Jun 20 — Jan’s Plan, Man

On June 20, 1631, Dutch pirate Jan Janszoon attacked the Irish village of Baltimore, capturing and enslaving up to 200 villagers.

If a man named Hackett lives in your neighboring village, do not trust this man.

We’ll get back to that, first let’s take a look at Jan Janszoon.

(What kind of a name is Jan for a man, anyway?)

Jan had a long and successful career. He started off as your standard Dutch pirate, abandoning his family to roam the seas, attacking ships left and right. Until he got a little too cocky with some Barbary pirates in 1618. Jan was captured and taken to Algiers, where he “turned Turk” (aka converted to Islam) and decided to continue pirating alongside his new Barbary friends.

In 1619 a group of pirates got sick of the peace treaties being made and decided to create their own Republic of Salé. They set up a government of 16 pirates and eventually made Jan their President & Grand Admiral (not bad for a humble Dutchmen, if you ask me).

So Jan was the Man. The Man with a Plan.

Under Jan, the Republic of Salé thrived in their pirating and slavery ways. Over the years Jan himself would slip away from his official Presidential duties to go on pirating adventures himself (who knew a pirate Admiral would have sooooo much paperwork?).

And now, fast-forward a few years to 1631 when Jan was off the coast of Ireland and captured a fisherman named Hackett…

John Hackett was a Catholic Irish fisherman, and held some pretty deep resentment towards the Protestants in Ireland. Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, the English crown decided to confiscate vast swaths of land from the Irish, and gave it to Protestants to farm.

Obviously, the Irish were not very happy about that.

And so, when Hackett was captured by Jan The Man, and asked where there were good raiding spots, Hackett knew exactly the direction in which to point the pirates.

Baltimore, in West Cork, was full of those damned Protestants. And so Hackett, instead of pointing the pirates in the direction of his own town, gave away the the location of the majority-Protestant village.

With his crew of Dutchmen, Moroccans, Algerians and Ottoman pirates, Jan sailed into Baltimore and went about raiding this small, seaside village.

They killed quite a few Baltimorians that day, but that wasn’t their main mission. Their real goal was to capture and enslave whoever they could.

Taking approximately 108 people (some suggest this number was actually as high as 237 people), Jan was on his way back to Africa to sell them as slaves.

Surprisingly, things didn’t go too peachy keen for John Hackett after this whole ordeal. Even though Jan took mostly English Protestants, the Irish were pretty much not okay with slavery (or betrayal) in general.

Hackett was convicted of ‘conspiracy” and hanged from a clifftop outside Baltimore.

Of the Baltimorians who were captured that day, only 3 would ever return to Ireland. The rest lived out their days as boat, labor, or sex slaves.

So it goes.

Originally published at http://www.todaywasterrible.com on June 20, 2019.