Sailor Mouth Saturday: Dock

We all know what a dock is, don’t we? It’s that long thing made out of worm-eaten wood that allows you to walk out over the lake/bayou/ocean/sea, sit down and fish. Or maybe jump off and go for a swim. Or just tie up the family dory. That is the experience that most of us have had. For me, a dock is a welcoming place of solitude and communion with the water. Or it’s a place of so much bustle and energy that the air fairly crackles.

In the great age of sail, and to men who went to sea in ships, it was more often the latter. A dock proper is a receptacle for ships where they can quite literally park to take in cargo or to refit. A dry dock, where ships could be built and/or repaired, was usually a deep trench with strong flood gates at one end. The ship, depending on size and the capacity of the dry dock, could be towed in, the water let out, the flood gates closed and work begun. By the end of the 18th century most blue water navies had large dockyards to support their fleets. Some of the most famous are Boston, Baltimore, Charleston, New Orleans and San Francisco in the U.S., Deptford, Sheerness, Chatham and of course Plymouth or Pompey (from whose wonderful website the above picture of HMS Warrior comes) in the U.K. France had Dunkirk, Brest and Marseilles while Spain had Gibraltar and Malaga and Cartagena. Algiers, Tripoli and Sale kept things up on the Barbary Coast.

An entire language and culture sprang up in and around dockyards that was separate from but cousin to the culture of the sea. Dock dues were monies paid to the commissioner of a dock for use. Dockers were the inhabitants of a dockyard’s wider area. This term sprang up in England around the town of Plymouth in particular with a docker being anyone who had a residence between the dockyards proper and the town. Baltimore and New York also had “dockers”. In France they were known as diminuers – “diminishers”.

This derogatory sounding epithet may have stemmed from the distrust and sometimes outright hatred sailors felt toward dock workers. Dockyard duty was almost always the purview of a ship’s lieutenant or midshipman who commanded a gang of his mates ashore. They would be stationed at dry dock with their ship to keep an eye on the men working on her, frequently called “dockyard maties”. The artisans in particular – wood and metal workers – were considered dishonest and prone to steeling. Fights sometimes broke out between ship’s men and dockyard “artificers” that could end in serious injury or even death.

A ship is said to dock herself up when she has eased onto an underwater bed making her temporarily stationary. Docking a ship can occur elsewhere than a dock yard. A good example would be careening where in a ship is literally hauled up onto a beach or other shoreline and laid on her side for “breaming”. This is the process of getting the muck off her bottom by melting the tar and paint on her keel with fire which in turn removes seaweed, grass, lipids and worms from her bottom.

Though helpful for his ship the dockyard was generally no friend to a sailor, who felt he had to keep his guard up and an eye on his beloved ship at all times. The only exception being, it perhaps goes without saying, the taverns and the ladies. There at least, a seaman could find welcome and a good time.

Sailor Mouth Saturday: Sally

As we know, Sale is a port in Morocco that was once very much favored by Barbary pirates. Sale is pronounce "salay" in the North African languages but was corrupted in English to "sally", like the girl's name. This word seeped into the vernacular, as words will, and was overlaid onto other existing words to mean a variety of things over land and sea.

The French verb saillir means to rush out from, and this was the first origin of the term as used in warfare and aboard ship. In particular, a sally was a rush of soldiers hurrying out of a castle or fortress to attack besiegers. In this sense, the term sortie was also used but has come to be more closely associated with reconnaissance than attack. From the same verb comes the specifically nautical term which means moving something by sudden jerks or through the pooled force of a group of men rushing forward. A crew could sally a ship that had run aground back into deep water, for instance.

A sally-port is an egress cut in a fort to allow the men to sally forth from it. In the case of a fire-ship - one loaded with black powder, sent floating toward and enemy and set ablaze at the last moment - sally-ports would be cut into the quarters of the ship to allow its crew to exit before the big boom. There was also a sally-port at Portsmouth in England whose waters were reserved for the exclusive use of men-of-war's boats.

A sally (or sallee) rover was a Barbary pirate ship or, in other instances, the pirate himself. Salleeman was also appropriate in reference to the ship. Since these ships roamed all over the Atlantic, from Ireland to Newfoundland and the Gulf of Mexico to the Mediterranean, the now common term for going out into the world - sally forth - was probably kept alive in the English language by its use in reference to these corsairs and their ships.

Finally there is the sally lunn, a sweet bun slightly larger than a muffin eaten hot with butter. This was originally invented and sold by a lady of late 18th century Bath, England named Sally Lunn. It was a favorite of British sailors who had the good fortune to recuperate from injuries at the famous spa.

I'll leave you with that tasty thought. And for those of you wondering, yes; that is Stephen Decatur up there in the center of that painting once again kicking pirate ass.

People: The Albanian Captain(s)

Some time in the early 1530s a boy was born in Albania. Neither he nor those who loved him could have known what fate held in store, but it's a certainty that if even half his story is anywhere near true it would make an incredible action-adventure movie.

We don't know what the boy's given name was but it is probably safe to say that he was raised a Christian. This made him a target for the North African pirates who raided his homeland at various intervals. In 1546, the boy was taken up by the raiding party of the pirate Kari Ali and brought to Algiers as a valuable slave. The first years of his life in the busy port city are also lost to history. What we know is that by 1565 Kari Ali Rais ("Rais" being the equivalent of "Captain" or "Commander" in English) was dead and the young Albanian, now calling himself by the Muslim name of Murat Ali, took his place and became Murat Rais.

