Corsairs and Navies, 1600-1760

CORSAIRS AND NAVIES

1660 - 1760

Sebastian le Prestre de Vauban. By Rigaud (Girandoti)

CORSAIRS AND NAVIES

1660 - 1760

J.S. BROMLEY

THE H A M B L E D O N PRESS LONDON

AND

RONCEVERTE

Published by The Hambledon Press 1987 102 Gloucester Avenue, London NW1 8HX (U.K.) 309 Greenbrier Avenue, Ronceverte WV 24970 (U.S.A.) ISBN 0 907628 77 8 ©Jean Bromley British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Bromley, J.S. Corsairs and navies, 1660-1760 1. Privateering - History I. Title 910.4'5 D27

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bromley, J.S. (John Selwyn) Corsairs and navies, 1660-1760 Collection of the author's essays. English and French Includes bibliographical references. 1. Privateering - History - 17th Century Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Privateering - History - 18th century Addresses, essays.'lectures. 3. Naval history, Modern - Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Title V47. B76 1987 359.4'09'032 85-30584

Printed and bound by Billing and Sons Ltd., Worcester

CONTENTS Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Preface John Bromley, Historian by John McManners and John Roberts Publications of J.S. Bromley 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Outlaws at Sea, 1660-1720: Liberty, Equality and Fraternity among Caribbean Freebooters Colonies at War A Letter-Book of Robert Cole, British CónsulGeneral at Algiers, 1694-1712 The North Sea in Wartime, 1688-1713 The Importance of Dunkirk Reconsidered, 1688-1713 Jacques-Winoc Plets, armateur en course (c. 1650-1716) Quelques reflections sur le fonctionnement des classes maritimes en France, 1689-1713 The Jacobite Privateers in the Nine Years War Les equipages des corsaires sous Louis XIV, 1688-1713 The Loan of French Naval Vessels to Privateering Enterprises, 1688-1713 The French Privateering War, 1702-13 Projets et contrats d'armement en course marseillais, 1705-1712 The Trade and Privateering of Saint-Malo during the War of the Spanish Succession Duguay Trouin: The Financial Background

vii ix xi xv xxii 1 21 29 43 73 103 121 139 167 187 213 243 279 297

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15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

French Traders in the South Sea: The Journal of Lieutenant Pitouays, 1706-1709 The Channel Island Privateers in the War of the Spanish Succession Le commerce de la France de l'Ouest et la guerre maritime, 1702-1712 Some Zeeland Privateering Instructions: Jacob Sautijn to Captain Salomon Reynders, 1707 Les corsaires zélandais et la navigation scandinave pendant la Guerre de Succession d'Espagne The Profits of Naval Command: Captain Joseph Taylor and his Prizes Prize Office and Prize Agency at Portsmouth, 1689-1748 The Second Hundred Years War

Index compiled by Cecilia Dolley

325 339 389 407 435 449 463 495 505

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The articles reprinted here appeared first in the following places and are reprinted by the kind permission of the original publishers. 1

2 3

4 5 6 7 8

9

10

11 12 13 14

History from Below: Studies in Popular Protest and Popular Ideology in Honour of George Rude, edited by Frederick Krantz (Concordia University, Montreal, 1986), pp. 301-20. History of the English Speaking Peoples, 60 ( 1970), pp. 1921-7. Spoleczénstwo Gospodarka Kul tura: Studia ofiarowane Marìanowi Malowistowi w Czterdziestolecie Pracy Nankowej (Warsaw, 1974), pp. 45-58. Bijdragen en Mededelingen Betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, xcii (1977), pp. 270-99. This appears here for the first time. Revue des Amis du Vieux Dunkerque, xvii (1983), pp. 61-77. Les Cahiers de Montpellier, 6 ( 1982), pp. 11 -29. Statesmen, Scholars and Merchants: Essays in EighteenthCentury History Presented to Dame Lucy Sutherland, edited by J.S. Bromley, A. Whiteman and P.G.M. Dickson (Oxford, 1973), pp. 17-43. Les Hommes et la Mer dans l'Europe du Nord-Ouest de l'Antiquitéà nos jours, edited by A. Lottin, J-C. Hocquet and Stephane Lebecq, Revue du Nord, numero 1 special hors série (1986), pp. 303-22. Les Marines de guerre européenes XVII-XVIIF siècles, edited by M. Acerra, J. Merino and J. Meyer (Presses de l'Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1986), pp. 65-90. Historical Essays Presented to David Ogg, edited by H.F. Bell and R.L. Ollard (London, 1963), pp. 203-31. Revue d'histoire économique et sociale, I (1972), pp. 74-109. Transactions of the Société Guernesiase, xvii ( 1964), pp. 631-47 The Mariner's Mirror, 71 (August, 1985), pp. 259-85.

viii

15 16

17 18

19 20

21 22

Acknowledgements

Revista da Universidade de Coimbra, xxvii (1979), pp. 147-60. Transactions of the Sacíete Guernesiase, xiv ( 1950), pp. 44478; A People of the Sea, edited by Alan Jamieson (Methuen, London, 1986), pp. 136-47. Annales du Midi, Ixv (1953), pp. 49-65. William HI and Louis XIV: Essays by and for Mark A. Thomson, edited by J.S. Bromley and R. Hatten (Liverpool, 1968, pp. 16289. Le Navire et l'economie maritime du Nord de l'Europe, edited by M. Mollat (Paris, 1961), pp. 93-109. Wirtschaftskräfte und Wirtschaftswege II: Wirtschaftskräfte in der Europäischen Expansion. Festschrift für Hermann Kellenbenz, edited by J. Schneider (Stuttgart, 1978), pp. 52944. Hampshire Studies, edited by J. Webb, N. Yates and S. Peacock (Portsmouth, 1981), pp. 169-99. Britain and France: Ten Centuries, edited by D. Johnson, F. Crouzet and H. Bédarida for the Franco-British Council (London, 1980), pp. 164-72,374.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Sebastian le Prestre de Vauban

Frontispiece

John Selwyn Bromley, 1913-1985

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1

The Caribbean and Atlantic Seaboard

23

2

View of Dunkirk

72

3

The English and Dutch fleet bombarding Dunkirk, 21 September, 1694

102

4

Barques Longues

120

5

Corvette, Barque and Brigantine

166

6

Duguay Trouin

296

7

Title page of the Journal of Lieutenant Pitouays

330

8

Plan of the Bay of Valparaiso

334

9

Louis Alexandre de Bourbon, Com te de Toulouse

388

10

Privateers in action

448

PERMISSIONS Giraudon (Frontispiece, 9); Presses de la Cité (6).

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PREFACE

A proper modesty usually restrains authors from setting forth the circumstances surrounding the genesis of their works, but the reader of a posthumous publication may perhaps expect a word of explanation. The initiative for this present collection came not from John Bromley, but from a longstanding friend and fellow historian who persuaded him during his last illness to assemble the scholarly contributions made over thirty-five years in some more accessible and permanent form. It was an inspired suggestion, for though John's offprints were much prized by their fortunate recipients, not least because some of his choicest pieces appeared in publications unlikely to claim the attention of his more insular contemporaries, few even among his closest colleagues suspected that a roll-call of his publications would run to forty titles. Despite his declining physical powers, John devoted himself wholeheartedly to the task of preparing these for publication. To give the volume a greater coherence he decided to include only those articles concerned with what he called 'the Private War at Sea'; having settled the subject matter, he proceeded to determine the precise sequence of the contents and to choose, with characteristic care, a title which would leave no doubt about the cargo. Even then he found the energy to select the illustrations and to make recommendations about the index. Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760 has been published almost exactly in accordance with John's instructions, the only change being the removal of his introductory essay to the facsimile edition of John Baltharpe's The Straights Voyage on the grounds that it stood uneasily apart from Baltharpe's text. Corsairs and Navies is John's historical testament; though we must regret that his inexhaustible quest for answers and his unstinted generosity to fellow scholars have robbed us of the monograph he was preparing on the French corsairs and European commerce between 1688 and 1713, the present volume, together with his research files,1 now in the care of the National Maritime Museum, go some way to alleviate that loss. Always punctilious in his courtesies, John left precise informations, These files include Professor Bromley's papers and many microfilms. The Department of Printed Books and Manuscripts at the National Maritime Museum has prepared a list of these for consultation by researchers.

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Preface

neatly written on a used envelope, concerning the dedication and the acknowledgements. He wished to place on record his gratitude for the generous help he received from the trustees of the Leverhulme Trust Fund, who awarded him an emeritus fellowship in 1978, and from the British Academy, which made him a grant towards the costs of microfilming French archives. John also recalled his debt of gratitude to the Oxford History Faculty as well as to 'countless friends'. The many archivists in record offices in this country and abroad, who rendered him services over the years will find in the footnotes that their help has not gone unrecognized. Many friends of John contributed in one way or another to the appearance of this volume. Particular thanks are due to Brian and Cecilia Dolley, Jack Simmons, Stevan Pavlowitch, John McManners, John Roberts, Simon Groenveld and Patrick Crowhurst. It is a matter of special satisfaction that the University of Southampton showed its appreciation of the Emeritus Professor of Modern History's many contributions to the academic community by making a subvention towards the costs of this publication. Finally, John left strict orders that his comprehensive debt to his wife Jean should be registered here. It is my pleasant duty to discharge this heartfelt wish, for without her constant support and encouragement historians would have been deprived of these dazzling glimpses into the cosmopolitan world of the privateer. Alastair Duke Southampton 26 April 1987

To the Memory of the late RICHARD PARES, Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford

JOHN SELWYN BROMLEY

(1911-1985)

JOHN BROMLEY, HISTORIAN

This volume of selected articles and essays by John Bromley is dedicated, sadly, to his memory. Had one time to identify and collect the materials, another volume could be produced consisting of pages scattered in the works of others which, in reality, were partly his. He was a generous soul; he would lend money to a hard-up research student as cheerfully as he would push Richard Pares in his wheelchair to the Parks at Oxford to watch the cricket (eavesdroppers on their conversation being dazzled by the display of eighteenth-century lore). More than this - a generosity whose folly only a practising historian can appreciate - his vast store of archival gleanings was freely set at the disposal of others, and his original ideas and inspirations were there for the asking to anyone who consulted him. How much of the volume of the New Cambridge Modern History which he edited is really his, in addition to the chapters which bear his name? He corrected, improved and added to everyone's work, year after year, until final publication. One contributor who submitted a draft referring to the noise made by the late-seventeenth-century printing presses received learned advice from John about the best specific word, and 'clatter' became the agreed answer which went into the text. Then rather later, an editorial letter arrived offering a splendid additional paragraph with footnote references to works in Dutch and Portuguese, an opportunity to go bravely in borrowed plumes which was gratefully accepted. This addition, in the end, never got into print; four years later, in a final exercise in compression, John humbly asked permission to remove it - having entirely forgotten his own authorship. The sad news of John Bromley's death had an international resonance. Spanish, Dutch, French, Polish and American scholars expressed their sense of loss. He had advised so many people, corrected so many typescripts, suggested so many avenues of research, attended so many conferences in so many places. More especially was he known and well regarded by the French and the Dutch. That familiar figure emerging from the Palais Soubise at the end of the day, floppy Basque beret rakishly askew and briefcase swinging as he sauntered away, was a marvellous ambassador - to some French historians the first demonstration that there really were Englishmen who could be trusted with their country's history. The Dutch admitted him a Commander of the Order of

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Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760

Orange-Nassau, a distinction which greatly pleased him. One of his friends likened him to Jean Le Clerc, the 'facteur de la République des Lettres', the indispensable go-between among the Protestant intellectuals from various nations who found refuge in Holland in the late seventeenth century. It was a fair comparison, for John, knowing everybody and sharing in so many intellectual ventures, was promoting the cause of history without seeking acclaim for himself, and it was a history free from national prejudices and, indeed, from national perspectives altogether. In his writing he gave unstinted praise to two kinds of men, and one of the categories consisted of those whose achievements were self-consciously supra-national, contributions to Europe. On this ground, Louis XIV (whose warlike pride would otherwise have been intolerable) was respected as the figurehead of the brilliant civilisation of France which dominated and brightened the style and imagination of contemporary Europe, and William III is described as achieving true greatness only because he was one of the few who had 'a sense of the European commonweal'. In the world of international historical scholarship, the universal admiration for John was sometimes qualified (if that is the word) by saying he was a 'perfectionist - hence, the magisterial, definitive book that was in him would never be published. The word 'perfectionist' needs interpretation. His sophisticated Inaugural Lecture (1961) is revealing for what it omits as for what it says. Nowhere does the new professor defend history as an intellectual discipline suited to teaching the bureaucrats and business men of the future the art of analysing complex problems and the skills of lucid prose writing, or as a fund of knowledge for politicians and diplomats - the standard arguments of academics for the public funding of the Arts. On the contrary, he seeks disciples coming to him out of'disinterested intellectual curiosity'. Nowhere does he put forward the fashionable relativist view of each age writing its own version of the past in the light of its peculiar, immediate insights. Rather, he talks of the expansion of the area of agreed certainty, the identification of long-term factors, the interpretation of 'collective, therefore representative events', the link up with sociology, art, linguistics and musicology on the way to total comprehension of 'civilisations', vast Toynbee-inspired units of study in which Churches and States are 'only the most important manifestations'. To those who knew John well, beneath the crackle of the epigrams lurked something akin to aesthetic despair. His affection for his students and his yearning to get 'behind the beards and the boogie-woogie' to understand them was matched by his realisation that so many of them were on an unenthusiastic cliche-ridden pilgrimage towards the 'false glitter' of a mere degree. Disinterested curiosity was a commodity in short supply. The goal, the total understanding of civilisations lay far ahead in a distant future; the only way to the truth of things is to build a 'vast infrastructure of

