The Bombardment of Algiers on 27th August 1816, painted by George Chambers in 1836. The English commander, Edward Pellew, had run out of ammunition but the authorities in Algiers did not know that, and they surrendered thousands of European slaves for liberation.
WITHIN fifty years of victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588, England’s navy was so neglected that Arab pirates from the Barbary coast were raiding Cornish villages and commandeering fishing-boats with impunity, abducting hundreds of men, women and children for slave-labour in docks and on farms, down mines and in homes across the Ottoman Empire.
Public charities raised ransom money and in 1646, Parliament engaged Edmund Cason to redeem some two hundred and fifty, but Algiers alone had over ten times the number. Fifteen years on, the squalid slave-compounds, bread-and-water diets and angry beatings described to an open-mouthed Samuel Pepys by two former captives were still a depressing reality.*
Mediterranean politics made direct action against the Barbary states ticklish, but Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo allowed Edward Pellew to take British and Dutch ships to Algiers and, on August 27th, 1816 — after an outrageous bluff, since he had run out of ammunition — compel the wrathful Ottomans to let thousands of European slaves go.
* See Recollections of Slavery.
Précis
From the 17th century, Arabs slavers from the Barbary states of North Africa raided the southwest of England for Christian slaves without reprisal. Attempts at ransom could never achieve much without direct action, but in 1815 a combined British and Dutch fleet descended on Algiers and forced the Ottomans to give up thousands of European slaves. (55 / 60 words)
