Most Irishmen are familiar with Davis' thrilling poem The Sack of Baltimore, which tells the story of the swoop made by the Algerian corsairs in the seventeenth century on the village of Baltimore in the south-west of Cork county.
On that occasion the pirates took nearly 300 prisoners, who were subsequently sold as slaves in Algiers. It is, however, a curious, but little known, fact that there should have been in the nineteenth century voluntary emigration by Irishmen to the land of the Algerians.
Marshal MacMahon, desirous of diverting some portion of the stream of emigration from the country of his forefathers to the rich and fertile fields of Algeria, despatched a confidential agent to Ireland in 1869, with the result that about 150 Irishmen of the farming class set sail for Algeria in the October of that year. The experiment, however, proved a failure owing to lack of capital and the inroads caused by fevers, and in a few years the Irish colony vanished from this historic part of Northern Africa.
The Irish Times, December 27th, 1929.
