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Queen Charlotte at eighty yards from the mole, springs on her cables. Exmouth had learned close range as a frigate captain named Pellew.

For three centuries the corsairs of the Barbary coast had worked the Mediterranean and beyond as a slave fishery, taking sailors, fishermen, and sometimes whole coastal villages; the raiding had reached Ireland and Iceland at its high-water mark, and the ransom of Christians was a standing line in half the treasuries of Europe. The powers found it cheaper to pay tribute than to fight, and did, for generations, the young United States included. What changed in 1816 was partly conscience and mostly spare capacity: the Napoleonic wars were over, the Royal Navy had nothing left to prove, and in May the corsairs massacred some 200 Corsican and Sicilian coral fishermen at Bona who worked under British protection. London sent Lord Exmouth, who as plain Edward Pellew had been the most famous frigate captain of his generation, with five ships of the line, and the Dutch added a frigate squadron under van Capellen. The ultimatum to the Dey of Algiers was new in kind: not a ransom negotiation but a demand to abolish Christian slavery outright. The Dey declined, and on 27 August 1816 Exmouth took the Queen Charlotte in to 80 yards from the mole head, springs on her cables, and opened a bombardment that lasted about nine hours. The fleet fired some 50,000 round shot; the Algerine navy burned at its moorings; the shore batteries were dismounted stone by stone. It was not cheap: over 800 allied casualties, a heavier butcher's bill in proportion than Trafalgar. Toward midnight the fleet warped out with its ammunition nearly gone, which the Dey did not know, and by morning he had accepted everything: 1,083 slaves freed, most of them Italians, walking down to the boats; the ransom money of the previous year repaid; and a treaty ending, on paper, the enslavement of Christians at Algiers. On paper is the honest phrase. The corsair economy resumed at lower volume within years, and it took the French conquest of 1830 to end it, replacing one servitude with a colonial one whose bill ran into the next century. But the day itself was real to the people in the boats, and it entered British naval lore as the fleet's last great action under sail against a fortress. George Chambers, who painted it 20 years on for the Naval Gallery at Greenwich, had begun life as a ship's boy out of Whitby at the age of eight and painted rigging the way a man does who has skinned his hands on it. His canvas gives the foreground not to the admirals but to the boat crews between the ships, rowing wounded men out of the smoke while the city burns like an amphitheater above them.