Jack Ward (aka Jack Birdy)

[corsair91]

Jack Ward (aka Jack Birdy)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Ward

John Ward or Birdy (c. 1553 – 1622), also known as Jack Ward or later as Yusuf Raïs, was an English pirate around the turn of the 17th century who later became a Barbary Corsair operating out of Tunis during the early 17th century.

Generally considered the best-known English pirate then since Sir Francis Drake.

After the failed invasion of England by the Spanish Armada in 1588, Ward found work as a privateer, plundering Spanish ships with a license from Queen Elizabeth I of England.

When James I of England ended the war with Spain upon assuming the throne in 1603, many privateers refused to give up their livelihood and simply continued to plunder. Those who did were considered pirates because they no longer had valid licenses.

Around 1604, Ward was allegedly pressed into service on a ship sailing under the authority of the King (the Royal Navy had yet to become a formal institution).

Ward and his colleagues deserted and stole a small 25-ton barque from Portsmouth Harbour.

Ward and his men sailed for the Mediterranean.
Ward arranged with Uthman Dey to use Tunis as a base of operations.
He accepted Islam along with his entire crew, changed his name to Yusuf Reis with a nickname of Chakour or Chagour as he was always used an axe in his piracy, and married an Italian woman while he continued to send money to his English wife.

Ward continued raiding Mediterranean shipping, eventually commanding a whole fleet of corsairs, whose flagship was a Venetian sixty-gunner. After 1612 he ended his career in piracy, electing to teach younger corsairs gunnery and navigation. He profited greatly by his piracy, retiring to Tunis to live a life of opulent comfort until his death in 1622, at the age of 70, possibly from the plague.


It has been suggested that his nickname was "Sharkey" and was the origin of this nickname, now given to anyone in the Royal Navy with the surname "Ward".

In the 2010s, various Turkish newspapers and websites popularised a hypothesis put forth in the monthly Derin Tarih that John Ward could be the inspiration for the character Jack Sparrow from the film series Pirates of the Caribbean.

[corsair91]

Ward the Pirate
http://www.themodernreligion.com/ht/ward-the-pirate.html


Ward the Pirate
Abdal-Hakim Murad, January 2003

Were they pirates, or were they warriors for Islam? For centuries, historians have debated the significance of one of the most stirring episodes in the history of Britain’s Muslim minority. Men such as Captain John Ward of Kent astounded their compatriots by proudly adopting Islam to fight the Inquisition and the expansionist powers of Europe. Contemporaries called such men ‘corsairs’; they themselves considered themselves mujahidin. Some were among the most pious Muslims this country has yet produced. Others were famous drunkards and lechers.

Ward and his likes were described by the adventurer John Smith. Later to be Disneyfied thanks to his romance with Princess Pocahontas, Smith was one English traveller who saw these Muslims at first hand, having spent some years in the Ottoman army before sailing to New England. He wrote a book, the True Travels and Adventures, to describe the European Muslims who were fighting for the Crescent against the Cross. Leading the list were men of Holland and England, who, disgusted by religious wars in their own countries, and unpersuaded by Trinities and Vicarious Atonements, ‘took the Turbant of the Turke’. ‘Because they grew hateful to all Christian princes,’ Smith observed, ‘they retired to Barbary.’

Smith was firmly of the opinion that the pirating lifestyle was introduced to the Barbary States by these Europeans, ‘who first taught the Moors to be men of war.’ His compatriots were well aware of the names of the seaborne mujahidin, particularly Captain Danseker and Captain Ward, among the most skilled seamen in the annals of English history, who placed their gifts at the disposal of emirs and sultans, and whose swashbuckling exploits Smith was able to retell in hair-raising detail.

Until the arrival of these European adventurers, the coastal ports of North Africa had been unused to war. They had, however, found new prosperity as the home of Spanish Muslims expelled by King Phillip III in 1610, an event that was perhaps the greatest act of racial brutality seen in Europe prior to the Nazi Holocaust. Most Moors knew little of the sea, and still less of the infernal arts of gunpowder; but they welcomed Muslims from the Mediterranean lands, and from the seafaring nations of the North, who were willing to accept Islam in exchange for military service with the Spanish exiles. By the middle of the sixteenth century, English Muslims were at the forefront of this movement, ranging the seas to capture first Spanish, and then any Christian ship, enslaving the crew, and selling the cargo as spoils of war.

