Pod Insights Dan Snow's History Hit Pirates: Barbary Corsairs & The Bombardment of Algiers About this episode For centuries, the Barbary Corsairs captured ships and enslaved European Christians, turning the Mediterranean into a sea of fear and ransom. Backed by the rulers of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, the corsairs built vast fortunes—and even empires. But in 1816, after failed diplomacy and mounting outrage, Britain struck back.
Dan tells the story of the fiery bombardment that shook Algiers to its core and marked the beginning of the end for Barbary piracy. For this episode in our Pirates series, he's joined by Aaron Jaffer, Curator of World History and Cultures at Royal Museums Greenwich.
Written by Dan Snow, produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.
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2:02 Dan Snow? You could call it gunboat diplomacy. But these were not boats. They were ships. The leading vessel had triple banked decks, mounting iron guns. All of them now run out through open gunpits. With a hundred cannons, she was one of the biggest and most potent battleships at that point in history. HMS Queen Charlotte. Perhaps not the most terrifying name in the roster of the Royal Navy. Not quite up there with war spite, implacable, invincible, Ark Royal, Victory. But a name to put fear into the guts of those who knew. She had blasted two French ships at the same time, the so-called Glorious First of June in 1794.
2:46 Dan Snow? Raking them both stem to stern with her well-drilled broadsides. She had turned the French ship Formidable into a floating wreck of smashed timbers and downed rigging the following year. Now, two decades later, she was leading another fleet towards a very different enemy. Not French, but Algerine. The warrior queen had come for the pirates of North Africa's Barbary Coast. On the quarterdeck was Admiral Edward Pellieu, Lord Exmouth. He had seen a lot of war. He had served in the Navy since the American Revolutionary War. He had swum into a wrecked ship in a storm to save the crew.
3:29 Dan Snow? He'd captured enemy possessions in the Indian Ocean. He knew his business. He surveyed the coast. The city lay in a bay. White buildings rose from busy harbour backed by steep hills. There were cannon on fortified sea walls.
3:48 Dan Snow? This is the stronghold of the Day of Algiers, ruler of one of the last Barbary states. States that had once dominated the seas right up to the bays and fishing villages of the northern coast of the Mediterranean and beyond. Out into the Atlantic too. Their slavers had once scoured Cornwall, Ireland, even Iceland for victims to sell in the human flesh markets of the North African coast. The Europeans had long tried to suppress this trade. Now, they were here to extinguish it. Exmouth had spoken with the representatives of the Day just weeks earlier to secure a treaty abolishing Christian slavery in the region.
4:28 Dan Snow? But within days of his departure, over 200 captured European fishermen had been massacred. Meanwhile, European ships were still having problems with Barbary corsairs. They were licensed privateers as far as the Day of Algiers was concerned. They were brutal pirates to their victims. They operated out of the city, attacking and plundering vessels, causing disruption to trade. It was now 1816, the year after Waterloo. The wars in Europe were over. Napoleon was in his tropical prison. The British were dominant on the world's oceans, and now they had the time and bandwidth for a little housekeeping.
5:11 Dan Snow? The glory days of piracy on the Barbary coast were fading. They'd had a reprieve as Europeans had fought massive wars against each other for a generation. Now the British were here to finish them for good. They had tried diplomacy. It was now time for the stick. The fleet of Lord Exmouth positioned itself off the harbor. There are five ships of the line, five frigates and four bomb vessels. There are also six Dutch ships under Admiral van Capellen. The mission is clear: compel the release of European slaves, secure an end to Christian slavery, and punish the Day for his betrayal. And demonstrate British naval power.
