A reminder for me about how much the different cultures seem to have trouble getting along. In this case it could have been more about each individual man (3) and his own desires becoming more important than anyone else. Then, each taking it to extremes of immorality and heinousness for years before the subject of the book - The Stolen Village actually took place.

Regarding the kidnapped individuals turned to slaves of Baltimore Ireland: Another perspective is how each of the referred to men above choices affected innocent peoples lives. Even though they were slaves, it seems possible that some may have faired better after a time than if they had not been kidnapped and taken to a far away land - Algiers. ( )

http://nhw.livejournal.com/1147446.ht...

On 20 June 1631, pirates from Algiers descended on Baltimore in County Cork and kidnapped over a hundred of its inhabitants, most of the population, bringing them back to Africa and selling them into slavery. Ekin describes this as 'the most devastating invasion ever carried out by the forces of the Islamist jihad on Britain or Ireland', and while I regret that he asserts the jihadism of the pirates, who were clearly less interested in religion than, say, Sir Francis Drake or Oliver Cromwell, you can see what he means.

Yet in fact very little of this is quite as it seems. The leader of the pirates was a Dutch renegade whose sons settled in New Amsterdam (or as we now call it, New York), and whose descendants include, for instance, Caroline Kennedy. The kidnapped villagers were a small Calvinist colony in a hostile territory; Ekin makes a good case against a local Irish Catholic dignitary for having organised the pirates' raid in the first place, and makes it quite comprehensible that when the opportunity of ransom came aroud fifteen years later, only two of the hundred-plus former villagers of Baltimore chose to go home. Algiers had a decent health service, running water in the houses and a decent climate; Baltimore is still lacking in some of these respects and certainly lacked all of them in the seventeenth century. (I was there when I was nine, but did not check the water or the health service; the weather, however, was poor.)

Ekin is a journalist rather than a historian, and has got perhaps a bit carried away by his research into what life was like for the slaves of Algiers, his description of which occupies most of the book. (Having said that, his attitude is properly sceptical and his documentation scrupulous; my criticism is of his structure, not his methods.) He also doesn't appear to have visited Algiers personally, which is not a criticism, it's just a shame that he doesn't give us the benefit of today's perspective.

Even so, the story is a fascinating insight into the world of seventeenth-century maritime commerce linked by the Atlantic Ocean: New Amsterdam at one end, Don Quixote and Zoraida at the other. The fact that Algiers and New Amsterdam were such cosmopolitan places, with people moving pretty freely between them and Western Europe, makes it rather difficult to justify describing one city as 'Islamic' or indeed the other as 'Christian'. (And makes his choice of words to describe the raid even more regrettable.)

Anyway, fascinating stuff. ( )

http://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2008/01... ( )

June 1631 and pirates from Algiers along with the elite Janissaries raid a small fishing village in Cork, taking with them the inhabitants as slaves. It took over a decade to try to return them and then only 2 returned. This is a look at this little-known story.
Interesting and frustrating this is an interesting look at both Baltimore of the time and Algiers of the time. How slaves were treated, the lives they lived and how they sometimes died in interesting and painful ways. Using accounts from other people who experienced some of the same thing this paints quite a vivid picture of what happened. Whats frustrating is the lack of knowledge of what happened to the hundreds of people who were captured and made into slaves, but their voices have been silenced by time this is as close as it will get.
Des evidentally enjoyed his topic, was facinated by it and wanted to explore it as well as he could, and he does. He writes history in a very accessible but also quite informative way. The bibliography is expansive. I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised by the scholarship seeing as how he's an editor for the Sunday World in Ireland, a tabloid. ( )