The Stolen Village

"Yes, it’s astonishing. Des Ekin is a man who tells this story with the great verve and narrative flair of a journalist. In 1631 a Dutch renegade called Morat Rais sailed to the south coast of Ireland . One night he landed outside the small village of Baltimore in County Cork and he kidnapped 107 protestant settlers and took them back to Algeria and sold them. At the time Ireland was considered to be a nest of pirates. The Irish were sympathetic to the Barbary pirates, because they were anti-English and paid well. In the 17th century there were alehouses on the west coast of Ireland where you got your change in Algerian dollars, there was that much commerce going on. In the story there is some controversy about what made Morat choose Baltimore. Some say he was going for a richer town up the coast but was put off because it was so heavily armed. The idea is that Morat captured someone who gave him this inside information and pointed him towards Baltimore because they were Protestants and the informer was a Catholic. What strikes me very strongly is that the pirates in the books by Peter Leeson and John Latimer are held up as heroes. There is something romantic about them. You don’t see the same romance attached to the Islamic pirates of Barbary. They are seen as the other, the enemy. When an English pirate like Morat converted to Islam it was seen as the ultimate betrayal. They had gone over to the other. How come Jack Sparrow from The Pirates of the Caribbean is fun and glamorous and we can laugh at his antics and yet we don’t do the same with the Somali pirates? If there’s a film in development at the moment, it won’t be about a plucky band of Somali pirates. It will be about a clean-cut, Tom Cruise, US military figure, fighting against overwhelming odds in the Gulf of Aden."