My Ancestor was Captured by Barbary Pirates

Where it all started

A few months ago, while I was exploring my mother's ancestors, I discovered that one of them was a rating in the Royal Navy in 1760. This blog post is about what I discovered as I tried to find out a little more about him. As you will learn, this research took an unexpected turn.

This all began when I looked at the Marriage Register for Stoke Damerel (just outside Plymouth), Devon, for September 1760. There it recorded  the marriage of Nicholas Phillips, who was my ggggg grandfather, and Mary Davey. I remembered a vague family legend that an ancestor in this family line had had connections with the Royal Navy, but this was the first documentary evidence of this I had found: he was described as “of His Majesty’s Ship Portland”.

The Royal Navy famously kept outstanding records of people and events, so here was an opportunity to visit The National Archives in Kew to see what else there was recorded about Nicholas Phillips.

Each Royal Navy ship kept detailed Muster Lists of its crew. Every week or two every crew member assembled and their names were ticked off in a register. Each crew member had a unique muster number that they kept for as long as they were assigned to the ship, making it possible to trace a single person from when they joined to when they left, even if they had a common name. The Muster Lists for HMS Portland around this time are held at the National Archives in Kew in ADM 36/6339-6345. These Muster Lists are very informative but can be time consuming to consult; in this case a trip to the National Archives turned out to be an invaluable use of my time.

First contact

As it turned out, Nicholas Phillips appeared by name, with the same muster number, in several Muster Lists for HMS Portland, starting as an Ordinary Seaman on 17 Nov 1756, and ending as an Able Seaman in December 1760. The last Muster List even records why he left the ship - he deserted in Plymouth in December 1760, just months after his marriage in Stoke Damerel.

The Muster Lists, in addition to recording how much he was paid, and how much he was charged for tobacco (it turns out he was a smoker) and for venereal disease treatment (nothing in his case), also record where each crew member joined the ship. Usually this is the name of the ship they transferred from or the port where they joined. In Nicholas' case it read “Saffe taken in the Ann Galley” (some entries had this as “Saffee”), suggesting he may have come from a ship called the “Ann Galley” (or even “Ann, a galley”), but the meaning of “Saffee” was a puzzle. The same words also applied to six other crew members who were recorded in the Muster Lists next to Nicholas and who joined on the same date.

What is Saffe?

Where was HMS Portland when he first mustered on board? Fortunately each Royal Navy Muster List book periodically contains a Table of Musters where each complete Muster (of the names of every crew member) is summarised as a single line which includes the location where the muster was taken. The HMS Portland Muster List book has the answer: the ship was at “Saffe Road” - there is that word again. Looking at the locations of other musters around the same time shows that Saffe Road was not far from Gibraltar.

Why 17 Nov 1756?

What was so special about the date 17 Nov 1756 that seven new crew members came on board in Saffe Road that day? Maybe the Portland Captain’s Log would shed some light on exactly what the ship was doing. Again, these Captain's Logs are to be found in the National Archives in Kew.

According to this log, on 17 Nov 1756 HMS Portland was “At single anchor in Saffee Road”, approx 32 deg 23 min N (it's worth noting as an aside here that some of the longitude measurements in this log were badly off, as would be expected in 1756 before the invention of accurate maritime timepieces). Checking neighbouring log entries this location was just outside the modern Moroccan port of Safi (أسفي). In summary, HMS Portland had left Gibraltar Bay on 7 October 1756, travelling via “Sallee” (سلا, near modern day Rabat), arriving in Saffee Road on 7 Nov. And on the crucial day of 17 Nov 1756 the log reads:

“At 10 came on board 4 boats wth an Embassador from Morroco from the Prince of Saffee he brought the captures wth him viz 11 men and one woman that was taken in the Ann Galley the 8 of August last”.   

“Captures”? “Taken”? “8 of August last”? Curiouser and curiouser

Time to check back with the Muster Lists. Sure enough there were six other men listed together with Nicholas Phillips as new crew joining the ship on 17 Nov 1756:

• Wm Robinson,

• Thos Searle,

• Wm Parker,

• Nichs Phillips,

• David Maoys,

• Jno Blackwell,

• and Mich Welsh.

There were also four other names listed as supernumeraries (they were effectively passengers) who joined at the same time (their origin was also recorded as ”Saffee belonging to the Ann Galley”):

• Jams Crisp,

• Mattw Lions,

• Josph Popham,

• and William Popham.

That makes 11, the same number as was recorded in the captain's log. Interestingly, despite the words in the log, no woman appeared on the muster list, but this may simply be because she was a woman. All four of the named supernumeraries later left the ship in Gibraltar on 26 Nov 1756, but the seven new crew members didn’t, they were now crew.

8 August 1756

What on earth had happened here? In particular, what had taken place on 8 August 1756?

Here I had a stroke of luck. A general Google search for “Captured 8 August 1756” led me to an intriguing webpage titled “Elizabeth Marsh, Female Captive” [5] about a woman captured by Barbary pirates in 1756. This web page tells the story of a woman called Elizabeth Marsh who had been captured by Barbary pirates on 8 Aug 1756 along with the ship she was on together with its crew. The article named the ship as the Ann. This seemed to be describing the same event, so I just had to follow it up.

Searching for the name Elizabeth Marsh led me to a book: in 2007 the historian Linda Colley published a biography of Elizabeth Marsh, called "The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh" [6]. This well sourced book identifies many source documents at The National Archives in Kew and the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, as well as an autobiographical work by Elizabeth Marsh herself called “The Female Captive” [7]. This book records Elizabeth’s own perspective of being captured, held (and, by her own account, being treated much more kindly than the captured crew), and finally released, giving some evidence that could be compared with other perspectives, if any could be found. Fortunately Colley’s book quickly led to a host of evidence confirming these events were one and the same. 

