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00:01This week, join us as we go in search of the nastiest characters ever to sail the high seas.
00:07The pirates of the Mediterranean.
00:10These bloodthirsty brutes make Caribbean pirates look like Boy Scouts.
00:15They waged a holy war against the West and kidnapped a million people.
00:21Digging for the truth is hot on their trail.
00:24We're going to test out their deadly weapons.
00:28Brave the decaying dungeons of North Africa.
00:31This place was pretty much the end of the road.
00:33Yeah.
00:34And hunt for a pair of Barbary pirate ships half a mile deep in the Mediterranean.
00:39And these will be the first of their kind ever found.
00:42We're digging for the truth and going to extremes to do it.
01:02If your only image of pirates is dashing Caribbean rogues in search of adventure, you're in for a shock.
01:11A far more vicious, bloodthirsty group of thugs were wreaking havoc on the other side of the world in the
01:17Mediterranean Sea.
01:20Welcome to the top of the rock of Gibraltar.
01:22I'm Hunter Ellis.
01:24Hundreds of years ago, fierce bandits ruled the waters all around here.
01:27But even today, we know very little about these barbaric characters.
01:31I'm on a journey to find out who they were and why they terrorized the high seas.
01:36Hopefully shedding some new light on the pirates of the Mediterranean.
01:42Gibraltar was ground zero for pirate attacks.
01:46That's because it's only 14 miles from North Africa's Barbary Coast, their home base.
01:57The most famous Mediterranean pirate was Barbarossa, Redbeard.
02:02In the late 1500s, his band of cutthroats waged a terrifying war against European vessels unfortunate enough to sail into
02:11their sight.
02:15The pirates' goal was not to sink the ship, but to capture everyone on board, especially wealthy passengers.
02:24They would be ransomed back to their families for a fortune in gold.
02:30Rich merchants desperately changed into poorer clothes, hoping to lower their rate of ransom.
02:40Barbarossa's reign over the high seas ended in the early 16th century.
02:45But the worst was yet to come.
02:49In time, a tyrannical Moroccan sultan seized power and dragged piracy to new depths of depravity.
02:57Moulay Ismail's savagery gave rise to the most sophisticated pirate empire in history.
03:06But what motivated these vicious attacks on European sailors?
03:11To find out, I'm heading to a battered medieval castle on the top of the rock.
03:18Long before the Brits wrestled control of Gibraltar from Spain in 1713, another foreign power ruled here.
03:26This citadel is testament to its strength.
03:30Hunter, up here.
03:32Hey, Clive.
03:33What do you think of this?
03:35Looks like it's been under a few attacks.
03:37Come on up.
03:38There's a lot more to see here.
03:39All right.
03:40See you upstairs.
03:42Clive Finlayson is the director of the Gibraltar Museum.
03:49He says this ancient castle sheds light on why the Barbary pirates were waging their bitter war against the West.
03:56All right.
03:59Looks like the chapel within the castle.
04:02Look harder.
04:02Take a look at those arches.
04:04Look a bit more.
04:05Now, I've seen these types of arches in mosques.
04:08Yeah.
04:08People forget the Muslims ruled and dominated this part of the world for close to 800 years.
04:14I mean, 800 years.
04:15That's almost as long as the Roman Empire.
04:17Yeah.
04:17I mean, it's a long, long time.
04:18And it's a typical thing the Christians did.
04:21When they took places over from the Muslims, they were actually converted.
04:25So, originally a mosque, converted into a chapel.
04:27When did the Muslims first come over?
04:29They came across in 711 from North Africa.
04:31These were Berbers from North Africa itself and Arabs.
04:34And they just literally went right across Spain in months.
04:40Clive tells me the Moors were part of one of the great imperial expansions of all time,
04:45the spread of the Muslim caliphates in the 8th century AD.
04:50Centered on Baghdad, the caliphates expanded across the Middle East and North Africa.
04:57As early as 711, Islam crossed the Strait of Gibraltar.
05:02Soon, Spain, Portugal, and parts of southern France were ruled by Muslims.
05:07For 800 years, they've flourished here, especially in Spain,
05:12launching a golden age of science and architecture.
05:15The better part of 800 years is the struggle between Muslim and Christian.
05:19There's a few Christians, knights and dukes and things,
05:22that survive in the mountains in the north.
05:24And they gradually start to say, oh, hang on, we've got to recover this place.
05:27And start to push to regain their land.
05:30When eventually the whole place is captured, the year is 1492.
05:33It's a very special year.
05:34It's the discovery of America, among other things.
05:36The Christians are rounding up all these Muslims, and they're telling them,
05:39look, this is not your home.
