Sack of Baltimore

The Sack of Baltimore took place on June 20, 1631, when the village of Baltimore, West Cork, Ireland, was attacked by North African pirates from the North African Barbary Coast. The attack was the biggest single attack by the Barbary pirates on Ireland or Britain. The attack was led by a Dutch captain turned pirate, Jan Janszoon van Haarlem, also known as Murad Reis the Younger. Murad's force was led to the village by a man called Hackett, the captain of a fishing boat he had captured earlier, in exchange for his freedom. Hackett was subsequently hanged from the clifftop outside the village for his conspiracy.

Murad's crew, made up of Dutchmen, Algerians and Ottoman Turks, launched their covert attack on the remote village on June 20th 1631. They captured 108 English settlers, who worked a pilchard industry in the village, and some local Irish people. 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 North Africa. Some prisoners were destined to live out their days as galley slaves, while others would spend long years in the seclusion of the Sultan's harem or within the walls of the Sultan's palace as laborers. At most three of them ever saw Ireland again.

Conspiracy theories abound relating to the raid. It has been suggested Sir Walter Coppinger orchestrated the raid to gain control of the village from the local Gaelic chieftain, Fineen O'Driscoll. It was O'Driscoll who had licenced the lucrative pilchard industry in Baltimore to the English settlers. In the aftermath of the raid, the remaining settlers moved to Skibereen.

The incident inspired Thomas Osborne Davis to write his famous poem, The Sack of Baltimore. A detailed account of the sack of Baltimore can be found in the book The Stolen Village: Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates by Des Ekin.

In 1999, the raid on Baltimore was portrayed in a screenplay titled "Roaring Water, The Sack of Baltimore", by Irish screenwriter Sean Boyle.

See also

• The Turkish abductions or Icelandic raid

External links

• Baltimore, West Cork County, Ireland
• The Sack of Baltimore — short account from the Baltimore Web site
• The Sack of Baltimore — the text of Davis's poem
• The Stolen Village: Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates (at amazon.co.uk)
  • The Stolen Village listing at books.google.com
• Fineen the Rover, Hackett and the Algerian pirates