John Bromley, Historian

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indispensable pedantry'. Without massive support from that infrastructure, John himself would never generalise. Had he believed that each generation composes its own history and been willing to write provisionally, he might have overcome his temperament, and become the Braudel of the North Atlantic. Temperament was, of course, the essential reason why he felt unable to venture into wide-ranging hypotheses and confident generalisations. He was too sensitive, too conscious of all the nuances and, above all, he was obsessed - no other word is strong enough - with the Truth. It was so in his life; although he was religious and admired the Anglican Liturgy, for years he taught at Keble College without a Fellowship because he refused to take an archaic oath. It was so in his writing. Anyone who submitted a typescript to him for comment - as so many did - would reflect ruefully afterwards that the best epigrams had been cancelled because 'the word is too strong', 'the evidence doesn't quite go that far'. In an early essay on the 'Decline of Absolute Monarchy in France, 1683-1774', a masterpiece of historical synthesis, he insisted on beginning with 'Were it not for one very important proviso', which reduced his dramatic opening sentence to the tentative. And his concluding paragraph (on medieval survivals in the France of the Enlightenment), which deserves to be anthologised for all students of style as a model of evocative writing, was one he himself wanted to omit; he told the editors of the volume that he had written it only because he supposed it was the sort ofthing they liked. They had to be very firm to prevent him suppressing it. What we have missed because of John's severe self-limitation of scope may be guessed from a reading of his introduction to Volume VI (16881725) of the New Cambridge Modern History. Injudicious paragraphs he sketches the contributions of the guerre de course to the fortunes of both sides in the great war, the switch of power from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, the vast profits of the South American market, the 'deadly holeand-corner skirmishing in North America' where the shape of the distant future was being determined. His synthesis would have been global, as aware of the significance of the collapse of the Mughal Empire as of the decline of Portugal, and finding everywhere strange linkages, like that between 'the high summer of piracy' from Madagascar to the Red Sea and the manipulations of'respectable circles in New York and Boston'. This is an adumbration of the great book he did not write. Instead, he devoted a lifetime of minute research to contributing to the 'indispensable infrastructure' - though how far removed from 'pedantry' is the series of brilliant, learned and sharply-etched cameos that came from his pen! His choice of theme in the infrastructure, however, may seem to require some special further explanation. Psychologically and emotionally, it has been said, he was destined to study the eighteenth

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Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760

century. The wide-ranging interest he showed in 'manners'; his cosmopolitanism, the sense he diffused of not only the cultivated but the self-cultivated mind, all suggested affinities with the age at the centre of his professional concern. But what aspect of the century would he turn to? His diversions from the archives were literature, provided it was not harshly satirical, with correspondence and memoirs as favourites if the writers observed the courtesies; art, especially painting in its more subtle forms; and music of the gentler Romantic kind. Everything suggested that his eighteenth century would be that of the Enlightenment, of baroque shading off into rococo, of the age of Reason phasing off into sensibilité - he would write of culture, the arts and patronage, of the history of ideas, of the conduct of intelligent diplomatic negotiations and the manoeuvres of sophisticated courtiers. Yet this aesthete, this gentle scholar who went to labyrinthine lengths in his correspondence and conversation to avoid letting slip a single wounding word, chose to study the clash of hardened fighting men, some of them brutal characters who lived by rapine. Perhaps opposite called to opposite, the imagination swinging to 'the dangerous edge of things'. But there is a simpler explanation of the apparent paradox. Privateers and pirates, in a strange sense, were a supra-national group, belonging to the confraternity of the oceans. Even those who were official commerce raiders and - maybe - dedicated patriots, were conscious of their independence of the regular naval forces and of their individual freedom of action on the high seas. They provided John with a cosmopolitan subject of study, one in which the powers of Western Europe were involved in a pattern of diplomatic, commercial and, indeed, lawless activities. It was a theme after his own heart, even if at first glance one would have assumed he would deal with cultural and artistic exchanges between the nations, rather than warlike ones. And there was a final argument to turn the balance of choice. Here was a theme which, above all else, involved stories of courage, and the courageous were the other category of men to whom John gave unstinting praise. Significantly, Charles XII of Sweden, quixotic and foolish, was his hero, on Dr. Johnson's ground: 'Were Socrates and Charles the Twelfth of Sweden both present in any company, and Socrates to say, "Follow me and hear a lecture in philosophy" and Charles, laying his hand on his sword, to say, "Follow me and dethrone the Czar", a man would be ashamed to follow Socrates . . . Mankind reverence those who have got over fear, which is so general a weakness. ' Hesitant, erudite and sensitive, this most peaceable of historians was glad to recount the stories of men of action, men of courage. For some the jump of imagination involved in concentrating on the privateer theme would have been too difficult to contemplate, but the obligation of the historian to enter with sympathy into minds and societies utterly alien was one which John could fulfil with ease, naturally

John Bromley, Historian

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and instinctively. To an almost inhibiting degree, he could understand life-styles totally different from his own, to the point where he found it almost impossible to pass a simple, ruthless judgement against anyone. A friend who worked with him on an abortive project for a text book on eighteenth-century European history wanted to condemn Louis XIV's warlike ambitions, the Polish noblemen's stupid constitutional arrangements, the disorganised barbarism of the Barbary Regencies: to no avail -John always had defences and explanations. In a remarkable article, he described the ƒ ¡bustiers of the Caribbean as dirty, blasphemous and debauched, but he admired their code of distributive justice - their merit awards, allowances for special responsibilities, compensation for the crippled, their solemn funeral rites, their recognition of matelotage, the bond of individual friendship. The title 'Liberty, Equality and Fraternity among the Caribbean Freebooters' is not sardonic, and the essay begins: 'Two societies, two conceptions of justice, collaborated and collided when French forces stormed Cartagena of the Indies in May 1697'. 'Two societies'? France, the heartland of European civilisation, and a gang of cut-throats in steamy jungles and on tropical seas: there was no anomaly in setting them in parallel. If a Time Machine had transported John back to meet the subjects of his researches, how would he have reacted? Two antithetical pictures, both convincing, come to mind. One would be his fastidious repulsion against any hint of violence or cruelty; the other would see him seated on a coil of rope or on a tavern bench talking endlessly with the riff-raff of the Western ocean. Historians, said the Inaugural Lecture, must be 'lovers of life', and his love of life, all life, was as evident in his recreation of the past as in his administration, teaching and friendships in the present. He had time for, and an interest in, everyone. His love of people was associated with a wide-eyed admiration for the technical artefacts men make and use as extensions of themselves; to him, they were as revealing about mankind as philosophy, poetry and other intellectual creations. The sea fascinated him (in encouraging a friend to take a professorship in Tasmania, he said: 'You will live in a seaport; that's always a bonus' - and he himself went to Southampton soon afterwards). But it was not a preoccupation with the ocean as a scenic background, dark with storms or in sunlit calm, but with the sailing ships that plied upon it, with their delicate patterns of mast and rigging and their multifarious mysterious tackle - things of beauty, the supreme expression of human ingenuity and teamwork. In these essays we meet all sorts of craft: the majestic ships of the line with everything from 40 to very near a 100 guns, and the wherries and flutes that watered and provisioned them, the corvettes or barques longues with their six to eight guns, the /regates a bombes for rapid sailing, the sloops and yachts, flyboats and pinks, barques and brigantines, ketches, hoys and galliots. Through the pages resound litanies of the names of ships, everyone savoured as if

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the author himself was the captain on the bridge or the armateur on the quayside seeing it off: Le Sauvage, La Railleuse, La Roue de Fortune, L'Espérance de Nantes, L'Ange Gardien, the Southsea Castle and England's Frigott . . . . He knew what stores they had to carry for repairs, and rejoiced to find them complete with dry tar, tallow, sulphur, parchment skins, 'tolles noiailles' for mending sails and 'estamines' for new flags. Their crews were his old friends and he knew all their appointed tasks: captains, mates, pilots, prizemasters, pursers, surgeons, chaplains and the bossemans in charge of anchors and grappling. He could interpret the 'lingua franca' of the North Sea, which enabled Dutch, English and Scandinavian seamen to serve together, he could mediate in the disputes over 'gunnage and tunnage' and 'pluntrage'. John Bromley was the comprehensive historian of all the irregular forces scouring the high seas in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century: English, Dutch, French (and the Jacobite raiders launched by James II in exile), the buccaneers of the West Indies and the Barbary corsairs. But to describe him as the historian of privateering and leave it at that would be to do him an injustice. He was concerned with the politics, war plans and economic designs of the various governments involved in the guerre de course, and if his imagination was supremely captured by ships and sailors, his interests and sympathies extended to the people of the seaports who fitted out the vessels and welcomed them home. The irregularly paid workers of the dockyards with their varied expertise, the amateurs who furnished the vessels, the corn-factors, oil men, chandlers, sword cutlers, rope-makers, barrel hoopers and all others who provisioned and equipped them, the subscribers leagued together under their dépositaires, procurers or directeurs who contributed the finance, 'a popular privateering conspiracy . . . a homogeneous community' extending from the very rich to artisans and widows; these were the subjects of his study. To resurrect these folk, he haunted the Archives Nationales in Paris, and roamed the coastal areas of France, reading in the archives of all the maritime Departments, and in the municipal collections, Chamber of Commerce papers and capitation registers of the ports: Brest, Dunkirk, Le Havre, Saint-Malo, Rochefort, Toulon, Marseille, Bayonne, Bordeaux. The existence of an archival source he had not seen worried him; if only one could plunge into the uncalendared morass of the files of the Parlements and other law courts to unearth more details about the rules for sharing out the spoils of war! His last article, written with the knowledge that death was only weeks away, is a fine example of his comprehensive expertise - ranging from Versailles and the considerations of high strategy to the tall granite houses and narrow streets of Saint-Malo where calculating citizens were clubbing up to finance privateers. There was always in John a tension between his revulsion against the cruel deeds of his raiders and his admiration for their courage and seamanship: 'zig-zagging from coast to

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coast as the winds dictated, joining and parting company from sunset to sunset, infiltrating convoys before dawn . . . anchoring in dead water on the Dogger Bank or judging the tidal caprices of the Pentland Firth'. But in this last essay the central figure is Duguay Trouin, who commanded his first vessel at the age of eighteen, who had compassion on the drowning and on prisoners of war, who was guided into battle by his inner voice, and made honour his guiding star and cared for 'la gioire' more than riches. It was fitting that John, himself facing imminent death with quiet courage, should have chosen to invoke, in the last pages he wrote, the memory of this chivalrous figure, one of'those who have got over fear, which is so general a weakness'. John McManners John Roberts Oxford, 1987

PUBLICATIONS OF J.S. BROMLEY

1950 'The Channel Island Privateers in the War of the Spanish Succession', Sacíete Guemesiase XIV, pp. 444-478. 1953 'Le commerce de la France de l'Ouest et la guerre maritime, 1702-1712', Ármales du midi LXV, pp. 49-65. 1959 'Quelques remarques sur Edmund Burke et le Revolution franchise' in Hommages offerts a M. le doyen Etienne Gros, ed. P. Guiral (Aix-enProvence), pp. 205-10. 'Introduction' to John Baltharpe, The Straights Voyage (Luttrell Society reprint), pp. vii-lii. 1960 (With E. H. Kossmann) ed., Britain and the Netherlands, Papers delivered to the Oxford-Netherlands Historical Conference 1959, (London). 1961 'Les corsaires zélandais et la navigation scandinave pendant la Guerre de Succession d'Espagne' in Le navire et l'economie maritime du nord de l'Europe, ed. M. Mollai (Paris), pp. 93-109, 1962 History and the Younger Generation (Southampton).

1963 'The French Privateering War, 1702-1713' in Historical Essays 1600-1750 presented to David Ogg, ed. H. E. Bell and R. L. Ollard (London), pp. 20331. 1964 'The Trade and Privateering of Saint-Malo during the War of the Spanish Succession', Transactions of the Société Guemesiase XVII, pp. 631-47. (With E. H. Kossmann) ed., Britain and the Netherlands. II. Papers delivered

Publications of J.S. Bromley

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to the Anglo-Dutch Historical Conference 1962, (Groningen).

1968 'Some Zeeland Privateering Instructions: Jacob Sautijn to Captain Salomon Reynders, 1707' in William HI and Louis XIV: Essays 1680-1720 by and f or Mark A. Thomson, ed.J. S. Bromley and R. Hatten (Liverpool), pp. 162-89. (With E. H. Kossmann) ed., Britain and the Netherlands in Europe and Asia. Papers delivered to the Third Anglo-Dutch Historical Conference, (London). 1970 'Introduction' in New Cambridge Modern History VI The Rise of Great Britain and Russia, 1688-1725 ed. J. S. Bromley (Cambridge), pp. 1-36; reprinted 1971. (With R. D. Hussey), 'The Spanish Empire under Foreign Pressure, 1688-1715', ibid., pp. 343-80. (With A. N. Kurat), 'The Retreat of the Turks, 1683-1730', ibid., pp. 608-47. Reprinted in A History of the Ottoman Empire to 1730, ed. V. J. Parry et al., (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 178-218. (With A. N. Ryan), 'Navies, 1660-1720', ibid., pp. 790-833. 'The Decline of Absolute Monarchy, 1683-1774' in France: Government and Society, cd. J. M. Wallace-Hadrill and J. McManners, 2nd. edition (London), pp. 134-60. 'The Later Stuart Navy' in History of the English Speaking People LVI, pp. 1801-4. 'War on the High Seas, 1689-97', ibid., LX, pp. 1921-27. 'Colonies at War, 1701-13', ibid., LXIII, pp. 2026-29. 1971 (With E. H. Kossmann) ed., Britain and the Netherlands IV Metropolis, Dominion and Province. Papers delivered to the Fourth Anglo-Dutch Historical Conference, (The Hague, 1971). 1972 'Projets et contrats d'armement en course marseillais, 1705-1712', Revue d'histoire économique et sociale, I, pp. 74-109. 1973

'Lucy Stuart Sutherland' in Statesmen, Scholars and Merchants: Essays in Eighteenth-Century History presented to Dame Lucy Sutherland, ed. J. S. Bromley, A. Whiteman and P. G. M. Dickson (Oxford), pp. vii-xv. 'TheJacobite Privateers in the Nine Years War', ibid., pp. 17-43. 'In the Shadow of Impressment: Friends of a Naval Militia, 1844-1874' in War and Society. Historical Essays in Memory ofj. R. Western, ed. M. R. D. Foot, (London), pp. 183-97; 320-24.

