Sunday, 21 March 2010
A Historico-Literary Interlude: The Sack Of Baltimore
 by Thomas Osborne Davis (1814-45)
THE SUMMER sun is falling soft on Carbery’s hundred isles,
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The summer sun is gleaming still through Gabriel’s rough defiles;
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Old Innisherkin’s crumbled fane looks like a moulting bird,
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And in a calm and sleepy swell the ocean tide is heard:
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The hookers lie upon the beach; the children cease their play;
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The gossips leave the little inn; the households kneel to pray;
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And full of love, and peace, and rest, its daily labor o’er,
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Upon that cosy creek there lay the town of Baltimore.
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A deeper rest, a starry trance, has come with midnight there;
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No sound, except that throbbing wave, in earth, or sea, or air!
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The massive capes and ruin’d towers seem conscious of the calm;
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The fibrous sod and stunted trees are breathing heavy balm.
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So still the night, these two long barques round Dunashad that glide
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Must trust their oars, methinks not few, against the ebbing tide.
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Oh, some sweet mission of true love must urge them to the shore!
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They bring some lover to his bride who sighs in Baltimore.
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All, all asleep within each roof along that rocky street,
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And these must be the lover’s friends, with gently gliding feet—
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A stifled gasp, a dreamy noise! “The roof is in a flame!”
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From out their beds and to their doors rush maid and sire and dame,
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And meet upon the threshold stone the gleaming sabre’s fall,
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And o’er each black and bearded face the white or crimson shawl.
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The yell of “Allah!” breaks above the prayer, and shriek, and roar:
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O blessed God! the Algerine is lord of Baltimore!
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Then flung the youth his naked hand against the shearing sword;
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Then sprung the mother on the brand with which her son was gor’d;
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Then sunk the grandsire on the floor, his grand-babes clutching wild;
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Then fled the maiden moaning faint, and nestled with the child:
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But see! yon pirate strangled lies, and crush’d with splashing heel,
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While o’er him in an Irish hand there sweeps his Syrian steel:
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Though virtue sink, and courage fail, and misers yield their store,
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There ’s one hearth well avenged in the sack of Baltimore.
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Midsummer morn in woodland nigh the birds begin to sing,
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They see not now the milking maids,—deserted is the spring;
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Midsummer day this gallant rides from distant Bandon’s town,
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These hookers cross’d from stormy Skull, that skiff from Affadown;
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They only found the smoking walls with neighbors’ blood besprent,
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And on the strewed and trampled beach awhile they wildly went,
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Then dash’d to sea, and pass’d Cape Clear, and saw, five leagues before,
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The pirate-galley vanishing that ravaged Baltimore.
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Oh, some must tug the galley’s oar, and some must tend the steed;
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This boy will bear a Scheik’s chibouk, and that a Bey’s jerreed.
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Oh, some are for the arsenals by beauteous Dardanelles;
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And some are in the caravan to Mecca’s sandy dells.
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The maid that Bandon gallant sought is chosen for the Dey:
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She ’s safe—she’s dead—she stabb’d him in the midst of his Serai!
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And when to die a death of fire that noble maid they bore,
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She only smiled, O’Driscoll’s child; she thought of Baltimore.
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’T is two long years since sunk the town beneath that bloody band,
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And all around its trampled hearths a larger concourse stand,
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Where high upon a gallows-tree a yelling wretch is seen:
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’T is Hackett of Dungarvan—he who steer’d the Algerine!
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He fell amid a sullen shout with scarce a passing prayer,
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For he had slain the kith and kin of many a hundred there.
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Some mutter’d of MacMurchadh, who brought the Norman o’er;
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Some curs’d him with Iscariot, that day in Baltimore.
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Yesterday I received from a fetching relative (once a colleen in Cork) a book, "The Coast of West Cork," by Peter Somerville-Large.
On page 68 I found this:
"..there occurred in 1631 the famous Sack of Baltimore by Algerian pirates.
