Chapter Eleven

Pirates of the Mediterranean

Botany can be a dangerous profession for a man determined to travel in pursuit of his passion. We next hear of Tradescant sailing into the Mediterranean with the British fleet to crush the Barbary pirates of Algiers – another dismal political failure redeemed by the treasures Tradescant brought back from his Mediterranean foray. Among them was the ‘Argier Apricocke’, its yellow fruit smaller than any other ‘but as sweete and delicate as any of them’, according to John Parkinson, who tells us that ‘this with many other sorts John Tradescante brought with him returning from the Argier voyage, whither hee went voluntary with the Fleete, that went against the Pyrates in the yeare 1620.’1

The pirates of the North African coast were a mixed crew of many nationalities who threatened Europe’s fragile peace and disrupted its favourite occupation: the business of trade and making money. If it seems odd that Tradescant should attach himself to a military expedition – rather like a modern-day plant hunter hitching a ride to Iraq – the public and private spheres were then not so carefully divided and casual volunteering was nothing out of the ordinary. As a young man, even gentlemanly John Evelyn had rushed across the Channel to join the Dutch in their siege of Gennep, arriving when the battle was already won. After ten days of baking daytime heat and nightly river mists, he declared himself ‘pretty well satisfied’ with the confusion of armies, and left.2 Tradescant at least saw action with the fleet, as he was clearly listed with other ‘gentleman volunteers’ on the pinnace Mercury, serving under Captain Phineas Pett.³

In early Tudor times, English trade had flourished in the Mediterranean, even to its eastern shores, known as the Levant.⁴ As Turkish maritime power increased, trade faltered and ceased completely from 1550 to the early 1570s. But after Spain and other Catholic forces destroyed the Turkish fleet at the battle of Lepanto in 1571, English ships ventured back into the Mediterranean; and as Anglo-Spanish relations drifted towards war, ties between England and the Ottoman empire grew closer. Queen Elizabeth gave a charter and monopoly privileges to a new joint-stock company, the Levant Company, and sent an ambassador to Constantinople, paid for by the ‘Turkey merchants’ who became synonymous with luxury and wealth, founded on their rich trade in carpets, cloths, silks, oils, sweet wines, currants and Eastern spices.

Like many diplomats posted abroad, the English ambassador would play a key role in bringing plants back into England. When London herbalist and barber-surgeon John Gerard was gardening for Queen Elizabeth’s Lord Treasurer, Lord Burghley, he described the route taken by the red lily of Constantinople from the wilds of Turkey into his own garden at Holborn:

This plant groweth wilde in the fieldes and mountaines, many daies journeis beyonde Constantinople, whither it is brought by the poore pesants to be solde, for the decking up of gardens. From thence it was sent among other bulbs of rare and daintie flowers, by master Harbran ambassador there, unto my honorable good Lord and master, the Lord Treasurer of England, who bestowed them upon me for my garden.⁵

Plants were also flowing courtesy of plant-loving London merchants such as Nicholas Lete of the Levant Company and John de Franqueville. Parkinson mentions both of them in connection with the double yellow rose from Turkey, ‘which first was procured to be brought into England, by Master Nicholas Lete, a worthy Merchant of London, and a great lover of flowers, from Constantinople, which (as wee heare) was first brought thither from Syria’. But Lete’s yellow rose quickly died, as did all those he gave to others, and ‘afterwards it was sent to Master John de Franqueville, a Merchant also of London, and a great lover of all rare plants, as well as flowers, from which is sprung the greatest store, that is now flourishing in this Kingdome.’6 The Jerusalem artichoke almost certainly came to England via John de Franqueville’s garden; botanist John Goodyer describes receiving two small roots in 1617 from ‘Master Franquevill of London, no bigger than hens egges: the one I planted, and the other I gave to a friend, mine bought mee a pecke of rootes’. The account appeared in Thomas Johnson’s revised edition of John Gerard’s Herball accompanied by a stern warning that whether the roots were boiled, stewed or baked in pies, they ‘cause a filthie loathsome stinking winde within the bodie, thereby causing the belly to bee pained and tormented, and are a meat more fit for swine, than men’.⁷

