Dan Snow's History Hit - Pirates: Barbary Corsairs & The Bombardment of Algiers

Episode Date: July 13, 2025

For centuries, the Barbary Corsairs captured ships and enslaved European Christians, turning the Mediterranean into a sea of fear and ransom. Backed by the rulers of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, the corsairs built vast fortunes—and even empires. But in 1816, after failed diplomacy and mounting outrage, Britain struck back.Dan tells the story of the fiery bombardment that shook Algiers to its core and marked the beginning of the end for Barbary piracy. For this episode in our Pirates series, he's joined by Aaron Jaffer, Curator of World History and Cultures at Royal Museums Greenwich.Written by Dan Snow, produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.You can discover more and book tickets for the 'Pirates' exhibition at the National Maritime Museum Greenwich here.Join Dan and the team for a special LIVE recording of Dan Snow's History Hit on Friday 12th September 2025! To celebrate 10 years of the podcast, Dan is putting on a special show of signature storytelling, never-before-heard anecdotes from his often stranger-than-fiction career as well as answering the burning questions you've always wanted to ask!Get tickets here, before they sell out: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/dan-snows-history-hit/You can now find Dan Snow's History Hit on YouTube! Watch episodes every Friday here.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail].

Hi folks, Dan here. I have some very, very exciting news for you. To celebrate our 10th anniversary with you, we are doing a live show of Dan Snow's history, the first for a very, very long time. So please join me on Friday the 12th of September in London town. By popular demand, I'll be retelling the story of the legend Thomas Cochran, the Goat, greatest of all time, the man who inspired the movie Master and Commander, and looking back over 10 years of making this podcast, Prime Ministers, Oscar winners, World War II veterans, Holocaust survivors, and some of the greatest historians in the world.

It's a time for me to hang out with you guys and answer any burning questions you may have. So don't miss it, it's going to be an epic party and there is no one I'd rather spend it with. All of you dedicated listeners. You can get tickets at the link in the show notes, but hurry because they are selling fast. See you there. You could call it gunboat diplomacy, but these were not boats. They were ships. The leading vessel had triple bank decks mounting iron guns. All of them now run out through open gun ports. With a hundred cannons, she was one of the biggest and most potent battleships of that point in history.

HMS, Queen Charlotte. Perhaps not the most terrifying name in the roster of the Royal Navy. Not quite up there with Warspite, implacable, invincible, Arch-Royal, Victory. But a name to put fear into the guts of those who knew. She had blasted two French ships at the same time, the so-called glorious 1st of June in 1794, raking them both stem to stern with her well-drilled broadsides. She had turned the French ship Formidable into a floating wreck of smashed timbers and downed rigging the following year. Now, two decades later, she was leading another fleet

towards a very different enemy. Not French, but Algerian. The warrior queen had come for the pirates of North Africa's Barbary coast. On the quarter deck was Admiral Edward Pellew, Lord Exmouth. He had seen a lot of war. He had served in the Navy since the American Revolutionary War.

He had swum into a wrecked ship in a storm to save the crew. He'd captured enemy possessions in the Indian Ocean. He knew his business. He surveyed the coast. The city lay in a bay. White buildings rose from busy harbour backed by steep hills. There were cannon on fortified sea walls. This is the stronghold of the Day of Algiers, ruler of one of the last Barbary states.

States that once dominated the seas right up to the bays and fishing villages of the northern coast of the Mediterranean and beyond. Out into the Atlantic too. Their slavers had once scoured Cornwall, Ireland, even Iceland for victims to sell in the human flesh markets of the North African coast. The Europeans had long tried to suppress this trade. Now they were here to extinguish it. trade. Now they were here to extinguish it. Exmouth had spoken with the representatives of the day just weeks earlier to secure a treaty abolishing Christian slavery in the region. But within days of his departure, over 200 captured European fishermen had been massacred. Meanwhile European ships were still having problems with Barbary corsairs. They were licensed privateers, as far as the day of Algiers was concerned. They were brutal pirates to their victims.

