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Morat's two ships continued northwesterly
towards the Irish coast. He and probably
some of his crew still had bitter memories of
being badly mauled by a Spanish warship off
the Dutch coast. The English Channel and
North Sea certainly teemed with valuable merchant
ships but it also teemed with warships­
Charles I was interested in the royal navy and
was building it up once again.
The two Algerian warships made landfall
off the Old Head of Kinsale on the morning of
19 June and it was here they scooped up two
6shing boats working out of Dungarvan harbour.
These boats were too small even for
Morat and his crew to have any interest in
plundering and they took them purely for the
sake of the information they could yield.
The captain of one of these boats was a Roman Catholic
named Hackett. From now on, keep an eye on this man.
Everything he does looks suspicious.
Morat's shipswould have been like hundreds of
other vessels busy about the coastal waters of
northern Europe. So there was nothing to alarm
the two 6shing boats &om Dungarvan. By the
time Hackett and his men became apprehensive,
it would have been too late to escape. The
red felt caps and embroidered red waistcoats of
the Janissaries would have soon told them who
their captors were. They were ordered up into
Morat's ship, while their own 6shing boat under
a prize crew rowed in pursuit of the other
mackerel 6shermen.
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The Algerians' voyage had lasted for perhaps
two months and all the booty they had to
show for their trouble was a few mackerel, a
quantity of indifferent ship's stores and forty
captive seamen. This was small loot when it
had to be divided between two hundred and
eighty hungry men; particularly so when half
had to go to the owners of the man-o-war and
a further twenty to twenty-6ve percent to the
militia and customs officers of Algiers.
There would probably have been renegades
or even Christian slaves among Morat's
crew who would have known Kinsale. These
men may well have urged their captain to sail
into Kinsale harbour on the chance of 6nding
a rich ship or two lying at anchor. But when
Morat ordered John Hackett to pilot them in
to the landlocked anchorage, the Dungarvan
man told them that Kinsale would be too hot
for them. As an alternative he suggested
attacking Baltimore. One wonders why.
Dungarvan lay to the east of Kinsale. It
may therefore have seemed a good idea to
Hackett to persuade the Algerians to move
westerly. Baltimore was the 6rst harbour of
any size west of Kinsale. It also had a reputation
as a place ofrefuge for English pirates and
it might have seemed only just to Hackett to
encourage dog to eat dog. But probably the
major reason why John Hackett suggested
Baltimore was that it was a comparatively new
English Protestant plantation.
It strikes me-and this is only a hypothesis-that
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