Hiram Morgan writes: In Holy Trinity, a white Moorish-style church built in the late nineteenth century overlooking the port of Algiers, there is a memorial to Devereux Spratt, the first Anglican minister to come to the great African city. Reverend Spratt didn’t however arrive of his own free will – he was a captive of the Barbary pirates, one of many thousands seized from the coasts of Europe in the seventeenth century. He had been clapped in irons in sight of the port of Youghal in 1642 having already been through awful trials that year.
Born in 1620 and educated at Oxford, Spratt first came to Ireland to tutor the children of the Denny planter family in Tralee and subsequently succeeded his grandfather as a local rector. But the great Irish rebellion breaking out in Ulster in October 1641 spread to Kerry the following spring. Many Protestants who fled into town, including Spratt’s mother and younger brother, died during the six-month siege. Forced to surrender Tralee, the remainder, as refugees, were convoyed across Munster under sporadic attack. Securing passage to England with the help of the erstwhile Protestant avenger Baron Inchiquin turned out to be a very short respite for Spratt.
Safe at last from Popish Irish rebels on board an English ship off the Cork coast, he and the other 120 passengers, most of them refugees like himself, suddenly found themselves in the hands of Muslim Arab pirates. Spratt was in utter despair when he arrived in Algiers but soon was being pressed to become minister of the English Protestants there and was surprised that his owner let him do so, declaring ‘God is Great’. Spratt fortunately managed to retrieve a credit note he was carrying when taken and eventually he got an English merchant to use it to organise a whip around among the English community of the Italian port of Livorno to raise his ransom. Spratt was at last a free man – yet he decided to stay on, preferring to endure, so he claimed, ‘afflictions with the people of God than to enjoy liberty at home’. More than likely though he was also due to pay a city tax, and it wasn’t until another visiting English merchant paid it that he was able to leave.
On a recent visit to the North African city an attendant in Holy Trinity drew back a cupboard to show me another plaque commemorating Spratt marrying an English couple in 1644 and baptising their son in the following year. An English publication of the period also records the remarkable story of English escapees to the Balearic Islands who had used the cellar where Spratt’s congregation met to make and hide a canvas boat until such time they were able to get it to the port under cover of darkness and put to sea. One wonders whether there were any of the English settlers famously abducted from Baltimore harbour in 1631 remaining alive to attend Spratt’s prayer services. During his time in Algiers, its corsairs captured five English ships, bringing their historical tally according to Spratt’s information to 1,700 Christian ships overall. We’ll never know exactly how many tens of thousands were consequently herded into the bagnios, the port’s slave pens, and then brought to the badestan, its slave market, for sale.
After about three or four years’ captivity in Algiers, Spratt got back to an increasingly godly England where he joined the winning side. Following a stint as chaplain in the parliamentary navy, he ministered across the West Country. Then in the middle of the 1650s with the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland complete, he decided to head back to Munster where, evading the tories plaguing the highways, he preached in the parishes of Mitchelstown and Galbally and acquired a veteran’s land grant. But his fortune changed again after the Restoration when he was ejected from Mitchelstown for being too Puritan and the Condon family, as restored Catholic proprietors, returned to challenge his land tenure.
But extraordinarily, providence smiled on him again when he got Tipperary town as a parish and when litigant Patrick Condon, allegedly drunk, fell off his horse into a ditch and broke his neck. Spratt remained grateful to God in being able to raise two surviving children even though he and his wife, Palgrave, lost three others. He regularly organised ‘days of humiliation’ of fasting and prayer for God’s forgiveness after the persecutions suffered by fellow Protestants in France, Germany, Hungary and the New World and lived long enough see himself commemorate October 23rd, the date the 1641 rebellion broke out, as a solemn ‘day of thanksgiving’ in the Church of Ireland. Spratt died three years into the reign of the Catholic king James II, but still felt, with regard to a law case concerning additional parishes he wished to obtain, that things were going in the right direction, ending his memoir with the words: ‘I was much in prayer about that time and God heard me. Gloria Altissimo’.
Devereux Spratt, whose Experimentall obversations for frequent meditation tells this vivid Protestant version of the seventeenth century, isn’t remembered in Ireland today. Yet he – along with many others English speakers who arrived in Algiers by accident, design or under duress – are suitably memorialised there in a lovely ecclesiastical oasis.
The story of the escape from Algiers to Majorca was told by one of the participants in William Oakley’s Eben-ezer: or a small monument of great mercy (London, 1675). The Reverend Spratt’s memoir was published in full by St John D Seymour from a surviving manuscript as Adventures and Experiences of a seventeenth-century Clergyman (Church of Ireland pamphlet, Dublin, 1909).
22/9/2025