05:40You came from North Africa 800 years ago.
05:43That's nearly a millennium.
05:44Right.
05:45Go back to your home.
05:46So they round them up by force, they put them into boats,
05:49and they push them to the other side of the straits into North Africa.
05:52After 800 years, I wouldn't go without a fight.
05:55Absolutely.
05:56Imagine this was their home for generations.
05:58They were born here.
05:59They go back.
06:00There's very little for them to do.
06:02There are pirates around.
06:03This is a way of making a living.
06:05It's also a way of getting your own back at those guys that kicked you out from your home.
06:09So even more than greed, it was revenge that drove the Barbary pirates to attack the Europeans.
06:16It was jihad, a holy war, a term that still echoes down the ages.
06:24So if the Barbary pirates had no shortage of motivation, where's all the evidence showing just how deadly these sea
06:32bandits were?
06:34Finding that is my next job, and it's no slam dunk.
06:40Despite four centuries of ruling the waves, not one Barbary pirate vessel has ever been found.
06:48I'm down in Gibraltar's harbor, preparing for a dive 100 feet to the bottom of the bay.
06:55Darren Fah, deputy director of the Gibraltar Museum, wants to show me a discovery his team has made on the
07:01far edge of the harbor.
07:04Joining us is Darren's colleague, marine archaeologist Geraldine Finlayson.
07:08Good to see you.
07:08I'm looking forward to diving with you today.
07:10Yeah, definitely.
07:11This is Geraldine.
07:12Hi, Geraldine.
07:13Hunter, very nice to meet you.
07:14So what are we doing today?
07:15We're going to dive on this site, which is a pile of cannon on the seabed with also sort of
07:21cannonballs associated with it.
07:22And this is something you guys have already been working on, is that correct?
07:24It's something we've been working on for a while.
07:26It's an interesting site.
07:27We're still not quite sure what it is yet, whether it's actually a wreck, hopefully, or not.
07:32So we have to go down, measure it all up, grid it all down, make sure everything's fine.
07:36And if it's a wreck, it's going to be very exciting.
07:38All right, well, I'm excited to see it for myself.
07:39Definitely.
07:40All right, well, we've got a lot of gear to load up and head on out.
07:42Let's go.
07:43Okay.
07:52Can I imagine with the history of all the conflict that's gone on in this area that there's probably wrecks
07:57littered all over the bottom of the ocean?
07:59Oh, definitely.
08:00I mean, this has been a crossing point of cultures for thousands of years.
08:04You know, we're literally at the gates of the known world where we're at.
08:09For millennia, the Strait of Gibraltar has been a key strategic point.
08:14It connects the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean, so it's always been fiercely contested.
08:21Countless great battles took place here, making this seabed a vast graveyard of wrecks.
08:27From ancient Roman vessels to Napoleonic men of war.
08:34But what I'm looking for is something called a zebek.
08:38A lightweight, fast-moving attack vessel favored by Barbary pirates.
08:47It's like looking for a needle in a haystack.
08:51Finding a zebek among so many shipwrecks is not going to be easy.
08:58But it's worth taking a look at what Darren has found.
09:08We come across the battered hull of one ship.
09:11So new, the wood is still here.
09:17In contrast, our target can barely be made out at all.
09:21It's camouflaged by centuries of sea life.
09:25Still, there are dozens of cannons littered all over the site.
09:30I don't see any wood.
09:32If this is a shipwreck, the boat itself is long gone.
09:41Darren and Geraldine want to establish the site's parameters.
09:46We begin with the boundary of the debris field.
09:49It measures about 60 feet from end to end.
09:53A bit shorter than a zebek.
09:57But without any wood, it's difficult to figure out what the ship once looked like.
10:04And the number of cannons?
10:06It's still a mystery.
10:09As our air runs out, I've got a lot of questions for Darren and Geraldine.
10:18So what do you actually think the pile of cannons comes from?
10:23We don't know yet.
10:25I mean, there's no obvious order to the scattering.
10:29It could be a wreck.
10:30It could just end up being a dumped pile of cannon that were obsolete and they just got rid of
10:36them.
10:37So now that you're mapping the top layer, then once you're able to move the artifacts that are on top,
10:41what are you hoping to discover down below?
10:43Well, if we lift the top layer where the oxygen has been kept away, then we might well find that
10:49there's wood.
10:49And that will help us identify whether it's a wreck, all sorts of things.
10:53You can determine whether it was from a British vessel.
10:56There's such a thing called dendrochronology, which measures the rings on the wood.
11:01So it can actually give us a date for that wood.
11:04Wow.
11:04So there's a lot of information that we can get from the wooden structures that might be there.
