In 1631 the town of Baltimore, in West Cork, fell victim to a sensational attack by pirates which ended the 400-year reign of the O'Driscolls. More than 100 men, women, and children were taken away from the coves of West Cork to the slave markets of The Moors, in North Africa.
By David Mullen
The name Carbery’s Hundred Isles is a bit of a misnomer as there are far from one hundred islands lying in West Cork’s Roaringwater Bay. The ‘Carbery’ derives from the medieval Barony of Carbery along the coast, though the name still survives in the two reformed baronies of Carbery East and West.
The ‘Hundred Isles’ part comes from an 1844 poem by Thomas Davis dramatising the sack, by Algerian pirates, of Baltimore in 1631. The pirates, commanded by a Dutchman, Murad Reis, snuck in to Baltimore under cover of darkness through the channel separating the mainland from Sherkin Island, one of the largest of the ‘hundred isles’ and snatched 107, mostly English, settlers away to the bazaars and harems of North Africa.