At dawn on January 12 1617, the Dolphin, an English merchantman bound for London, was sighted off the Sardinian coast by five Barbary pirate ships. There was time for the crew to say their prayers, eat dinner and listen to a rousing speech from the captain. Then all hell broke loose. The Dolphin was blasted with cannon shot and boarded, the corsairs 'entering our ship thick and threefold, with their scimitars, hatchets, half pikes and other weapons’. There was bloody hand-to-hand fighting; incendiary grenades set fire to the ship. One landed in the surgeon’s basin while he was tending the wounded; he calmly hurled the flaming vessel into the sea, and somehow the Dolphin managed to escape. The pirate captain responsible for this mayhem was a one-armed Londoner called Robert Walsingham.
It is out of such eyewitness accounts that Adrian Tinniswood weaves this mosaic account of piracy and slavery, cross-cultural contact and redemption along the shores of North Africa. Barbary was the abode of the Berbers – the patchwork of small Islamic fiefdoms centred on Algiers, Tunis, Tangiers and Tripoli which became, in the English imagination, the land of the Barbarians.
