They launched their attack on the sleeping village before dawn. More than armed corsairs crept ashore and upon a signal, torched the thatched roofs of the houses and carried off the terrified inhabitants as they fled their burning beds. In minutes, they had taken more than souls, English settlers all. They herded them back to the ships and bore them away from the shores of Ireland to the slave markets of Algiers.
The raid on Baltimore, immortalized in verse by the poet Thomas Davis, was the worst-ever attack by Barbary corsairs on the British Isles. Very few of the known captives were ever heard of again three women at most, who were ransomed up to 14 years after their abduction. As for the rest, their fate was certain: they ended their days at the oar as galley slaves or as concubines in North African harems.
For his part John Hackett was arrested and hanged on a clifftop outside the village. It is certainly possible that the Sack of Baltimore was a random event, that for Murat Reis, Baltimore was merely a target of opportunity. By the summer of , the local Irish population had endured an English plantation settlement in Baltimore for more than 30 years. Algiers, in North Africa, was, at the time, the centre of Barbary piracy.
As the pirates grew bolder, they ventured beyond the Mediterranean, seizing ever faster European sailing vessels on the high seas and imprisoning their crews. The most successful of these corsairs was a renegade Dutchman named Jan Janszoon, who had adopted the moniker Murat Reis.
He commanded a fleet that could rival all but the largest navies. Reis set sail for Ireland in the spring of Over the course of his 1,mile journey, he had seized and burned a number of smaller vessels, imprisoning their crews. A Dungarvan man by the name of John Hackett was the captain of one such ship.