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1974 'A Letter-Book of Robert Cole, British Cónsul-General at Algiers, 16941712', in Spoleczénstwo Gospodarka Kultura: Studia oßarowane Marianowi Malowistowi w Czterdziestolecie Pracy Nankowej (Warsaw), pp. 45-58. 1975 'The Importance of Dunkirk (1688-1713) Reconsidered' in Course et piraterie: Etudes presentees a la commission internationale d'histoire maritime a l'occasion de son XVe colloque internationale . . . San Francisco, aoùt 1975 ed. M. Mollai et U. Bonnel (Paris), pp. 231-70. (With E. H. Kossmann) ed., Britain and the Netherlands V Some Political Mythologies. Papers delivered to the Fifth Anglo-Dutch Historical Conference, (The Hague). 1976 The Manning of the Royal Navy: Selected Public Pamphlets, 1693-1873, ed. with an introduction for the Navy Records Society (London). 1977 'Away from Impressment: the Idea of a Royal Naval Reserve, 16961859' in Britain and the Netherlands VI War and Society, ed. A. C. Duke and C. A. Tamse, (The Hague), pp. 168-88. 'The North Sea in Wartime, 1688-1713', Bijdragen en mededelingen betreffende de geschiedenis der Nederlanden, XCII, pp. 270-99. 1978 'The Profits of Naval Command: Captain Joseph Taylor and his Prizes' in Wirtschaftskräfte und Wirtschaftswegell Wirtschaftskräfte in der europäischen Expansion. Festschrift fur Hermann Kellenbenz, ed. J. Schneider (Stuttgart), pp. 529-44. 1979 'The Rise and Fall of the Dutch Republic', Historical Journal XXII, pp. 985-95. 'French Traders in the South Sea: the Journal of Lieutenant Pitouays, 1706-1709', Revista de Universidade de Coimbra, XXVII, pp. 147-60. 1980 'The Second Hundred Years War' in Britain and France: Ten Centuries, ed. D. Johnson, F. Crouzet and H. Bédarida (London), pp. 164-72; 374. 1981 'Britain and Europe in the Eighteenth Century', History, LXVI, pp. 394412. 'Prize Office and Prize Agency at Portsmouth, 1689-1748' in Hampshire

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Studies, ed. J. Webb, N. Yates and S. Peacock (Portsmouth), pp. 169-99. 1982 'The British Navy and its Seamen after 1688: Notes for an Unwritten History', in Charted and Uncharted Waters ed. S. Palmer and G. Williams (London), pp. 148-63. 'Quelques reflexions sur le fonctionnement des classes maritimes en France, 1689-1713', Les cahiers de Montpellier, VI, pp. 11-29. 1983 'Jacques-Winoc Plets, armateur en course (c. 1650-1716)' Revue des amis du Vieux Dunkerque, XVII, pp. 61-77. 1985 'Outlaws at Sea, 1660-1720: Liberty, Equality and Fraternity among the Caribbean Freebooters' in History from Below, Studies in Popular Ideology in Honour of George Rude, ed. F. Krantz (Montreal), pp. 301-20. 'Duguay Trouin: the Financial Background', The Mariner's Mirror, LXXI, pp. 259-85. 'The Loan of French Naval Vessels to Privateering Enterprises, 16881713' in Les marines de guerre européennes, XVH-XVHIe siècles, ed. M. A cerra, J. Merino et J. Meyer (Paris), pp. 65-90. 1986 'Les equipages des corsaires sous Louis XIV (1688-1713)' in Les Hommes et la Mer dans l'Europe du Nord-Ouest de l'Antiquité a nos jours, ed. A. Lottin, J-C Hocquet et S. Lebecq (Lille), pp. 302-22. 'A New Vocation: Privateering in the Wars of 1689-97 and 1702-13' in A People of the Sea: the Maritime History of the Channel Islands, ed. A. G. Jamieson (London), pp. 109-47.

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l OUTLAWS AT SEA, 1660-1720: LIBERTY, EQUALITY AND FRATERNITY AMONG THE CARIBBEAN FREEBOOTERS Two societies, two conceptions of justice, collaborated and collided when French forces stormed Cartagena of the Indies in May 1697. For their commander, the baron de Pointis, a naval captain in the mould of Drake, this bloody if strategically pointless success fulfilled a long-postponed design "that might be both honourable and advantageous", with ships lent and soldiers (but not seamen) paid by the King, who in return would take the Crown's usual one-fifth interest in such "preis de vaisseaux", the remaining costs falling on private subscribers, in this case no less than 666 of them, headed by courtiers, financiers, naval contractors and officers of both pen and sword.' According to Pointis, peace rumours restricted the flow of advances and the expedition, nearly 4,000 strong when it sailed out of Brest, was weaker than he had planned, especially if it should prove difficult to use the ships' crews ashore. At St Domingue, however, the experienced governor Jean Ducasse, who had risen by his own business abilities from relatively humble origins in Beam, had orders to place another thousand men at the baron's disposal, in locally armed frigates and sloops. Some of these seasoned warriors were garrison soldiers, others militiamen and small settlers; there were also 180 negroes, some free and others lent by their owners with a promise of manumission if the enterprise went well. But the majority, at least 650 and probably more, wereflibustiers, freebooters whom Ducasse had called from the sea and detained for months pending the late arrival of the squadron. With their long, light muskets known as boucaniers--from their original use by those earlier huntsmen who smoke-dried their meat (boucane) Indian-fashion--these were crack marksmen, well able to board ships or Spanish trenches, if not ramparts, with little use for artillery. According to the careful historian, Fr Charlevoix, who had access to government records as well as to the manuscripts of a fellow Jesuit, Le Pers, who was serving on the Coast of St. Domingue at the time, Ducasse's contingent, amounting in the end to more than a fifth of the whole force, acquitted themselves with their usual audacity and resourcefulness. 2 Even Pointis, in his Relation, praised the negroes. The flibusiiers, however, were "a troop of Banditti... idle Spectators of a great Action ... this Rabble ... that base Kind of Life", gifted only with "a particular Talent at discovering hidden Treasures". He had resented having "to court them in the most flattering Terms". They, in their turn, were quick to object to "le baton haut" of naval officers, as happened again when Le Moyne d'Iberville brought his last privateering armament to Martinique in 1706.' It was because they would serve immediately only under a man they knew, preferably one whom they had elected,

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that Governor Ducasse himself joined the expedition. Even so, they would have sulked in the woods had he not obtained from Pointis some prior agreement about sharing the plunder. A notice was accordingly posted at Petit Goave--by this date as much the principal privateering base of the Coast as the island of Tortuga had been in the earlier decades of "la flibuste"--announcing simply that the St Domingue contingent would participate "homme par homme" with the crews of His Majesty's ships. Ducasse took this vague undertaking to mean that his men would share in the booty in the same proportion as their numbers bore to those from France. Pointis, mindful of the claims of his shareholders but entirely overlooking the modest investors of the Coast, allowed this assumption to rest until he was ready to embark the booty, provisionally estimated at not more than nine million in livres tournois. Ducasse and his followers, who had not been allowed into the counting-house where the gold and silver and precious stones had been collected, suspected that it would add up to twice as much; in any case, they expected over two million for themselves. Word came back, for the two leaders were no longer on speaking terms, that they were entitled to 160,000 livres tournois in silver crowns or pieces of eight, as their proper proportion of what was due to the French crews — a tenth of the first million and a mere thirtieth of the rest. This worked out at twenty-five crowns a man instead of an anticipated 1500 or 1600, including three months' wages. The freebooters' answer was to return to the city, against the appeals of Ducasse, and sack it all over again. They came away with enough precious metal to distribute a thousand crowns to each man by weight, as their custom was, before sailing, but also with fabrics and other merchandise which they would later have parted with for much less than they were worth. Four of their larger ships were soon intercepted by the British navy, the cargo of the Cerf Volani allegedly being sold in Jamaica for £IOO,000.4 The quarrel between Pointis and Ducasse reverberated for years. A royal arrêt awarded the flibustiers something near seventeen per cent of the ultimate net sum available for distribution, but it was remitted to St Domingue in goods, piecemeal, and much of this "masse de Carl^agennes" never reached its intended destination, partly because it passed through dishonest hands but also because many of the tropical claimants had dispersedjor died.5 It was precisely the flight of its warriors that every good governor of St Domingue, thinly populated and exposed to attack from many quarters, most feared; and Ducasse too had a substantial personal stake in the masse or stock out of which the tropical investors should recover their outlay. Nevertheless, the "perfidy" of Pointis rankled most in that he had caused the governor to break faith with his prickly following. 6 He had already experienced their stubborn refusal to go to sea whenever they had money to spend, and their strong preference for the occasional Spanish prize over regular cruising against the English or Dutch, as distinct from tip-and-run descents on Jamaica for slaves. Moreover, they were still grumbling that they had not received justice after Ducasse's own attack on Jamaica in 1694. Beeston, governor of Jamaica, referred to this when reporting the state of mutiny which preceded the departure for Cartagena — "they to fight and the great only to take away the money from them."7 This feeling about "the great" marks the whole history of seventeenth-century privateering in the West Indies, and indeed finds echoes among the pirates, properly so called, documented by Defoe. "They were poor rogues", said some, of those

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3

strung up at Cape Coast in 1722, "and so hanged, while others, no less guilty in another way, escaped."8 The resentments of pirates, generally recruited from merchantmen, were most specifically directed at the despotism of shipmasters: after seizing a ship, "Captain Johnson" tells us, "the Pirates began to take upon themselves the distribution of justice, examining the men concerning their master's usage of them, according to the custom of other Pirates".' On privateers, impeccably commissioned by a sovereign prince, a kind of class consciousness revolted against the larger shares of prize and plunder allotted to the officers, often numerous because crews were not under naval discipline; and there was sometimes distrust of the owners as well, usually entitled in France and Britain to two-thirds of the net takings, though there was no rule about this and it looks as if such "gentlemen adventurers" came to be contented with half at a later date. The well-known cruises of Woodes Rogers and George Shelvocke into the Pacific, respectively in 1708-11 and 1719-22, provide rich evidence of both attitudes, and are especially relevant here because they carried old campaigners from "the Jamaica [buccaneering] discipline". They evidently drew on what William Dampier, himself a buccaneer from 1679 to 1688 and chief pilot to Rogers, calls "the Law of Privateers", meaning in effect what in St Domingue was known as "the Custom of the Coast" — a corpus of practices which also left a strong mark on those of the common pirates, many of whom originated in the Caribbean after the proclamations of peace in 1697 and 1713, and sometimes while formal hostilities continued between their princes. Shelvocke's account largely consists of his encounters with mutineers. Their first petition, moderately worded by comparison with what was to come, he described as "needless tautologies, insignificant expressions, and dull confusion". It referred to the treatment of Rogers's two crews, who carried their "Case" against the Bristol owners to the House of Lords, though in vain."' The agreements Shelvocke had to make at sea defining and dividing plunder—those articles in a prize to which the captors had sole claim, such as the personal possessions of prisoners--follow almost word for word those made by Woodes Rogers and his fellow captain, Stephen Courtney, whose grand stroke was to surrender "the whole Cabin-Plunder", that is, the contents of "the Great Cabbins" of captured shipmasters and often therefore the best of the pillage. Their object was to prevent both indiscriminate plunder and its concealment by securing every man's interest. To do so they had to extend their definition well outside the limits (all above deck, roughly) recognised in European courts and eventually to shut their eyes to the embezzlement of "Arms, Chests, Knives, Roman Relicks, Scizzars, Tobacco, loose Books, Pictures, and worthless Tools and Toys, and Bedding in use...". Shelvocke's chief enemy, William Betagh, his captain of marines, wanted to go much further — "to oppose the owners having a part of any thing but what was upon freight, or mentioned in bills of lading"." Cheating the owners by excessive pillage was inherent in privateering. Thanks to "riflinge", Elizabethan "owners and victuallers" may have received less than half the value of their prizes, instead of the nominal two-thirds; and the armaieurs of Louis XIV's numerous corsairs never ceased to complain of pillage, and of the laxity of the courts in repressing it. Temptation mounted when wages were substituted for shares, for then a ship's company was entitled in France only to a tenth of the prize money in place of a third, the same as in the navy. The naval bureaucracy preferred wages ("a la solde") to shares ("a la part") in privateers, because of the

4

Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760

tricks and delays for which the directors of armaments were notorious; but "a la part" remained the prevailing system at Dunkirk and St Malo, if not in Provence. Rogers's "undertakers" neatly combined wages and shares, wages halving a man's share whatever his rank. There was no universal method and no uniform tariff of shares, though Trinity House had long ago tried to establish one.12 At St Malo the company's portion was distributed by a panel of ship's officers in the light of performance, but at Calais and probably Dunkirk shares were allotted before sailing, as was the English practice, where all depended on the negotiating strength of owners, officers and seamen in each case. Thus Woodes Rogers was to enjoy twenty-four shares in his company's third, the master and surgeon ten each, and so on down the scale to the sailor at two and a half, the landman at one and a half. Exactly the same sub-division was observed in their agreements about plunder; Rogers exchanged his "Cabin Plunder" for an extra five per cent on his shares. These were high in proportion to the sailor's; at Calais, for example, a captain got only four or six times the "lot" of a matelo!. " But Rogers was about to cruise for as many years as a small Calais corsair would be away for months; the investment, risks and objectives were in no way comparable. Nevertheless, his company alleged that the officers "could not possibly in a Privateer deserve what they were allow'd in proportion to the rest". Shelvocke's boatswain called them all '"Blood-suckers". The syndic of St Malo implied as much of some of his own captains. 14 That Shelvocke was on the British navy's half-pay list would not have worked in his favour either. Naval officers were notoriously avaricious about prize-money, which engendered constant friction between them. One who knew them well told King William in 1699 that some commanders kept their men out of their money for years, "until not a man concerned was to be found", while James Vernon, a secretary of state and prize commissioner, considered that this particular fraud contributed to desertion and piracy. 15 Although their codes of punishment were wide apart, harsh treatment in navy and merchant navy alike fed these animosities. In the latter, however, arbitrary and even savage conduct by a master was less likely to be corrected by other officers or the employer. There was a great gulf fixed between shipmasters, with their powers and responsibilities and prospects, and even their first mates. The powers and responsibilities were as old as the Laws of Wisby and Oléron, themselves only compilations of earlier decisions or customs; masters were responsible to their owners for the offences of their crews, a member of whom had little right to defend himself against the boss's physical blows, while any refusal of duty might forfeit all title to wages. Once he had signed articles, a seaman's life was no longer his own. Meanwhile, the privileges and social position of masters had gone forward by leaps and bounds, at least in England. In the late seventeenth century a body of attorneys is said to have lived on encouraging seamen's claims against them. 16 It is essential to keep this background in mind if we are to understand the originality of the Caribbean freebooters in dealing with plunder, and indeed freebooting itself. However, it would be wholly erroneous to suppose that "flibustier", alias "buccaneer", necessarily implies a seaman. This "fanciful kind of inversion" itself implies that the English were confused by the interchangeability of flibusiier and boucanier, who in the opinion of James Burney, still the best of their English historians, "are to be considered as the same character, exercising sometimes one,

