Author’s Note

I remember as a child singing the “Marines’ Hymn” and being puzzled by “from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.” Montezuma I got, that being nearby Mexico, but what’s this Tripoli business? That’s North Africa!

Much later, I found that line referred to the Barbary Wars in the early nineteenth century. (The first was 1801-1805, the second in 1815.) The school history lesson was that the Barbary states of North Africa were pirates who captured American and European ships, held the crew members for ransom or sold them into slavery, and demanded tribute as protection money from nations that wanted their shipping to be left alone.

I do not find pirates romantic. They were greedy and sometimes murderous criminals who preyed on the vulnerable. Barbary pirates were the scourge of the Mediterranean from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and sailed as far as Iceland and even South America. The town of Baltimore in County Cork, Ireland, was famously sacked and virtually the whole population was captured and sold into slavery in 1631.

In the early nineteenth century, when Once a Scoundrel is set, many of the larger European nations found it easier to pay tribute to the Barbary states, particularly those countries that were busy fighting the continent-wide Napoleonic wars. The United States, on the far side of the Atlantic, preferred to stay neutral and maintain a healthy shipping trade with European countries.

This did not work out well for the U.S.; Britain was blockading France and didn’t want irresponsible colonials selling their goods in Europe. This was a primary cause of the War of 1812 between Britain and the United States.

Barbary pirates were another matter. It wasn’t just national pride that made the United States go to war, nor was it the chip-on-the-shoulder testiness of a fragile new country that felt it was being disrespected. The plain fact was that the demands for tribute were so insanely high that the country couldn’t come close to affording to buy the pirates off. Hence, the United States went to war.

An excellent and highly readable account of the Barbary Wars is in Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates, by Brian Kilmeade and Don Yaeger. I recommend it.

It may sound unlikely that a European ship was forced to carry men and a menagerie to Constantinople, but in fact the USS George Washington was compelled to do exactly that. Besides having to transport over two hundred extra men, greatly overloading the ship, Kilmeade and Yaeger said there were “4 horses, 25 cattle, and 150 sheep, in addition to 4 lions, 4 tigers, 4 antelopes, and 12 parrots.” And the ship had to orient toward Mecca for prayers. Gabriel and the Zephyr got off lightly!

Fantasies of harems and polygamy were wildly popular in the West and inspired lush paintings and lascivious writings, and those institutions did exist. But the Koran specifies that multiple wives must be treated with strict equality in economic, emotional, and sexual terms. Which would be both expensive and exhausting! In real life, the clear majority of Muslim marriages were (and are) monogamous. Hence, Malek’s devotion to his wife is as true and real as any romance—and I do love a good romance!