madness in Seventeenth-Century England) revisits the kleptocratic heyday of the Barbary states-Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, bits of Morocco-which offered fortified harbors to pirates and in turn built their economies around the sale of stolen cargoes and captives. The buccaneers, who kidnapped whole villages as far north as Ireland and Iceland, were denounced as the scourge of Christendom. Yet most of the "Turkish" pirates Tinniswood highlights were British, Dutch, or Italian renegades who sometimes bought pardons and obtained naval commands from their native countries. The million Christians sold into bondage often converted to Islam and became pillars of the North African economy. The author makes this story an entertaining picaresque of crime, combat, and moral compromise; fierce sea battles and daring escapes alternate with corrupt hagglings as European governments vacillate between gunboat diplomacy and offering tribute for the release of their enslaved countrymen. Tinniswood gives us both a rollicking narrative and a rich brew of early modern maritime history. Illus., map. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
English writer/historian Tinniswood (www.adriantinniswood.co.uk) tells the fascinating story of the 17th-century pirates of the Barbary Coast, who were at the height of their influence at a time when the Mediterranean served as a major commercial roadway. He focuses on the clashes between pirates of the East (Tunis, Algiers, Tripoli) and the governments of the West (England, France, Spain), also exploring how the pirates' conquests continue to inform the conflict between Christianity and Islam. Clive Chafer's acting chops shine in his impressive narration of this work that well educates listeners on the crimes, fierce sea battles, corrupt government haggling, and gunboat diplomacy that characterized this era of world history. For scholars, historians, and students, all of whom will be fascinated by how closely piracy of the 1600s resembles today's ongoing experience with crime on the high seas. [The Riverhead hc was described as shedding "new light on an overlooked portion of 17th-century history," LJ 12/10.-Ed.]-Dale Farris, Groves, TX (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Exciting history of 17th-century piracy among African city-states.Prolific British historian Tinniswood (The Verneys: A True Story of Love, War, and Madness in Seventeenth-Century England, 2008, etc.) demonstrates an excellent grasp of obscure sources in crafting a comprehensive synthesis. He argues that the notorious, reviled "Barbary corsairs" have been historically misunderstood: "An underlying racism and a more overt anti-Islamism make it hard to imagine Captain Blood or Jack Sparrow as North African Muslims." The author theorizes that piracy was state-supported and a key economic requirement for the development of Tunis, Algiers and Tripoli (allied with the Ottoman Empire) and independent Morocco, and further was encouraged as a "sea-jihad," an Islamic counterweight to European ambitions in the Mediterranean. While the British and other European powers belittled the Turks and Moors as savages, the situation was ethically muddied by their intermittent encouragement of privateering during various warsthese governments routinely issued "letters of marque" that essentially gave captains the right of piracy over ships flying enemy colors. Furthermore, both European and Barbary states routinely enslaved and ransomed captives; the specter of white slaves being held by African Muslims inflamed British society and contributed to numerous campaigns. Some of the European attempts blockade Barbary ports became comedies of error; others turned tragic or brutal, such as the French mortaring of Algiers. The pirates themselves were a diverse lot, especially following a 1612 amnesty. Many were British subjects who "turned Turk" (sometimes claiming coercion later when captured), while others were fearless Islamists who viewed attacking European ships as both good business and a strike against infidel encroachment (Tinniswood emphasizes the parallels with contemporary geopolitics only in the preface, regarding Somali piracy, but they are apparent.) This approach was epitomized by a 1631 raid on the Irish coastal town of Baltimore, which enslaved dozens. Throughout, the writing is precise and mordant but also witty, allowing the reader to feel empathy for the rough and absurd lives of these long-ago mariners, and agree with the author's conclusion that whatever the corsairs' faults, a lack of courage was not among them.Rigorous and sophisticated.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