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5

17

sometimes the other employment". Charlevoix, steeped in the "société des ordres", was distinguishing functions rather than men in describing them as separate "corps", as he did also the settlers (habitants) and their indentured white servants (engages) in that "République des Aventuriers" which preceded royal government in St Domingue and long lived side by side with it. It was all a matter of less or more, the gens du metier (without fixed property unless or until they settled down, as some did) and the part-timers, who might also be settlers or traders rather than huntsmen — a dying profession long before 1700.'8 What flibustier and boucanier most obviously had in common was their accuracy with small arms, the principal weapon of the privateering barques or sloops, which called for the minimum of seamanship. Fr Labat, who sometimes sailed with them and counted some of their captains among his friends, attributes their preference for a simple sail-rig to a dislike of work in the first place; Pointis' sailors were "nègres blancs" to them.'11 In any case, "roving on the account" included land operations, all the way from Trinidad to Campeche and ultimately the Spanish Pacific coasts as well. Sir Henry Morgan's ransom of Panama in 1671, to recall only the most famous of these episodes, was the reward of sound military tactics as well as tough marching by a miscellaneous Anglo-French force which knew how to draw itself up "in the form of a tertia"; in Cuba earlier, says Esquemeling, "the Pirates marched in very good rank and file, at the sound of their drums and with flying colours".2" Their standard method of levying contributions from coastal villages, under threat of burning, is reminiscent of the Thirty Years War. In Dampier's and other contemporary narratives there is mention of "the forlorn", the European soldiers' term for the advance guard, also known among the freebooters as the "enfants perdus". :i Their habit of assuming noms de guerre was also common with those impoverished noblemen and others who made a profession of war in mercenary armies; and we know that privateering captains from Europe could often be described, like Nathaniel Butler of the Old Providence Company, as "an ancient soldier at sea and land". 22 Even more evocative of the European military background, ignored by our buccaneering historians, was the role assigned to the quartermaster, the second man to the freebooter captain and elected like him, but more especially entrusted with the interests of "les garcons", above all in the distribution of booty, "une espèce de procureur pernicieux qui règie leurs comptes", as an unkind planter official put it. This "trustee for the whole", as Defoe described him, enjoyed the chief authority also on pirate vessels, except in chase or action: among the Caribbean privateersmen, "his opinion is like the Mufti's among the Turks". 2 ' Such a magistracy can have had little to do with the humble role of quartermasters at sea, who were petty officers ranking only a shade above the ordinary seaman. This fact may well have rendered his title agreeable, and it is true that seagoing quartermasters took charge of boats during disembarkations; but, as an infallible sign of "the Jamaica discipline", he resembles those officers who saw to the billetting, feeding, clothing and accounts of a body of troops, once known as harbingers, highly respectable and well enough remunerated for their duties to be worth the attention of commissioned officers.24 Freebooters -- a "softer" word than "pirates" and not yet common robbers -got their name from an old tradition of soldiers serving for booty only, like those privateersmen who signed "on the old pleasing account of no purchase no pay [a la

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Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760

pan]"." Even after 1700, while pay mutinies remained "so endemic that they were almost condoned" in Europe, "plentiful campaigns" meant good plunder.^ The prospect of loot was a friend to the recruiting sergeant, conjuring up that dream of sudden wealth which was also a powerful if illusory inducement to many a West Indian immigrant, thanks to travellers' tales and the eloquence of those who traded in indentured servants. To illustrate the lure óf pillage to officers as well as men, we need look no further than the restlessness of the land forces engaged in Cromwell's Western Design when it was at first proposed to "dispose of all Preys and Booties... towards the carrying on of the present Service", many officers, on the contrary, "coming in hopes of Pillage into a country where they conceiv'd Gold as plentiful as Stones". Venables and Penn wished to meet this pressure, in effect, in much the same way as the ßibustiers managed their booty, by throwing all into a common stock, with fierce penalties on concealment and a view to distribution "according to every Mans quality and Merit". There was no reference to special recompenses for the loss of limbs or eyes, characteristic of privateering and piratical charter parties, but the generals referred to David's military law (1st Sam. xxx. 24) "to give equal share to every person of the Army though not present in the Action". 27 Whether or not Levelling teachings came to the West Indies in 1655, we can be certain that the Civil War experience abundantly did — and Irish experience long before that, especially through its victims. So, too, through Dutch and French, the pitiless, sauve-qui-peut mentality of the long Continental strife, as we see it through the eyes of Simp/icissimus. Whether any significant number of our Caribbean freebooters had endured the tyranny and rapacity of military commanders there is no means of telling, but in nothing were these "pay-grabbers" and "military enterprisers" more distrusted than in the sharing of loot. What is of even more interest for present purposes, military workforces showed talent in organizing their mutinies, under elected leaders — the Ambosat or electo of the sixteenth century. 2 " We shall never know the individual buccaneer, not even most of the captains, with anything like the intimacy which the devotion of George Rude has recovered for participants in urban riots, or even as well as we know the leading figures in Warwick's and Pym's Old Providence Company. This is because buccaneering proper, unlike the long history of earlier privateering and armed trade in the Caribbean, was by definition locally based and early West Indian records are scarce. It is conventionally dated from about 1640, from the use of Tortuga, with its comfortable anchorage and strong natural defences, by bands of rovers from the recently settled British and French islands in the outer chain of the Antilles, as distinct from earlier occupation by the boucaniers who hunted hogs and cattle for barter with vessels from Normandy, which frequented those parts well before 1600.29 Under the suggestive name of Association Island, Tortuga had also been briefly taken over by the Old Providence Company in the 1630s. There is no need to recapitulate the early vicissitudes of this privateering nursery, except to stress the brutality of Spanish attempts to expel the intruders. Like the harsh treatment of prisoners later—though these were more usually treated as convicts than pirates — it was enough to feed the flames of hispanophobia, so harsh a characteristic of some of the earlier ßibustiers as to afford their marauding an ideology of sorts. Tortuga, alternately dominated by French and English leaders, always elected but sometimes tyrannical, until formally adopted by the French Crown in 1657,

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received several increments of Huguenots, beginning with the fall of La Rochelle: St Domingue itself, with its English and especially Dutch elements, offered them a more attractive asylum than the more strictly governed Martinique.10 Whether Montbars of Languedoc, soaked in Las Casas, or the merciless L'Ollonais (of Sables) were of Protestant origin is unproven, but two other leaders particularly feared by the Spaniards, Roche Brasiliano and Laurens de Graaf, were Dutchmen. Calvinism, it is true, did not flourish in the West Indies, as the example of Providence Island (Santa Catalina) showed, and such traces of religion as we find among theflibustiers were Roman: Ravenau de Lussan, referring to one of the many discords which marred their collaboration with the British in the South Sea (after 1680), expresses shock at the iconoclasm of the buccaneers, who were yet capable of sabbath observance "by command and common consent" under Captains Sawkins and Watling. Ravenau, a Parisian and an example of the gentleman adventurer in debt, was shrewd enough to see that Creole hatred of impiety rubbed off on French Catholics." Walking off with the altar candlesticks, on the contrary, was necessary to "la bonne guerre" and we are not obliged to believe Labat's assertion that the Martinique privateers always donated captured church ornaments to sacred uses.': Spanish churches were also regularly used as the corps de garde for prisoners and pillage, apart from the intrinsic value of their contents. The aggressors had their own share of superstition, however, and there were good and able men among them, like the incomparable Dampier and his "ingenious Friend Mr Ringrose"." If the ideological bitterness of the sixteenth century was receding, it is hardly credible that the Freebooters could have acted so fiercely towards Spanish Creole civilians without the moral self-righteousness conferred, in their turn, by Spanish atrocities and intolerance, real or mythical. It was still what the Elizabethans called a war of reprisals: "our Men", wrote Dampier, "were very squeamish of plundering without Licence", even if it meant getting one from an Asian prince in the faraway Philippines. This was in 1686, several years after the supply of French or Portuguese commissions had dried up." In the violent, mobile West Indian scene the freebooters necessarily suffered heavy casualties. Losses were particularly heavy following the grand exodus to the Pacific in the 1680s, so much so as to create anxiety for the security of Jamaica and St Domingue when the islands were divided by the Nine Years War. Yet, so long as Spain was the enemy, their forces soon built up again. Ducasse once remarked that thzflibuste renewed itself every ten years.' 5 A reliable analysis of 1706, admittedly from Martinique, which succeeded where St Domingue failed in organizing a prosperous cruising war against English and Dutch, breaks in down into three human elements: a sprinkling of young men from the best families; impoverished settlers "et des engages qui ne veulent point s'assujetir au travail de la terre"; and ("la plus forte de la flibuste") deserters from merchantmen, hiding behind their noms de guerre, Sailors from Europe, however, needed time to become acclimatized and there is evidence that they did not take to the staple diet of the freebooters, manioc. Morgan in 1680, when he had turned King's evidence, told London that buccaneering tempted "white servants and all men of unfortunate and desperate condition".' 7 Pointis saw them as seamen deserters or else vagabonds sent out to work in the plantations: "at the End of the Term of Servitude, some Body lends them a Gun, and to Sea they go a Buccaniering". 18 As an excellent intendant of Martinique pointed out, the engagé, though he served shorter articles than his British counterpart,

8

Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760

usually wanted to go home after eighteen months: the habit of hard work had to be acquired, and there were also bad masters who underfed and worked them beyond their strength." The blacks were said to be better treated, unless the bond-servant exercised some skill as artisan, in which case he was more like a European apprentice, though earning higher wages. But artisans too joined the freebooters, "We had Sawyers, Carpenters, Joyners, Brickmakers, Bricklayers, Shoemakers, Taylors, &c.", says Dampier.40 Because they frequently adapted prizes for their own use, and were as often wrecked, the buccaneers set a high value on carpenters, as on surgeons or apprentice surgeons. Paid off with a few hundred pounds of tobacco at the end of his articles, the engage had not the means to set up planter, as the English often had before Barbados and the Leewards filled up; but even there, as is well known, the "sugar revolution" (1640-60) spelt doom to the small planter. Captain William Jackson, who "kept the Indies in an uproar", could have manned his ships threefold at Barbados in 1642, on the basis of no purchase no pay, "every one that was denied entertainement reputing himselfe most unfortunate"."" Jackson and his "vice-admiral", both old Providence hands, armed ships in England, but increased their tleet to seven in Barbados and St Christopher, with an additional 750 men. Can we doubt that the obscure beginnings of a Caribbean-based privateering industry are connected with the mid-century decades of growing displacement and indebtedness, when the struggle for existence, among those who survived the appalling mortality rate of immigrants, quickened movement from island to island? In these conditions a bond-servant might change masters many times, as bankrupt planters swelled the ranks of runaways and derelicts, naturally disposed to soak the wealthy Spaniard. The plight of the British has been movingly described by Carl and Roberta Bridenbaugh, who consider that from 1640 the "parent islands" contained "the greatest concentration of poverty-stricken freemen in any of England's dominions before 1776", boom or slump. 42 The parent islands of the French reached demographic saturation somewhat later, but their social experience was not dissimilar. In both cases, of course, the run of" first-generation immigrants were men and women without resources, buying their passage by selling themselves to a known or more often unknown settler. Some would have borne the scars of pressures and oppressions, if not persecutions, at home. More than half the population of the British West Indies in 1650 were Irishmen, the latest arrivals soldiers from Drogheria; Barbados alone received thousands of war prisoners before the transportation of felons began in 1655. Numerous anabaptists came out with Penn and Venables in that year. J ' Gabriel Debien's patient combing of the "actes d'engagement" in the notarial minutes of La Rochelle, Nantes and Dieppe points to a preponderance of daylabourers, textile workers and other ruraux making for the islands, and not least St Domingue, where one might become a "valet de boucanier"; many sailed in the winter months, when jobs were relatively scarce.4" Although we are now more vividly aware of seasonal and other kinds of vagabondage along French roads and rivers, it seems significant that so many came from areas affected by peasant risings against the royal fise and the proliferation of crown agents, not to mention plunder by unpaid soldiers, in the 1630s; the Croquanis of Saintonge, Angoumois and Poitou,

