A Different Way To Deal With Jihadi Pirates

I'm reading the book, White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and Islam's One Million White Slaves, and I came across something interesting. Most of the book follows the true story of a British kid who becomes a slave for twenty-three years to the sultan of Morocco. Ships from Morocco were nabbing ships from all over Europe, stealing the plunder and taking the Europeans captive to be sold as slaves in the North African cities of Algiers and Meknes.

The Jihadis also raided the coast of Europe. They sometimes captured all the people of a random, isolated town along the coast — men, women, and children — and took them back to North Africa to be sold as slaves.

England's response to this was unbelievably weak. I'm only halfway through the book, but so far they have shown no backbone whatsoever. They make ineffective attempts to BUY their citizens back, and they make "peace agreements" which, of course, the Muslims ignore when they wish.

That's how the English were dealing with it. And it went on for over two hundred YEARS!

Yesterday I came across a comment on an online article detailing how the Dutch handled a similar situation. They had been paying off the Algerian Corsairs (Muslim pirates), but the Corsairs seized Dutch ships anyway.

So the Dutch sent a squadron of warships to the main harbor of Algiers. On the way there, they captured several Corsair ships and towed them into the harbor, and demanded all their Dutch citizens back or they would hang all the Jihadis from the Corsairs.

The pasha thought they were bluffing, so they hung all their Muslim captives and left the ships in the harbor and went out to find more. They towed in another batch of Corsairs and made the same demand.

And what do you think happened?

All Dutch slaves were immediately released by the Algerians.