5:54 Dan Snow? Exmouth sends a message ashore demanding the release of all Christian slaves without ransom, full compensation to the families of the massacred fishermen, and a formal end to slavery. The Day delays. Hours pass without reply, tension builds. The internal partitions of the ships of the line are cleared away, officers' furniture stored for safekeeping down the hold. Young boys, powder monkeys bring charges of gunpowder up from the magazines to the gun crews. Solid shot is round home, snug in the barrels of the British Empire's iron enforcers. What comes next is an extraordinary statement of British naval confidence. The Queen Charlotte glided to within eighty yards of the Algerine breakwater, dropped
6:39 Dan Snow? its anchor and settled a stone's throw away from the port. At eleven fifteen, one overenthusiastic Algerine gun crew fired on the British flagship. She responded with a broadside. As the British and Dutch fleet blazed away at the shore defences, smashing masonry, knocking cannon off their carriages, killing and driving off the defenders, the Day unleashed a counter-attack. A swarm of little boats came pouring out of the harbour, they hoped to overwhelm and confuse the battleships, but the British calmly turned their guns on this new threat and cannonballs tore through thin planking of these little boats.
7:22 Dan Snow? Crews were sent sprawling into the water, men were vaporised by thirty-six-pound balls hitting them at just a few metres' range. You're listening to Dan Snow's History and we have arrived at the beginning of the end for Piracy in the Age of Sail in our Pirates series. For this penultimate episode, I'm joined by Aaron Jaffer. He is curator of World History and Culture at the Royal Museum's Greenwich. He's going to tell us the incredible story of the bombardment about two years and Britain's enormous effort to stop piracy and slavery on the Barbary Coast once and for all.
8:00 Dan Snow? Aaron, first of all, I guess what's the Barbary Coast?
8:03 Speaker 03 The Barbary Coast is in North Africa. It's actually a cluster of different states. Tunis, Tripoli, Algiers, they're all Ottoman regencies. That means nominally they're part of the Ottoman Empire. But actually, in practice, by this time, the early 1800s, they're behaving how they want. Sometimes they help out the Sultan, sometimes they go their own way. There's also the independent Kingdom of Morocco, which isn't part of the Ottoman Empire. Now, you say Barbary pirates. We don't actually use the word pirate when we're talking about sailors who are from these places. We actually prefer the term corsair, which is much more accurate. What happens is these states send out lots of sailors
8:45 Speaker 03 to attack the ships of Christian nations from Europe.
8:49 Dan Snow? So unlike pirates who are total freelancers, thugs, these corsairs are, they got a piece of paper from the boss, from the political authority, saying, "Go and do this job."
8:58 Speaker 03 You're absolutely right. They are sanctioned by the rulers of these Barbary states. Sometimes they're provided ships by them. And also, when they bring back their booty, they have to provide some of it to those rulers. They're a bit like people we call privateers from European states, who, as you say, have a piece of paper to say, "You can go out and attack our enemies." What's rather different about the corsairs, and one of the reasons we don't call them Barbary privateers, is there's this ideological element involved. They see themselves involved in this eternal war against Christendom. So from their point of view, or at least the justification they use, is that it's fine to be attacking the ships and the coastlines,
9:42 Speaker 03 the villages and the people from these Christian states.
9:45 Dan Snow? Okay, so there's a real political, ideological perhaps, dimension there. How are they attacking? Because you mentioned states. So are they just nicking ships full of trading goods? Or are they attacking coastlines and settlements as well?
9:56 Speaker 03 It's actually both. So if you wind back to the heyday of the Barbary corsairs, that's really the first half of the 1600s. They're sending out their ships really quite far and wide. At one point in time, Barbary corsairs were mainly operating in the Mediterranean, so attacking coastlines of places like Spain, what's now Italy, France, Corsica, Sicily, Sardinia, these kinds of places.
10:21 Speaker 03 But in the early sixteen hundreds, they start using different kinds of ships, square rigged ships, it means they can get out into the Atlantic, for example. They even attacked the coastline of the British Isles, so England and Ireland both have places where the Barbary corsairs are coming ashore and abducting people. The most famous raid is sixteen thirty one, that's in Baltimore in southern Ireland. Over a hundred people are carried off by these Barbary corsairs, who even make it to Iceland and the Newfoundland fisheries as well. So they're really getting a long way from the North African coast. And you can go to parts of Europe today, you know, you might be on holiday, and see an abandoned tower.
11:02 Speaker 03 These towers are built all around Europe to guard against these Barbary corsairs.