Both Lete and de Franqueville were well known to John Gerard himself, who mentioned them with love and gratitude in his own Herball of 1597. It was Lete who sent Gerard a yellow variety of clove gillyflower from Poland ‘which before that time was never seene nor heard of in these countries’.⁸ Lete’s Syrian factor in Aleppo also sent his master three pounds of cotton seeds, although Gerard could only entrust their success to the Lord. When he himself planted some cotton seeds, they grew ‘very frankly’ at first but then perished ‘by reason of the colde frostes that overtooke [them] in the time of flowring’.⁹

Keen to obtain Mediterranean plants directly, Gerard despatched one of his assistants, William Marshall, as a ship’s surgeon aboard the Hercules, to scout for new varieties. Marshall brought back seeds of the spreading plane tree which he found ‘growing in Lepantae, hard by the sea side, at the entrance into the towne, a port of Morea [the Peloponnese], being a part of Greece, and from thence brought one of those rough buttons, being the fruite thereof’. Gerard rightly warned against its choking dust (pollen). Among its varied uses, he suggested that the fruit of the plane tree drunk with wine ‘helpeth the bitings of mad dogs and serpents, and mixed with hogs grease, it maketh a good ointment against burning and scalding’.¹⁰

The prickly Indian fig tree, a Mediterranean novelty for British gardeners.

Another Mediterranean plant brought back by Marshall for Gerard was the Prickly Indian fig tree or Ficus indica, a ‘strange and admirable plant’, which Gerard described as being a ‘multiplication of leaves’ covered in whitish prickles, producing figlike fruit ‘stuffed full of a red pulpe and juice, staining the hands of them that touch it, as do the Mulberies, with a bloudy or sanguine colour’. As well as growing in the East and West Indies and Virginia, said Gerard, ‘It groweth also at Saint Crux and other places of Barbarie, & also in an Iland of the Mediterranean sea called Zante,’ about a day and a night’s sailing with a ‘meane winde’ from the port of Petrasse [Pátrai] in Morea, ‘where my servant William Marshall before remembred, did see not onely great store of those trees made of leaves, but also divers other rounde bodied plants, of a woody substance’. Marshall obligingly brought many of them home ‘in tubs of earth, very fresh and greene for my garden, where they flourished at the impression heerof’. Medically, however, Gerard had no idea what to do with the plant, although he prudently included a report from those who had eaten liberally of the fruits ‘that it hath changed their urine to the colour of bloud, who at the sight thereof have stoode in great doubt of their life’.11

Hostilities between England and Spain checked the direct introduction of Spanish plants into England for a time, but then the accession of James I to the English throne increased the likelihood of a lasting peace and plant hunters once again crossed into Spanish territory. John Parkinson supported Dutch botanist Wilhelm Boel on a plant-hunting trip through the western Mediterranean in 1607 and 1608. Boel brought back more than two hundred different sorts of seeds, ‘besides divers other rare plants, dried and laid betweene papers, whereof the seeds were not ripe’. Parkinson planted all his seeds, ‘and by sowing them saw the faces of a great many excellent plants’. But his joy was short-lived, as ‘many of them came not to maturitie with me, and most of the other whereof I gathered ripe seed one yeare, by unkindly yeares that fell afterwards, have perished likewise’.¹²

While Parkinson may have lacked the skills and the technology to overwinter Boel’s tender importations, he was still able to boast of the many Spanish plants that flourished in his London garden at Long Acre, like Spanish broom and the great double yellow Spanish bastard daffodil, which he proudly called ‘Parkinsons Daffodill’, for ‘I thinke none ever had this kinde before my selfe, nor did I my selfe ever see it before the year 1618, for it is of mine own raising and flowring in my Garden.’¹³ Among the twenty-one varieties of auricula he was able to describe from first-hand experience was one he called the Spaniard’s blush, ‘being of a duskie blush colour, resembling the blush of a Spaniard, whose tawney skinne cannot declare so pure a blush as the English can’.¹⁴

