george_rooke

In 1609 Ward continued his depredations: he was said to be off Sardinia in May with nine bertons, and his subordinate Bishop was off Ireland with ten or eleven ships and 1000 men in August. An English attempt to negotiate Ward's return to England failed, as did an attempt on his life, and despite a joint Spanish and French attack on Tunis which fired some thirty vessels, some apparently Ward's, he was said to be about to leave for Ireland with a squadron of fourteen vessels at the end of the year. By now his reputation in England was such that his exploits were celebrated not only by three ballads but by two pamphlets, neither factually reliable: Newes from sea, of two notorious pyrats Ward the Englishman and Danseker the Dutchman, with a true relation of all or the most piraces by them committed unto the sixt of Aprill 1609 and A true and certaine report of the beginning, proceedings, overthrowes, and now present estate of Captaine Ward and Dansker, the two late famous pirates; from their first setting foorth to this present time, as also with the death of divers of Wards chiefe captaines.

The years 1610–12 repeated the pattern of previous years: during sweeps through the eastern Mediterranean at least two of Ward's vessels were shipwrecked in late 1610 but his fleet still had fifteen vessels and 1500 men; in June 1611 he was said to have left Tunis for either Calabria or the Adriatic; and in March 1612 he captured the Valnegrina, bound for Alexandria. In late 1610 he had converted to Islam, his apostasy being made the subject of Robert Daborne's play, A Christian Turn'd Turke (1612), in which the fictionalized Ward met his just deserts by being torn to pieces and his remains thrown into the sea. In the same year both he and Dansiker were named and discussed in Thomas Dekker's If this be not a Good Play the Devil is in it. According to the Venetians he took the name of Issouf Reis; to a Tunisian source of the late seventeenth century, itself a testimony to the longevity of his fame, he was Captain Wardiyya.

Clearly by 1612 he had given up any idea of leaving Tunis. In or before 1615 the Scottish traveller William Lithgow dined with him in Tunis at his ‘faire Palace, beautified with rich Marble and Alabaster stones’ (Ewen, 12) and in 1616 reported that Ward in his retirement had taken to rearing chicks by incubating eggs in camel dung. Ward may have gone to sea one last time in 1622. Apparently he died in Tunis during an outbreak of plague in the summer of 1623; his body was thrown into the sea. Besides a wife in England, there was another in Tunis: Jessimina, a Palermitan renegade.

DAVID R. RANSOME
Sources C. L'E. Ewen, Captain John Ward, ‘Arch-Pirate’ (1939) · C. M. Senior, A nation of pirates (1976) · C. Lloyd, English corsairs on the Barbary coast (1981) · N. Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the age of discovery (New York, 1999) · CSP Venice, 1607–23 · N. Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (1998)
Wealth at death unknown, but probably considerable

David R. Ransome, ‘Ward, John (c.1553–1623?)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004