11:07 Dan Snow? Yeah, those towers on the headlands, on the beach on which you're sipping your drink and swimming in the sea, those towers, chances are they used to look out for the Barbary corsairs.
11:15 Speaker 03 Exactly, remember that when you're sipping your drink down.
11:18 Dan Snow? Through the seventeenth century, hardly anywhere on the European coastline had been untouched by the corsairs of North Africa. One particularly brutal attack took place on the twentieth of June sixteen thirty one at Baltimore in West Cork, Ireland. The slavers took perhaps two hundred villagers for a life in the harems, the fields, or chained to the thwarts of the all-powered galleys of the Barbary coast. In England, the pirates even seized Lundie Island in the Bristol Channel and used it as a base for slaving. In July sixteen twenty seven, pirates raided northern Iceland. The raids continued into the eighteenth century, and European governments struggled to respond.
11:57 Speaker 03 The thing is, Europeans are never in a position to club together to stamp out this Barbary menace, as it's called. Between the late sixteen hundreds and the end of the Napoleonic wars, all the great naval powers are busy fighting each other, making alliances. There's not this concerted effort to stamp them out, and there's no unity to do that. And then in earlier periods, in the first half of the sixteen hundreds, the heyday of the Barbary pirates. They don't have strong enough navies. The British, they're also indulgent of the Barbary corsairs because particularly during periods of conflict, the Barbary states helped provide food and other supplies to the British garrisons at places like Gibraltar, the Ionian Islands.
12:41 Speaker 03 So they can be quite useful to the British. And by this time, the British have signed treaties with them, so their shipping is protected.
12:49 Dan Snow? Some countries sent representatives to negotiate and buy back as many slaves as they could, but this was no long-term solution. It was a drop in the ocean, considering how many were in captivity. Only three of the enslaved people captured at Baltimore, for example, made it back to Ireland after being ransomed. Historians struggle to pin down the number, but it's believed there are around one and a quarter million Christians enslaved and taken to the North African coast from the early 16th century to the late 18th. What happens at the end of the Napoleonic War? Britain's been involved in this giant generational struggle against France and the Allies, you know, huge coalition warfare. Does Britain have a bit of bandwidth at that point to turn its attention to these North African states?
13:33 Speaker 03 What happens at the end of the Napoleonic Wars is that firstly, Europe's a bit more united, having gone through this huge upheaval. The navy's more powerful and not fighting each other. Also, the way slavery is viewed is changing as well. And this is one of the reasons the British are kind of forced to get involved and bombard Algiers. The British have recently passed laws to stamp out the transatlantic slave trade. And there are people in Europe who are saying, well, it's hypocrisy of the British to start trying to stamp out this trade, you know, enslaved Africans going across the Atlantic. And you're not doing anything about these enslaved Christians much closer to home on the North African coast.
14:15 Dan Snow? So the British policymakers are being lobbied, going, well, do you care more about West Africans than you do about Southern Italians and people from Southern Spain?
14:24 Speaker 03 Yes, there are definitely these comparisons being made. As I said, the British are moving, having been one of the world's leading slave traders, the British are moving to this 19th century period of abolition and being very proud of trying to stamp out the transatlantic slave trade. But as you say, there's this slave trading going on much closer to home.
14:45 Dan Snow? The trans-Mediterranean slave trade.
14:47 Speaker 03 Exactly.
14:48 Dan Snow? And now you're appeased, these are sort of allies, or at least certainly not enemies anymore.
14:53 Speaker 03 Well, there are always, between great powers, there's always lots of rivalry. But of course, the end of the Napoleonic Wars sees a long period of European peace, which does enable naval powers like Britain and the Netherlands and France to act in a different way to before.
15:09 Dan Snow? Is there a sense that the Brits are sort of trying to police the world's oceans?
15:13 Speaker 03 There's certainly a feeling in the Royal Navy and in wider Europe about needing to do something about the Barbary States and particularly the Barbary Corps there. Nelson, for example, who's long dead by now, but when he was at sea, writes a letter saying something like, "My blood boils that I cannot chastise these pirates."
15:32 Dan Snow? You're listening to Dan Snow's History. Don't go anywhere, there's more to come.
