Anniversary of Baltimore pirate raid

It is 382 years this week since the Jun 20, 1631, raid on the thriving Cork fishing village of Baltimore by pirates from Algiers in Morocco.

The date was not by chance as Des Ekin explains in his book The Stolen Village — Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates.

English settlers, many of them Protestant of Calvinist beliefs, escaping persecution in England, lived in Baltimore. They paid leases and made Baltimore their home alongside local Irish Catholics. Their trades included fine sail boats for dragnet fishing for the fish industry.

Families like Broadbrook, Curlew, Davys, Paine, Ryder, Croffines were in the second generation. On Monday, Jun 20 at 2am the raid began. The pirates, led by a well-known, wealthy corsair admiral pirate Morat Rais, wanted slaves to sell in Algiers, a fortified coastal city of 100,000 with a strong slave business.

Morat, with 230 men, landed quietly from their main flagship. They had covered their oars with material to deaden any sound and went to the Cove near Baltimore, an area of over 100 inhabitants. They stormed into the cabins that they set alight and screaming at the stunned inhabitants, rounding them up. Tim Curlew and John Davys defended and were killed immediately.

The main village of Baltimore was next, but they no longer had the element of surprise. William Harris woke and heard the screams at the Cove.

He ran with others to an upper part of the village where they fired a musket and beat a drum to scare off the intruders.

The raid ended. They didn’t finish the attack on the main village, but 107 people had been taken.

On Jun 20 1610, exactly 21 years earlier, three leading men of the district signed an agreement that after 21 years, Baltimore would be given to one of them forever. This was not legal.

So someone must have hired Morat Rais to clear out the village. Two of the 107 returned 15 years later, when ransom was paid by the English parliament for the return of a group of English and Irish people taken as slaves. A third person, a woman, was freed years before, with a family ransom.

After that, Baltimore went into decline and many moved inland. The raid was a one-off attack by North African pirates, but these attacks were frequent on the coasts of Western and Southern Europe. It shows how slavery affected all nationalities

Today, Baltimore is a popular summer tourist town, a safe harbour for sailors, with the excellent Baltimore RNLI, and a pub called The Algiers Inn.

M Sullivan

College Road

Cork