They operated out of the city, attacking and plundering vessels, causing disruption to trade. It was now 1816, the year after Waterloo. The wars in Europe were over. Napoleon was in his tropical prison. The British were dominant on the world's oceans. And now they had the time and bandwidth

for little housekeeping. The glory days of piracy on the Barbary Coast were fading. They'd had a reprieve as Europeans had fought massive wars against each other for a generation. Now the British were here to finish them for good. They had tried diplomacy. It was now time for the stick. The fleet of Lord Exmouth positioned itself off the harbour.

There are five ships of the line, five frigates and four bomb vessels. There are also six Dutch ships under Admiral van Kappelen. The mission is clear. Compel the release of European slaves, secure an end to Christian slavery and punish the day for his betrayal. And demonstrate British naval power. Exmouth sends a message ashore demanding the release of all Christian slaves without ransom, full compensation to the families of the masquered fishermen and a formal end to slavery. The day delays. Hours pass without reply, tension builds. The internal partitions of the ships of the line are cleared away, officers furniture stored for safekeeping down the hold, young

boys, powder monkeys bring charges of gunpowder up from the magazines to the gun crews. Solid shot is rammed down, snug in the barrels of the British Empire's iron enforcers. What comes next is an extraordinary statement of British naval confidence. The Queen Charlotte glided to within 80 yards of the Algerian breakwater, dropped its anchor and settled a stone's throw away from the port. At 11.15, one over-enthusiastic Al-Jarine gun crew fired on the British flagship. She responded with a broadside. As the British and Dutch fleet blazed away at the shore defences, smashing masonry, knocking

cannon off their carriages, killing and driving off the defenders, the day unleashed a counter-attack. A swarm of little boats came pouring out of the harbour. They hoped to overwhelm and confuse the battleships, but the British calmly turned their guns on this new threat and cannonballs tore through thin planking of these little bones. Crews were sent sprawling into the water. Men were vaporised by 36-pound balls hitting them at just a few metres range. You're listening to Dance Knows History here and we have arrived at the beginning of the end for Piracy in the Age of Sail in our Pirates series.

For this penultimate episode, I'm joined by Aaron Jaffa. He is curator of world history and cultures at the Royal Museum's Greenwich. He's going to tell us the incredible story of the bombardment of our cheers and Britain's enormous effort to stop piracy and slavery on the Barbary Coast once and for all. Aaron, first of all, I guess what's the Barbary coast?

The Barbary coast is in North Africa. It's actually a cluster of different states. Tunis, Tripoli, Algiers, they're all Ottoman regencies. That means nominally they're part of the Ottoman Empire, but actually in practice, by this time the early 1800s, they're behaving how they want. Sometimes they help out the sultan, sometimes they go their own way. There's also the independent kingdom of Morocco, which isn't part of the Ottoman Empire. Now you say Barbary pirates, we don't actually use the word pirate when we're talking about sailors who are from these places. We actually prefer the term

corsair, which is much more accurate. What happens is these states send out lots of sailors to attack the ships of Christian nations from Europe. So unlike pirates who are total freelancers, these corsairs are, they've got a piece of paper from the boss, from the political authorities saying, go and do this job. You're absolutely right. They are sanctioned by the rulers of these Barbary states. Sometimes they're provided ships by them.

And also when they bring back their booty, they have to provide some of it to those rulers. They're a bit like people we call privateers from European states who, as you say, have a piece of paper to say, you can go out and attack our enemies. What's rather different about the Corsairs, and one of the reasons we don't call them, you know, Barbary privateers, is there's this ideological element involved. They see themselves involved in this eternal war against Christendom. So from their point of view, or at least the justification they use,

is that it's fine to be attacking the ships and the coastlines, the villages and the people from these Christian states. OK, so there's a real political, ideological perhaps, dimension there. How are they attacking? Because you mentioned states. So are they just nicking ships full of trading goods, or are they attacking coastlines and settlements as well? It's actually both. So if you wind back to the heyday of the Barbary Corsairs,