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19:00 Dan Snow? In early 1816, the British decided that this centuries-long conflict over disrupted trade and slavery must end. They sang "Real Britannia," "How Britons Never, Never, Never Shall Be Slaves." Well, it was time to match that rhetoric with action. Lord Exmouth was sent on a diplomatic mission to the Barbary States to negotiate an end to Christian slavery. He successfully secured treaties with Tunis and Tripoli, which agreed to stop taking captives, but he found a less-than-cooperative delegation when he got to Algiers.
19:33 Speaker 03 One tactic they use the day the ruler of Algiers is, "I have to go and ask the Sultan." Algiers is an Ottoman regency, supposed to be under control of the Sultan in Istanbul, or Constantinople, as it was often called. Saying, "I have to go and ask him," is a great delaying tactic. So the Algerians are stalling. During these rather fraught negotiations, Omar orders his men to arrest British people at Algiers. This includes these fishermen, who aren't actually British, but they are under the protection nominally of the British. They resist, and about 200 of them are massacred. And then there's this real feeling in Europe, "Well, why aren't the British doing something?"
20:18 Dan Snow? There is outrage in Britain. Exmouth is ordered to return to Algiers this time with a fleet, and compel the day to "free all Christian saves unconditionally, to abolish Christian slavery permanently, and pay indemnities for the murdered fishermen." It's an ultimatum delivered by the awesome expression of power that is the Royal Navy. He gathered a squadron of five big battleships. That's a floating artillery train of over four hundred cannon, far more than Napoleon had at the Battle of Waterloo, for example. He also had five smaller frigates, and four bomb ships which carried huge mortars which could fire big explosive shells through a high-trajectory arc, which means they land on top of undefended enemy positions. The venerable HMS Queen Charlotte,
21:03 Dan Snow? with its hundred guns, is his flagship. It wasn't a massive force, but Exmouth was confident it was enough. In fact, any more big ships he believed might get in each other's ways. He had recce'd the defences of Algiers. His expert eye had taken in every gun position. He'd done the maths. The angles of fire, weight of shot, time to reload, ranges. He was certain he could suppress the shore batteries before they did too much damage to his ships. When the British arrive in Gibraltar just before the planned attack, a squadron of five Dutch frigates, led by Vice Admiral Theodorus Frederick van Kapelen, offered to join the expedition. Exmouth agreed to have them along, and he gave them a peripheral role. Admirals were diplomats as well as warriors,
21:48 Dan Snow? and he knew the legitimising value, I think, of making this a coalition effort. They arrived in Algiers. And once again, the Algerines delayed. The British and Dutch fleet made their preparations to attack. The time passed with no satisfactory response. Exmouth ordered his ships to close with the port defences. Queen Charlotte anchored fifty yards from the main Algerian batteries on the maul, the man-made protective spit.
22:16 Dan Snow? Queen Charlotte opened fire. The entire fleet joins her. Gun crews trained to a high pitch by years of war went through their actions mechanically. They hauled the thick cables to bring the cannon in board. They swabbed and wormed the gun to put out the embers and get rid of any debris from the last round. In goes the gunpowder and the cannonball. In goes the wadding, ram it home, haul again to wheel the gun back out. The gun captain looks along the barrel, some instructions. The crew nudge the cannon to port or starboard. The wedges beneath the casque will attack to lower the elevation. Then, stand back, pull the cord. The flintlock snaps down, a spark. A millisecond later, a roar. Smoke, fire. Guns to the right and left doing the same, above and below.
23:01 Dan Snow? Cannonballs smashing into stone ramparts, splinters flying, ricocheting balls skittling groups of defenders. The survivors start to melt into the city, keener on their lives than their duty to the day. According to Exmouth's log, he wrote, "The fire from their batteries was very spirited, but our superiority of gunnery soon told." At first, those Algerian batteries returned fire, and they did cause damage to several ships. Three of the British ships in particular took intense fire and suffered casualties. But over the next three hours, the British systematically silenced the Algerian guns. If you visit the Pirates exhibit in the Maritime Museum in Greenwich, you can actually see the most incredible painting.
