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During the Middle Ages, the mere mention of the Barbary Coast was enough to incite a fearful flutter in the bosom of every self-respecting gentlewoman in Europe; the North African seaboard between Egypt and the Atlantic Ocean was considered the most dangerous place on earth, a heathen hideaway for ruthless depredators who stalked the seas in search of foreign ships, wealth, and slaves. It mattered little that the seaborne "marauders" were, in fact, corsairs -- Mediterranean privateers given permission by their rulers to stem the bloody tide of the Crusades -- or that European seafarers had long employed similar tactics; in the hearts and minds of invading Christendom, the Muslim captains were savage, bloodthirsty pirates, and the Barbary Coast encapsulated all that was wicked in the far reaches of the world.
Several centuries later, as New World riches turned Spanish galleons into slow-moving treasure troves, it was the Caribbean that inspired similar tales of breathless horror and futile prayers. Islands such as Jamaica, Hispaniola, and Tortuga became treacherous enclaves for runaway slaves, French deserters, British privateers, Norwegian sailors, and escaped convicts of every nationality, creed, and color, all of whom banded together to form the highly skilled, thoroughly debauched, undoubtedly pitiless, and, consequently, most famous pirate crews the world had yet known. But, while cities and ports throughout the Caribbean staked their economy, and sometimes their sovereignty, on the brutality and excess of high-seas outlaws, not one was tagged with the "Barbary Coast" epithet; that dubious honor was preserved for a small, fog-enshrouded town on the Pacific coast.
"The Barbary Coast," wrote Benjamin Estelle Lloyd in his 1878 chronicle, Lights and Shades of San Francisco, "is the haunt of the low and the vile of every kind. The petty thief, the house burglar, the tramp, the whoremonger, lewd women, cutthroats, murderers, all are found here. Dance-halls and concert-saloons, where bleary-eyed men and faded women drink vile liquor, smoke offensive tobacco, engage in vulgar conduct, sing obscene songs, and say and do everything to heap upon themselves more degradation, are numerous. Low gambling houses, thronged with riot-loving rowdies, in all stages of intoxication, are there. Opium dens, where heathen Chinese and God-forsaken men and women are sprawled in miscellaneous confusion, disgustingly drowsy or completely overcome,...