that's really the first half of the 1600s. They're sending out their ships really quite far and wide. At one point in time Barbary Corsairs were mainly operating in the Mediterranean, so attacking coastlines of places like Spain, what's now Italy, France, Corsica, Sicily, Sardinia, these kinds of places. But in the early 1600s they start using different kinds of ships, square-edged ships, and means they can get out into the Atlantic for example. They even attack the coastline of the British Isles. So England and Ireland both have places where the Barbary Corsairs are coming ashore and abducting people. The most famous raid is 1631, that's in Baltimore

in Southern Ireland. Over 100 people are carried off by these Barbary corsairs, who even make it to Iceland and the Newfoundland fisheries as well. So they're really getting a long way from the North African coast and you can go to parts of Europe today, you know, you might be on holiday and see an abandoned tower. These towers are built all around Europe to guard against these Barbary corsairs. Yeah, those towers on the headlands, on the beach on which you're sipping your drink

and swimming in the sea, those towers, chances are they used to look out for the Barbary corsairs. Exactly, remember that when you're sipping your drink down. Through the 17th century, hardly anywhere on the European coastline had been untouched by the corsairs of North Africa. One particularly brutal attack took place on the 20th of June 1631 at Baltimore in West Cork Island. The slavers took perhaps 200 villagers for a life in the harems, the fields or chained to the thwarts of the all-powered galleys of the Barbary coast.

In England the pirates even seize Leys of the Barbary coast. In England, the pirates even seized Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel and used it as a base for slaving. In July 1627, pirates raided Northern Iceland. The raids continued into the 18th century and European governments struggled to respond. The thing is, Europeans are never in a position to club together to stamp out this Barbary menace as it's called.

Between the late 1600s and the end of the Napoleonic Wars, all the great naval powers are busy fighting each other, making alliances. There's not this concerted effort to stamp them out and there's no unity to do that. And then in earlier periods, in the first half of the 1600s, the heyday of the Barbary pirates, they don't have strong enough navies. The British, they're also indulgent of the Barbary corsairs because particularly during periods of conflict, the Barbary states help provide food and other supplies to the British garrisons at places like Gibraltar, the Ionian Islands. So they can be quite useful to the British.

And by this time, the British have signed treaties with them, so their shipping is protected. Some countries sent representatives to negotiate and buy back as many slaves as they could. But this was no long-term solution. It was a drop in the ocean, considering how many were in captivity. Only three of the enslaved people captured at Baltimore,

for example, made it back to Ireland after being ransomed. Historians struggle to pin down the number, but it's believed there were around one and a quarter million Christians enslaved and taken to the North African coast from the early 16th century to the late 18th. What happens at the end of the Napoleonic War? Britain's been involved in this giant generational struggle against France and the allies, you

know, huge coalition warfare. Does Britain have a bit of bandwidth at that point to turn its attention to these North African states? What happens at the end of the Napoleonic Wars is that firstly, Europe's a bit more united, having gone through this huge upheaval, navies are more powerful and not fighting each other. Also the way slavery is viewed is changing as well and this is one of the reasons the British are kind of forced to get involved and bombard Algiers. The British have recently passed laws to stamp out the transatlantic slave trade and there are people in Europe who are saying,

well, it's hypocrisy of the British to start trying to stamp out this trade, you know, enslaved Africans going across the Atlantic. And you're not doing anything about these enslaved Christians much closer to home on the North African coast. So the British policymakers are being lobbied, going, well, do you care more about West Africans than you do about Southern Italians

and people from Southern Spain? Yes, there are definitely these comparisons being made. As I said, the British are moving, having been one of the world's leading slave traders, the British are moving to this 19th century period of abolition and being very proud of trying to stamp out the transatlantic slave trade. But as you say, there's this slave trading going on much closer to home. The trans-Mediterranean slave trade.

