Friday, 28 July 2006
Lundy Island & The Barbary Pirates
The next Pirate tale I have to tell may surprise one or two readers – so make sure you’re sitting comfortably…;)
We have all heard about people being taken from Africa and forced into slavery, but how many of us know about slaves being taken to Africa in the 16th and 17th centuries? How many know that many of these slaves were kidnapped from the Cornish and Devon coasts, as well as from ships sailing from England to Ireland and America?
In the early 16th Century, men from the Barbary Coast of North Africa sailed to the British Isles to exact revenge for their defeat in the Crusades. They were apparently authorised by their countries to attack the shipping of Christian countries. Their ships were lighter and faster than those of the English, and, as well as capturing crew and cargo, they were able to successfully raid the Cornish and Devon coast, kidnap whole villages, and take them back to Africa as slaves.
For a time in the 17th Century these Barbary pirates used Lundy as a base, and even flew the flag of Islam. People were afraid to live on the coast and church towers were used as lookouts. One of their captains, Murat Reis, was on Lundy Island sometime around 1645. He is known to have taken over 300 prisoners from the nearby British coast to Salee Castle in Algiers, to be sold as slaves. Around this time, these pirates finally seemed to attract the attention of those in power, and Oliver Cromwell decided to take action to regain Lundy Island from their grasp.
Robert Blake (a North Devonian) and William Penn (from Redcliffe, Somerset) were the men given the order to free Lundy Island. They bombarded the island and the pirates’ boats until the pirates surrendered. It is said that 20,000 prisoners were released!
The rest of Britain may not have heard the last of the Barbary pirates, but Lundy was no longer flying their flag. It is believed that they captured four hundred and sixty-six ships in total. And it was not only the British Isles that suffered; many more people were kidnapped from around Spain and Portugal.
Lundy was not yet free from its association with pirates and smugglers, however. I shall next tell you of one of the island’s most notorious smugglers – Thomas Benson.