11:08So that would be a real find.
11:09Absolutely.
11:11It's clear this site is still a work in progress, but it's not my only option.
11:17I'm off to join a crew of shipwreck hunters who may have stumbled across not one, but two Barbary pirate
11:23ships.
11:28I'm in Gibraltar looking for some of the nastiest characters to ever sail the Mediterranean Sea, Barbary pirates.
11:36They left few traces on land, so I'm heading into open water to see if I can find the remains
11:42of their sunken ships.
11:46And I think I'm on to something big.
11:51I've been invited to come aboard the Odyssey Explorer.
11:55These guys are professional shipwreck hunters.
11:58And they've got some of the best underwater technology in existence.
12:05They've made a deep sea discovery they think could be a first.
12:09Potentially two Barbary pirate shipwrecks.
12:18I head to the bridge to talk to Greg Stem.
12:21Hey Greg.
12:22Hey Hunter.
12:23Co-founder of Odyssey Marine Exploration.
12:25And you guys are finding incredible stuff.
12:27So can you tell me a little bit about the wreck sites that you've discovered that could be associated with
12:31Barbary pirates?
12:32Well, we found two of them out there, way east of Spain, north of Morocco, right in the area that
12:38the Barbary pirates operated.
12:40This is where they typically would pounce on the merchant ships.
12:43And the wrecks exhibited details of some of the things these boats would have had?
12:46Well, we found two ships that looked very much like pirate Zebecks.
12:51And these would be the first of their kind ever found.
12:53No, nobody's ever found anything like this before.
12:55Right.
12:55So one of the problems with identifying them is you don't have a paper anywhere showing this is what a
13:00Barbary pirate Zebeck looked like.
13:03But not only do they have the cannons.
13:05Greg tells me that some 300 years ago, these ships slipped beneath the waves and plummeted half a mile to
13:12the ocean floor.
13:14There they remained until 2005 when the Odyssey Explorer passed overhead.
13:19After picking them up on their sonar, they turned to Zeus, an ROV that brings new frontiers to underwater excavation.
13:30Zeus traveled to the pitch black seabed and transmitted amazing high-def images of the wrecks back to the surface.
13:46With robotic arms controlled from the ship, Zeus took sediment samples and measured artifacts.
13:59It retrieved an impressive array of relics.
14:05These range from a pirate-era cannon and lead shot to perfectly preserved pots that helped date the vessels to
14:12the late 17th century when piracy was at its peak.
14:18But one feature above all others leads Greg to think that what Odyssey has found may well be genuine Barbary
14:25pirate Zebecks.
14:28What we thought we should look for for a Barbary pirate ship would be two cannons forward or two cannons
14:33after.
14:34These ships were made to go really fast and either they were shooting at somebody and chasing them or they
14:39were running away and shooting.
14:40So it's a very unusual configuration for a merchant ship to have two cannons forward, two cannons after, which allows
14:46for galley slaves in the middle of the ship, which is how they hunted down these merchant ships.
14:52The merchant ships were at the mercy of the wind.
14:54So what they could do is they'd get their galley slaves going and they'd catch the ships, they'd board them.
14:58And they didn't want to tear up the ships, they actually wanted to capture the ships.
15:02So they didn't need a lot of cannon power, but they would just jump up with their Damascus swords and
15:06just take over the ship.
15:08Wow.
15:08Photo mosaics of the Zebeck wrecks are very suggestive.
15:13Unlike the pile of cannons I saw on my dive, there are four large cannons on each wreck, two in
15:19front and two in back.
15:21It's the hallmark of a Zebeck.
15:28Has the Odyssey Explorer found the first bona fide Barbary pirate shipwrecks ever discovered?
15:35It's time to show the evidence to the Digging for the Truth team and see if we can come up
15:39with a firm answer.
15:42Kara Cooney is our archaeologist, and Charles Ingram is a former U.S. Marine.
15:48He brings an in-depth knowledge of weapons to the table, including how to use them.
15:53Kara will study the artifacts Odyssey has already retrieved from the bottom of the sea, and try to piece our
15:59giant puzzle together.
16:02This is cool, because these pipes are Turkish style, Ottoman style.
16:06Wow.
16:06It's possible that that could be the clue to tell us whether these are Barbary guys or not.
16:12These artifacts are intriguing, but they're not proof positive that the ships belong to pirates.
16:18So far, the items identified could have been owned by Arab merchants.
16:24As Kara and Charles settle in, I'm going to take one last look at Gibraltar.
16:30There's another relic from the pirate era that I've got to see.
16:35I'm meeting historian Bob Davis back up on the rock.
16:38So why are we meeting here at the top of the rock?