Exactly. And now Europe's at peace, these are sort of allies or, you know, or at least certainly not enemies anymore. Well, they're always between great powers, there's always lots of rivalry. But of course, the end of the Napoleonic Wars sees a long period of European peace, but of course the end of the Napoleonic Wars sees a long period of European peace, which does enable naval powers like Britain and the Netherlands and France to act in a different way to before. Is there a sense that the Brits are sort of trying to police the world's oceans?

There's certainly a feeling in the Royal Navy and in in wide Europe about needing to do something about the Barbary states and particularly the Barbary Corsairs. Nelson, for example, who's long dead by now, but when he was at sea, he writes a letter saying something like, my blood boils that I cannot chastise these pirates. You listen to Dan Snow's history. Don't go anywhere. There's more to come. Ever wondered what it feels like to be a gladiator, facing a roaring crowd and potential death in the Colosseum? Find out on the Ancients podcast from History Hit. Twice a week, join me, Tristan Hughes, as I hear exciting new research about people living thousands of years ago, from the Babylonians to the Celts to the Romans, and visit the ancient sites which reveal who and just how amazing our distant ancestors were. That's the Ancients from History hit.

In early 1816 the British decided this centuries-long conflict over disrupted trade and slavery must end. They sang of rural Britannia, how Britons never, never, never shall be slaves. Well, it was time to match that rhetoric with action. Lord Exmouth was sent on a diplomatic mission to the Barbary states to negotiate an end to Christian slavery. He successfully secured treaties with Tunis and Tripoli, which agreed to stop taking captives, but he found a less than cooperative delegation when he got to Algiers.

One tactic they use the day the ruler of Algiers is, I have to go and ask the sultan, Algiers is an Ottoman regency, supposed to be in the control of the Sultan in Istanbul or Constantinople, as it was often called. Saying, I have to go and ask him is a great delaying tactic. So the Algiers are stalling. During these rather fraught negotiations, Omar orders his men to arrest British people at Algiers.

This includes these fishermen who aren't actually British, but they are under the protection, normally, of the British. They resist and about 200 of them are massacred. And then there's this real feeling in Europe, well, why aren't the British doing something? There's outrage in Britain. Exmouth is ordered to return to Algiers, this time with a fleet, and compel the day to free all Christian slaves unconditionally, to abolish Christian slavery

permanently, and pay indemnities for the murdered fishermen. It's an ultimatum delivered by the awesome expression of power that is the Royal Navy. He gathered a squadron of five big battleships. That's a floating artillery train of over 400 cannon, far more than Napoleon had at the Battle of Waterloo, for example. He also had five smaller frigates and four bomb ships, which carried huge mortars which could fire big explosive shells through a high trajectory arc, which means they land on top of undefended enemy positions. The venerable HMS Queen Charlotte, with its hundred guns, is his flagship. It wasn't a massive force, but Exmouth was confident it was enough.

In fact, any more big ships he believed might get in each other's ways. He had wrecked the defences of Algiers. His expert eye had taken in every gun position. He'd done the maths. The angles of fire, weight of shot, time to reload, ranges. He was certain he could suppress the shore batteries before they did too much damage to his ships. When the British arrive in Gibraltar,

just before the planned attack, a squadron of five Dutch frigates, led by Vice Admiral Theodorus Frederick van Kaepelen, offered to join the expedition. Exmouth agreed to have them along and he gave them a peripheral role. Admirals were diplomats as well as warriors and he knew the legitimising value, I think, of making this a coalition effort. They arrived in Algiers and once again the Algerians delayed.

The British, Dutch fleet made their preparations to attack. The time passed with no satisfactory response. Exmouth ordered his ships to close with the port defences. Queen Charlotte anchored 50 yards from the main Algerian batteries on the mole. The man made protective spit. Queen Charlotte opened fire. The entire fleet joins her. Gun crews trained to a high pitch by years of war went through their actions mechanically.

They hauled the thick cables to bring the cannon in board. They swabbed and wormed the gun to put out any embers and get rid of any debris from the last round. In goes the gunpowder and the cannonball. In goes the wadding, ram it home, haul again to wheel the gun back out. The gun captain looks along the barrel, some instructions. The crew nudge the cannon to portal starboard. The wedges beneath the caskaball attack to lower the elevation. Then stand back, pull the cord.

