“Did you know about the Sack of Baltimore?

"A raid on the coastal village of Baltimore, Ireland, during which pirates left with the entire populace of the settlement. The attack was led by a Dutch captain, Jan Janszoon van Haarlem, also known as Murad Reis the Younger. Janszoon also led the 1627 raid on Iceland. Such raids in the Mediterranean were so frequent and devastating that the coastline between Venice to Malaga suffered widespread depopulation, and settlement there was discouraged. In fact, it was said that this was largely because there was no one left to capture any longer."

“For a more detailed account:

From Baltimore to Barbary: the 1631 sack of Baltimore

-Guest, at jameslafond.com

The Sack of Baltimore, which was not complete but devastating and featured Dutch savagery, Muslim honor and English skullduggery is a complex microcosm of an age of total predation, an age defined by human bondage.

The settlement of Baltimore itself was established as a small plantation as part of the effort to replace native Irish with immigrant Scotch. It also served as the primary center of piracy in the British Isles. The Dutch captains of this period, who had forsaken Christianity—which was then splintering as Church and State [1] strove to achieve primacy in the souls of their shared flocks—reminds one of the Irish Wild Geese, who, losing their nation to foreign interests served as mercenaries and advisors against Great Britain for centuries. Holland was, at this period under Spanish, Mercenary, and to a lesser degree French and English, threat, to which it would succumb a generation later as England and France moved in to divide the tiny nation that had fought off the Spanish and mercenary occupiers of the Hapsburg dynasts. One wonders if the Dutch Muslims saw themselves as battling the traitorous elements in their own nation as well as the large patron states that sought to rest Holland’s maritime empire from her, primarily Spain, but increasingly including France and England.

Dutch ships and captains were the premier shallow water gunnery platforms from 1600 through 1800, built and used as they were for navigating shallow and narrow seas. This made their converted vessels and captains ideal tools for embittered Moroccans seeking to strike back at Christendom after their people’s expulsion from Southern Spain circa 1500.

Some points of interest relating to the sack of Baltimore and the trade in white European slaves that, for the entirety of the 17th century were the most trafficked human beings in the English speaking world and were the most sought after slaves in the Arabic speaking world:

1. The 1634 expedition financed by Lord Baltimore to settle Catholics from England in the Chesapeake Bay, was undertaken in dread of “Turkish” pirates while still within sight of England.

2. The English Navy of the time consisted of three elements, pirates [privateers, shady military contractors] who operated only on offense, royal vessels which were kept in port as a check on the fleets of other nations, and the squadrons of the nobility, up to and including lord Grenville’s 51 ships, which sat out the English destruction of the Spanish Armada in 1588 as a matter of slight, as Drake wished to deprive his rival for the Queen’s affection of an opportunity to distinguish himself. Hence there was no system of coastal defense as existed in the Napoleonic Era, which most readers on the Age of Sail are more familiar with.

3. Beyond the ill-prepared and essentially medieval logistics of the period British fleet, England was wracked with at least three financial depressions, two plagues and religious separatism during this period. The King’s attempt to keep a standing army of conscripts [slave soldiers] resulted in a bandit force thousands strong pillaging the countryside. This all added up to dire economic conditions in which the Crown found itself not only unable and unwilling to protect its poorest subjects, but also got into the business of selling the jobless, homeless and orphaned into slavery.

Under the above conditions the citizens of Baltimore and the nearby community that warded off the follow-on attack, were unusually well set to defend themselves, as they were armed settlers, compared to the more helpless villagers of mainland England and Europe. For this reason the daring expedition to raid English Ireland in 1631, required inside men, whose motivations might only be conjectured. It should be noted that the Muslim captors treated the women and children [sex slaves and confidants destined for monarchs and the elite] with respect and compassion, reserving their cruelties for the captive men destined to die in hard labor. By contrast, Christian slavers of the period treated all with cruelty, brutality and utter dehumanizing contempt. [5]

1. The Thirty Years War, which crippled German nationality in the cradle, drained the Spanish treasury and devalued currency, due to the tons of Aztec and Inca gold sunk into the war effort by the Spanish monarchy, raged from 1618 through 1648, a religious war served by soulless military contractors.

2. Historic Fiction on Video: The Admiral [Dutch, 2016], The Last Valley, 1971, Omar Sharif. Michael Cain.

3. Games: Here I Stand, table top, 1990s multiplayer design

4. Book Source: The Reformation, Durant, The Thirty Years War by C.V. Wedgewood and also her three volume treatment on the monarchy of Charles I, Culminating in, A Coffin for King Charles

5. Modern horrific art, including Death on the Battlefield and the Valley of the Shadow of Death, radiate from this period directly into the modern horror of Stoker, Lovecraft, Howard and down through current imagery of Witchcraft in film by such cinema thugs as Rob Zombie, all of which is based in the era of the burning of witches, the fragmentation of Christendom, the fall of the nobility and the embers from which grew the modern nation states. There is a reason why this period of European history has never been meaningfully studied in American high schools.

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