23:46 Dan Snow? It depicts the height of the bombardment of Algiers by George Chambers, painted in roughly 1836, and it gives you a really true sense, I think, of what the harbour would have been like during that afternoon of appalling fire and flame.
23:58 Speaker 03 It's a huge painting. It's nearly three metres wide, really impressive, really worth seeing in the flesh, as it were. And what you can see, it's as if you're almost on the waterline, looking at these British ships going into action against the Algerines. There are several of these huge warships visible, that includes HMS Impregnable, coming in from the right of the frame. Got a beautiful carved figurehead, you can see just on the bow or the front of the ship. We've got HMS Minden firing a starboard guns, that's the guns on the right side of the ship, if you're looking down towards the front or the bow.
24:37 Dan Snow? Unsurprisingly, it's only just over 10 years after Trafalgar, the ships look like very similar to the big battleships like HMS Victory that people will be familiar with from images of Trafalgar.
24:47 Speaker 03 Certainly, you've got these multi-deck warships, crowded with men, lots of guns on show, ready to be used. Very importantly, we've also got HMS Queen Charlotte, that's really in the thick of it, bombarding the fortifications of Algiers. In fact, interestingly, you can't see much of Algiers or the fortifications. If you look in the background of the painting, you can see the city rising on the high ground behind, but really the ships are the centre of attention here, and a lot of the fortifications they're attacking are obscured by fire and smoke of battle. It's quite a dramatic painting, it really puts you in the action, it does convey some of the horrors of naval warfare as well.
25:31 Speaker 03 As well as these large ships crowded with men, you've got lots of smaller boats in the water, and I think one of the most telling parts of the painting is you can see Algerine shot kicking up the spray as it hits the water, you know, you really don't want to be hit by this. What you can't see but would have been happening at the time are Algerine boats coming out to attack these larger Royal Navy vessels. Also visible, of course, the Dutch, we shouldn't forget the Dutch, you can see a Dutch vessel, I think that's Melampus in the background, flying the Dutch red, white and blue flag. The bombardment takes about 10 hours, it's 10 hours roughly of the British and Dutch firing at these coastal fortifications.
26:14 Speaker 03 The plan is not to attack the town itself, but to attack these forts along the shore, which are crowded with Algerine gunners. The gunners, of course, are firing back, trying to sink these vessels. They're also sending out their own smaller boats to attack them, and the British are firing both at the water and at the shore. There's a huge amount of shot fired in both directions all day.
26:40 Dan Snow? Bombardment lasts until midnight. Much of the city burns. Fire consumes the arsenal and nearly all the shipping in the harbour. The morning light the following day reveals the full extent of the damage.
26:53 Speaker 03 The Algerian fleet is destroyed and the shore fortifications are severely damaged. Another effect is that the city has been damaged too, by fire, by shot. The American consulate, who's of course observing this, he writes, "Every part of the town appears to have suffered from shot and shells." There's really quite a scene of devastation after this bombardment.
27:15 Dan Snow? Casualties on the British and Dutch side have been estimated about 900, not insignificant. But on the Algerian side, perhaps up to 5,000 military and civilians. A huge loss of life and limb. Another eyewitness recalled, "The construction of the mole could not be discerned. Neither could the positions where the batteries had been sighted. No more than four or five guns that were still mounted were visible. The bay was filled with the smoking hulks of the remains of the Algerian navy and by many floating bodies." Exmouth wrote a letter to the day warning that if he didn't accept the demands, he would continue the action, despite knowing full well he didn't have the ammunition to do so. Luckily for Exmouth, the day accepts the terms.
28:01 Dan Snow? And a treaty is signed, freeing thousands of slaves and recompensing much ransom money.
28:07 Speaker 03 For now, Omar capitulates, promises to stop slaving. Doesn't end very well for him. He's assassinated sometime later. For now, his rule is safe, but in capitulating to the British and having fought against the Americans the previous year, politically, he's really, really battered.
28:25 Dan Snow? And so he'll release existing Christian slaves and promises not to take any more. Though slavery in the region doesn't completely end with this action, despite British naval efforts, the day does rebuild Algiers, but instead of Christian slaves, he uses Jewish forced labour. Is there a change in the balance of power in the Mediterranean? Do those Barbary states cease their cursory?