Plant hunters may have benefited from the lull in hostilities between European powers, but merchant vessels at sea were under increasing threat from pirates, as privateers of all nations – deprived of the opportunity to attack ‘enemy’ ships – threw in their lot with the outright pirates operating out of the Barbary ports of North Africa: Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli and Moroccan Salé.¹⁵ Although nominally owing allegiance to the Turkish sultan, these North African regencies existed as virtual pirate states, their numbers swelled by Moors thrown out of Catholic Spain who nursed their own grievances against Christendom. It was an explosive mix, especially as the pirates were lumped together as ‘Turks’ and therefore Moslems, even though they included a number of renegade Christians, captives-turned-pirates and simple freebooters attracted by the rich pickings and open markets of the Barbary coast. Among them were many English who – as German traveller Paul Hentzner remarked – made ‘good sailors and better pirates, cunning, treacherous, and thievish’.16

One man in particular hated piracy in any form: King James I of England. He equated pirates with the bullies who had blighted his Scottish childhood, tugging and pulling at his strings before he could stand up for himself. Mention of piracy would send him into a rage and he was proud of hanging English pirates – as many as nineteen in a row dangled from Wapping Pier, late in December 1608.¹⁷ The Barbary pirates offered the additional provocation of religion, and James had already expressed his hatred of the Turk in an epic poem celebrating the Christian naval victory at Lepanto.¹⁸ (One Spanish participant in the battle was Miguel de Cervantes, creator of Don Quixote, who was later carried off as a slave to Algiers and endured five years of captivity before he was ransomed by his impoverished family.)

By the second decade of James’s reign, the problem of piracy was growing more serious. Not just ships were at risk: whole coastal towns panicked at the sudden appearance of pirate fleets. Instead of hanging pirates, James tried a different approach, offering pardons to woo privateers away from piracy. One who responded was the man who had visited Tradescant at Canterbury to talk about melons, Sir Henry Mainwaring. After he had turned against piracy, Mainwaring wrote a short discourse on his former calling which he presented to the king as a thank-you for his own pardon, signing the dedication ‘Your Majesty’s new Creature’.¹⁹ Widely circulated among leading figures of the day, it called for the suppression of pirates on the Barbary coast and provided much useful information on pirate habits and fortifications. From it we learn, for instance, that the inner harbour of Algiers was protected by a mole and ‘great store of singular good Ordnance’ commanding the whole road²⁰ or anchorage, ‘which is very dangerous if the wind come Northerly’. Mainwaring may also have inspired the May date for the British raid on Algiers, remarking that ‘Generally not any Pirates do stir in the Straits from the beginning or middest of May till towards the last of September.’21

Mainwaring was not Tradescant’s only link to the Algiers expedition, however. His employer, Edward, Lord Wotton, was one of a fourteen-man commission asked in 1617 to advise the king on how to tackle the Barbary pirates. Another member was the Lord Keeper, Sir Francis Bacon; and among the many merchant representatives brought into its deliberations was plant-loving Nicholas Lete of the Levant Company. Tradescant’s old friend and Virginian co-investor, Samuel Argall, captained one of the merchant ships sent into the Mediterranean, and belonged to the expedition’s inner war cabinet.²² And a prime mover behind the whole expedition was the king’s favourite and Tradescant’s next employer: George Villiers, still only a marquess (his dukedom came after his Spanish escapade of 1623), who took command of the navy as Lord High Admiral in 1619, replacing the ‘corrupt and supine’ Earl of Nottingham.²³

In his determination to act against the Barbary pirates, James was keen to bring other powers into the action – Spain and the United Provinces especially, whose uneasy truce was still holding but whose relations were driven by suspicion. Not surprisingly, negotiations dragged on interminably, and in the end the English fleet went ahead alone with little more than separate expressions of goodwill and assurances of cooperation from the other powers.

The man appointed in July 1620 to lead the fleet against Algiers was Sir Robert Mansell, whose long career in the navy spanned a time of notorious corruption. Granted the office of Treasurer of the Navy in 1604, he made a fortune when he finally sold it on being appointed Vice Admiral of England in 1618. The action at Algiers certainly did not go well for him and he afterwards turned away from the navy to the manufacture of glass, for which he had bought the monopoly. ‘To judge from his performance on this occasion,’ wrote historian Christopher Lloyd, he ‘must be regarded as one of the most inept admirals in history.’ To be fair, however, Mansell was operating under hopelessly conflicting instructions: to root out the Algerine pirates without endangering His Majesty’s ships, and to redeem Christian slaves without attacking the city of Algiers itself, for fear of offending potential allies in any future conflict with England’s then ally, Spain. Not surprisingly, Mansell spent much of his time aimlessly cruising about, ‘awaiting clarification of such impossible instructions’.24

