A Cruel Harvest

AMONG the fascinating real stories to have emerged from this small land area over the centuries, the one of Algerian pirates sneaking into the West Cork village of Baltimore in 1631 and carting off over 100 of its inhabitants is surely ranked among the highest.

The facts are truly amazing. Aided by a Co Waterford man Hackett, (later hanged), Algerian pirates arrived in the dead of night to the sleepy English colony, and Gaelic remnant, of Baltimore. There they carted off 108 men, women and children to a life of slavery in the sultan’s army or as vassals in his kingdom.

Notwithstanding a putative screenplay by Sean Boyle and the mawkish poem The Sack of Baltimore by nationalist Thomas Davis (he also wrote the equally mawkish, A Nation Once Again), the story has never been fictionalised. More recently Des Eakin’s book The Stolen Village: Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates, provided exhaustive research into the event.