Before Britain ruled the waves, the British were being sold into slavery.
For over 200 years, raiders crossed from North Africa, took our people from our own shores, and sold them in the markets of Algiers. They came in the night.
In 1631, corsairs landed at a sleeping village in Ireland and carried off more than a hundred men, women, and children in a single raid. Cornwall, Devon, the whole western coast lived under the threat. Fishermen were taken from their boats, families dragged from their beds. Many thousands of Britons vanished into the slave pens of North Africa.
And for a long time, Britain could do nothing. It paid ransoms. It paid tribute. The sea belonged to the slavers. Then Britain built a navy, and everything changed. In 1816, a British fleet sailed into Algiers and opened fire, hour after hour, until the slaver port burned and its ruler was forced to free more than a thousand captives. 🏴