The BookPimp™ Touts: The Barbary Pirates, by C.S. Forester

C. S. Forester was sort of the Tom Clancy of the 1930s and 1940s. The author of some thirty novels—the reissues, omnibus editions, and differing U.S. and U.K. titles make it difficult to come up with an exact count—and a dozen or more history books, he is best remembered today as the creator of Horatio Hornblower, who, over the course of a dozen novels set in the Napoleonic era, rose from midshipman to the rank of Lord Admiral of His Majesty's Navy and had exciting adventures all over the world. If you've read any of Patrick O'Brian's later Aubrey-Maturhin novels, Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturhin—

Well, actually a closer reading suggests that O'Brian created Jack and Stephen by transposing Kirk and Spock back to the age of fighting sail. But Gene Roddenberry is on record as admitting at least once that when he created the character of James T. Kirk, all he was trying to do was put "Captain Hornblower in space."

Getting back to Forester, then: if Gregory Peck is cast as one of your leading heroes, and Humphrey Bogart as another (in The African Queen), you must be doing something right. In all, some twenty-five films and teleplays have been adapted from Forester's novels, the most recent one being released in 2003.

The Barbary Pirates, on the other hand, is a history. A few of the reviews of this book on Amazon complain that it seems childish, and that's with good cause; the dust-jacket copy on my 1953 hardcover edition makes it clear that this book was written for what we now call the YA market, and that it was one of a series of at least 50 YA history books published by Random House in the 1950s with the intention of instilling patriotism and pride into 10- to 13-year-old American and Canadian boys and girls. So, while this is definitely not a college textbook, it is also clear that fifty years ago, we had much higher standards of literacy for 10- to 13-year-olds than we do now.

As for questions of patriotism, pride, and publishers: I'm not going there.

As a writer, this book interests me on two levels. First, with the recent resurgence in piracy along the African coast, this book makes it clear that this is not by any stretch of the imagination a new problem. In fact, the very word barbarian derives from the ancient Greek word for the Berber peoples of northern Africa. (And if you want a horribly politically incorrect take on the classical Greek view of the situation, Google Aesop's fable, "Hermes and the Arabs." This is one that generally is omitted from contemporary collections.)

While African pirates were a well-known hazard back in Greek and Roman days, the so-called golden age of piracy begins with the Christian reconquest of Spain in the 1490s and continues with only minor interruptions for more than 300 years. Moslem raiders operating out of ports on the North African coast murdered, burned, and looted as far away as Iceland and Denmark, dragging the young and healthy from entire villages off into chattel slavery from which few ever returned. (The old and infirm, they simply rounded up and butchered.) Entire stretches of the Spanish and Italian coasts were depopulated by the Barbary corsairs. Forget Jack Sparrow; the real Barbarossa brothers were a pair of Algerians famous for their hideous cruelty. Miguel de Cervantes was captured by corsairs in the mid-1500s and later ransomed, an experience which influenced Don Quixote; Daniel Defoe was captured by and escaped from Moroccan pirates in the mid-1600s, an experience which he later wrote about in Robinson Crusoe. Frankly, the Barbary corsairs made the Vikings look like Boy Scouts.

For centuries, Europeans coped with the corsairs using a combination of bribery, appeasement, and diplomacy, "diplomacy" being largely the negotiations over the exact amount of the bribe or ransom. The corsairs could be bought off—for a while—and from time to time various European kingdoms got fed up with appeasement and chose to fight instead. Again, the corsairs could be fought into submission—for a while—but invariably, the Europeans ended up believing the problem was solved and turning their attention back to European matters, at which point the Barbary corsairs came roaring back.

All of this changed in 1801, when the young United States of America, being unable to afford the bribes, ransom, and tribute demanding by the Pasha of Tripoli, decided to send gunships and Marines to the shores of Tripoli instead. And this is where the story gets really interesting.

Which brings us to the second level on which I as a writer find this book thought-provoking. If you're looking for prototypes for heroic characters, this book is full of them. You'll meet Stephen Decatur; a man they used to name entire towns after but who has since dropped down the memory hole. The youngest man ever to make the rank of captain in the U.S. Navy, Decatur commanded the Enterprise, and when the Tripolitans captured the American frigate Philadelphia, the captain of the Enterprise, at great personal risk, led a small party of Marines on a covert mission right into the very heart of the enemy's stronghold—

No, wait, that story seems strangely familiar already.

Okay, you'll meet Presley O'Bannon, a U. S. Marine Corps lieutenant who, commanding a mighty force composed of seven U. S. Marines, one U. S. Navy midshipman, a handful of Greek, Austrian, and Italian soldiers-of-fortune, and some four hundred unreliable Bedouin allies, marched from Egypt to Tripoli, defeating all opposition along the way and almost conquering Tripoli, only to have defeat snatched from the jaws of victory at the last moment by the valiant peace negotiators of the U. S. State Department. You'll meet the unfortunate Hamet, rightful heir to the throne of Tripoli, who holds the dubious distinction of being the first foreign leader to decide to throw his lot in with the Americans based on his meetings with our Navy officers and Marines, only to find himself later stabbed in the back by our diplomats. You'll meet—

Oh, never mind. The book is a fast, lightweight read, and you'll meet a load of fascinating characters and get some unusual insights into both history and contemporary politics. After reading this book, I guarantee that when you hear on the news that Somali pirates have captured yet another tanker or freighter and are demanding millions in ransom—

You'll be saying, "Screw that. Who's the captain of the Enterprise these days?"