The attack was planned with local knowledge. A Cork fisherman named John Hackett, whose boat had been captured by the corsairs of Algiers, agreed — willingly or under duress — to guide the fleet of Murad Reis the Younger (a Dutch-born convert to Islam in the service of the Regency of Algiers) through the channels of Roaringwater Bay to the village of Baltimore on the West Cork coast. More than two hundred raiders rowed ashore under cover of darkness and swept through the sleeping settlement, carrying off men, women and children. In less than an hour it was done. The fisherman Hackett was returned to Baltimore by the departing corsairs and subsequently hanged from the clifftop above the village for his role in guiding the attack.
The story
Of the 107 people seized that night, very few were ever seen in Ireland again: at most three women were ransomed back over the following fourteen years. The rest disappeared into the slave markets of Algiers and Salé — men to the galley benches, women to domestic servitude. A darker conspiracy theory documented by historian Des Ekin in The Stolen Village (O'Brien Press, 2006) suggests that a wealthy local landowner, Sir Walter Coppinger, may have bribed the corsairs to eliminate a rival English colony, though definitive proof is lacking. The village never fully recovered; the English settlers largely abandoned it, and the original English character of Baltimore faded back into the Gaelic landscape.
The sack of Baltimore left its mark deep in the Irish consciousness. The poet Thomas Davis immortalised it in the ballad 'The Sack of Baltimore' (1844): 'The yell of Allah breaks above the prayer, and shriek, and roar.' The event remains the largest Barbary coast raid on mainland Britain or Ireland on record, and its combination of maritime horror, betrayal, and lost community has given it the character of a national wound that time cannot quite close. It is treated in depth in History Ireland (the leading Irish historical journal), in Des Ekin's book-length account, and in the official heritage interpretation at Baltimore harbour.