Merchants and Pirates in Early Seventeenth-Century Barbary: Knowledgeable Sailors and the Long Shadow of the Law

This paper will turn from ideas about knowledge and commerce to the crucial role of sailors as knowledgeable witnesses of illicit commerce in early seventeenth century North Africa, home to hundreds of English pirates. During the first years of the seventeenth century, Algiers, Tunis, Mamora, and Safi attracted many English merchants who, barred from the lucrative trade routes controlled by the Levant Company, sought access to the rich stolen cargoes on sale there.

While these ports were beyond the direct reach of English law, commercial practices there were anything but lawless. Since English merchants were legally forbidden to deal with their pirate compatriots, they engaged in elaborate theatrical performances designed to disguise their transactions. Initially, they purchased the stolen goods not from the pirates themselves, but from local rulers who had in theory bought up the cargoes, making public use of all kinds of mundane commercial procedures – public weighing at the common beam, legal certificates written up in Turkish and Italian signed and sealed by local dignitaries -- to emphasize the normalcy and legality of their actions.

Once James I made it clear by proclamation that these indirect sales were also forbidden, merchants engaged in even more elaborately staged performances, pretending to be forced to buy the stolen goods by local officials: shots would be fired, hostages taken, and so on. These performances, in which local Barbary officials, English merchants, and pirates all cooperated, were staged largely for the benefit of English sailors, on whose testimony the distant English courts were obliged to rely. Ordinary sailors’ presence as witnesses and the knowledge they conveyed to judges in England thus played an essential role in structuring this illicit form of commerce. Not simply laboring men, they were also expert witnesses of a distant and unfamiliar world.