Outlaws at Sea, 1660-1720

9

the Nu-Pieds of Normandy. These violent events would not have been soon forgotten. Emotive, visceral, spontaneous gestures they may have been, devoid of revolutionary content: nevertheless, large assemblies of aggrieved taxpayers had shown a capacity for self-organization, the constitution of "communes", election of deputies and promulgation of Ordonnances: "L'assemblèe du Commun peuple, le Conseil tenant, a esté ordonné ce qui s'ensuit...". Revealing, indeed startling, is the image they had of themselves as forgotten men, "comme si on ne songeait a nous que comme des pieces perdues".45 Well might Mazarin fear the contagion of English example in 1647.46 Two years later republican placards appeared in Paris, also a major source of West Indian immigrants, often from the building trades. The presence of a substantial, literate working-class élite among the emigrants is fully established. A rector of Kingston was to say that in the Jamaica of 1720 there were not six families of "gentle descent": tavern-keepers, tailors, carpenters and joiners called themselves Colonel, Major, Captain, Honourable or Esquire. 47 So respectable a picture may be corrected, however, by the critical comments of the priest who sailed with an ill-fated party for Cayenne in 1652: "toutes sortes de personnes...enfants incorrigibles...gens qui avoient fait faillite. ..Plusieurs jeunes débauchez...des Moines Apostáis...Et le pire de tout, quantité de femmes...". They had not got far before their "General" accused them of aiming at "un corps de Republique, voulant y establir des Presidents, Conseillers...un Parlement".'"1 A president, councillors and other officers were certainly elected for the baptismal ceremonies, followed by protracted drinking, when newcomers to the tropics crossed the Line. Charlevoix has it that these mysteries were held in St Domingue to release a man from all antecedent contracts. 49 Even there life was never so simple, but for some decades it preserved in exaggerated forms that libertarianism which in some degree splintered all the English colonies, as was demonstrated from the start in the radical politics of Bermuda and Barbados. A governor of Jamaica, within ten years of conquest, could describe his people as "generally easy to be governed, yet rather by persuasion than severity"; as late as 1692, Ducasse wrote of "cette colonie n'ayant esté formée que selon le caprice de chaqué particulier, elle a subsiste dans le désordre"; not a man, said another, "qui ne se croie plus que nous officiers du Roy".5" The early history of "the Coast" was stamped by a series of revolts, especially against French monopoly companies, from the time when Governor d'Ogeron (1665-75), "whom nature had formed to be great in himself", began "to establish the regularity of society upon the ruins of a ferocious anarchy". 51 The supreme embodiment of this impatience of authority, this drive to absolute freedom, was la ßibuste, in Jamaica "roving on the account". Dampier, who called it "the other loose roving way of Life", notes that "Privateers are not obliged to any Ship, but free to go ashore where they please, or to go into any other Ship that will entertain them"." The authorities agree on their self-will, caprice, dislike of work; on their disordered and unwashed clothing, their habit of singing while companions tried to sleep and shooting to make a noise; on their blasphemies and debaucheries. So long as they had cash to spend, it was difficult to persuade them to the sea. In this they resemble the typical picaro, willing to lose everything on the throw of a dice, then begin all over again; and the picaresque novel, though seldom set in the New World, contains

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some profound truths about it. Living from day to day, at the mercy of events, the picaresque rogue is seldom his own master for long, yet living on his wits he can assert his independence and turn the table on masters no more virtuous than himself.51 There was more than this, however, to the libertinism of the buccaneers. They were not merely escaping from bondage. In their enterprises at least, they practised notions of liberty and equality, even of fraternity, which for most inhabitants of the old world and the new remained frustrated dreams, so far as they were dreamt at all — more than we usually suppose, perhaps. The first such notion was familiar enough to Croquants and Levellers: the right to be consulted. Elizabethan seamen, according to Monson, had claimed a say in the conduct of their voyages and freedom to adopt at sea a casual privateering consort — unpremeditated agreements which owners might disown. 54 Both were standard features of buccaneering practice. Before ever a ship's company left on the account, however, articles had to be agreed regarding future dividends, captains and quartermasters elected. Later might follow "consults" about consortship with other companies encountered, or about tactics, especially in tight situations. Thus L'Ollonais "called a council of the whole fleet, wherein he told them he intended to go to Guatemala. Upon this point they divided into several sentiments— But the major part of the company, judging the propounded voyage little fit for their purpose, separated from L'Ollonais and the rest."55 Far from base, especially on the far side of the Isthmus of Darien, such secessions were commonplace. After the death of Richard Sawkins, "the best beloved of all our company or the most part thereof", records the scholarly Basil Ringrose, Captain Sharp "asked our men in full council who of them were willing to go or stay, and prosecute the design Captain Sawkins had undertaken, which was to remain in the South Sea...". 56 Those who stayed later deposed Sharp and subsequently reinstated him. So even when captains only consulted each other, they must have kept a finger on the pulses of their followings. Morgan seems only to have taken counsel with "the chiefest of his companions", but he had a record of success which removed all obstacles. 57 No doubt this and a reputation for personal valour go far to explain the election of other leaders. Yet powers of verbal persuasion must always have been requisite, another quality Morgan had in abundance. Governor Nathaniel Butler of Old Providence noted in his diary how Captain Parker "and his two Counsellors being obstinate to their owne Endes, went about to satisfie", with words, a starving crew which "in temperate wayé desired to know what he meant to doe with them" — and buccaneers could be far more intractable than that. 58 It is unlikely that they could have been ruled by the methods of terror and delation attributed to Tuscan captains in the Levant by one who sailed with them in the 1690s.^ As late as 1708, the Board of Trade in London thought that the "ill practices too frequently committed" by Bermudian privateers (clearly influenced by the Jamaica discipline) could be prevented if captains enjoyed "the sole command... whereas, as we have been informed, every seaman on board a privateer having a vote, it is not in the captain's power...". 60 The balance between privateering democracy and dominant personalities is hard to strike, and commanders certainly enjoyed absolute power in action; but in this as in other respects there is a strong indication of the consolidation of a body of regulatory customs among the freebooters in the survival of references to them into

Outlaws at Sea, 1660-1720 11 the Spanish Succession War. In 1706 the "gouverneur par interim" on the Coast, Charitte, in writing home, used such phrases as "les charteparties qui se font aux Isles Francoises" or simply "charteparties de l'Amérique". He was referring to the distribution of booty and provision for the maimed. The principles are the same as those briefly described by Esquemeling and Charlevoix for an earlier period.61 No text of a "chasse-partie", as it was known (neatly translated by Burney as a "chasing agreement"), has come to light before 1688. It does not restate the basic egalitarian principle, "a compagnon bon lot", presumably because this could be taken for granted; it is an agreement between Captain Charpin and Mathurin Desinarci?, "quartier maistre de l'équipage" and deals expressly with a very few departures from that rule, in defining the captain's dividend--ten lots and first choice of any captured vessels--and those of two surgeons, who in addition to the usual allowance for their chests were to keep captured instruments "qui ne seront point garnys d'argent". 6 Pillage included "or, argent, perle, diamant, musq, ambre, sivette, et toutes sortes de pierreries" as well as "tous balots entammez entre deux ponts ou au fond". That this was clarified is a sure sign that their ship, St Roze, was not owned by captain and crew. The typical privateer seems usually to have been the crew's common property or that of their leader, in which case he was awarded extra shares. Morgan's captains in 1670 drew the shares of eight men for the expenses of their ships, besides their usual allotment, which Esquemeling elsewhere states as "five or six portions to what the ordinary seamen have".*1' It is to be noted that the largest part of the outlay in a European privateer consisted in victuals, arms and cash advances to the crew. None of these items counted for much or at all with the freebooters, who contributed each man the essential weaponry and often also his provisions, so far as they did not rely on what they shot or fished, gathered or seized; with a week's supply of food to start off with, the only big capital item was the ship and this itself might well be a cheap prize. Only a frigate would call for such resources as those of the royal officers on the Coast (usually also planters) could supply, and they might invest with the object of stimulating the "course aux ennemis", especially governors who shared the admiralty tenth in prizes. M At the same time there was nothing to stop settlers from taking out an interest, and we have to allow for the debts piled up by freebooters with inn-keepers and others; the cabaretiers gave credit to the flibustiers in 1690, for example, to buy victuals, allegedly at inflated prices. 65 In St Domingue privateering retained the approval of the community long after it had begun to be opposed by a powerful interest in Jamaica, the Spanish traders. In 1709 Choiseul Beaupré, a governor who set himself to revive the waning course, claimed credit for restoring the classical "a compagnon bon lot", which meant that the chief fitter-out agreed with the ship's company for a certain number of lots amounting to never more than an eighth of the produce of a cruise, in place of his usual third — in metropolitan France, twothirds. 66 As an interesting Guernsey charter party of 1703 suggests, this difference of a third may be accounted for by the fact that the crew provided their own food and drink; in earlier times, when armateurs were divided into owners and victuallers, armaments, including trading voyages to the Caribbean, had been split into thirds, so that "tiercement" in France came to be a synonym for whatever was owing to a crew. On the other hand, the buccaneering sloop was so cheap that it could have

12

Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760

been mainly the cost of victualling that fell on the fitters-out, whether ship's company or not, allowing "victualling" to include such items as powder, lanterns and "menus ustensiles".67 The freebooters allowed "extraordinary shares" to other ship's officers besides the captain, but on a narrow scale; "the Master's Mate only two", says Esquemeling, "and other Officers proportionable to their employment". On a small sloop or brigantine they were not numerous. Defoe's pirates, who drew directly on the model of the freebooters, offered a bonus only to half a dozen officers, even captain and quartermaster receiving only twice (or less) the common dividend. 6 * This was what they called "a free ship, that is, they agreed every man should have an equal share in all prizes".69 Labat's friends among the freebooting captains received only a present in addition to the equal dividend when their ship was common property, though it might be substantial enough to multiply his dividend three or (bur times; otherwise the only special beneficiaries, rateably, were the quartermaster, surgeon and pilot. 7 " But the freebooters liked to make merit awards. Morgan offered fifty pieces of eight for "entering the first any castle, or taking down the Spanish colours"; Rogers, twenty "to him that first sees a Prize of Good Value, or exceeding 50 Tuns in Burden", and "a good Suit of Clothes to be made for each Man that went up the River above Guiaquil[i/cJ". His owners had already agreed to a scale of compensation for widows and those "so disabled as not to get a Livelihood", as well as further rewards for "Whoever shall in Fight, or otherwise, signalize himself", notably in boarding. 7 ' Time had passed since it was possible to assert that English privateers could not afford to take care of their wounded or the relatives of their dead, and since the mercenary soldier's wage was expected to cover the cost of his injuries. 72 The shipowners' duty to provide for a sick seaman is at least as old as the Laws of Oléron, but awards to the disabled originated much later. The mutual benevolent fund created by Drake and Hawkins in 1590, the Chatham Chest, marked a giant step forward for seamen, although its resources fell far below the claims made on it in wartime: by 1675 it was granting disability pensions for war wounds, "in its historic condition of insolvency". 71 At about that date the French government blazed a similar trail for its troupes de terre, and it was the first, though not until 1703, to set up a state fund for granting half-pay to men disabled in private armaments at sea, with small lump-sums for widows. The idea was born of a small tax on prizes levied in Brittany for the redemption of Barbary slaves, and its extension opposed by the Dunkirk owners, who pointed to the traditional responsibility of its magisrrat for finding public employments, short of the "maison des pauvres"; even at St Malo there were many claims for unpaid nursing expenses in the admiralty court. 74 Against this background it is not surprising that Esquemeling, who qualified as a surgeon at Amsterdam a year after his book was first published there, makes much of the smart money awarded in the chasse-parties for the loss of limbs and eyes. As with all such articles, there was room for variety, and doubtless evolution: an eye worth only a hundred piastres even in Morgan's grand scale--1800 crowns for the two hands as against 600 for one and 1500 for both legs--equated with a t h u m b or index finger at 300 in Labat's account, in which the wearing of a cannula had gone up to as much as an arm (600 ecus, without distinction between right and left). Defoe's pirates offered 600 dollars (about £150) to a cripple, according to the three

Outlaws at Sea, 1660-1720

13

sets of articles he came by — about the same as the governor of St Domingue offered for its defence in 1709, with the alternative of a life annuity. 7 5 There is clear evidence of custom at work in these tariffs, except that the freebooters had no thought for pensions. That would have contradicted their mentality, which was to distribute dividends on the first possible occasion. Nor was there anything like a hospital on the Coast until 1710, when Choiseul created one for soldiers andßibustiers, partly to be funded by the lots of those killed without heirs."1 But there were captured slaves. Negroes, though sometimes freed when they could be replaced, served as slaves until they could be sold. After money, plate and precious stones, they were the most easily convertible booty. Indeed, the crippled freebooter might elect to take a slave in lieu of 100 pieces-of-eight. Indeed, that might prove a sounder pension than any annuity — with up to six slaves in return for a wooden leg, a retired freebooter might set up planter, though he would need to be a good husband of his shares, as some were. 77 Charlevoix tells us that the practice was for cruises to go on until enough had been earned to pay for the lamed and wounded — first charge on the common stock. There were other prior charges, including the claims of owners or victuallers ashore (if any) and the admiralty tenth, payable in Jamaica from the start and on the Coast by the 1690s, to judge by the disputes of Ducasse with the governor-general in Martinique. 7 * Given a flexible attitude to plunder, which by definition belonged to the captors exclusively, and the sale of prize goods in neutral islands, especially Danish St Thomas, it is unlikely that these tithes were ever surrendered in full. But no doubt whatsoever hangs over the basic rule of the common stock. All our authorities refer to this, or to the punishment of theft, at the least by forfeiture of shares, at worst by marooning. The articles drawn up in 1697 for d'Iberville's projected Mississippi expedition — describing his Canadians as flibusiiers, interestingly enough--impose both penalties, unless "selon le voi" the offender deserved shooting: the same with the pirates' articles. Woodes Rogers preferred to get agreement to a fine of twenty times the value for concealing plunder worth more than half a crown, besides loss of shares, the original penalty: that the terms were stiffened suggests trouble in the intervening year, but also that it was reprobated by the majority. It means something that Dampier never accused his fellows of the "many hundreds of little deceitful Acts" which he noticed among Dutch seamen in the Far East; in his "new voyage" of 1683-91, moreover, he reports only one case of theft, the offender being condemned "to have three Blows from each Man in the Ship...". 7 " Cheating would self-evidently be least tolerable under the system of "a compagnon bon lot", virtually a Rousseauistic contract rooted in self-interest. By this device the freebooters' democracy may be thought to have achieved an objective which eluded most commanders on land or sea, "everybody thinking they have a right to get what they can".8" "Captain Johnson", who enjoyed exposing the hypocrisy of his readers, noted the paradox: "For these men whom we term, and not without reason, the scandal of human nature ...when they judged it for their interest., .were strictly just."1" It is reasonable to assume that an outraged sense of justice, besides a cut in expectations, played its part in the Cartagena affair, and for that matter in the "obloquies and detractions" which drove Morgan to leave most of his followers behind when he sailed home from the Isthmus in 1671.'2