What had happened

To cut a long story short, Elizabeth Marsh’s father was Milbourne Marsh, who had been promoted from a navy post in Menorca to a senior post at Gibraltar Dockyard at the start of the Seven Years' War between Britain and France. He had taken his family with him, where Elizabeth had rapidly tired of life in the Royal Navy dockyard and persuaded her father to secure her passage on a small merchant ship, the Anne Galley, bound for London. This ship had left Gibraltar in a convoy in late July 1756 and had rapidly become separated from the convoy in foul weather. The next ship they had met was a Barbary Corsair which rapidly overtook and captured them and took them to Morocco.

Once it was apparent that the ship his daughter was on had been captured, Milbourne lobbied the First Lord of the Admiralty to secure her release. Conveniently this event occurred at a time when the British government wanted to renormalise British relations with Morocco, leading to the despatch of HMS Portland in October 1756.

Further confirmation of events

The captain of HMS Portland in 1756 was Jervis Maplesden (who was later captured by the French at Saint Cast in 1758 during the Seven Years War). There are some copies of letters dating to 1756 between him and Sidi Mohammed, the Prince of Safi, in the National Archives [8] that confirm the negotiations that took place between Britain and Morocco over a few weeks during which the captives were clearly pawns in a strategic power game.

The risks to the passengers and crew ere very real. Earlier in 1756 the behaviour of the envoy sent by the British to separately negotiate a treaty with Morocco had insulted the Prince who was determined to use this as leverage. In particular they show that, although the captives came ashore in Sallee the Moroccans proposed to release them to a British Man of War in Safi; the alternative would be an overland trip back to Sallee in which case their safety could not be guaranteed (Sallee was a Barbary Corsair port and the letters imply that Sidi Mohammed was not entirely in control of the region).

On 1 Dec 1756, after the rescue was completed, Captain Maplesden sent a report of the events back to the Admiralty naming everybody who had been on the Ann Galley when it was captured [9]. In addition to those in the muster list above, he named three more:

• the Master Thomas Stevens,

• Boatswain John Hamstrong,

• and a passenger called Elizabeth Marsh.

Reading between the lines it appears that the Master and Boatswain were not released along with the others.

Meanwhile, back in England, the story of the capture of the Ann Galley was syndicated across newspapers. For example, The Leeds Intelligencer on 19 Oct 1756 published:

“Ships taken from the English. […] The Anne Galley, [captain] Crispe, from Barcelona, is taken and carried into Saloe”, confirming the name of the captain.

What might have happened?

What future could they have expected as captives, had they not been rescued? In short, their future would most likely have been bleak.

Elizabeth Marsh could have expected to end up in Sidi Mohammed’s harem. According to The Female Captive this is exactly what she had feared.

As for the male captives, they would have had a future of slavery ahead of them, but with a chance (if they were still alive at the time) of taking part in later exchanges of captives.

In other words, the fact that anybody got out was down to Elizabeth Marsh’s father influencing events by pulling strings. 

And what happened to Nicholas Phillips after he joined the crew of HMS Portland? It seems that being a crew member on a Royal Navy ship, harsh though the conditions would have been, suited him. Analysing the muster lists more completely reveals that, although HMS Portland had stayed at Plymouth or Portsmouth on four separate occasions between 1756 and 1760, giving him chances to desert it, he stayed with the ship. He finally deserted at the fifth opportunity, newly married and with a child on the way. He didn’t go far though, settling in Millbrook, just the other side of the Hamoaze from the dockyard.

Conclusion

This research, starting from a common enough parish register entry, has been quite a voyage of discovery, yielding up far more about this eighteenth century Royal Navy rating than I had any expectation of finding. Starting from a record of a parish marriage in 1760, we can now be certain that the Nicholas Phillips who married Mary Davey in Stoke Damerel had, just four years earlier, been captured by Barbary pirates, been held (and mistreated according to The Female Captive) in Morocco for four months, and then released onto HMS Portland along with Elizabeth Marsh and others.

These events changed the course of his life: he could only have married Mary Davey because his ship was in Plymouth Royal Naval dock at the same time that she was in Plymouth; and this had only happened because he had been captured by Barbary pirates, then rescued by a Royal Navy ship and 'pressed' into the crew; and he was only picked up by that ship because Elizabeth Marsh was also captured at the same time and her father pulled strings. 

So I am only here because of Elizabeth Marsh; without her, Nicholas Phillips would not have married Mary Davey and my gggg grandfather would not have been born.

Julian Luttrell

The Tree Sleuths, 2022. The Tree Sleuths website.

Sources: 

[1] Stoke Damerel, Marriage Register, 1760, Page 185, Entry 797, Plymouth and West Devon Record Office, 166/22

[2] HMS Portland, Muster List, 1756, The National Archives, ADM 36/6339 Folio 261

[3] HMS Portland, Muster List Table of Musters [3], 1756, The National Archives, ADM 36/6339 Folio 239 

[4] HMS Portland, Captain's Log [4], The National Archives, ADM 51/3941 

[5] https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Elizabeth-Marsh-Female-Captive-Barbary-Pirates/

[6] Colley, Linda, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh, Harper Collins, 2007, ISBN 9780007192199

[7] The Female Captive, a narrative of facts which happened in Barbary in the year 1756, written by herself. Published in two volumes in 1769. Digital images, British Library, General Reference Collection DRT Digital Store 1417.a.5

[8] Letters from Commanders-in-Chief, Mediterranean, The National Archives, ADM 1/383 Folios 505-520 

[9] Letters from Captains, The National Archives, ADM 1/2108/9