The flintlock snaps down, a spark. A milliseconds later, a roar. Smoke. Fire. Guns for the right and left doing the same, above and below, cannonballs smashing into stone ramparts, splinters flying, ricocheting balls, skittling groups of defenders as the survivors start to melt into the city, keener on their lives than their duty to the day. According to Exmouth's log, he wrote, The fire from their batteries was very spirited, but our superiority of gunnery soon told. At first, those Algerine batteries returned fire, and they did cause damage to several ships.

Three of the British ships in particular took intense fire and suffered casualties. But over the next three hours, the British systematically silenced the Algerine guns. If you visit the Pirates exhibit in the Algerian guns. If you visit the Pirates exhibit in the Maritime Museum in Greenwich you can actually see the most incredible painting it depicts the height of the bombardment of Algiers by George Chambers painted roughly 1836 and it gives you a really true sense I think of what the harbour would have been like during that afternoon of appalling fire and flame. It's a huge painting, it's nearly three meters wide, really

impressive, really worth seeing in the flesh as it were. And what you can see it's as if you're almost on the waterline looking at these British ships going into action against the Algerians. There are several of these huge warships visible, that includes HMS Impregnable coming in from the right of the frame. Got a beautiful carved figurehead. You can see just on the bow or the front of the ship, we've got HMS Minden firing a starboard guns. That's the guns on the right side of the ship

if you're looking down towards the front or the bow. Unsurprisingly, it's only just over 10 years after Trafalgar. The ships look very similar to the big battleships like HMS Victory that people will be familiar with from images of Trafalgar. Certainly, you've got these multi-deck warships crowded with men, lots of guns on show, ready to be used. Very importantly, we've also got HMS Queen Charlotte. That's really in the thick of it bombarding the fortifications of Algiers.

In fact, interestingly, you can't see much of Algiers or the fortifications. If you look in the background of the painting, you can see the city rising on the high ground behind, but really the ships are the centre of attention here and a lot of the fortifications they're attacking are obscured by fire and smoke of battle. It's quite a dramatic painting, it really puts you in the action. It does convey some of the horrors of naval warfare as well. As well as these large ships crowded with men, you've got lots of smaller boats in the water and I think one of the most telling parts of the painting is you can see Algerian shot kicking up the spray as it hits the water. You know you really don't want to be hit by this. What you can't see but

would have been happening at the time are Algerian boats coming out to attack these larger Royal Navy vessels. Also visible of course the Dutch, we shouldn't forget the Dutch, you can see a Dutch vessel, I think that's Malampis, in the background flying the Dutch red, white and blue flag. The bombardment takes about 10 hours, it's 10 hours roughly of the British and Dutch firing at these coastal fortifications. The plan is not to attack the town itself, but to attack these forts along the shore,

which are crowded with Algerian gunners. The gunners, of course, are firing back, trying to sink these vessels. They're also sending out their own smaller boats to attack them, and the British are firing both at the water and at the shore. There's a huge amount of shot fired in both directions all day. Bombardment lasts until midnight. Much of the city burns. Fire consumes the arsenal

and nearly all the shipping in the harbour. The morning light the following day reveals the full extent of the damage. The Algerian fleet is destroyed and the shore fortifications are severely damaged. Another effect is that the city has been damaged too, by fire, by shot. The American consulate, who's of course observing this, he writes every

part of the town appears to have suffered from shot and shells. There's really quite a scene of devastation after this bombardment. Casualties on the British and Dutch side have been estimated about 900, not insignificant. But on the Algerian side, perhaps up to 5,000 military and civilians. A huge loss of life and limb. Another eyewitness recalled, the construction of the mole could not be discerned. Neither could the positions where the batteries had been sighted. No more than four or five guns that were still mounted were visible. The bay was filled with the smoking hulks of the remains of the Algerian navy, and by many floating bodies.