Horrified priests regularly emerged from the churches of Algiers, Tunis and Sale, to witness the regular conversion celebrations in the streets. They report that slaves who converted would accept Islam in a simple ceremony in a mosque; but free men and women would do so at the tomb of a local saint, to which they would be led in a great public procession, preceded by a military band. Riding a horse, and holding an arrow in his hand to symbolise commitment to the Jihad, a newly-circumcised Englishman would then learn the basics of the Qur’an, and apply himself to his new vocation. Only a minority took to the sea; others are known to have made a living as tailors, or butchers, or even as imams of mosques. To this day there is a building in the Moroccan town of Sale known as the ‘Englishman’s Mosque.’

Most of these individuals took the secret of their lives with them to the grave. Thanks to the Spanish Inquisition, however, historians have access to information about a good number of them. Those who returned to a seafaring life ran the risk of recapture and interrogation by the Inquisition’s priests, and it is from the Inquisition’s meticulously-kept records that we know the details of their conversion, and, often, their tragic fate.

One Inquisition court, in the year 1610, investigated no fewer than thirty-nine Britons. Twelve of them were from the ports of the West Country. Ten were Londoners; six were from Plymouth, and others originated in Middlesbrough, Lyme, and the Channel Islands. In 1631, the Inquisition in the Spanish city of Murcia tried one Alexander Harris, who as Reis Murad had become a prominent Muslim seafarer. He was convicted, forced to convert to Catholicism, and sentenced to seven years as a galley-slave. Another unfortunate Englishman was Francis Barnes, who admitted to the inquisitors that he had faithfully prayed and fasted ‘in the Mahometan manner’ while working as a ship’s pilot at Tunis, where he was captured by Spanish raiders. In 1626, Robin Locar of Plymouth, also known as Ibrahim, was captured by Tuscan galleys and convicted of practising Islam. Captain Jonas of Dartmouth, known as Mami al-Inglizi, was yet another victim of these dreaded Spanish raiders.

An interrogation by the Inquisition was meant to be terrifying. One survivor, the Plymouth Muslim Lewis Crew, described how the priests, after using various forms of torture, would ask the Muslim captive whether they would accept papal teaching on six issues. Firstly came the Trinity, as the main point at issue between Islam and Christianity. Second was the perpetual virginity of Mary. Third was the Immaculate Conception. Fourthly, questions would be asked about the doctrine of Purgatory. Fifthly, the accused would be required to demonstrate his orthodoxy on the doctrine of papal supremacy. Finally, the Sacraments of the Catholic Church would be the subject of a complex investigation, which no doubt confused the simple sailors who made up the majority of the Inquisition’s convicts. Like many others, Crew had steeled himself for a religious debate of the kind held in public between converts and Christians in Algiers; he found, however, that the Inquisition was interested only in enforcing orthodoxy, not in justifying it.

The Inquisition’s writ counted for nothing in Protestant England; but even here, those Muslim sailors who returned to their homes could face interrogation and martyrdom. Sir Walter Raleigh, commenting on the gravity of the problem, recorded that ‘Renegadoes, that turn Turke, are impaled’, and this seems to have been the usual punishment for such men. Three English martyrs are known in the year 1620, while in 1671, a Welshman was put to death by impalement after refusing to reconvert to Christianity. Archbishop Laud was so concerned by the Muslim presence that he instituted a miniature English version of the Inquisition. His ‘Form of Penance’, enforced in 1637, laid down strict rules to ensure the sincerity of reconversions to Christianity, including the use of penitential robes and white wands borrowed directly from Catholic practice.

Despite the best efforts of the inquisitors, the corsair cities continued to thrive. By the end of the sixteenth century, the number of Englishmen and other Europeans who had joined this adventure had become enormous. Diego de Haedo, a Benedictine priest, estimated that by 1600, half of the population of Algiers was made up of European converts and their descendents. Later, Voltaire was to remark on ‘the singular fact that there are so many Spanish, French and English renegades, whom one may find in all the cities of Morocco.’

Most of the corsairs were of humble origins. A few, however, were well-known in their own lands. One such was Sir Francis Verney (1584-1615), who ‘turned Turk in Tunneis’, and was later captured and served for two years as a galley slave as a punishment for his conversion.

But perhaps the two best-known English corsairs were the celebrated sea-dogs John Ward and Simon Danseker. A seventeenth-century ballad heard throughout the taverns of England sang that

All the world about has heard
Of Danseker and Captain Ward
And of their proud adventures every day.

