"But too true it is," wrote Monson, "that since that time our poor English, and especially the people of the West country, who trade that way daily, fall into the hands of those pirates. It is too lamentable to hear their complaints, and too intolerable to suffer the misery that has befallen them."[27] By 1625 the Turkish pirate ship was "a common object of the seashore" in the West. There were at least a score of them in the Channel. They captured the Island of Lundy, and, "Hun-like", threatened to burn Ilfracombe unless a large sum was paid as indemnity. They landed in Cornwall one Sunday, surrounded a church while divine service was proceeding, and carried off sixty men from the congregation into slavery. Some months earlier it had been officially reported that there were nearly 1400 Englishmen captive in Salee alone, "all, or greatest part, taken within 20 or 30 miles of Dartmouth, Plymouth, or Falmouth. When the winter takes, then the Sally men-of-war go to Flushing and Holland, where, having supplied all wants, and the winter past, they go to sea again. If they want men in the places with the Dutch, they are furnished." Perhaps the most celebrated coastal raid was that made by Murad Reis upon the village of Baltimore, on the Munster coast, on 31st June, 1631. Piloted by a traitor from Dungarvon--one Flachet by name, who, it is consoling to learn, expiated his crime on the scaffold--the "Turks" sailed into the little harbour in the dead of night and descended on the sleeping village like a "bolt from the blue". Completely surprised, the Irishmen could oppose no resistance to the dark-skinned demons and their blacker-hearted renegade comrades. Those who were not fortunate enough to be slain on their own doorsteps were herded on board the corsairs with all the weeping women and children of the village, even babies in arms, and carried off into a captivity worse than death itself. The total "bag" amounted to 237 men, women, and children. Baltimore was then a thriving fishing centre, but it has never recovered from this raid. The south coast of Ireland and the Bristol Channel seem to have been a favourite hunting-ground at this period. Murad had already been harrying the English coast before he carried out his coup at Baltimore. The year before the "Turks" had taken six ships _near Bristol_, and had something like forty ships operating in English waters. But the Government of King Charles was so feeble and so incompetent that even the Sack of Baltimore failed to rouse it to the necessary action.