[4] According to documents discovered by the archivist Albert Devoulx, Hamidou "belonged to a class of Arabs settled in the cities for a more or less long time, which the Europeans called Moors".

[5] Despite this, after the battle off Cape Gata, his captured officers and crew said that he was Kabyle during an interview with their American captors.

[7] At age 10 he started working aboard a pirate ship commanded by Raïs Memmou as a cabin boy.

[8] There are no documents on the activity of Raïs Hamidou during his early years as a pirate captain in Algiers, but we can assume that he was under the tutelage of an older privateer, and that he was doing his apprenticeship.

[13] In 1795 or 1796, after returning from a raid in Italy he was caught in a storm and anchored at La Calle, a French outpost in nominally Algerian territory.

But he was able to calm the anger of the dey and soon, he had a frigate built by the Spanish Maestro Antonio, a renegade carpenter in Algiers.

[9] Hamidou is mentioned regularly in the register of catches, especially involving Genoese, Venetian, Neapolitan and Greek vessels.

[21] These successes earned the Rais the title of the admiral of the Algerian fleet, and his own villa in El Biar from Hussein Khodja who later became Dey.

[22] For nearly two years, Hamidou's name ceased to appear on the prize register because of internal problems and rivalry with the Odjak, and the jealousy of the new dey.

[23] Hamidou was sent into exile in Beirut, but Hadj Ali Dey, who came to power in 1809, invited him back and reappointed him to all of his previous positions.