Ward, in particular, rose in the public eye until he became the best-known English pirate since Sir Francis Drake. Born at Faversham, he spent his teenage years working the fisheries. Late in the reign of Queen Elizabeth he joined the Navy, where his rebellious temperament impelled him to the unofficial capture of a ship rumoured to be carrying the treasure of Catholic refugees. The ship turned out to be empty of treasure, but the enterprising Ward used her to capture a much larger French ship off the south coast of Ireland, and to vanish from the Navy for good.

It was in this ship, which he called the Little John to drive home his image as a kind of latter-day Robin Hood, that he sailed to Tunis, hoping to join the campaign against the Catholic nations of the Mediterranean. He found favour with Kara Osman, the commander of the local janissary garrison, and at some point joined Islam.

His maritime prowess soon put him, according to a French report of 1606, in command of over five hundred Muslim and Christian volunteers. Among these were Captain Samson, in charge of prizes, Richard Bishop of Yarmouth (Ward’s first lieutenant), and James Procter of Southampton, who served as his gunner. Perhaps his greatest seaborne achievement was the capture of the Venetian galleon Reinera e Soderina, displacing 1500 tons, whose treasure amounted to over two million ducats.

By the second decade of the seventeenth century, Ward was master of the central Mediterranean. Another ballad has him send the following message to James I:

Go tell the King of England, go tell him this from me,
If he reign king of all the land, I will reign king at sea.

Life in Tunis, as in the Muslim world generally, was more refined and comfortable than its equivalent in Europe, and despite several offers, Ward showed no sign of yearning for his home shores. He built a palace, described by William Lithgow, the Scottish raconteur who passed through Tunis in 1616, as ‘a fair palace beautified with rich marble and alabaster stones. With whom I found domestics, some fifteen circumcised English renegades, whose lives and countenances were both alike. Old Ward their master was placable and diverse times in my ten days staying there I dined and supped with him.’ Another visitor, Edward Coxere, reported that Ward ‘always had a Turkish habit on, he was to drink water and no wine, and wore little irons under his Turk’s shoes like horseshoes’.

When Ward died of the plague in 1622, England seemed to be in two minds about him. There were many who hailed him as the scourge of the Papist navies, or as a man of humble origins who rose to humble the rich and powerful. Others found it harder to accept him, because of his voluntary conversion to Islam, and his adoption of Turkish ways and values. He was ‘the great English pirate … it is said that he was the first that put the Turks in a way to turn pirates at sea like himself’. But he was not soon forgotten. Later generations of English Muslims, both at home and in North Africa, admired him as a superb mariner, fearless in battle, and a doughty warrior for the Crescent against those who expelled the Moriscos, and sought to impose their implacable and cruel customs on the free lands of the South, where church, mosque and synagogue coexisted for centuries, and where humble birth was no barrier to glory.

[corsair91]

Pirate John Ward: the real Captain Jack Sparrow


https://www.historyextra.com/period/elizabethan/pirate-john-ward-the-real-captain-jack-sparrow/


Was John Ward the real Captain Jack Sparrow?

John Ward was the inspiration for the character of Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean films. Ward’s nickname was ‘Sparrow’ and he was known for his flamboyant style – much like the Hollywood icon.



John Ward was outlandish and fearless, terrorising the Mediterranean with a complete absence of morals – little wonder the English pirate was an inspiration for Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean films. Giles Milton tells the story of perhaps the most familiar blackguard that you’ve never heard of


The cannon were pumping shot into the hull of the vessel, sending lethal splinters of shrapnel through the air. A fire had broken out below the main deck and the crew was attempting to douse the flames. The sea battle was as terrifying as it was dangerous, yet a lone attacker could be seen leading from the front. Captain John Ward was urging his men forwards as they tried to grapple and board the vessel.

The Reniera e Soderina was a huge Venetian carrack laden with silks, indigo and other rich merchandise. If Ward succeeded in capturing her, he would be rich beyond his wildest dreams – the crowning glory of a glittering piratical career. Yet it was a career that had begun with very little promise. None of Ward’s friends or contemporaries thought him particularly talented, and none predicted that he would become the richest and most outlandish pirate of his age.

Though they reigned before the Golden Age of Piracy – commonly said to have begun in 1650 – both Elizabeth I and James VI and I were dogged by pirates:

Sir Francis Drake, Sir John Hawkins and Sir Richard Grenville (along with countless others) would make their fortunes on the lawless high seas. Yet it was the little-known John Ward who was to have the most surprising career of all.


A pirate’s life

Born into an impoverished family c1553, his early life was spent fishing the tidal waters of his native Kent. An out-and-out wastrel who spent much of his time getting drunk, he would “sit melancholy, speak doggedly … [and] repine at other men’s good fortunes”.

