Political Piracy

When I began researching the career of doomed explorer Henry Hudson about ten years ago, I happened upon mentions of contemporary English seafarers who had converted to Islam and made a terrifying name for themselves as Barbary pirates. They seemed to be a sort of 17th-century John Walker Lindh, the young American who went off to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban against troops from his own country. The analogy is not perfect, as the English pirate converts were clearly in it for the money and their conversion secured a flag of convenience for their predations. Nevertheless, the fact that English merchant ships were preyed upon by North African pirates commanded by English converts to Islam remains intriguing.

Alan G. Jamieson’s Lords of the Sea: A History of the Barbary Corsairs does mention one of the most notorious of this lot, John Ward, aka Yusuf Reis. His book...