The Irish people are still singing in their famous song titled “The sack of Baltimore” in which there is a verse that says: “The Algerian is lord of Baltimore” meaning the Algerian have become a master over Baltimore.
I love history, and I do research in it… So I traced back the history of this verse
and this poem That is still sung as folklore in Ireland
♫ It was an early morning … in 1631♫
it inspired many famous poets and artists in their artistic and drama-related works. and I found that the story happened exactly 390 years ago … the events were in 1631 when the Algerian navy had full control over the Mediterranean sea with no competitors and it was the greatest force of the region in that time.
Ships from Europe and America had to pay -Algerian navy- tributes and taxes for each passage on this sea In that period, the brave sailor Mourad Rais Al Asghar after all shores of the Mediterranean sea from Greece, Italy, Spain and France had surrendered to him, decided to break the thorn of Britain that had started to show its muscle in the sea and presented its military navy as “unbreakable power” in the Pacific Ocean Therefore he -Mourad Rais- decided to spread his operations and invade Britain, Ireland and Iceland and indeed, he prepared for that with a group of Algerian sailors and he went ahead with just 2 big boats heading towards Ireland When Mourad-Rais crossed the Spanish and Portuguese shores towards the north, he got closer to the British islands and found a British warship on his way. He was able to force them to surrender and capture all its crew and took the ship with him towards Ireland. On the day of June 20th 1631, a bit after midnight, he arrived at a shore of an Irish town in the south named Baltimore. He and his crew got off their ships and started storming castles and fortresses. They captured hundreds of Irish and British. By the way, the British were new colonizer of Ireland, they weren’t native to the land. After sunrise, the Algerians had already completed their mission. They had tied more than 200 Irish and British. They put them on their ships and went back to Algeria with the British ship they had seized on their way to Ireland. They didn’t leave anyone behind except a few who fled to remote villages and 2 dead soldiers who resisted and didn’t want to surrender unfortunately. This operation led by Mourad-Rais Al Asghar embarrassed Britain a lot on both the political level and military level and because of this, the British consul in Algiers had to implore the Bey in Algiers to return the prisoners and not sell them as slaves but he wasn’t successful in this and they were sold. Two of them were able to flee and return to Ireland. This swift attack was a big shock to the Irish people and led them to write tragic poems to relate this story and it’s still embedded in their mind up to this day In the 18th century, an Irish man opened a pub in Baltimore and named it “the Algiers toast” and was changed later on to a hotel and named “The Algiers Inn” to perpetuate that event that according to them should not be forgotten A century after that event, other poets wrote poems and literature works about that raid -The sack of Baltimore- In recent years, the event came back to the surface through sad compositions played by the Irish -musicians- and I saw some of them on Youtube They built a statue of Mourad-Raid Al Asghar with his Algerian naval clothes. and they put it in the museum This story may seem odd and hidden away in history yet when you look into it, you can find a lot of literary works about the event called “the Sack of Baltimore” in the English language the story is very common and well known and I wanted to share it with you
I wish that would be an addition to your historical knowledge