The first inkling of his future talents came with the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Ward was one of many mariners who turned to privateering – a semi-legalised form of piracy in which Elizabeth I issued licences to anyone intending to plunder ships that belonged to the hated Spanish.

The deal was simple: the Crown received five per cent of the loot and the Lord Admiral’s agents took 10 per cent. The rest was divided between the ship’s owner and the crew. It is not known whether Ward was successful as a privateer, for these formative years of his career have been lost to history. Yet it was certainly during this time that he learned his piratical tricks.

Ward’s seafaring life took a knock in the summer of 1604 when the Anglo-Spanish war came to an end. James VI and I – successor to Elizabeth I – banned all privateering expeditions and Ward found himself out of work. According to an acquaintance, Andrew Barker, he bemoaned his ill fortune.

“Where are the days that have been … when we might sing, swear, drink, drab [whore] and kill men as freely as your cake-makers do flies?” Ward yearned for the recent past, “when the whole sea was our empire, where we rob at will”.


Ward was lodging in Portsmouth when he heard a rumour that was to change his life. A small merchant ship was anchored in the harbour, and it was stashed with the possessions of a Catholic merchant about to move from England to France. Ward persuaded 30 of his seafaring comrades to seize the vessel and its treasure. His little band stormed the ship that very night, overpowering the two watchmen and clamping them in irons. They then set sail into the English Channel.


When Ward went to examine his ill-gotten treasure, he received a rude awakening. The ship’s Catholic owner had got wind of their plot and moved all his possessions ashore. Ward had stolen a vessel with no valuables whatsoever. Off the Isles of Scilly, his men spotted a French merchant ship. Ward hailed her, gave the sign of friendship and passed “many hours in courteous discourse” with the captain. But he eventually revealed his true colours, raising his piratical battle-cry for the first time. Within seconds, his men grappled the vessel and boarded it, seizing both ship and crew. Ward had scored his first success.

A big ship required a big crew. Ward sailed to Cawsand in Cornwall and convinced a band of smugglers and fishermen to sign up for what he promised would be the voyage of a lifetime. Their destination was the Mediterranean, where there were known to be rich pickings. Traders, merchantmen and galleons – all were to be targeted by Ward and his band.

Their first prize was a coastal trader laden with merchandise. Their second was a two-masted transport ship used to carry galley slaves. With these ships in tow, Ward headed for the port of Algiers, which had been a haven for pirates for many decades. He was out of luck. Just a few months earlier, the city had been attacked by an English privateer named Richard Gifford, and the city’s governor was understandably ill-disposed towards Englishmen.


Ward sailed instead for the port of Salé on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, another locale frequented by vagabonds. Its pirates had been attacking merchant ships for years, and had grown so bold that they’d started to raid the shores of England and France, seizing entire villages and selling them in the great slave markets of North Africa.

In Salé, Ward found himself in like-minded company. A number of English and Dutch pirates were already living in the port and they agreed to join his team. Ward sold his booty, trimmed his ships and headed for Tunis, in which he hoped to make his base. It was a voyage that would transform his life.

Tunis was nominally ruled by a pasha appointed by the Ottoman Sultan in Istanbul but, by the time Ward arrived in 1605, the real power lay in the hands of Uthman Dey, leader of the janissary soldiers (janissaries being the Sultan’s household troops and bodyguards) garrisoned in the city. Wily and ruthless in equal measure, Uthman Dey had created a powerful guild of corsairs, and they preyed on shipping across the Mediterranean.


Uthman Dey may well have had second thoughts about welcoming this mixed band of Cornish smugglers and West Country ruffians. Toothless, heavily bearded and wearing a bizarre array of stolen velvet doublets and silken waistcoats, Ward’s pirates looked starkly different to the fabulously uniformed janissaries who patrolled the city.

Nonetheless, Dey recognised that Ward was a skilled pirate and allowed him to use Tunis as his centre of operations, just so long as he got a share of the loot.

Ward began capturing an astonishing array of vessels, including an English merchantman named John Baptist, richly laden with luxurious damasks. Ward renamed her the Little John, after the English folk hero. Another captured vessel was renamed the Gift, suggesting that Ward, though reportedly morose, had a sense of humour.

Many other ships were seized in the early spring of that first year in Tunis. One of the largest was the 300-ton Rubin, heavily laden with pepper, indigo and luxury goods purchased in Alexandria and destined for Venice. Also seized were the Elizabeth, Charity and Pearl, along with the Trojan of London: her English crew “were made slaves for shooting off but one shot in their own defence”.