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Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760

Defoe relates with gusto a mock trial conducted by a crew of Caribbean pirates under the greenwood tree about 1720 — a parody of English institutions typical, apparently, of these outlaws. 81 But freebooter justice was deeply flawed in its own turn. We need not make too much of the fact, so much deplored by the earliest historian of the Coast, the Dominican Pére du Tertre, that they were apt to be selfappointed judges in their own cause;84 nor perhaps of acknowledged cruelties to Spanish civilians, which seem to have been largely confined to the extraction of information and of ransoms — manners in which they had little to teach European privateersmen, and nothing to European war lords. As Ducasse wrote after his descent on Jamaica in 1694, "Nous avons fait la guerre en gens désintéressés, ayant tout brulé"; at Cartagena, thought Charlevoix, ibeflibustiers showed more ruse than violence, much of it feigned." A calculated terrorism, as distinct from gratuitous cruelty, was inherent in this type of banditry, approximating most nearly to the "haiduk" variety in Eric Hobsbawm's classification.1"1 Among the pirates proper, examples of sheer brutality are not hard to find; they made a point of recruiting prisoners, the freebooters in the end released them; but even the pirates, it was said, were most to be feared in the first flush of success. The test of fraternity is how they treated each other. The freebooters' care for their sick and their solemn funeral rites are indications of that.* 7 Farther, Esquemeling remarks that, among themselves, the buccaneers "are very civil and charitable... if any wants what another has, with great liberality they give it to one another". 87 Liberality, indeed a generosity "mieux qu'en aucun lieu du monde" (as Labat says of their hospitable customs), was as characteristic of the flibustiers as intemperate drinking, and neither trait was perhaps without a touch ofthat ostentation which to them would stamp a gentleman — "ce sont des diners eternels"."* But if high spending was a rule of "la bonne flibuste", as it was a habit of the European picaro, so was gambling. What Bartholomew Sharp called "Confusion and strong Contests among the Men" were a necessary consequence of their "Consults", but drink and gaming engendered faction. A buccaneer would wager the clothes off his back. "The main Division", says Dampier of Swan's men at Mindanao in 1687, "was between those that had Money and those that had none." A little earlier, Sharp himself, wishing to go home with "almost a thousand pound", had been supported by the thrifty and turned out by those "scarce worth a groat", who were for staying in the South Sea."1' Ravenau de Lussan had an even sorrier tale to tell of his return across the Isthmus in 1688: "Eighteen of those whom the luck of the play had most despoiled had determined to massacre those who were rich...". To save their heads, but also to solve a problem of portage, "the rich" shared again with "the poor", on condition of receiving back a half or two-thirds after reaching St Domingue.*1 No wonder d'Iberville, Rogers, and the pirate John Phillips, to mention but a few, treated gambling as an abuse only less heinous than theft, or that Sawkins cast the dice overboard.91 Fraternity "on the account", therefore, under stress of monotony and rum, might be less apparent than in times of danger or dividend distribution. Was it anything more than the camaraderie of the camp or the sociability of the village? "Pebble-Smasher" and "Never-Fail" were only variants of "Chasse-Marée" or "Passe-Partout", and of a thousand other such familiar vulgarities as helped cement the fellowship of military "chambers" and the inescapable collectivity of country communities.'' 2 Gildsmen were supposed to be brothers too — and George Rude has

Outlaws at Sea, 1660-1720

15

taught us not to underrate the solidarity of the shop-floor, of the mentality common to masters and men among the sans-cu/oties. One could also invoke Professor Mousnier's "société des fidélités" for the seventeenth century, although his examples of total devotion are all of high-born men.1" Further down the scale, however, out on the Coast, there was the well-established institution of matelotage, first among the boucaniers, who shared any property they had with their "mess-mate" and might bequeath it to him: when the early habitants combined to cultivate a plot, "¡Is s'amatelotaient'V 4 What is less well known, something like matelotage prevailed among the log-cutters of Campeche and Honduras, the "Baymen" whose "Trade had its Rise from the decay of Privateering"." An anonymous but intelligent visitor to those parts in 1714-15 noted that they were hard drinkers and very quarrelsome, but t h a t neighbours lived in common, under two elected governors and a short compendium of laws "very severe against theft and Encroachments". 96 Forty years earlier, Dampier noticed there how "every Man is left to his choice to carry what he pleaseth, and commonly they agree very well about it". And on Saturdays at least they hunted. 9 7 It looks as though "the Custom of the Coast", originally that of the boucaniers, being rooted in the wilderness and doubtless subject to Carib, Cuna and other Indian influences, possessed an extraordinary power of survival in suitable circumstances. But between Coast and Bay we need look for no stranger agency than the freebooters themselves. The code survived even while its adherents might fail it, as is true of any social group. Among "fellow adventurers" as impulsive as the Brethren of the Coast it would be surprising to find consistency of conduct, especially with English and •Dutch admixtures of differing backgrounds. And yet the outlines of a fairly homogeneous portrait can be put together. That Captain Andreas who called one morning on the Scots in Darien, and who claimed Swan and Davis as "his particular Friends", stands forth as a recognizable type: "He (as generally those People are) is of a small Stature. In his Garb affects the Spaniard as alsoe in the Gravity of his carriage. He had a red loose Stuff coat on with an old halt and a pair of Drawers, but noe Shoes or Stockins.'"" The skills of a Rude could uncover a crowd of such forgotten men.1'1' There are sources still to be mined, especially Spanish, and short of them ample room for new perspectives. The freebooters astonished the world in their day and have attracted some sensational literature since. Sadly, very little has come from professional historians. As Una said to Puck in one of Kipling's stories, "pirates aren't lessons". But did she wish they were? And why not?

NOTES

I. An Authentiek und ¡'anicular Account of the taking of Carthagena by the i'rench... Bv the Sieur Pointis (London, 1740: a lute edition of the 1698 translation of the Relation tic ^expedition tie Carthagene, Amsterdam, I69X), p. 1; [Paris,| A[rchives] Nationales), Marine B4/I7, t'os. 404-5; B[ibliothcque| N[ationale], Thoisy 91, p. 515. There isa modern narrative of this expedition in N.M. Crouse, The I'rench Struggle for the West Indies 1665-1713 (New York, 1943), ch. viii.

16

Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760

2. P. F.-X. de Charlevoix, Hisloire de I'Isle Espagnole de S. Domingue, 4 vols. (Amsterdam, 1733), iv, 123 f'f. 3. Account, pp. 42-3, 62, 69; AN, Colonies] C8A/16, Vaucresson, 10 May 1706. 4. Ibid., C9A/3, Cos. 303 ff., 370 IT.; Anon, An Answer to Mr. Paschal's Letter... (London, 1702), p. 5; Charlevoix, iv, 106, 150 ft'. 5. Ibid., pp. 167-8; AN, Col. C8A/I2, fos. 190 ff.; C9A/8, f.337 v ; BN, Thoisy 91, pp. 515-32. 6. AN, Col. C9A/4, fos. 272-4. 7. Charlevoix, iv, 44-5, 105, 110; C[alendar of] S[iale\ P[apen;\ Colonial Series], 1696-7, p. 403. 8. Captain Charles Johnson, A Genera! History of the... Pirales, ed. A.L. Hayward (London, 1926), p. 252. For Defoe's authorship, see J.R. Moore, Defoe in the Pillory (Bloomington, 1939), pp. 126-88. 9. Ibid., 304. 10. G. Shelvocke, A Privateer's Voyage Round the World (London, "Travellers Library" edn., 1930), pp. 43-6; The Manuscripts of the House of Lords, new ser. vol. xii (London, 1970), pp. 235-6. 11. Woodes Rogers, A Cruising Voyage Round the World, ed. G.E. Manwaring (London, 1928), pp. 22-3, 114-6, 170-1, 206-7; Shelvocke, p. 114. 12. K . R . Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering (Cambridge, 1964), pp. 39-44, 167; Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawl. A 171, fos. 63-4; AN, Marine G 144 and B 3/115, Ib. 532. 13. Rennes, Arch. Dep. llle-et-Vilaine, fonds de notaires. Pilot and Vercoutère-Le Roy (actes d'engagement): Arras, Arch. Dép. Pas de Calais, 13 B 156, 13 Feb. and 2 March 1694; Capt. Edward Cooke, A Voyage to the South Sea, 2 vols. (London, 1712), sig. b4r"Vl 14. Rogers, p. 173; Shelvocke, p. 40; AN, Marine B3/115, fos. 544-8. 15. The Sergison Papers, ed. R.B. Merriman (London, Navy Ree. Soc., 1950), pp. 8-9; G.P.R. James, Letters Illustrative of the Reign of William ill, 3 vols. (London 1841), ii, 187. 16. C. Molloy, OeJui-e Marítimo. 5th ed. (London, 1701), pp. 220-4; R. Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry (London, 1962), pp. 149-54. 17. History of the Buccaneers of America (London, Unit Library ed., 1902), p. 40. In 1657 the first of Jamaica's governors refers to "buckaneers" as "French and English that kill cattle" in Hispaniola: "Edward D'Oyley's Journal, Part 2", Jamaica Hist. Rev., xi (1978), 69. 18. Charlevoix, iii, 11, 54-67; P. Constantin, "Jacques Yvon sieur des Landes (1645-1698), Lieutenant du roi a Saint-Domingue", La Province du Maine, xxxvi-vii (Laval, 1957), 7-48. 19. Nouveau Voyage aux Isles de I'Amcrique. 2 vols. (The Hague, 1724), 1, ii, 77; Charlevoix, iv, 137. 20. CSP Col. 1669-1674, p. 202; John Esquemeling, The Buccaneers of America, ed. W.S. Stallybrass ("Broadway Translations", London, n.d.), p. 131. 21. Cf. Defoe's description of seamen as "Les Enfants Perdus, the Forlorn hope of the World", An Essay upon Projects (London, 1697), p. 124. 22. F. Redlich, The German Military Enterpriser and his Work Force, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden, 1964), i, 117; A.P. Newton, The Colonising Activities of the English Puritans (New Haven, 1914), p. 252. 23. AN, Col. C9A/9, to. 217; Johnson, pp. 184-5, 400. 24. C.G. Cruickshank, Elizabeth's Army (Oxford, 1966), p. 49; R.E. Scouller, The Armies of Queen Anne (Oxford, 1966), p. 66. 25. Shelvocke, p. 30; Redlich, i, 134; M. Pawson and D. Buisseret, Port Royal Jamaica (Oxford, 1975), p. 29. 26. Scouller, pp. 130, 267.

Outlaws at Sea, 1660-1720

17

27. The Narrative of General Venables, ed. C.H. Firth (Camden new ser. no. 60, 1900), pp. 1416. 28. Redlich, i, 135; G. Parker, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road 1567-1659 (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 188-90. 29. See K.R. Andrews, The Spanish Caribbean: Trade and Plunder 1530-1630 (New Haven, 1978), esp. pp. 181-7. 30. G. Debien, Les Engages pour les Amules 1634-1715 (Paris, 1952), pp. 188-9; Newton, pp. 103-10, 192-3, 211-16, 279-82; cf. Charlevoix, iii, 46. 31. I have used the translation of'his "Journey to the Southern Sea from 1685 to 1686" in M. Besson, The Scourge of the Indies (London, 1929): see pp. 115-16. CI'. Basil Ringrose's journal in Esquemeling, pt iv, p. 398. 32. Nouveau Voyage, I, i, 75-6. Louis XIV did his best to return the church treasures taken by Pointis: AN, Marine B 4/18, 1'os. 348-65. It should be recalled that Spanish American churches were "the place of all publiek Meetings, and all Plays and Pastimes are acted there also": William Dumpier, A New Vorage Round the World, ed. Sir A. Gray (London, 1927), p. 93. 33. Ibid., p. 189. Dampier's veracity can be checked by reference to Ringrose's journal (and vice versa) till the latter's death in 1686. 34. Ibid., p. 211. Jamaican commissions were no longer obtainable after 1670, when many buccaneers resorted to S t Domingue. Conversely, some of the flibustiers served in Jamaican privateers during the Spanish Succession War. See generally A.P. Newton, The European Nations in the West Indies ¡49Ì-I6S8 (London, 1933), pp. 286 ff., and C.H. Haring, The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century (New York, 1910). Cf. the design of Capt. Nathaniel North's men, "not intending to Pirate among the Europeans, but honestly and quietly to rob what Moors fell in their way, and return home with clear consciences...". 35. AN, Col. C9A/4, fo. 446 (15 Oct. 1698). 36. Ibid., C8A/16, "Mémoire sur l'état présent des Isles. Remis par Mr Mithon et Mr de Vaucresson...à son arrivée", IO May 1706; ibid., 8, fo. 75, Blénac to Pontchartrain, Martinique, 23 March 1694. 37. CSP Col. 1677-1680, p. 565. 38. Account, p. 10. 39. AN, Col. C8A/IO, tbs. 350-3, Robert to Pontchartrain, I I July 1698. 40. New Voyage, p. 240. Cf. C. and R. Bridenbaugh, No Peace Beyond the Line: The English in the Caribbean 1624-1660 (New York, 1972), pp. 106, 118-20. Half a dozen types of engagement are described by G. Debien in "L'émigration poitevine vers l'Amérique au XVIIi.' siècle", Bulletin de la Société des Antiquaires de l'Ouest, ser. 4, t. ii (1952), pp. 27330. 41. The Voyages of Captain William Jackson, 1642-1645, ed. V.T. Harlow (Camden 3rd ser. no. 34), p. 2; cf. Newton, Colonising Enterprises, pp. 267-8, 315-17. 42. Op. eil., p. 113. 43. ¡bid., pp. 17, 102-3, 196; A.P. Watts, Une Histoire des colonies anglaises aux Antilles (Paris, s.d. |I925|), p. 134. 44. Debien, Engages, ch. v. 45. R. Mousnier, Fureurs paysannes (Paris, 1967), pp. 72, 90, and review by R. Mandrou in Rev. Hist., ccxlii (1969), 29-40. 46. C. Hill, Puritanism and Revolution (London, 1958), p. 136. 47. Debien, Engages, pp. 109, 131; L. Lewis, "English Commemorative Sculpture in Jamaica", Jam. Hist. Rev., ix ( 1972), p. 12. 48. A. Biet, Voyage de la France Equinoxiale en I'lsle de Cayenne (Paris, 1664), pp. 8, 56f.