The fleet of six royal warships and twelve smaller merchant ships set off from Plymouth Sound on 12 October 1620 on a voyage that would last a full year.²⁵ As many as a quarter of the sailors may have been press-ganged into joining the force.²⁶ Tradescant was not yet among them; his ship, the Mercury, was still at Ratcliff shipyard along with its sister ship, the Spy. Both had been commissioned especially for the Algiers expedition from Master Shipwright Phineas Pett, who would also captain the Mercury to the Barbary coast.

Born into a virtual dynasty of shipbuilders and one of the best shipwrights of his day, Captain Pett had good royal connections²⁷ but also stood accused in two major fraud and naval mismanagement scandals. Although the king cleared him of the earlier charge, which involved selling for private gain the cargo of a ship fitted out entirely at the state’s expense, in collusion with his ‘very good friends’ Sir Robert Mansell and Sir John Trevor, it seems likely that the charges were well founded and that all three had set out to defraud the state.²⁸ Even on the commission to build two ships for the Algiers expedition, Pett had tried to boost his profits by unilaterally increasing their size ‘upon some hopes of thanks and reward’, as he said himself somewhat disingenuously in his autobiography. The trick did not work, however, and the merchants who were footing the bill refused to pay for the extra tonnage, leaving Pett with debts of £700 (or so he claimed); ‘notwithstanding I was forced to hasten the business and to keep extraordinary numbers of workmen at great rates, and in a place where the provision and materials were nightly stolen and embezzled to my utter undoing.’²⁹

While Pett was still finishing off his two ships at Ratcliff on the Thames, the main fleet made its way down the Iberian peninsula, reaching Gibraltar at the end of October, then sailing along the Spanish coast and stopping briefly at Malaga and Alicante to take on provisions. After ‘being fitted with Wine, Water, and other such necessaryes’, they sailed across to the North African coast, dropping anchor at Algiers on 27 November where they attempted to press their demands: the restitution of some 150 English ships captured during the previous five years, together with their cargoes and all the English subjects then living in the town, whether slaves, renegades, boys or freemen. Negotiations dragged on for ten days or so, with endless toings and froings and English complaints about the ‘perfidious and fickle’ Turks.30 In the end, all that the English gained for their pains were ‘some 40. poore captives, which [the Turks] pretended was all they had in the towne’, although even some of these may have been snatched back and locked up again. Acceding to Algerine demands that a consul should stay behind, Mansell had an ordinary seaman dressed up for the part who went ashore to see what he could do to help the English captives left behind.³¹ By 8 December, the fleet had set sail for Majorca.

Launched in the middle of October, Pett’s two pinnaces, the Mercury and the Spy, were ready to sail by Christmas, when Tradescant would have joined them with the rest of the crew. The pilot came on board, together with Sir John Ferne (captain of one of Mansell’s merchant ships) and Pett’s wife, who just that summer had given birth to their eleventh (and last) child.³² By New Year’s Day, the pilot and Pett’s wife had departed, but it was the middle of the month before the voyage proper began, and on 8 February 1621 they anchored in Malaga roads with the two supply ships they were accompanying into the Mediterranean. Pett’s autobiography passed over the next seven and a half months in silence, presumably because even he was unable to gloss over the combination of incompetence and sheer bad luck that dogged his ‘very good friend’ Mansell’s fleet on its return to Algiers.

The fleet proper meanwhile had been sailing between Majorca, Alicante and Malaga, taking on provisions and offloading their many sick men. They made occasional forays against pirate ships, invariably without success. On Christmas night, for instance, they chased eight or nine Turkish ships ‘and made divers shot at them, but by reason it was a darke night, and that they sayled better then our ships, they escaped us’, wrote sailor John Button in his journal.33 News from home was no better. When Mansell’s fleet anchored at Alicante on 31 December 1620, they were greeted by ‘great joyes, triumphs, and solemne processions in the cittie’. The inhabitants were celebrating the overthrow of the king and queen of Bohemia (King James’s daughter, Elizabeth Stuart, and her husband), driven from Bohemia by the Catholic forces of the Holy Roman Emperor after reigning for less than a year. It was a joy the English most definitely did not share.