16:40I wanted to bring you to a place that would really make it clear how important the Barbary pirates were
16:44to this area.
16:45But you're not at the top yet.
16:47Yeah.
16:48Still got a ways to go.
16:49All right.
16:49I'm afraid we do.
16:51Yeah.
16:52Watch out for the monkeys.
16:53Yeah, they're everywhere.
16:54Yeah.
16:55Fetching view here.
16:57It's an amazing view.
16:58So when was the wall built?
17:00Well, this wall was built in response to a specific situation, actually.
17:04The town of Gibraltar was pillaged by pirates on the 8th of September, 1540.
17:09And it was an extremely devastating attack.
17:12They hauled away a large number of villagers, looted the town, rape, destroy churches, you name it.
17:18And afterwards, the inhabitants of the town begged Charles V, the king of Spain, to do something to protect them.
17:25And he responded by building this wall.
17:29In 1540, Barbary pirates from North Africa stormed these shores, ransacking homes, kidnapping dozens of people for ransom,
17:37and killing hundreds more.
17:41From then on, the people of Gibraltar lived in constant fear.
17:46Any moment, the pirates could appear again.
17:50This wall, 30 feet high and a quarter of a mile long, was a desperate attempt to stop the raids.
17:57The people who had to live here were constantly afraid.
18:00Pirates were coming at them.
18:02And in fact, they had this, what was somebody's called the fear of the horizon.
18:05So how effective was this wall?
18:07Well, it's a big wall, and obviously it kept out a lot of people.
18:10It kept out some attacks.
18:12And the town basically was not attacked again, as far as we know.
18:16On the inside, in Gibraltar.
18:18But for the people who had to fish and work their fields, it wasn't so good, huh?
18:21You were basically in trouble.
18:23These people came, the pirates came every year, every summer.
18:26They took all the way up and down the coast of Spain.
18:29They were wide open to pirates.
18:30And these pirates came, thousands of them at a time.
18:33Year after year, every summer they would come.
18:35So where's their home base from here?
18:37Well, they had a very short distance to travel, actually.
18:40It's right over there.
18:41That's Africa.
18:42Right there.
18:42That's Africa.
18:43And in fact, they had this great fight between faiths going on at the time.
18:47On the one side, the pirates are Muslims.
18:49Over here, they're Christians.
18:51And constantly what's going on is basically a battle for control of the minds and hearts of people.
18:58It wasn't just coastal villages that suffered.
19:02No European ship that sailed the Mediterranean was safe.
19:06Over the next several centuries, thousands of ships would be conquered by these bloodthirsty thugs.
19:13But no pirate was more menacing than the powerful sultan who turned piracy into a multi-million dollar enterprise.
19:25The Digging for the Truth team is scouring the shores of the Mediterranean, trying to understand how a band of
19:32Muslim pirates launched a reign of terror on Europe.
19:37I've come to Morocco with Bob Davis to check out what was once the Barbary pirates' hometown.
19:43It's called Saleh.
19:44And it sits right across the river from the modern capital of Rabat.
19:52So this is the entrance to the Saleh Harbor, huh?
19:55Yeah, home to the famous Saleh Rovers.
19:57And basically, the town of Saleh was founded by a group of pirates that were expelled from Spain, and they
20:03needed somewhere to go.
20:04And it turned out that in Morocco itself, there was this huge power vacuum and sort of the kingdom had
20:10collapsed, essentially.
20:11And so they were able to come and establish themselves here without anybody stopping them.
20:15And when they came here, they set up basically doing the same work they'd done before, only as pirates.
20:20They built ships, they went to sea, and they spent basically the next several hundred years preying on shipping.
20:27Now, what about those fortifications? Were they here when the pirates were here?
20:31Yeah, the pirates built them.
20:32This is actually the home of the Republic of Boora Greg, named after the Boora Greg River you see right
20:38in front of you here.
20:38Really, because when I think of pirates, I think of renegades who operate for profit port to port.
20:44Not a group of people building a walled city.
20:46Ah, the classic freebooters, but it makes sense to cooperate.
20:49And in fact, these guys learned early on, come together and put together an entire community.
20:54And you can sort of see it laid out here in front of you.
20:55There's the fortress that guards the harbor. You can imagine all bristling with cannon.
21:00And over there, a building that to this day is still called the Pirate Tower, as they call it.
21:04This is where the pirate elders used to meet to sort of make community decisions.
21:08But they were so successful that they soon attracted people from all over.
21:11Other Moors, for example, from Spain, other Muslims, and then Christians as well.
21:15European Christians who converted to Islam in order to go into the pirating business.
21:19And that's what they did.
