Tim Severin - Corsair

Abruptly a hand was seizing the collar of his loose shirt, and he found himself dragged off the canopy, then hauled bruisingly over the edge of a small boat, and dumped into its bilges. A voice said in English, ‘We’ve got another of the bastards.’ Someone knelt on him painfully and tied his wrists behind his back. A short while later he was pulled to his feet and then half lifted and half thrown up the side of a ship where he found himself on a steady, dry deck. Swaying with exhaustion, he kept his eyes down and watched the salt water trickle out of his clothes and make a wavering line across the planks. He felt wretched.

‘Ti! Moristo? Mauro? Turco?’ a voice was asking aggressively. Someone was trying to establish his nationality, speaking in rusty lingua franca and standing so close that he could smell the interrogator’s foul breath. But Hector felt too tired to answer. ‘He’s not wearing an ankle ring. Must have been one of the crew,’ claimed another voice gruffly. Someone was fingering the qibla still hanging from its thong around his neck. ‘Look at this,’ said the first voice. ‘He’s an Allah worshipper all right. Saw this when I was in the bagnio at Tunis.’

Hector raised his head and found himself looking into the hostile face of a common sailor. A jagged scar running from the corner of his mouth to his right ear gave him a brutish look. Behind him stood a short, badly shaved man wearing a wig and dressed in clothing which had once been of fine quality but was now shabby and stained with grease spots. Hector took him to be a ship’s officer.

‘My name is Hector Lynch,’ he said, addressing the officer. ‘I am from Ireland.’

‘A Papist turned Mussulman, that’s droll!’ mocked the officer. ‘A bucket that has dipped twice into the sink of iniquity.’

‘My father was a Protestant,’ began Hector wearily, but his reply was cut short by the officer’s retort. ‘You’re a renegade and turncoat, whatever stripe of faith you were before. To be serving with Barbary pirates means you deserve to hang. But as you are worth more alive than dead, you will be kept in chains until we reach port. Then you will wish you had gone to the bottom of the sea along with your thieving friends.’

Hector was about to ask the ship’s destination when the sound of a hammer on iron distracted him. A little distance behind the officer, the ship’s blacksmith was striking off the ankle ring of a starved-looking galley slave who must have been rescued from the wreck of Izzet Darya . Standing next in line, awaiting his turn and dressed only in a loincloth, was Dan. The Miskito, Hector recalled, had been wearing his slave ring when he had joined the corso, and Turgut Reis had not ordered it to be removed. Clearly the warship’s crew had mistaken Dan for a slave they had liberated from the corsairs. Deliberately Hector forced himself to look away. Any sign that he knew Dan would betray his friend.

‘Take the renegade and put him with his fellow blackguards!’ ordered the officer, and Hector found himself pushed across the deck to join a group of bedraggled survivors from the galley; among them were several odjaks. As he stood waiting to be led away to the prison hold, Hector heard a cheer go up. The starved-looking man had been freed from his slave ring, and several of the warship’s crew were gathering round to slap him on the back and congratulate him on his liberty. As Hector watched, Dan stepped forward impassively and placed his foot on the blacksmith’s anvil. A few sharp blows and the blacksmith had knocked out the rivets from the ring, and again a cheer went up. But this time, the congratulations were cut short as the starved-looking man suddenly turned and, snatching at Dan’s loincloth, whipped it away so that the Miskito stood naked. Pointing at Dan’s circumcised penis, his accuser screamed, ‘Rinigato! Rinigato!’ and gave a vindictive whoop of triumph.

TWELVE

CHEVALIER ADRIEN CHABRILLAN, Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Stephen, was thoroughly satisfied with his day’s purchase. Through his agent, Jedediah Crespino of the well-known Tuscan banking family, he had just acquired thirty prime slaves for galley service. The slaves had appeared on the Livorno market unexpectedly and Jedediah had snapped them up. An English warship, the Portland , had sunk a large Algerine corsair off Sardinia, and pulled a number of her crew from the water. Naturally the Portland ’s captain wanted to profit from his victory so he had landed his captives at what was the biggest slave market in the Christian Mediterranean, with the possible exception of Malta. Tall and aristocratic, Chevalier Chabrillan was a familiar figure in Livorno. Always immaculately dressed in the red uniform of the Order, he had a reputation as something of a dandy. Indeed observers had been known to remark that such a renowned galley captain had no need to take so much trouble with his appearance, always powdering his cheeks and parading the latest fashion in periwigs and buckled shoes. His celebrity as a warrior for the Faith, they said, was already sufficient to make him stand out. Chabrillan, they agreed, was a true heir to the days when the Duke of Florence had been able to send two dozen galleys under the flag of St Stephen to confound the Turk. And when the Grand Magistry had announced that it could no longer afford to equip and man such a large fleet, the Chevalier had offered to meet the costs of keeping his own vessel in commission, and had obtained permission to cruise in company with the vessels of the Order of St John of Malta. So his frequent appearances in Livorno were usually to buy and sell slaves or to negotiate the disposal of prizes.

Livorno was ideal for such transactions. Declared a free port by the Duke of Tuscany less than a decade earlier, it was now a thieves’ kitchen on a grand scale. On the waterfront and in the counting houses it was quietly acknowledged that the transactions of men like Chabrillan were best not investigated too closely. Ostensibly the galleys of the Orders were licensed only to cruise the sea in search of vessels belonging to ‘our enemies of our Holy Catholic Faith’, as Grand Master Cotoner in Valletta put it. Such vessels could be seized and sold, together with their crews and cargoes. And should a Christian ship be found to be carrying Muslim-owned goods, then the Order’s captain could impound only the goods but must release the vessel. Often, however, both goods and ship were confiscated, and on occasion the Christian crew themselves were held for ransom or even sold as slaves.

In such delicate traffic Livorno relied on its Jewish population. There were nearly three thousand of them, and they had been granted exceptional privileges. Here a Jew could own property, wear a sword at any hour, employ Christian servants and did not have to wear the Jewish badge. They also operated a complex network of commerce with their co-religionists in Tunis, Malta and Algiers. It was for this reason that Chevalier Chabrillan valued his connection with Jedediah Crespino so highly.

‘ONE HUNDRED SCUDI a head, a most satisfactory price if I may say so, though the English captain did insist that he was paid at once and in silver,’ observed the Jewish banker. He and Chabrillan had met in the Crespino’s private apartments at the end of the day’s business. Jedediah lived in great style even though his office was only a minor outpost of the Crespino mercantile empire. He ran his business from a building overlooking the docks, and the first-floor room in which the two men now sat was sumptuously furnished with heavy brocades, fine furniture, rich rugs and a brilliant display of coral ornaments – a sign of the commerce in trinkets and religious artefacts which had been the mainstay of the Crespino fortune in the early days. ‘Will you be selling on the slaves or keeping them for yourself ?’ the banker continued.