Patrolling these shores were a succession of corsairs among whom was the Englishman Charter Yachts Sailing Turkey John Ward, he of ballad fame, who was here three thousand years later. In February of 1607 Ward was in the western Aegean where he took in quick succession the Venetian galleon Rubi and a smaller Venetian, Carminati, bound from Athens to Venice with cargoes originating in the Levant. One of John Ward's more infamous exploits taking place two months later was the capture below the Gulf of Antalya of a large Venetian merchantman bound from Syria and Cyprus to Rhodes Town near Gocek. Called Reniera e Soderina, this heavily-armed argosy was overtaken in calm weather by two of Ward's lighter and faster raiders, bretones or round ships as depicted to the right, each nevertheless said to have mounted 40 guns and to have carried more than 100 armed men. The captured cargo was indigo, silk, cinnamon and cotton worth at least 100,000 pounds sterling at a time when sterling had value. Within months of her capture Ward had modified the Reniera's hull to that of a bretone and hoisted to her masthead an admiral's pennant.
The pirates owed much of their success to
new technology. They brought with them into the Mediterranean high-sided
sailing ships that the Italians called bertoni. They looked fairly similar to
the galleons that were coming into fashion in the Spanish and Venetian navies,
but they possessed a deep, strong keel and functioned well with three
square-rigged sails. They were not especially large and they carried crews of
around sixty, with one cannon for about every three men. When their rivals
within the Mediterranean managed to capture these ships, they made every use of
them; they even purchased them from English and Dutch captains. Yet Venice was
strangely conservative. Lateen-rigged galleys had defended the city’s trade and
empire for many centuries, and attempts to convince the Venetian government
that the new type of ship was vital to the defence of the republic fell on deaf
ears. The Venetian elite could not understand why what had worked in the
thirteenth century would not work in the seventeenth. Bertoni became a common
sight in Venice only in the early seventeenth century, when the republic begged
England and Holland to support its struggle against the Austrian Habsburgs. By
1619 the Venetian navy possessed fifty bertoni alongside fifty galleys. Yet
even when Venetian captains sailed bertoni, they seemed unable to challenge the
superior skill of northern seamen. In 1603 the Santa Maria della Grazia, a
Venetian bertone, was heading for Alexandria when it was captured off Crete –
Venetian territory. Then, once released, it was seized at night-time while
sailing up the Adriatic, and deprived of its guns. The Italians were no longer
near invincible at sea.
Northerners also attacked northerners; the
relationship between the English and the Dutch oscillated violently in the late
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In 1603 Thomas Sherley, in command
of a motley crew of English, Italian and Greek sailors, attacked two Dutch
ships carrying Aegean grain from the Cyclades to Genoa. Sherley was content to
pose as the agent of the Medici duke of Tuscany, and as a sort of crusader
against the Turks, though quite how an attack on the Dutch fitted into this is
a mystery. Sherley had to write to the duke to explain himself, because he had
clearly over-reached himself. The Medici were happy to buy English bertoni and
to employ English sailors.
The duke even obtained his gunpowder from England.
He wondered whether it might be a good idea to lure John Ward into his service,
since he seemed such an effective corsair. The duke of Savoy, whose territory
extended down to Nice, was happy to make his flag and his port at Villefranche
available to all sorts of dubious sailors. As Alberto Tenenti pointed out, ‘in
the Mediterranean at the end of the sixteenth century, a real change was taking
place, psychological as well as naval and commercial’: the spirit of the
crusade had been replaced by a cynicism which was occasionally masked by the
language of holy war, but among the pirates that was belied by their willing
cooperation with Turks and Moors. The clearest indication of this was provided
by the Knights of Santo Stefano: by the seventeenth century they were
freebooters able to benefit from the handsome concessions made to them by the
Medici dukes of Tuscany.
The northerners found that the tough
shipboard life of the seventeenth century – fetid water, biscuits full of
weevils, tough discipline – was alleviated a little when sailing in
Mediterranean waters. John Baltharpe was an English sailor who recounted in
doggerel his voyage around the Mediterranean in 1670. Putting in at Messina, ‘a
market was on board each day’ and he could buy
Silk-stockings,
Carpets, Brande-wine, Silk Neckcloaths, also very fine: Cabidges, Carrets,
Turnips, Nuts, The last a man may eat from Sluts: Lemmons, Orenges, and good
Figs, Seracusa Wine also, and Eggs.
In Livorno, Baltharpe was delighted to find
excellent fish, ‘which ’mongst Italians is a good dish’, while at ‘Cales’, or
Cagliari, ‘nothing was scant’. Even at Alicante, where meat was scarce and
‘instead of English Cheese, and Butter, A little Oyl we get, God wot, far
worser’, there was the consolation of plenty of red wine – ‘this blood of Bulls
. . . ’Tis sweet, Delicious, very tempting, The Bottle is not long a emptying’.
Looking into the future, the efforts of Lord Nelson around 1800 to keep his men
supplied with Sicilian lemons – 30,000 gallons a year, made available to the
entire British Navy – ensured that his crews in the Mediterranean and beyond
did not suffer from scurvy.
The interest of northerners in the
Mediterranean was accentuated by the rising standard of living in the sixteenth
century, and, even though this stalled in the seventeenth century, the
northerners became a permanent presence after Lepanto. Their identity varied:
the Hanseatic Germans were pioneers (arriving when Mediterranean harvests
failed in 1587), but did not maintain a strong presence, while the ‘Flemish’
increasingly consisted of mainly Protestant Dutch from the rebellious northern
provinces of the Spanish Netherlands, rather than the Catholics of Flanders
proper. The rise of the Dutch navies began with the emergence of Antwerp as the
hub of the Portuguese spice trade with the East, but Dutch prosperity was based
on profits from expanding trade and piracy in the Mediterranean just as much as
it was based on the proceeds of its Atlantic and Indian Ocean traffic.
When the
United Provinces established their de facto independence from Spain, business
shifted increasingly to the shipyards of Holland. Within the Mediterranean
there was some cooperation, at first, with the French merchants who were
beginning to make headway in North Africa, and occasionally allowed Dutch ships
to fly the French flag (guaranteeing their safety in Ottoman waters).
The
phrase ‘flag of convenience’ is especially apt: captains switched back and
forth, to gain whatever protection a particular nation could claim from the
rulers of the Mediterranean shores and islands.
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