The Story of the Barbary Corsairs | Page 6

sometimes of
ransom by his friends. The career of the pirate, with all its chances, was
a prosperous one. The adventurers grew rich, and their strong places on
the Barbary coast became populous and well garrisoned; and, by the
time the Spaniards began to awake to the danger of letting such
troublesome neighbours alone, the evil was past a cure. For twenty

years the exiled Moors had enjoyed immunity, while the big Spanish
galleys were obstinately held in port, contemptuous of so small a foe.
At last Don Pedro Navarro was despatched by Cardinal Ximenes to
bring the pirates to book. He had little difficulty in taking possession of
Oran and Buj[=e]ya; and Algiers was so imperfectly fortified, that he
imposed his own terms. He made the Algerines vow to renounce piracy;
and, to see that they kept their word, he built and garrisoned a strong
fort, the "Peñon de Alger,"[2] to stop their boats from sallying forth.
But the Moors had still more than one strong post on the rocky
promontories of Barbary, and having tasted the delights of 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 Peñon, 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-Gezaïr ("the Islands"), said to be so called
from that in its bay; or, more probably, Al-Gezaïr 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 preëminently 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