At last the fleet met up with Pett’s long-awaited pinnaces; the Mercury with Tradescant on board had a burden of 240 tons, sixty-five men and ‘20 peeces of Brasse ordnance’, while the Spy was smaller at 160 tons, fifty-five men and eighteen brass guns.³⁴ Tradescant’s pinnace was heavier and better armed than several merchant ships in Mansell’s fleet and clearly part of the fighting force, rather than simply a supply ship as has sometimes been supposed.

As the attack on Algiers did not take place until mid-May, Tradescant had nearly three months to botanize in the Mediterranean while the Mercury tramped up and down with the rest of the fleet, following Mansell’s orders. On 9 March, the Mercury sailed for Tétouan on the Moroccan coast, then on to Malaga, where the fleet took on ‘some Beereage, Wine, some Wood and Water’. Most probably towards the end of April he visited the island of Formentera, which lies just to the south of Ibiza, as Thomas Johnson records seeing a small red-flowered trefoil he called the ‘Rough Starrie headed Trefoile’ in ‘the garden of Mr. Tradescant, who did first bring plants hereof from Fermentera a small Island in the Mediterranean Sea’.³⁵ According to one member of the expedition, the island was empty of people ‘but affoordeth wood in greate aboundance, very easey to be gotten, for yt groweth downe to the sea shore of which the whole ffleete tooke in great store. There is uppon this illand wild hogge and wild asses.’³⁶

Another Tradescant introduction from the Mediterranean was a wild pomegranate tree, which bore flowers ‘farre more beautiful then those of the tame or manured sort,’ in Parkinson’s view, ‘because they are double, and as large as a double Province Rose, or rather more double, of an excellent bright crimson colour, tending to a silken carnation’. The garden varieties were plentiful in Spain, Portugal, Italy and other warm countries, he said, while English gardeners could preserve them only with great care.37

Spring is a magnificent time in the Mediterranean and among the many plants Tradescant saw growing wild in great abundance was the ‘Corne Flagge’ or gladiolus. ‘They grow in France and Italy,’ John Parkinson tells us, and about Constantinople, ‘being (as is said) first sent from thence. John Tradescante assured mee, that hee saw many acres of ground in Barbary spread over with them.’³⁸ Tradescant also had time to step ashore on to Spanish soil as he later talked about Spanish onions to Parkinson, who described them as ‘both long and flat, very sweete, and eaten by many like an apple, but as John Tradescante saith, who hath beene in Spaine, that the Spaniards themselves doe not eate them so familiarly’, preferring our own white onions, ‘which they have there more plentifully then their sweete Onions’.³⁹ Among the plants listed in Tradescant’s first plant catalogue of 1634 were several other Mediterranean natives that he may have brought back from his Barbary adventure, among them four rock roses (Cistus), two Smilax, a turpentine tree (Pistacia terebinthus), and perhaps a sweet yellow restharrow (Ononis speciosa).⁴⁰

By the end of April, the fleet had reached Majorca, where they took on more supplies and made their final preparations for the forthcoming attack on Algiers. ‘The town of Maiorke is large and well fortified,’ wrote one of the participants in his journal, ‘the people industrious both men, women and children given to labour, loving and courteous to strangers: here we found all manner of victuals in plenty and at easie rates. Their chiefe Marchandise are Oyle, Wood, and Cheese, wherof the countrey affordeth plenty.’⁴¹