Eksmouth wrote a letter to the day warning that if he didn't accept the demands, he would continue the action, despite knowing full well he didn't have the ammunition to do so. Luckily for Eksmouth, the day accepts the terms. And a treaty is signed, freeing thousands of slaves and recompensing much ransom money. For now Omar capitulates, promises to stop slaving, doesn't end very well for him. He's assassinated some time later. For now his rule is safe, but in capitulating to the British and having fought against the Americans the previous year, politically he's really, really battered. And so he'll release existing Christian slaves and promises not to take any more.

Though slavery in the region doesn't completely end with this action, despite British naval efforts, the day does rebuild Algiers, but instead of Christian slaves, he uses Jewish forced labor. Is there a change in the balance of power in the Mediterranean? Do those Barbary states cease their corsairing? There is less slaving going on, but it's not immediate. There are bouts of raiding that go on afterwards. What about the Royal Navy?

Presumably if we look at the ninth century, we like to think of it as a global policeman, gunboat diplomacy, opening up ports for trade. This presumably helps to cement that tradition. Yes, well, the Barbary Corsairs really are very much of an older period. They're a bygone era by this point. They're from a time when Muslim states have much stronger seafaring presence, much more power in the Mediterranean, as opposed to the 19th century when the Mediterranean is very much in the control of Europeans, free trade is becoming more important.

And this era of taking captives, of ransoming them back, that's not possible anymore. So this is a reflection of that, the growing sophistication and potency of these European navies, particularly the British navy, compared to those outside Europe. Whereas in the 1600s, they were sort of level pegging. If anything, perhaps at a disadvantage by the early 1800s and beyond, partly through the Industrial Revolution, firepower. The Royal Navy is pretty difficult to beat. In the years that followed the bombardment, the newly rebuilt city of Algiers

still tried to pursue corsairing, but those days would be short-lived. A new future lay on the horizon for Algiers as a French colony. The two nations had long been at odds. They disagreed over unpaid debts, grain shipments made during Napoleonic Wars that France had never settled. But in 1827 it really came to a head. There was a tense exchange in the day's palace.

Hussain Day, the day of Algiers, struck the French consul across the face with a fly whisk. It was a symbolic insult. But the French seized on it as justification for war and invasion. Three years later, on the 14th of June 18 1830 a massive French force, 37,000 soldiers, landed just west of Algiers. They advanced quickly, they defeated local resistance and a series of sharp skirmishes. On the July the 5th the day surrendered. The French agreed to go into exile with his family and much of his portable wealth. The fall of Algiers marked not just the end of the regime. It was the end of a centuries-old form of government that sustained the Barbary corsairs. France moved to dismantle that corsair system.

The fleets were disbanded, arsenals were destroyed or repurposed, privateering licenses were revoked, slave markets were shut down, European captives held in Algiers were freed. It was a total structural reordering. The administrative and military machinery that enabled piracy was dismantled, and France didn't stop there. The invasion had been framed as a limited punitive mission. We've all heard that before. It quickly transformed into a full-scale colonization,

not just Algiers, but great swathes of northwest Africa. Over the following decades, France expanded inland, waged prolonged wars against resistance, and turned whole of what is now Algeria into a settler colony. The era of the Barbary Corsairs was well and truly over. Thank you so much to Erin Jaffer and the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. I hope the episode inspires you to book your tickets to the Pirates exhibition to learn more about the bombardment of Algiers and the Barbary Corsairs. You can see that magnificent painting in particular. In our next and final episode,

we'll be looking at the end of the golden age of piracy in the Caribbean and Europe. The demise of those famous names who terrorized the sea for decades. By the 1730s, the noose was tightening. This was the era of the pirate hunts. Make sure to follow in your podcast play. You'll get the episode of Pir pirate hunts delivered fresh to you and you can discover how the world's most notorious pirates met their end. Not by cannon fire,

but with courts in colonies as empires took ever greater hold of the region. See you for that next Monday folks. See you next Monday, folks. See you next time.