Sack of Baltimore facts for kids

Entrance to Baltimore bay

The sack of Baltimore took place on 20 June 1631, when the village of Baltimore in West Cork, Ireland, was attacked by pirates from the Barbary Coast of North Africa – the raiders included Dutchmen, Algerians, and Ottoman Turks. The attack was the largest by Barbary slave traders on Ireland.

The attack was led by a Dutch captain, Jan Janszoon van Haarlem, also known as Murad Reis the Younger, who was enslaved by Algerians but released when he renounced his faith and converted to Islam. Murad's force was led to the village by a man called Hackett – the captain of a fishing boat that was captured earlier – in exchange for his freedom. Hackett was subsequently hanged from the clifftop outside the village for conspiracy.

Attack

Murad's crew, made up of European renegades and Algerians, launched their covert attack on the remote village of Baltimore on 20 June 1631. They captured 107 villagers, mostly English settlers along with some local Irish people (some reports put the number as high as 237). The attack was focused on the area of the village known to this day as the Cove. The villagers were put in irons and taken to a life of slavery in Algiers.

Aftermath

Slave market in Algiers, 1684

Some prisoners were destined to live out their days as galley slaves, rowing for decades without ever setting foot on shore while others would spend long years in a harem or as labourers. At most three of them ever returned to Ireland. One was ransomed almost at once and two others in 1646.

In the aftermath of the raid, the remaining villagers moved to Skibbereen, and Baltimore was virtually deserted for generations.

Conspiracy speculation

In his book The Stolen Village, Des Ekin raises the possibility that Sir Walter Coppinger, a prominent Catholic lawyer of Hiberno-Norse descent and member of the leading Cork family – who had become the main landowner in the area after the death of Sir Thomas Crooke, 1st Baronet, the founder of the English colony – secretly hired the Barbary pirates to attack the village in possible collaboration with the family of deceased local Irish clan chief, Sir Fineen O'Driscoll. It was the Clan O'Driscoll that rented Baltimore and its lucrative pilchard fishing grounds to the English Puritan settlers on 20 June 1610. The lease for the land was for twenty-one years at the end of which the title for the land was set because of a loan agreement to transfer to Walter Coppinger on 20 June 1631.

Baltimore Bay on the south coast

Coppinger before the time was over on the lease tried by an assortment of means to evict the settlers from Baltimore and gain the valuable fishing rights of the area early. After a long period of legal wrangling and harassment, it was decided in 1630 by the courts that the settlers could not be evicted because of the large amount they had invested in the development of the town. Coppinger was required to rent the land to the settlers for perpetuity. Ekin proposes that Coppinger, in order to guarantee that the land would revert to him on 20 June 1631, as originally agreed with the English settlers, hired Murad Reis to raid Baltimore. Elkin acknowledges that there is no concrete proof that Coppinger had any involvement with the raid, however, he does note the uncanny coincidence of the raid happening on 20 June 1631 the exact same date the lease was supposed to end.

On the other hand, Murad may just as easily have planned the raid without any help. For example, it is well-documented that the authorities had advanced intelligence that Murad planned to make an attack against a port town along the County Cork coast, although Kinsale was incorrectly thought to be the target rather than Baltimore.

See also