“British officers call us pirates, smugglers, slavers and sea-witches according to their temper, and I have been all four in one month by their account. We are poorer in engines than the packet states. We are not poorer in seamanship, and their own captains know it, and say so when there is no clerk present.”
As the southern packet rooms and London tell it
The packet rooms tell it on the days when the fear is raiding. A merchantman fell behind her convoy in a narrow place, and before her master could clear for it she was boarded, cleanly, by men who were famous for boarding and for nothing else. Nobody fought for long. The crew were carried off and given a price, and the price went through a broker every man in the room could name, a respectable man who did ordinary business the rest of the week. Behind the broker, the room said, lowering its voice, was Lord Abdul Harun.
London calls him a corsair-lord, and London says he receives in a manner no London merchant could afford. He raids, in the telling, the belt of water that neither the Archon nor the Prince-Governor fully controls, and the room makes him darker or lighter according to the news from the south that week.
On a quiet day the same room tells it differently. On a quiet day he is a line in a house’s accounts, and a small one: smaller than the premium it would cost to insure against him. That, the older clerks say, is the whole reason the arrangement lasts.
What is known
British traffic into the southern approaches passes under arrangements with Archon Demetrios Kallisar and Prince-Governor Rashid al-Qadisi, renegotiated more often than they are honoured, and Abdul Harun raids the belt neither of them fully controls. What both sides agree on is the practical arrangement: a trade in ransom, through brokers known to everybody, at stable rates. A British house with Basin trade budgets for it as a line in the accounts, smaller than the insurance it would otherwise pay.
The corsair shore is a British name. Qadis, Sefra, Valmora, Benisafra and Almazira are separate schools of seamanship, law and credit, and the Black Banner fraternities keep articles like a trade. Against a British squadron in open water they would lose; against a straggler in a narrow place they are the best in the world. He touches a company only on Inner Sea business, and most never meet his name outside a packet room.