21:22So if they can build all of this, they must have been highly profitable.
21:26Yeah, it was a good business.
21:27And they say that in the Pirate Tower was the place that they kept all their piles of treasure,
21:32and they would divide it all up amongst them.
21:36Coupled with pirate towns in Tunisia, Algeria, and Libya,
21:39the Saleh pirates maintained an iron rule over all the ports of the Barbary Coast.
21:47But this was just the beginning.
21:49Bob tells me the ruler appeared, whose partnership with the pirates
21:53would make them some of the richest criminals in the world.
21:58To learn more about them, we head to a dusty town about 80 miles east of Saleh.
22:07Welcome to Meghnes.
22:09During the heyday of the Barbary pirates, this was the greatest city in Morocco.
22:13In fact, all of North Africa.
22:16I've come here because I've learned that this place was the source of the pirates' wealth,
22:20and home of their most notorious benefactor.
22:27Few pirates lived here, but Bob explains this was the city they knew intimately.
22:34Today, it remains a distinctly North African town,
22:37with a central medina, or marketplace, surrounded by towering stuccoed walls.
22:44And just as they did three centuries ago,
22:47any visitor entering the imperial palace has to pass through this beautiful gate.
22:53This is it. This is the gate to the imperial city of Meghnes,
22:57built by Sultan Mule Ishmael.
23:00He called this Bab Mansour.
23:03And if you translate that, what does that mean?
23:05The gate of the victorious one.
23:07Certainly is impressive.
23:08Yeah, well, apparently Mule Ishmael didn't find it all that impressive.
23:14Mule Ishmael ruled Morocco for 55 years, from 1672 to 1727.
23:23A story about the gate sums him up perfectly.
23:27After it's unveiled to great acclaim, the Sultan pays a visit to its architect.
23:33He asks him whether he could have done an even better job in constructing the gate.
23:39The architect, perhaps being an honest guy, says yes.
23:44Whereupon Mule Ishmael takes out his sword and decapitates him on the spot.
23:59Or that was the legend, anyway.
24:01But what this really shows you is the scale of Sultan Mule Ishmael's ambitions.
24:05How so?
24:06Well, this is the man who united Morocco by the sword, as they say.
24:10This is the man who wanted to turn this city, Meknes, which is a small city, into his imperial capital.
24:16And to do so, he had a grand vision.
24:19You can see the vision realized here.
24:21And ultimately, he wanted to build a palace that was bigger than the palace at Versailles.
24:27To build and operate his imperial capital, Ishmael needs armies, slaves, and servants.
24:35And he knows just where to get them.
24:37He hires the Barbary pirates to do his dirty work for him.
24:43Soon, the Saleh rovers are fanning out to capture as many Europeans as they can.
24:50Their tentacles reach all the way to the outer limits of the continent.
24:55Accounts from the time describe villagers as far away as Scandinavia being kidnapped and dragged off.
25:02But why were these pirates so effective?
25:05Back at the Odyssey Explorer, Cara has been studying artifacts Odyssey retrieved from the wrecks they found.
25:11She's identified a couple of possible weapons, so Charles is checking them out.
25:16He's in Denmark at a place called the Medieval Center, with Bennerson Little, an authority on pirate weapons and techniques.
25:23This is it.
25:25Scimitar.
25:25Now, why does it have this curve?
25:27I've always wondered about that.
25:29The curve's there to facilitate the cut.
25:31When you strike tissues, especially soft tissues, you've got to hit and pull.
25:36You can see now, this is a very sharp blade, but as I'm striking my palm, no blood, there's no
25:42injury.
25:42But if I were to strike and then pull, I would get cut.
25:45But with this curved blade down here, it has a very natural cutting action.
25:49You don't really need to make that long draw or that long pull to cut.
25:55Wow.
25:57That is one mean weapon.
26:00Wielding their scimitars, Barbary pirates raided hundreds of villages across Europe, sending their captives to Morocco.
26:09But it was at sea where their skills and weaponry were most often put to the test.
26:15One of their most potent weapons was this seemingly ordinary pot.
26:20It may not look like much, but it was filled with powerful combustibles.
26:27And Jens Christensen knows the recipe.
26:31Here it is.
26:32Oh, that's the pot.
26:33It comes from a guide published in 1540 on medieval pyrotechnics.
26:38The idea of a fire pot is not that you want to blow something up.
26:42You want to throw it, for instance, on a ship, and then you will have it burn there, sort of
26:49like when you use napalm in modern warfare.
26:54The recipe starts off with a pound of saltpeter and includes sulfur, pig fat, and pitch.
27:04The Venetian turpentine, which also is a type of pitch.