18

Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760

49. Charlevoix, iii, 55. 50. Sir Charles Lyttleton, quoted by F. Cundall, The Governors of Jamaica in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1936), p. 19; P. de Vaissière, Saint-Domingue (Paris, 1909), p. 55. 51. Raynal, A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies. 8 vols. (London, 1783), vi, 125-6. 52. New Voyage, pp. 30, 238. 53. F.W. Chandler, Romances of Roguery: An Episode in the History of the Novel (New York, 1961), esp. pp. 47 ff., and A. Valbuena y Prat, ¿¡7 Novela picaresca espano/a (Madrid, 1956), pp. 14 ff. 54. The Naval Tracts of Sir William Monson, ed. M. Oppenheim, 5 vols. (Navy Ree. Soc., 190214), ii, 247; English Privateering Voyages to the West Indies 1588-1595, ed. K.R. Andrews (Hakluyt Soc., Cambridge, 1959), p. 162. 55. Esquemeling, p. 112. 56. Ibid., pp. 333-4. 57. Ibid., p. 130. 58. [London,] B[rit.] L[ibrary], Sloane MS. 758, entry for 25 Aug. 1639. 59. W. Hacke, A Collection of Original Voyages ( 1699), pt iv (Roberts); cf. AN, Col. C8A/6, fos. 446v-7. 60. Quoted by H.C. Wilkinson, Bermuda in the Old Empire (Oxford, 1950), p. 24. 61. AN, Col. C9A/7, fos. 322-3. 62. AN, Col. C9A/2, fo. 357, Isle a Vache, 18 Feb. 1688. 63. Esquemeling, pp. 60, 177. Charlevoix (iii, 68) grants the captains only a double lot. 64. Ducasse's running quarrel with Blénac, the governor-general at Martinique, who claimed the dixieme, suggests not only that it was a useful source of income, but that the disposal of prizes was now coming under official control, although Danish St Thomas remained a favourite mart for them: see (e.g.) AN, Col. C9A/2, fos. 322, 328-9, 362, 418-20, 471. Ducasse lost this battle in 1696 (7e/V/., 3,fo. 231), but in 1702 the Amirai de France awarded half his tenths to the governors of both islands (ibid., 6, fo 13ov). Governor d'Ogeron's more direct involvement in the flibuste should be clarified by the edition of his correspondence now being prepared by M. Michel Camus. 65. ibid.. 2. fo. 130. 66. Ibid.. 8, fo. 394. 67. 1 am most grateful to Dr Alan Jamieson of University College, London, for communicating a copy of the charter party of the Defiance of Guernsey, possessed by the Priaulx Library; it is impossible to be sure that it was typical of the numerous Channel Island privateers of the time. For illuminating examples of tiercemenls see C. Bréard, Documents relalifs a la marine normande et a ses armements aux XVIc el XVIle siècles pour les Antilles, le Brasil el les Indes (Rouen, 1889), pp. 11-25. 68. Esquemeling, p. 60; Johnson, pp. 184, 274, 307. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

Ibid., pp. 535-6. Nouveau Voyage, I, i, 74-5. Esquemeling, p. 178; Rogers, pp. 23, 171; Cooke, i, sig, b4. G. St Lo, England's Safety (1693), in Somers Tracts,' ii (1814), 72; Redlich, i, 122. J.J. Keevil, Medicine and the Navy. 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1957-8), ii, 135-6. Arrêt du Conseil. 31 March 1693, text in Citoyen Lebeau, Nouveau Code des frises. 3 vols. (Paris, an VII), i, 137, 273-5; AN, Marine B4/25, fos. 410-11; H. Buffet, Repertoire itumcrique de la sous-série V B: Amirauté de Saint-Malo (Rennes, 1962), pp. 188-206.

Outlaws at Sea, 1660-1720

!9

75. Esquemeling, pp. 60, 177-8; Labal, I, i, 75; Johnson, pp. 184, 274, 307; AN, Col. C9A/8, fos. 402-3. I have found only one French agreement, probably of 1702, offering compensation for disablement, but the sums are well below West Indian rates — e.g., 150 livres tournois, or roughly thirty-eight piastres, for an eye ( A N , Marine B4/23, fo. 134). 76. AN, Col. C9A/9, fo. 51; cf. ibid. 2, fo. 204. 77. The phrase is Dampier's, New Voyage, p. 246. Cf. Pawson and Buisseret, p. 31 ; G. Debien, Une Plantation de Satnt-Domingue: La Sucrerie G a ¡baud du For!. 1690-1802 (Cairo: Institut Francais d'Archeologie Orientale, 1941), p. 34; Labat, II, 237. 78. Charlevoix, iii, 68; AN, Col. C8A/6, fo. 407 (on provisions, 1691). On admiralty tenths see H.J. Crump, Colonial Admiralty Jurisdiction in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1931 ), p. 105, and supra, n. 64. 79. P. Margry (ed.), Découvenes el établissemenis ilex Francais dans l'Ouest et dans le Sud de l'Amtrique Septentrionale, 1614-1754. pt iv (Paris' 1880), p. 17; Johnson, pp. 182-3, 274, 307; Rogers, pp. 22, 206; Dampier, pp. 195, 219. 80. Sir C. Wager to Admiralty, 1727, cit. R.G. Marsden (ed.), Documents Relating lo Law and Custom of the Sea, 2 vols. (Navy Ree. Soc., 1915-16), ii, 266. Cf. T. Hesketh, A Discourse concerning Plunder (London, 1703), arguing, with reference to the plunder of St Mary's and of the Vigo galleons in 1702, that booty belongs to him who takes it; and more generally, F. Redlich, De Praeda Militari: Looting and Booty 1500-ISIS (Wiesbaden, 1956). 81. Op. cit., p. 545. 82. Esquemeling, pp. 222-3: pace D. Pope, Harry Morgan's Wa\ (London, 1977), p. 246, the charge was supported by Morgan's surgeon-general, Richard Browne, in CSP Col. ¡6691674, p. 252. 83. Johnson, pp. 259-60. Cf. the parody of Lords and Commons, ibid., pp. 166-8. 84. Histoire generali' des Antilles habitées par les Francois, 4 vols. (Paris, 1667), i i i , 151. 85. AN, Col. C9A/3, fo. 47; Charlevoix, iv, 163-4. 86. Bandits (London, 1969), esp. pp. 50, 62-4. 87. Charlevoix, ni, 246-7. Ravenau de Lussan suggests a care for sick comrades reminiscent of the Yugoslav partisans: Besson, pp. 98, 137, 147. Dampier, p. 155, notes the willingness of his companions to stay behind on one of their inarches to protect "a stout old Greyheaded Man, aged about 84, who had served under Oliver...". Cf. Lionel Wafer, A New Voyage and Description of ¡he Isthmus of America, ed. L.E. Elliott Joyce (Hak. Soc., Oxford, 1938), p. 5: "There had been an Order made among us at our first Landing, to kill any who should flag in the Journey. But this was made only to terrify any from loitering, and being taken by the Spaniards; who by Tortures might extort from them a Discovery of our March." The wounded Wafer owed his life to the kindliness of the "wild", unconquered Cuna Indians of the Isthmus, indispensable allies of the buccaneers. 88. Esquemeling, p. 61; Labat, I I , 244, 249. 89. Hacke, pt ii (Sharp), p. 14; Dampier, p. 252; Esquemeling, pp. 273, 341, 398. 90. Besson, p. 153; cf. Charlevoix, iii, 243. 91. Margry, iv, 17; Rogers, p. 207; Johnson, p. 307; Ringrose, apud Esquemeling, p. 398. 92. On the sharing of possessions and profits by the half-dozen men who composed a camera in the Army of Flanders, see Parker, p. 177; and Cruickshank, p. 114, for Elizabethan cameradas. Debien, Engages, pp. 136-7, offers a rich selection of nicknames in France. 93. Les Institutions de la France sous la monarchie absolue, i (Paris, 1974), pp. 85-9. 94. Charlevoix, i i i , 55; Labal, I, i, 75; Debien, Galbaud du Fort, p. 33; Burney, p. 41. Cf. London, Public Record Office, A d m i r a l t y 1/3930, Paris, 28 Oct. 1701, reporting a new Line of Battle: "the Prompt is in the midst of them as being Matelot, or assistant to the Vice-Admirall." 95. Dampier, p. 163.

20

Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760

96. BL. Add. MSS 39, 946, Ib. 10V-

97. Dampier, Voyages and Discoveries, ed. C. Wilkinson (London, 1931), p. 181. 98. Papers Relating to the Ships and Voyages of the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies 1697-1707, ed. G.P. Insh (Scottish Hist. Soc., 3rd ser., 6, Edinburgh, 1924), p. SI. 99. Some freebooter captains, mostly English, are to be found in P. Gösse's The Pirates' Who's Who (London, 1924), which draws on a narrow range of well-known sources. Gosse at least considered t h a t more of them deserved a place in the Dictionary of National Kit/graph \:.

2

COLONIES AT WAR The Succession War was won in Europe, but the succession itself included the greater part of the Americas - the world's principal source of silver and what were regarded as underdeveloped markets awaiting some livelier touch than the arrival of a fleet every two or three years from Cadiz. From their forward bases in Curacao and Jamaica, Dutch and English smugglers already traded slaves and manufactures to the coastal populations of what are now Venezuela and Colombia. The Portuguese, besides contraband exchanges between Brazil and Buenos Aires, usually held the Asiento - as in 1696-1700 - to supply three thousand five hundred Negroes a year for Spanish American mines, shipyards, and plantations. Since fulfilment of this contract required depots and agents ashore, it was valued for its incidental commercial opportunities. When the French Guinea Company obtained it in August 1701, London and Amsterdam saw clear proof that a Bourbon Spain would be run in French interests. It was a cause of war, and in 1713 an English Asiento, for the unprecedented period of thirty years, was regarded as a prize of peace. As this was optimistic, so were the Allies too pessimistic about the dominance of Versailles over Madrid. Commercial and colonial disputes bulked large in the friction between these two courts. The Asiento itself proved a disappointment. It contained a novel provision to admit slaves at Buenos Aires, but as this outflanked the established control of Panama and Lima it was bitterly contested. Not for three years was the Company allowed to set up its own warehouses in any Spanish colonial port; never was it allowed to enter the profitable tobacco and cocoa trades. Its captains and factors, not always scrupulous, met with obstruction from pedantic officials in the Indies and occasional mob violence. Meanwhile the French sugar islands ran short of labour, while the French navy had to guarantee the safe-conduct of Spanish convoys, the first of which met with disaster in Vigo Bay; later, in 1708 and 1711, English squadrons were to destroy some of the "galleons" coming out of Cartagena. In return for these escort services, the Council of the Indies declined to admit the French merchants at Cadiz to a legal share in the cargoes of the convoys. Nor would it accept the French presence in St Domingue by agreeing to a boundary on Hispaniola, the Spanish side of which afforded refuge to deserters from the French. Nevertheless the Spaniards had a greater grievance. It was difficult

22

Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1 760

enough to search armed French ships for contraband in the Caribbean. On the less frequented coasts of the Spanish Pacific the armed traders of St Malo were generally welcomed. Following a reconnaissance in 16991701, Jeanjourdan of Paris and Noel Danycan of St Malo, financiers who enjoyed protection at court, sent two ships to the South Sea and another to Canton. The China voyage was a dead loss andjourdan withdrew; but Danycan used the privileges of their combined companies to send two more ships to Chile and Peru in 1703, when other St Malo capitalists began to join in. Two years later, three of their ships returned with silver worth half a million sterling; three others realised a net profit of 350 per cent in 1706, when there were five more sailings. By 1708 it was being said in Parliament that this spectacular business had removed the larger privateers from the English Channel. In reply to Spanish protests, Louis XIV more than once undertook to stop the South Sea expeditions, but he needed their money. By 1714 well over a hundred vessels had delivered perhaps two-thirds of Peruvian silver production into Breton harbours. The over-trading evident by then was compensated in a few cases by going on to Canton, where the English had started a successful factory. Meanwhile the wealth and energy of St Malo spilled over into the Red Sea coffee trade, and it took over the undertakings of the French East India Company at Pondicherry, ready to occupy Mauritius in 1715. Collaboration between the Bourbon kings was also poisoned by the Pensacola question. The Spanish garrison in Pensacela Bay was established in 1698 as a precaution against foreign interest in the Gulf of Mexico, which had been stimulated by La Salle's Mississippijourney and by the explorations of peltry-traders from Charleston in the Tennessee country, down to the Alabama River. Menaced by an English and Protestant pre-emption of the lower Mississippi, Louis XIV was persuaded to safeguard the missions and fur-trade of New France by sending Iberville, the Canadian corsair, to fortify the delta in 1699. By 1702 this effort amounted to little more than a village at Mobile and a weak fort on the delta itself. The war nearly led to the abandonment of the colony, which had difficulty in feeding itself and was cut off for years at a time from metropolitan aid. As early as 1701 Louis XIV asked his grandson to let him have Pensacola, much better situated for navigation and defence. He never got it. Spain feared for the security of the vital Florida sea-passage and of Mexico itself. Even an ailing Louisiana, which could explore for minerals in the west, threatened Spanish interests in North America too, recently revived by the Jesuit missionary drive into Lower California. Nascent Louisiana spelled more immediate competition for the five thousand English and Huguenots of South Carolina, who had alliances with the Creek and Chickasaw Indians south of the Appalachians. Whereas the northern frontier of the British settlements had been ablaze