Murat's first cruise with the small flotilla his mentor had sailed started badly. He shipwrecked his flagship somewhere either on or near the coast of Sicily and things looked bleak. Fortune smiled a few weeks later and Murat's smaller vessels captured a prize and used it to continue their cruise. More prizes were caught off the Spanish coast and he returned to Algiers with ships and slaves to sell.

What we know of Murat personally is that he was a small man, probably no taller than five feet three inches. He was slender and liked to dress richly. Having embraced the Muslim faith - or "turned Turk" as the British would say - he used his ever accumulating wealth to build a large home wherein he is reputed to have kept three or four wives. He seems to have been a live hard/play hard kind of seaman, and he made himself very popular with the local Beys by bringing in prizes on a regular basis.

Murat's reputation for audacity and success got around the North African seaports and men came not only to join his crews but to sail in partnership with him. Murat, however, was not much of a team player. He would routinely disregard the Barbary codes and this behavior made him powerful enemies. One of these was a so called "Captain of the Seas", a title similar to Commodore, from Algiers named Uluj Ali. Uluj accused Murat of losing a rich galleasse of the Knights of Malta by trying to rush to board her, and a long standing animosity developed. It may have been Uluj who used his influence to keep Murat from attaining the title of Captain of the Seas over the course of the next decade.

Despite the political infighting, which it seems no powerful Rais could avoid, Murat continued his astoundingly lucrative raids on Spanish and Italian shipping. When he captured two powerful galleasses, which were ferrying the Viceroy of Sicily home to Spain in 1574, both the Sultan of Algiers and King Philip of Spain took note. The Viceroy and his entourage were ransomed for an exorbitant amount and Philip put a price on the infidel head of Murat Rais.

Four years later, Murat captured a flotilla from France carrying more in silver and gold coins than the previous ransom from the Spanish King. With this, Murat's reputation was sealed. The Sultan appointed him Captain of the Seas of Algiers, although the post didn't actually stick until it was confirmed by the Ottoman Emperor in 1594.

If your doing the math that means that Murat was somewhere around 60 years old when the Emperor elevated him to the new post. To me, this is where some questions have to be asked of the story. Murat redoubled his raids before and after his appointment, sailing into the Atlantic and, using Sale in modern Morocco as a base, raiding Spanish and Portuguese towns for slaves. In 1595, he took his largest flotilla to date to southern Italy where he captured three Sicilian galleasses while destroying a larger fleet of the Knights of Malta.

With this triumph, he was given command of several squadrons of the Ottoman navy. He continued his predations on Christian ships until he was called to assist - almost ironically - in the siege of Vlore, the largest city in Albania. Here he was killed during fighting in 1636. That's right; he would have been over 100 years old.

Obviously this is where the tale of Murat Ali Rais jumps the track. Even in this day and age, 100 years is a long time to live and not a one of us would be capable of going out to battle at that age. My personal belief is that we are dealing with two men, possibly a father and son, who went by the same name and had a similar talent for piracy. Their personalities blended as their legend grew and, like the Laffite brothers, they have come down in folklore as one man. Another possibility is that the deeds of others have been tacked on to the hero Murat Rais and his true dates of birth and death are now unknown.

Either way, there is no denying that the boy kidnapped from his natal home made more than good along the Barbary coast and may very well have seen his son do the same.

Home Ports: In The Land Of Sallee

The notorious Barbary Corsairs ranged the coast of North Africa from Roman times to the early 19th century. They were notorious for their tenacity and feared as ruthless slave catchers. Being chained to a Barbary galley was basically a death sentence and no European or American sailor wanted any part of it.

The corsairs used many ports along the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts of Africa: Tunis, Algiers, Tripoli and today's city, Sale in northern Morocco. This port town was probably originally colonized by Phoenician sea raiders - the Sea Peoples who harried Egyptian shipping. It is situated across the Sale harbor from the Ancient Roman port of Cella, now known as Chellah (near modern Rabat). Archaeologists have unearthed evidence of a thriving seafaring culture there, both local and Roman, that dates back to about 200 BCE. As the old city fell into disrepair, Sale (pronounce "Sah-lay") came into her own once again. By Medieval times, the descendants of local Berbers were sailing out to raid European shipping from her snug harbor.

During the heyday of Barbary piracy, from the Crusades until the final denouement in the 1810s, many famous corsairs used Sale as a base. The Barbarossa brothers, Aruj and Hizir, the great Murat Rais and of course the enemy of Islamic piracy, the Knights of Malta, all claimed Sale as a home port at one time. The fiercely independent local population rallied around the pirates and some writers - Peter Lamborn Wilson in particular - make Sale out to be a kind of pirate utopia where all were equals and no one went hungry.

Like Captain Johnson's kingdom of Libertaria on Madagascar, this is probably nothing more than wishful thinking. It does point up the fact, however, that the people of the port's livelihood was very much intertwined with freebooting. To a large degree the booty brought in by the pirates was humans. Sale was a slave port, and the people sold there could come from as far afield as Ireland and Newfoundland.

Caribbean pirates took to calling any Muslim corsair a Sallee or Salley Rover or simply Salley men. Their galleys were known by the same monikers. They were generally avoided not for any unusual bloodthirstiness but because of their propensity to kidnap sturdy men for sale back home.

Sale has become an essentially unappealing industrial town over the course of the last 100 years. Her history can still be seen, however, in the Phoenician and Roman touches, the Medieval stone moles near the water and the ancient port that will probably always be very close to what she was in the Golden Age of Barbary Corsairs.