27:09And then the important ingredients, schnapps.
27:13Like schnapps?
27:13Yeah.
27:14Schnapps, schnapps?
27:14Yeah.
27:14Okay.
27:15So when does it become a hazardous situation that you need to worry about?
27:20When you put a fuse to it.
27:21Ah, okay.
27:25Wow, it's almost burning.
27:26You can see it's burning from the inside.
27:28Yeah.
27:29Exactly.
27:30Look at that.
27:30This substance was made in advance and you would probably carry it in the pot on board the ship with
27:40a lid of probably parchment on it.
27:44Right now, this pot holds about 20 times the firepower that Jens just lit.
27:51Let's see what it can do.
27:52So now, how would a barbarian pirate use this?
27:55Basically, you want to throw a device like this onto the deck of the other ship and set it afire.
28:01Mm-hmm.
28:02This would be an excellent device to use.
28:03It was coming alongside, pitched this over onto it.
28:06You're definitely going to set fire to the vessel.
28:08I'm not sure if they'd have the capacity to put it out.
28:10Their firefighting was basically buckets of water and wet blankets.
28:13Because the amount of saltpeter in there, if there's just a little spark left, it'll just flare up.
28:26Look at that.
28:28Look at that.
28:30That is impressive.
28:33It's a perfect fit for contemporaneous reports of how Barbary pirates used this weapon.
28:41Survivors described how they would sling a few firepots on board and then fan out across the ship chasing captives.
28:49On land and on sea, the pirates were a force to be reckoned with.
28:58And the evidence of their reign of terror leads all the way to the English Channel and a mysterious wreck
29:04site laden with Arab gold.
29:09I've been searching for a needle in a haystack, a Barbary pirate shipwreck.
29:15Despite four centuries of terror at sea, no one has ever conclusively identified one of their vessels.
29:22The Odyssey Explorer came the closest, but their twin wrecks lie half a mile deep on the seafloor.
29:28And it'll take a lot more work to confirm their origin.
29:33Now I'm going to go visit another wreck.
29:35It's nowhere near the Mediterranean, but in fact, that's okay.
29:40Still, the quaint British village of Salkham seems a world away from the Saleh rovers.
29:47I set out to find some dive gear and a boat to take us to the site.
29:54Meanwhile, archaeologist Kara Cooney meets up with one of the divers who found the wreck, Neville Oldham.
29:59And we went out to the site and dived it.
30:01The first diver in, he saw something glint.
30:04And when he surprised it out of the reef with his knife, it was a gold finger.
30:09And it was absolutely as bright as the day it was made.
30:14And then he looked down and he could see he snelt in a sea of gold coins.
30:23The gold has gone to the British Museum, but Neville tells us the cannons are still there.
30:28And that's what I want to see.
30:31They lie just off a beach called, intriguingly, Moore Sands.
30:37Here off the coast of Moore Sands, looking at the wreck right here, they're going to head down into this
30:43pit and go to these forward cannons.
30:45All of these places marked in red is where these gold coins were recovered, here and here.
30:53I don't think there's any gold left.
30:57We reached the wreck site, and it's time to brave the chilly depths of the channel.
31:01It's nice and toasty right now, but in about five minutes, this English water.
31:07Ooh, man, that's going to be icy.
31:11Have fun down there.
31:13OK.
31:14I'll be checking where you're going.
31:16Go.
31:25Testing, one, two, three.
31:28Topside, can you hear me?
31:29Awesome.
31:31Roger that.
31:32We have you loud and clear, and we are heading down the rope towards the bottom.
31:36We're going to go check it out.
31:38OK, so the first thing you should see, Hunter, is part of an anchor.
31:42It's a round loop.
31:44We're heading over the rock right now, and actually, we have the broken anchor in sight.
31:53OK, now we're in the bow portion of the wreck site, and we have four cannons within about 10 to
32:0115 feet of each other.
32:03What kind of condition are the cannons in?
32:05I actually wish you could see this.
32:08They're concreted, but they're intact.
32:10I mean, they're all complete.
32:14So now we're heading down towards the aft section.
32:18OK, it looks like we're coming up on the aft cannons, and there's two, three possibly, right in this general
32:27area.
32:28Hunter, how far are the guns spaced apart from each other?
32:32It definitely is.
32:33I mean, everything's on axis, and it was about 100 feet swimming back here, so this would appear to match
32:41the footprint of a Z-back.
32:46Like the ships in the Mediterranean, the vessel itself has completely disappeared.
32:51But from the placement of its weapons and anchor, it's easy to visualize how it crash landed.
32:58Over time, the wood decayed, leaving behind a tantalizing array of relics that fit the profile of a genuine Barbary
33:06pirate vessel.