Throughout the seventeenth century and the early years of the eighteenth century the coast of Ireland was a prey to pirates. The Algerians gave endless trouble, but their biggest coup was at Baltimore. Piracy [by Muslims] was a normal hazard for sea travelers of the time, who ran a small risk of being sold into slavery. In 1641, for example, the Reverend Devereaux Spratt, a Protestant clergyman who had lost his living during the rebellion, was taken off the ship on which he was traveling back to England, which was captured in sight of land. In Algiers, where he became a slave, he estimated that the Algerians had seventeen hundred other captured slaves. After he was redeemed he implored that "the Lord stir up ye heats of Christian princes to roote out ye neste of pirates!" In 1642, Edmund O'Dwyer, an agent from the Vatican, was taken as a slave and was ransomed for the sum of 60 pounds. As late as 1695 the Ouzel, a galley sailing from Dublin to the Levant, was taken by Barbary pirates. The crew recaptured the ship and returned to Dublin with the rich hoard of the pirates' stolen treasure. The wealth - insurance money also having been paid -- was applied to shipping in general, and the result was the beginning of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce.
Baltimore was attacked on June 20th, 1631, after two Algerian ships under the command of a Dutch renegade [a word given to those Christians who had joined the enemy and turned Muslim] set out on a raiding party for the Cork coast. They first intended to enter Kinsale, but seeing that town well guarded, they drifted westward. Then they captured two Waterford ships, and one of their captains, Thomas Hackett of Dungarvan, agreed to guide them into Baltimore. Perhaps if he had not been a Waterford man the raid might not have taken place. But the Algerians entered the harbour, a scene described in Thomas Davis' poem:
"The yell of Allah breaks above the prayer, the shriek, the roar/
Oh blessed God, the Algerine is Lord of Baltimore!"
The town was looted and a total of a hundred and ten prisoners were taken away as slaves. Davis assumed that they were Irishmen, but this was not so Apart from a housemaid and Dermod Mergey and his children (Meirgeach was a surname of a branch of the McCarthys) all the kidnapped listed in official reports wee English planters. Among them were the wife and seven sons of William Gunter, "a person of some credit." Eventually Thomas Hackett was caught and hanged, but his execution did the captives no good, for most of them were to pass the rest of their lives as slaves on the Barbary Coast. Fifteen years afterwards, in 1649, when the English Parliament sent a Mr. Cason to Africa to redeem English captives at 30 pounds a head, he could only secure the release of two of the Baltimore victims.
"The Sack almost put an end to Baltimore." Posted on 03/21/2010 9:38 AM by Hugh Fitzgerald
Comments
21 Mar 2010
 reactionry
The Balzac of Baltimore
Or: The Liberation of Lisbon
Mr. Fitzgerald's post is much appreciated here on account of how monotonous eternity is. (And yes, given the way that even the Neanderthals (as Mr. Signorelli is surely aware) buried their dead, there is quite a stench of wilted flowers) However, American Readers should know that the "hookers"**above have naught to do with what the nattering nabobs of negativism* called the women of ill repute who reportedly followed in the train of General Joseph Hooker*** , who should not be confused with Gen. Tecumseh Sherman, who, unlike the former who ran into Jackson's (no, not Mary, the other one) "wall", marched, as noted by HF, "exelaunically" to the sea, nor with my long-lost relative, (found recently with GPS - the Gannibal Positioning System) the "whore of Babylon," whom the Emperor and his double-beaked Baltimore Orioles yearned to throw to the dogs, which should not be confused with the "Great Dane" which I confused with an angel, nor with the great Danes who sacked Lisbon in 844.
Monotonously Yours,
K.
The Meadows, Switzerland
* nattering nabobs of negativism - penned by William Safire and made famous by Spiro T. Agnew, the Honoré de Ballsack of Baltimore.
*** See Galway Hooker (not to be confused with George Galloway, who prostituted (granted, he would have done "it" for free) himself for Islam):
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