Ward so ingratiated himself with Uthman Dey that he was given a large plot of land in Tunis. He now set to work building himself a mansion on a scale and opulence that would have been unthinkable in his native England. One compatriot who visited the place described it as “a very stately house, far more fit for a prince than a pirate”. It was dripping with luxury, “a fair palace beautified with rich marble and alabaster stones”.

As for Ward himself, he began to play the role of swaggering Oriental potentate, living in “a most princely and magnificent state”. He also looked the part. “His apparel is both curious and costly, his diet sumptuous and his followers seriously observing and obeying his will.” In common with the greatest of lords, “he hath two cooks that dress and prepare his diet for him, and his taster before he eats”.

In April 1607, Ward was cruising along the Turkish coast when he spotted a vast merchant vessel on the horizon. As he set sail in pursuit, her faint outline slowly sharpened into view. Neither he nor his crew could quite believe their eyes. The Reniera e Soderina was “a great argosy of fourteen or fifteen hundred tons” – a veritable leviathan of a ship – and she was sailing from Aleppo with a cargo of silks, indigo and cotton. She was so heavily laden that she couldn’t manoeuvre in the light wind, making her a sitting duck for Ward’s more nimble vessels.


Ward shouted his battle-cry and the guns opened fire, blasting cannonballs directly into the hull. They pierced the ship’s timbers fully five times, setting light to bails of hay inside. The Reniera e Soderina fired back, but was unable to score a single hit.

After three hours of intense bombardment, Ward’s men prepared to board. As they did so, the Reniera e Soderina’s captain offered his crew the choice of fighting or surrendering. When they vowed to fight, he handed out small arms and deployed the bulk of his men on the quarterdeck.

Moments before Ward’s men grappled the ship, his gunners fired six rounds of lethal chain shot. It tore into the rigging and sails, but it also tore into the crew. Two men were shredded to morsels, causing those around them to drop their weapons in panic.

At this very moment, Ward himself leaped aboard. “In the deadly conflict he did so undauntedly bear himself,” one of his men said later, “as if he had courage to out-brave death.” The battle was long and fierce, but Ward was set on victory. “In the end, our captain had the sunshine: he boarded her, subdued her, chained her men like slaves.” Soon after, he sailed her back to Tunis in triumph.


The capture of the Reniera e Soderina was the zenith of Ward’s piratical career. He would never quite match this success. After refitting the ship in Tunis, he hired a crew and accompanied her on her first voyage as a pirate ship.

But that maiden voyage was also to be her last. Ward’s structural alterations to the cannon deck had so weakened the vessel that she broke up in a storm and sunk with the loss of 350 men. Ward himself slipped back to Tunis on one of the smaller vessels in his fleet.


Turning Turk

News of the disaster irreparably damaged Ward’s reputation and he became an object of hatred for many in Tunis, especially those who had lost loved ones in the disaster. Ward found himself in desperate straits and became increasingly reliant on the protection of Uthman Dey.

Around 1610, he and his crew took the momentous decision to ‘turn Turk’, converting to Islam and settling permanently in Tunis. Ward himself changed his name to Yusuf Reis and married for a second time, even though he still had a wife in England. One who saw him in his later years described him as a shadow of his former self. “Very short with little hair, and that quite white, bald in front.” He spoke little, and when he did it was mostly swearing. “Drunk from morn till night … a fool and an idiot out of his trade.”

Ward’s legend blossomed even within his own lifetime, and he became the subject of plays, pamphlets, ballads and books that in turn demonised and romanticised his exploits as a corsair.

One of the best known is Captain Ward and the Rainbow, in which the King sends a ship called the Royal Rainbow after the perfidious pirate. Ward prevails, naturally, the rhyme ending with the lines: “Go tell the king of England, go tell him this from me, If he reign king of all the land, I will reign king at sea.”

These words provide a fitting epitaph for the man who, up to this point, might have been England’s most notorious pirate. For much of his long and troubled lifetime, Captain John Ward was indeed king of the sea.

[corsair91]

The story behind the REAL Jack Sparrow (Who was John Ward?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xcosv3oXJos&list=RDLV2qxKLW2oUAE&index=7

That's Awesome!
10 Oct 2020

The story behind the REAL Jack Sparrow (Who was John Ward?)

[corsair91]

The Real Life Captain Jack Sparrow
https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/the-real-life-captain-jack-sparrow-12047f56c584

This is the day you will always remember as the day you almost got to know the real Captain Jack Sparrow

..

The character is based on a real-life pirate known as John Ward, an English pirate turned Muslim, famous for his expeditions.