33:10Getting to dive the wreck off the coast of Salcombe was absolutely amazing, but most of the artifacts had already
33:16been removed.
33:17So to see if this truly could be a Barbary pirate ship, I need to make one more stop, and
33:22that's here in London at the British Museum.
33:25The relics are kept here because they were found in British waters and therefore remain property of the crown.
33:32Right now, they're not on display.
33:35I need special permission to get a look.
33:40Venesha Porter is an expert in Islamic artifacts and keeper of the Salcombe treasure.
33:46She spent the last several years researching this intriguing collection of relics and coins.
33:52What we have is a lot of the material that has come out of the sea, off the coast of
33:59Salcombe.
33:59The gold is really the treasure.
34:02Well, this is an amazing one.
34:03The divers found almost 500 bronze and gold artifacts, including this gold ingot, the very first piece they saw.
34:10What's more, many of them are coins inscribed in Arabic.
34:15What's very, very important is that we have two coins here, which are the latest coins that have been found
34:22in the assemblage.
34:22And what date is that?
34:241631.
34:25Wow. So these are from 1631 or thereabouts.
34:30What does this allow you to do?
34:31Well, what it allows us to do is, in combination with the other artifacts, it allows us to suggest that
34:39the ship went down in the mid-17th century.
34:44This date fits perfectly.
34:45This is when pirate attacks in northern Europe were at their height.
34:49In the 1650s alone, two dozen attacks were reported in England.
34:54One was 100 miles up the Thames River, just outside of London.
34:57Was there anything recovered that came from the ship itself?
35:02Well, what's interesting is that there's a few little bits of wood.
35:07Now that seems very rare, because I dove on the site and wood surviving would be very hard.
35:12Yes, there's very, very little that is actually part of the fabric of the ship.
35:17So this actually came from the site and this was part of the ship.
35:22Yeah.
35:22What do we know about this wood?
35:25Well, that it's likely to be North African wood.
35:29Wow.
35:32North African wood and Moroccan coins.
35:35This is our best evidence yet.
35:38We may have found what we're looking for, a genuine Barbary pirate wreck.
35:43My goal on this trip was to get as close as I could to a real pirate Zeebeck.
35:49I never imagined it would be a thousand miles away from their home base.
35:54But my journey is by no means over.
35:58There's one final place in Morocco that reveals more about the horrors of Barbary piracy than any other spot on
36:05Earth.
36:11Figuring out the real story behind the Barbary pirates has been no easy task.
36:16My search for one of their ships took me to the depths of the English Channel.
36:21Now it's back to Morocco to put the last piece into the puzzle.
36:25How did Sultan Mule Ishmael join forces with the Saleh Rovers and take piracy to new depths of depravity?
36:35During his reign, Ishmael lived in utter splendor, protected by a retinue of African bodyguards raised as trained assassins.
36:45His goal, to vie with the kings of Europe to create a palace and a lifestyle as lavish as anything
36:51seen before.
36:53And none of it would have been possible without the Barbary pirates.
36:59To get an inside look at Mule Ishmael's domain, I'm meeting up again with Bob Davis.
37:05The palace goes on for miles.
37:07It was ostensibly the largest building in the northern hemisphere.
37:11And the evidence of that still survives. You can see it all around you.
37:20Bob first takes me into a sprawling complex.
37:23I figure it must have been the Sultan's private quarters.
37:27Yeah, well actually this was for his horses.
37:30At least 20 mammoth rooms lie side by side here, just for the horses and their grain.
37:38I think this gives you some idea. I mean just he built this enormous building and you can imagine what
37:42the palace looked like.
37:44Actually, that's not so easy.
37:46Much of the palace collapsed in an earthquake in 1755.
37:51But even in its ruined state, you can tell it was truly vast.
37:56It's impossible to say for sure just how big, because much of it is buried under the modern town.
38:02That looks like about 250 yards.
38:07One thing's for certain though, this entire place was built on the backs of slaves.
38:12Well, it's surprising that you say that because actually...
38:15Slavery wasn't unique to Meknes.
38:18But perhaps no single ruler purchased as many slaves for his personal use as Mule Ishmael.
38:25Bob says one final place illustrates best just how far Ishmael took his obsession for slaves.
38:33This will show you how it all fits together with the pirates.
38:41Watch these steps, they're really steep.
38:44In the old days, slaves used to come down on rope ladders that hung down from the skylights.
38:49And then every night they'd pull the ladders up.
38:52Welcome to the slave pens of Mule Ishmael.
38:55Yeah, this is where he kept his workforce, guys who built his palace.