28:49 Speaker 03 There is less slaving going on, but it's not immediate. There are bouts of raiding that go on afterwards.
28:55 Dan Snow? What about the Royal Navy? Presumably, if we look at the 19th century, we like to sort of think of it as a global policeman, gunboat diplomacy, opening up ports for trade. This presumably helps to cement that tradition.
29:08 Speaker 03 Yes, well, the Barbary corsairs really are very much of an older period. They're a bygone era by this point. They're from a time when Muslim states have much stronger seafaring presence, much more power in the Mediterranean, as opposed to the 19th century, when the Mediterranean is very much in the control of Europeans. Free trade is becoming more important. And this era of taking captives, of ransoming them back, that's not possible anymore.
29:38 Dan Snow? So this is a reflection of that, the growing sophistication and potency of these European navies, particularly the British Navy, compared to those outside Europe. Whereas in the 1600s, they were sort of level pegging. If anything, perhaps disadvantaged by the early 1800s and beyond, partly through the Industrial Revolution, firepower. The Royal Navy is pretty difficult to beat. In the years that followed the bombardment, the newly rebuilt city of Algiers still tried to pursue corsairing, but those days would be short-lived. A new future lay on the horizon for Algiers as a French colony. The two nations had long been at odds. They disagreed over unpaid debts, grain shipments made during Napoleonic wars that France had never settled.
30:22 Dan Snow? But in 1827, it really came to a head. There was a tense exchange in the Days' Palace. Hussein Day, the day of Algiers, struck the French consul across the face with a fly whisk. It was a symbolic insult, but the French seized on it as justification for war and invasion. Three years later, on the 14th of June, 1830, a massive French force, 37,000 soldiers, landed just west of Algiers. They advanced quickly. They defeated local resistance in a series of sharp skirmishes. On the July 5th, the day surrendered. The French agreed to go into exile with his family and much of his portable wealth. The fall of Algiers marked not just the end of the regime.
31:05 Dan Snow? It was the end of a centuries-old form of government that sustained the Barbary Corsairs. France moved to dismantle that corsair system. The fleets were disbanded, arsenals were destroyed or repurposed, privateering licenses were revoked, slave markets were shut down, European captives held in Algiers were freed. It was a total structural reordering. The administrative and military machinery that enabled piracy was dismantled, and France didn't stop there. The invasion had been framed as a limited punitive mission, we've all heard that before. It quickly transformed into a full-sail colonisation, not just Algiers but great swathes of north-west Africa.
31:48 Dan Snow? Over the following decades, France expanded inland, waged prolonged wars against resistance, and turned the whole of what is now Algeria into a settler colony. The era of the Barbary Corsairs was well and truly over.
32:10 Dan Snow? Thank you so much to Aaron Jaffer in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. I hope the episode inspires you to book your tickets to the Pirates exhibition to learn more about the bombardment of Algiers and the Barbary Corsairs. You can go and see that magnificent painting in particular. In our next and final episode, we'll be looking at the end of the golden age of piracy in the Caribbean and Europe. The demise of those famous names who terrorised the sea for decades. By the 1730s, the noose was tightening. This was the era of the pirate hunts. Make sure to follow in your podcast player, you'll get the episode of Pirate Hunts delivered fresh to you, and you can discover how the world's most notorious pirates met their end. Not by cannon fire, but with courts in colonies, as empires took ever greater hold of the
32:55 Dan Snow? region. See you for that next Monday, folks. See you next time.
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34:02 Speaker 04 Outdated technology isn't going to improve a disconnected healthcare system. Next. So what will? At Optum, we wake up every day and work for better. We call it healthy optimism. It's how we use insights and technology to help providers focus less on paperwork and more on patients. Will we fix it all overnight? No, but we'll wake up trying, again and again, until healthcare works as one for everyone. That's healthy optimism. Learn more at optum.com.
34:35 Dan Snow? Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.
Previous Boudicca: Myths vs Reality Next Christopher Wren Page updated November 1, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
