Corsairs of Umbar

Umbar before the Corsairs

Umbar was the greatest natural harbour on the coasts of Middle-earth south of the Bay of Belfalas, and the Númenóreans fortified it in the middle of the Second Age. It was there that Ar-Pharazôn landed with his fleet in S.A. 3261 to humble Sauron, and it was from the King's Men who settled it that the Black Númenóreans of Umbar descended, Númenóreans who had worshipped the Dark and hated the Faithful of Gondor as traitors. Gondor's Ship-kings took the haven in T.A. 933 under Eärnil I and held it through the siege of the Haradrim, and Hyarmendacil I's victory of 1050 made it a Gondorian fortress and the southern limit of the realm. A great white pillar crowned with a crystal globe was raised on the headland to commemorate Sauron's humbling.

The rebels of the Kin-strife

The Corsairs proper were born from the Kin-strife. When Castamir the Usurper was killed by Eldacar at the Crossings of Erui in 1447, his sons and their supporters, most of the great captains of Gondor's fleet, held out in Pelargir for a year and then, in 1448, sailed away with nearly the whole navy to Umbar. There they made themselves lords, mingling with the remnant of the older Númenórean population and with the men of Harad, and from Umbar they declared war on the kings of Gondor whom they regarded as illegitimate. The loss of the fleet crippled Gondor's sea power for centuries and made the Corsairs a lasting enemy on its southern flank.

Their first great blow fell in 1634, when Angamaitë and Sangahyando, great-grandsons of Castamir, raided Pelargir and killed King Minardil. The Great Plague followed two years later and Gondor was too weak to retaliate; the Corsairs grew rich on the trade of the south and on plunder. In 1810 King Telumehtar sailed south, stormed Umbar, killed the last descendants of Castamir and took the name Umbardacil, but Gondor could not hold the haven for long against the pressure of the Haradrim, and by the time of the Ruling Stewards it had been lost again and remained a nest of pirates whose Númenórean blood was much diluted by the men of Harad.

Corsairs and Stewards

The Corsairs struck whenever Gondor was weakest. In 2758, the year of the Long Winter, three great fleets came up out of Umbar and Harad and landed along the whole coast of Gondor from Lebennin to Anfalas, so that the Steward Beren could send no help to Rohan against Wulf. Their power was checked but not broken. In 2980 the captain Thorongil, who was Aragorn serving Ecthelion II under another name, led a small fleet by night into the harbour of Umbar, burned a great part of the Corsair ships and killed their Captain of the Haven on the quays, a blow that kept the south quiet for many years.

The War of the Ring

By the end of the Third Age Umbar was Sauron's client, and its fleet was his instrument for the assault on Gondor. In March 3019 the black-sailed ships of Umbar, fifty great vessels and many smaller, sailed up the Anduin, took Pelargir and ravaged Lebennin, so that the lords of the coast could not send their men to Minas Tirith. Aragorn, coming through the Paths of the Dead with the Grey Company and the Dead Men of Dunharrow, reached Pelargir on 13 March; the Dead overran the ships and the Corsairs fled in terror or leapt into the river. The captured fleet, manned by the freed slaves and the men of Lebennin and Lamedon, carried Aragorn to the Harlond on 15 March, and the sight of the Corsair sails raised the enemy's hopes on the Pelennor Fields before the standard of Elendil broke them. It was the last great stroke the Corsairs of Umbar attempted.

Relations with other peoples

The Corsairs were Gondor's oldest human enemies, a hatred sharpened by shared blood; they saw themselves as the true heirs of Númenor and the kings of Gondor as half-breeds. They were allied by trade and marriage with the Haradrim and in the last age served Sauron. With the Black Númenóreans they shared a coast and a resentment of the Faithful, and the Mouth of Sauron may have come from among them.

The Corsairs were a mixed people. Their leading families kept traces of the tall, dark Númenórean look, but by the end of the Third Age most of them were swarthy men of the southern coasts, indistinguishable from the Haradrim who fought alongside them. They were seamen before all else, fighting with cutlass and bow from the decks of great black-sailed galleys rowed by slaves taken on their raids.

Umbar was a city of ships. Its harbour, its slaves and its fleet were the whole of its economy, and its lords were captains rather than kings. The Corsairs kept a memory of Númenor turned to bitterness, and of Castamir as a wronged king; the pillar of Ar-Pharazôn stood over their haven until Sauron's servants threw it down after his return. Their ships were large, many-oared and black-sailed, and it was by those sails that Gondor knew them. They lived by raiding, piracy and the slave trade, and by carrying the trade of Harad, and they accepted Sauron's overlordship in the last years of the age because it promised them Gondor's coasts.

The Corsairs sprang from the defeat of Castamir's rebellion in 1447. His sons and the captains of Gondor's fleet took the ships to Umbar in 1448 and there founded a hostile realm of exiles, joining themselves to the older Númenórean settlers of the haven and to the Haradrim, and calling themselves the true Númenóreans against the mingled line of Eldacar.

The seizure of the Corsair fleet at Pelargir in 3019 ended the sea power of Umbar. Under King Elessar the Reunited Kingdom made peace with the peoples of Harad on its own terms and Umbar was reduced; nothing more is told of the Corsairs in the published texts, but their long war against Gondor ended with the Fourth Age.