38:59Hundreds, thousands, sometimes even tens of thousands of slaves.
39:02There's no water, except what comes in through these holes in the ceiling.
39:07So the Sultan Mule Ishmael is using the Barbary pirates to supply his workforce.
39:12Yeah, this is the main piece of business between Mule Ishmael and the pirates of Sali,
39:16was to supply the building force essentially for the palaces you saw upstairs.
39:22The Barbary pirates were his labor contractors essentially.
39:25They brought him the workforce that he needed to do this and sort of kept the whole cycle going.
39:37To meet Ishmael's insatiable demands, pirates stepped up their attacks like never before.
39:44They mounted hundreds of raids across the Mediterranean and up and down the Atlantic coast.
39:50All with one goal, to capture as many white slaves as possible.
39:59Tens of thousands of people were rounded up and sent directly to Ishmael's palace in Mechnaz.
40:07Mule Ishmael took cruel pleasure in inspecting his latest conquest.
40:12He insisted his pirate slave runners bring prisoners deep inside the palace to his private pavilion.
40:21Ishmael's prized acquisitions were important military men or wealthy merchants.
40:27They fetched the highest price in ransom.
40:33Poor but able-bodied men were condemned to forced labor.
40:38The young women to Ishmael's private harem.
40:42The going price for even a carpenter or skilled artisan was at least a year of his wages back home.
40:48No surprise, the pirates became enormously rich from their alliance with Ishmael.
40:56All in all, he enslaved as many as 50,000 Christians to build his palace.
41:05Pirates took jewels, took gold, whatever they could get.
41:08But what they mainly wanted to get was slaves.
41:10And off the ships that they took and off when they went ashore, they grabbed humans.
41:15They dealt in human cargo because basically human beings were worth more than the ships they sailed on.
41:20So for most of the slaves then who were captured by the pirates, this was the end of the road.
41:25You bet.
41:28Slavery became big business in Mechnaz.
41:32And Ishmael knew how to keep his operation running smoothly.
41:35Basically the jailers inflicted punishments on people that were so painful that essentially they convinced people to kind of lay
41:42low as much as possible.
41:43I sort of thought to sort of make it more real, make it more genuine, I'd actually give you a
41:48taste of the experience.
41:53While European leaders turned their heads, tens of thousands of their citizens were reduced to white gold.
42:02They wanted objects to be sold and tortured in dungeons like this.
42:11They often would measure it, they'd give them 50 pounds of chains or 70 pounds or even 100 pounds of
42:16chains they'd have to carry around.
42:17OK, and finally we have one last set of chains.
42:20Put it on nice and tight.
42:22Oh, yeah.
42:23These dungeons and the horrors they contained were an open secret in much of Christian Europe.
42:28Being seized by Barbary pirates was the worst nightmare of every man, woman and child.
42:34I can walk, but I wouldn't be a very effective worker.
42:37Well, you learn.
42:38You learn because somebody's persuading you rather forcefully.
42:43A particularly cruel torture was called the Boston Auto.
42:47The simplest of punishments are really sometimes the most effective.
42:53But you can see that it really hurts quite a bit.
42:58I'm only a mild-mannered professor.
43:00Oh, yeah. They know how to use them.
43:03Usually something on the order of three or four hundred lashes were given out to people.
43:08Are you getting any blood there?
43:09To make the point. No, we're not seeing it yet.
43:12This is nothing compared to what the slaves actually went through.
43:15But I'm beginning to get the picture.
43:19Oh, ow.
43:20I guess my lesson here is done.
43:22So, I'll leave you. You can enjoy the dungeon.
43:27See you, Mule.
43:28I'm hoping one of you two has the key.
43:34The Boston Auto was just one of many tortures.
43:39Some were forced to work while carrying blocks weighing 70 pounds.
43:45Others were publicly crucified.
43:48Another favorite torture, setting the slaves' long hair on fire.
43:57There's no doubt the Barbary pirates were far more than ragtag bands of sea-roving thieves.
44:04For 400 years, they inflicted unspeakable terror and misery.
44:10Enslaving a million Christians on land and at sea.
44:14But the pirates couldn't maintain their menacing hold forever.
44:18And eventually, they met their demise.
44:21Early in the 19th century, many European nations stopped fighting themselves for a moment
44:26and focused on their Islamic enemies.
44:28Many countries improved their navies and began to colonize the Barbary Coast,
44:32leaving the pirates with nowhere to go.
44:38Slowly, they faded from the pages of history.
44:42Their only remains?
44:44The ghostly impressions of their terrifying reign on the bottom of the sea.
44:50And in the forgotten slave dungeons of North Africa.
45:08The godly
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