The Story of the Barbary Corsairs | Page 6

chasing Spaniards, they were not likely to reform, especially as the choice lay between piracy and starvation. Dig they would not, and they preferred to beg by force, like the "gentlemen of the road." So they bided their time, till Ferdinand the Catholic passed away to his account, and then, in defiance of the Pe?on, and reckless of all the pains and penalties of Spanish retribution, they threw up their allegiance, and looked about for allies.
Help was not far off, though in this case it meant mastery. The day of the Moorish pirates was over; henceforth they might, and did, triumphantly assault and batter Spanish and Venetian ships, but they would do this under the captaincy of the allies they had called in, under the leadership of the Turkish Corsairs. The Moors had shown the way, and the Corsairs needed little bidding to follow it.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] See S. Lane-Poole, The Story of the Moors in Spain, 232-280.
[2] Algiers is in Arabic, Al-Geza?r ("the Islands"), said to be so called from that in its bay; or, more probably, Al-Geza?r is a grammarian's explanation of the name Tzeyr or Tzier, by which the Algerians commonly called their city, and which is, I suspect, a corruption of the Roman city Caesarea (Augusta), which occupied almost the same site. It should be remarked that the Algerians pronounce the g[=i]m hard: not Al-Jeza[=i]r. Europeans spelt the name in all sorts of ways: Arger, Argel, Argeir, Algel, &c., down to the French Alger and our Algiers.

II.
THE LAND OF THE CORSAIRS.
It is time to ask how it was that a spacious land seemed to lie vacant for the Corsairs to occupy, and a land too that offered almost every feature that a pirate could desire for the safe and successful prosecution of his trade. Geographers tell us that in climate and formation the island of Barbary, for such it is geologically, is really part of Europe, towards which, in history, it has played so unfriendly a part. Once the countries, which we now know as Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco, stood up abruptly as an island, with a comparatively small lake washing its northern shore, and a huge ocean on the south (see the map). That ocean is now the Sahra or Sáhara, which engineers dream of again flooding with salt water, and so forming an inland African sea. The lake is now the Mediterranean, or rather its western basin, for we know that the Barbary island was once nearly a peninsula, joined at its two ends to Spain and Sicily, and that its Atlas ranges formed the connection between the Sierra Nevada and Mt. Aetna. By degrees the Isthmus between Cape Bona and Sicily sank out of sight, and the ocean flowed between Spain and Africa, while the great sea to the south dried up into the immense stony waste which is known pre?minently as the Sahra, the Desert, "a tract of land, bare as the back of a beast, without trees or mountains."
[Illustration: After Bourguignat Walker & Boutallsc.
THE BARBARY PENINSULA.
(Elisée Reclus.)]
Through one or both of these narrow straits, Gibraltar and Malta, all vessels from the outer ocean bound for the ports of France and Italy and the Levant, were obliged to pass; and it must be remembered that just about the time when the Corsairs made their appearance in Barbary, the riches of the new-found Western world were beginning to pour through the straits to meet those of the East, which were brought to France and Spain, England and Holland, from Alexandria and Smyrna. An immense proportion of the trade of Europe had to cross the western basin of the Mediterranean, of which Barbary formed the southern boundary. Any bold man who could hold Tunis at the eastern corner, or Algiers in the middle, or Ceuta or Tangiers at the western point, might reckon upon numerous opportunities of stopping argosies of untold wealth as they passed by his lair. The situation seemed purposely contrived for Corsairs.
[Illustration: A MAP OF THE KINGDOMS OF BARBARY.
(Voyages to Barbary for the Redemption of Captives, 1736.)]
More than this, the coast was just what a pirate wants. The map shows a series of natural harbours, often backed by lagunes which offer every facility for the escape of the rover from his pursuers; and while in the sixteenth century there were no deep ports for vessels of heavy draught, there were endless creeks, shallow harbours, and lagunes where the Corsairs' galleys (which never drew more than six feet of water) could take refuge. Behind Jerba, the fabled island of the Lotus-Eaters, was an immense inland sea, commanded in the Middle Ages by castles, and affording a refuge for which the rovers had often had cause to be grateful. Merchant vessels were shy of sailing in the dangerous Gulf of the Greater Syrtes with its