Barbary corsairs

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Danish slaves in Barbary


In the period that interests us here the Danish kingdom after the separation from Sweden in 1523 included Norway and considerable parts of Schleswig and Holstein, as well as a number of colonies, among them Iceland. Denmark was active in the triangular trade including slave transports from Africa to the West Indies, and one ironic case of captivity involved a Dane onboard a ship on its way to the West African coast with a view of picking up black slaves – in stead he became a slave himself on the Barbary coasts......

Danish slaves in Barbary – University of Copenhagen

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So it was with my research of Arab seafaring. It began innocently and cursorily. I thought it would be accomplished in a week or so. I just needed a handful of facts for a novel I was writing. I suppose the Australian sailor-writer Alan Villiers inspired me at first. He had written about Arab seafaring in The National Geographic in 1946, and that article, focused as it was on Omani seamanship, had stuck in my mind.


I’m a sailor myself, but not of Villiers’ stature. He was a master mariner and naval historian. I’m a coastal and riverine putterer. But I lived on a sailboat with my wife for 10 years and I served in the Navy aboard an aircraft carrier. So I felt somewhat qualified to undertake a little research.
No sooner were my studies underway than the novel fell to the wayside and I immersed myself in a frenzy of discovery. Western historians, as Villiers knew, had pretty well written the Arabs out of their seafaring annals, painting them as sand dwellers. But they were equally at home on the sea and they deserve better than they have gotten in the histories.

That is why I excitedly greeted news in The New York Times on November 27th of a planned maritime history museum on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, the oil-rich emirate. Such a museum has long been needed not only to correct misperceptions about Arab seafaring but to redress omissions.
For example, the celebrated Portuguese caravel, that Model T Ford of the 15th Century, evolved almost certainly from the Arab ship designs the Portuguese encountered off the coast of Africa. But the Arabs have not been credited with this. Similarly, the modern lateen rig used by almost all modern sailboats is of Arab origin.


And there is much more. The Portuguese are justly celebrated as merchant navigators, but it is almost never mentioned that these famous seamen lost a 15-year sea war with the Omanis for control of the Indian Ocean. Nor is it often mentioned that the sea routes to the East for which the Portuguese are credited had been opened and plied by Arabs centuries earlier, as Vasco da Gama discovered when he arrived on the east coast of Africa and announced to Arab mariners that he intended to find the sea ways to Calicat, Cathay and The Jopons. Why, have they been lost? replied the incredulous Arabs.


The passions that hijack us