On 16 May, the fleet set sail for Algiers, ‘the wind Easterly a small breath’. Reaching Algiers five days later, they dropped anchor in strict formation. In the middle, closest to the mole, were the six warships and Argall’s Golden Phoenix. Their plan was to torch the pirate ships in the harbour by sending in two small ships captured from the Turks and packed with assorted ‘fireworkes’: dry wood, pitch, resin, tar, and brimstone. Grappling irons would hook the fireboats on to the Algerine ships, while three brigantines were fitted with ‘fire-bals, buckets of wildefire, and fire pikes to make their fireworkes fast unto the ships’. Seven further rescue boats were to take to the water, ‘well filled with armed men’, to protect the attackers. The weather was unkind, however. Three nights running, the attack was aborted when the wind dropped or changed. On the fourth night, after ‘a great showre of raine’ the wind veered round to the right direction and the deadly flotilla set off once more ‘but comming within lesse then Musket shot of the Moulds head it fell calme’. Even worse, the English lost the element of surprise ‘by reason of the brightnesse of the moone’. The attack went ahead all the same ‘but wanting winde to nourish and disperse the fire’, the ‘fireworks’ had no effect whatsoever. Six men were killed outright, another four or five would later die of their injuries, and thirteen were slightly hurt. No wonder Phineas Pett chose to remain silent about the fleet’s achievements.

Adding further insult, the next day four pirate vessels slipped into the harbour, having eluded the six English ships posted by the mole expressly to prevent this. Two nights later, the English drove ashore a Turkish vessel with 130 aboard, including twelve Christian captives. All drowned apart from a dozen Turks who made their way safely to land. This they learnt from two Genoese captives who swam out to the fleet, which now stood out to sea. The captives also told them that, had they waited, they could have captured more pirate ships that had slipped into port but now the Turks had strung a boom across the harbour, making further entry impossible.

It was altogether a humiliating failure. By early June the fleet had sailed away from the Barbary coast once more, heading for Spain. Four of the royal warships and five of the merchant ships returned home, leaving Mansell and his remaining fleet starved of victuals but still with orders to patrol the Mediterranean. International relations – especially between Catholics and Protestants – were deteriorating as the twelve-year truce between the United Provinces and Spain came to an end. The English fleet might be needed closer to home and so in September it was finally recalled, by which time Mansell had already turned home in advance of his orders.

Mansell had precious little to show for his year at sea, apart from a few rescued Christian captives and the occasional captured prize, including a ship from Leghorn (Livorno in Italy) carrying Jewish merchants and a ‘Flemming’ bound for trade with Algiers, ‘laden with Venice cloth, Legorne dishes, and divers other commodities: there was also found in her two or three thousand pound in ready money’.42 But the seas were no safer, as John Chamberlain indicated to Sir Dudley Carleton in a letter of October 1621. Travellers still needed God’s help to ‘escape the pirats who are strong and busie abroad . . . Yt seemes our fleet set out against them the last yeare did little goode, and went neither to Gravesend, nor Ostend, nor to no end.’⁴³

Captain Phineas Pett arrived back in England in late September, ‘and the 20th day at night, I came safe to my house at Chatham, finding my wife and children all in good health, for which mercy of God I gave God thanks, as did also my whole family’.⁴⁴ Tradescant may have come home earlier, transferring to one of the ships that left the Mediterranean in July. He would have fretted about getting his plants back safely and Wotton must have wanted his gardener back home. One imagines he returned to Canterbury with his head full of Moorish gardens like the rose-entwined crystal fountains of the Paradise Gardens east of Fez, seen by traveller John Leo⁴⁵, or the fruit gardens of Tagodast with their enormous quinces and vine-draped bowers, ‘the Grapes whereof being red, are for their bignesse called in the language of that people, Hennes egs’.⁴⁶ And when he looked on the pirate stronghold of Algiers, he might – like Leo – have seen its beauty as well as its fortifications. ‘In the Suburbs are many Gardens replenished with all kinds of fruit,’⁴⁷ wrote Leo, including, no doubt, the sweet and delicate apricot, which Tradescant so proudly brought home with him.

Although he does not yet seem to have been collecting rarities in any systematic sense, Tradescant may also have packed a few Mediterranean items into his bags such as shoes from Spain, North Africa and Turkey; a Spanish toothpick; some ‘Barbary Spurres pointed sharp like a Bodkin’; a Spanish tambourine; and various small Turkish objects, including a leather travelling bucket and a ‘Hand of Jet usually given to children, in Turky, to preserve them from Witchcraft’.⁴⁸ His collection of rarities would also include some historical items such as an iron manacle supposedly taken from the Spanish fleet of 1588 and sixteenth-century medals of Philip II of Spain. And among the benefactors to his collection appear the names of Sir John Trevor and ‘Mr Pette’, who must surely be the Mercury’s captain, Phineas Pett.