The Caribbean and Atlantic Seaboard

24

Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760

in the previous war, there was now a southern frontier problem also. Besides skilled diplomacy among these Indians and their tribal enemies, Iberville could hope to supply firearms to the bow-and-arrow Appalache of the Spanish missions in Florida, which had already endured slaving raids from the north. He conceived a vast plan of conquering Carolina and Virginia, beginning with a Franco-Spanish attack on Charleston. It was to prevent this that in 1702 Governor Moore besieged St Augustine, tough centre of the Spanish coastal garrisons in Florida. After eight weeks, relief arrived from Havana and Moore's frontiersmen withdrew, having lost their ships and cost their province £8,000 which it could ill afford. Moore's next expedition, early in 1704, had to pay for itself with slaves and plunder from the Appalache missions of western Florida. Executed by fifty whites and a thousand Indians, this campaign achieved and inspired widespread destruction of Spanish authority in Florida, besides undermining the frontier policy of Louisiana, already weakened by poverty of funds for Indian presents and cheap goods for sale. Nor were the Carolinians unprepared for retaliation. An attack on Charleston by five French privateers with Spanish troops, in 1706, failed miserably. So, however, did two English attempts to take Pensacela in the following year, with the aid of the Alabama Indians, and again in 1712, when the Carolina Assembly sent an expedition to burn the Choctaw villages around Mobile. Despite their precocious strategic vision, the Carolinian leaders were quarrelsome and they were up against a master of forest diplomacy in Le Moyne de Bienville, the saviour of Louisiana after the death of his brother Iberville in 1706. He was able to exploit Indian resentments of the cheating and brutality practised by Charleston traders. Anglo-French competition among Amerindian tribes also supplies a clue to wilderness hostilities farther north. Here another able diplomatist, Governor Callières of New France, had procured the neutrality of the five Iroquois nations whose villages divided the French of Montreal from northern New York, with its rival fur-market at Albany. The Iroquois, under Dutch or English influence, were historic enemies of Canada; it was now axiomatic at Quebec not to provoke them. Other tribes it could control. Governor Vaudreuil used his Indian allies, all Christian converts, no longer against New York, but to harass frontier townships between the Connecticut River and the coast of Maine. The notorious massacres at Deerfield (1704) and Havcrhill (1708) formed part of the terror lurking in the woods around many English border settlements and on the trails between them. The raiders, organised and led by French Canadians, preferred ransoms to scalps, but captives sometimes died on the march or were absorbed into the Abenaki tribes south-east of the St Lawrence. Not all would participate, and some expeditions failed because the Indians deserted. They understood the advantages of English trade at a

Colonies at War

25

time when there was a glut of furs in European markets and Canada faced economic ruin. The real object of the raids was to embitter the English against the Abenaki, while offering the latter plunder instead of trade. Throughout the war envoys shuttled between Quebec and Boston, usually to discuss prisoner exchanges but in 1705—06 neutrality also. This possibility broke on the refusal of Versailles, which sanctioned the scalping-parties, to let British vessels enter the St Lawrence or fish in Acadian waters (though a contraband trade persisted between Montreal and the Iroquois). The commercial aggressiveness of Boston was also to blame. By 1707, in the hands of Governor Dudley, an imperialist of the Carolina type, Massachusetts was returning to a strategy which had failed in 1690: the idea of an expedition to Quebec which should destroy the French threat more effectively than any number of reprisal raids overland. A step in this direction was taken when a thousand militiamen were sent to capture Port Royal on the eastern side of the Bay of Fundy, mainstay of the French hold on Acadia and base of the privateers which harried New England's shipping at an alarming rate: Samuel Vetch, an energetic Scottish trader who now took the lead in advocating large schemes of conquest at French and Spanish expense, called it the Dunkirk of North America. In 1707 the Massachusetts expedition achieved nothing, but in London next year Vetch employed his familiarity with the St Lawrence to interest the Junto, particularly Lord Sunderland, in a Scottish Canada. In April 1709 he was back in Boston, in the company of Colonel Nicholson, a forceful soldier with long experience of colonial government. They brought letters from the Queen promising four thousand troops for the "glorious enterprise". All that summer New England and New York were astir with preparation for the overthrow of French North America. Twelve hundred militiamen and regulars under Nicholson would move from Albany to Montreal, preceded by an advance guard at the foot of Lake Champlain and Indian scouts farther afield: of the Five Nations, only the Sénecas, neighbours of Canada's "Praying Indians", now remained neutral. Enlistment, billeting, provisioning (at controlled prices), distribution of arms, hire of transports and of whaleboats for landing craft - it was all a considerable effort of organisation and investment for the colonies ofthat day. Only the Quakers of Pennsylvania and New Jersey hung back; unruly Rhode Island and New York's factions displayed a rare unanimity. By July, colonial troops, well drilled and punctually paid, stood by in readiness for the English reinforcements. These never arrived. In October it was learned that they had been diverted to Portugal - early in June. The indifference thus shown towards the "great design" by the British government, under Marlborough's influence, reflects the primacy of European strategy. Though willing to hurt each other overseas, Britain

26

Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760

and France were not yet at war for colonial stakes. These had been entirely ignored by William III: the Peace of Ryswick left all but one of the fortified posts in Hudson Bay in French hands. In 1702 some parliamentary opinion, mainly Tory, favoured a maritime war, though it had in view the Spanish Indies, where a vast Creole rising was optimistically expected and where the Grand Alliance treaty provided that the English and Dutch should keep any conquests they might make. Yet the striking power of their navies was reserved mainly for the Mediterranean, in subordination to the armies. Only with the Tory election victory of 1710, and the desire to be rid of Marlborough, did "blue-water" strategy revive. It was assisted by pressure from an American delegation, headed by Nicholson and accompanied by four Mohawk chiefs - a stroke of publicity in court and town alike. The immediate result was a modest version of the Great Design. Nicholson returned to Boston with four hundred Marines and two fifty-gun battleships. Augmented by three cruisers on American station and fifteen hundred militiamen, this force easily overawed the small garrison of Port Royal on October 1. For 1711 the new government withdrew seven regiments from Flanders for service under Jack Hill, brother of Mrs Masham, and ordered Sir Hovenden Walker to see them to Boston with eleven warships. To preserve secrecy they went out under-victualled - an additional strain on colonial resources. This caused wrangling over merchants' bills, friction between officers and civilians; but by midAugust the squadron was in the St Lawrence, with sixty transports carrying seven thousand troops. Then everything went wrong. There was fog in the Gulf and the pilots lost their way. On the night of August 20, Walker was roused in his night-gown by an importunate landsman who "saw Breakers all round us". When the Admiral thought he was approaching the south shore of the river, strong currents and an easterly wind had carried his vanguard among the reefs of Egg Island. Weeks later visiting fishermen found the wreckage of seven transports, and corpses in British clothes. Only a provident shift of the onshore gale had spared the greater part of the fleet. For the rest of his life Walker was haunted by the decision to turn back as he had turned back from Guadeloupe after a landing there in 1703. While Quebec offered thanks to the Virgin, Nicholson disbanded the large force he had assembled near Lake Champlain for striking at Montreal. As the future of New France hung thus in the balance, London and Versailles were negotiating the preliminaries of a peace which should restore Hudson Bay and Newfoundland to English control, besides confirming the transformation of Acadia into Nova Scotia. In these respects the Peace of 1713 was in striking contrast with Rywsick. Even Walker's failure did not prevent the total recovery of Hudson Bay,

Colonies at War

27

though the only fighting there was the defence of the Company's remaining outpost, Fort Albany, against a hundred Canadians. The French paid more attention to Newfoundland. The cod-fleets from Brittany and Normandy were much reduced in wartime, but privateers abounded on the Banks. The French twice captured St John's, in 1706 and 1709. With Indian and Canadian reinforcements, Auger de Subercase, the defender of Port Royal, destroyed other English settlements as far north as Bona vista - ironically destined to become the southern limit of the French Shore at Utrecht. The previous French headquarters at Placentia was never overcome, though twice the object of half-hearted naval attention. England's only real success occurred in 1702, when Commodore Leake burned half a dozen settlements and their fishing vessels, besides keeping twenty-two prizes. Operations in these latitudes were connected with the Antilles, the other principal zone of colonial privateering. The ubiquitous Martinique corsairs cruised up to Acadia; Yankee skippers knew their Caribbean. Lacking legitimate Spanish prey now, the freebooters of St Domingue shifted their ground to Martinique, into which sixty prizes were taken even in the eighth year of war, besides others into Danish St Thomas, a booming neutral prize market. Some thirty "Martinicos" were usually at sea, small enough to escape pursuit in shoal waters. They kept food prices down when provisions from France failed, and they captured many Negroes. Port Royal in Jamaica was the main British privateering base, as also the only British naval dockyard in these seas, but Jamaican privateering was handicapped by the island's strong interest in smuggling with the Spanish Main. Martinique maintained six times as many prisoners of war, some of whom joined its corsairs. Though relatively well protected by a naval squadron, Jamaica lived in fear of enemy descents. The more exposed Leeward Islands suffered terrible damage. The French settlers on St Christopher capitulated in 1702, never to return; but a thousand freebooters looted it in 1706, before proceeding to ransom Nevis under Iberville, who had brought an armament from France intended for Carolina and Virginia but who soon afterwards succumbed to yellow fever at Havana. Parliament voted an inadequate £100,000 to compensate the planters of Nevis. In 1712 the pillage of Montserrat and Antigua was the prelude to attacks on Dutch Surinam, St Eustatius, and Curacao by Rene Cassard. He had already taken toll of Santiago in the Cape Verde Islands, on his way from Toulon with fifteen hundred troops. Three years earlier Sao Tomé in the Bight of Benin had been ransomed by privateers from St Malo. Lesser forces, usually from Martinique, sufficed to ransom the British fort on the Gambia River on three occasions. The cost of such commando raids, sometimes followed by pitched battles and chaotic accounting, might exceed the value of prizes and

28

Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760

ransoms. In the streets and round the bay of Rio de Janeiro in 1711, however, Duguay Trouin achieved the most remunerative and spectacular "descent" of the war. It was Bolingbroke's bargaining at Utrecht that obtained for Brazil a frontier with French Cayenne on the Oyapok instead of the Amazon, and a frontier on the Plate River hitherto disputed by Spain. The Succession War thus possessed a real colonial dimension. If the fighting was on a smaller scale than later, it was astonishingly widespread and often cruel. On both sides there were Americans, like Iberville, Moore, or Vetch, capable of the strategic vision of a Pitt, even though their home governments as yet preferred to settle the main issue on the Continent of Europe. Overseas, Britain gave priority to her trade convoys. The French displayed more initiative, but never enough to controvert Blenheim and Ramillies. Yet their colonial losses at the peace table, which except for Acadia and St Kitts had not been British conquests, were economically light enough. Their cod-fishery survived, while the British hardly made more of the Asiento than they had done. During the war, British colonial trade managed better. Afterwards, in the Antilles, beloved by statesmen and economists, the French advance was sensational. And in 1715 the Board of Trade itself referred anxiously to French North America: circling from Quebec to the Mississippi delta, might it one day "drive us down to the sea coast again and thence back to Old England our native hive"?

3

A LETTER-BOOK OF ROBERT COLE, BRITISH CONSUL-GENERAL AT ALGIERS, 1694-1712 Few areas in the history of the early modern world remain as obscure as the so-called Barbary Regencies of the Ottoman empire, geographically so close to Europe and for several centuries a disturbing if diminishing factor in its life, whether one thinks of the intervention of their corsairs, outside as well as within the Mediterranean, or of the diplomatic competition between the sea-powers at Tripoli, Tunis and Algiers. In all the attention given recently to Habsburg Spain, for instance, one misses the long-continued guerrilla-style raids of the Moors on the coasts of Valencia and Andalusia, or for that matter any clear statement of the functions of the Spanish p r e s i d i o s at Oran and elsewhere; likewise, there can be no real study of British Gibraltar which fails to explore its economic relations with the Maghreb. Even the well-trodden historiography of Louis XIV's later wars still lacks the modest but real presence of North Africa, which supplied food to the Christian belligerents at critical moments and where the inaval power of Algiers became at intervals a subject of keen contest between English and French diplomacy. As events were to show, the decade of the 1680s in effect marked the close of open warfare between Barbary and at least two of the leading Christian powers. The British peace treaty of 1682 with the City and Kingdom of Algiers was renewed at intervals, with minor emendations in 1700, 1703 and 1716. The third (and highly destructive) French bombardment of Algiers, in 1688, was followed by the treaty of 1694, which more or less satisfactorily settled the outstanding problem of the captive slaves on both sides. These epoch-making settlements nevertheless required careful nursing, partly because of the ruthless nature of Anglo-French rivalry at the Turkish courts, and even more because European hostilities not infrequently created incidents involving Islamic

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property or passengers at sea, to say nothing of minor breaches of the treaties, such as non-observance of the passport system laid down by that of 1682. Algerian opinion was hypersensitive to injustices real or apparent. But of course it was also highly mobile, like the political structure itself. Although by 1709 the Dey was strong enough to get rid of the last traces of visible control from Istanbul, in the person of the Pasha, real power had come to lie with the janissary militiamen, who elected and disposed of deys at their pleasure: in the twenty years following 1689 there were no less than six of these displacements. As Shaaban Dey, who held office for the unusually long period of six years (1689—95), wanned the French government, "II faut aussi faire reflexion que c'est ici une République de gens de guerre, lesquels vous vous asservir ez par les bontés que vous aurez pour eux" 1. Exactly why the Militia could be described as "un animal horriblement farouche" is a problem that calls for deeper study than it has yet received. It is one that dominates the whole history of the Ottoman empire after 1683 — compounded of military defeat, religious xenophobia, economic distress and social protest. In North Africa, however, the element of humiliation at Christian hands hardly seems to arise; after the French bombardments of the 1680s the most resounding event to occur between Christian and Muslim was the capture of Oran from the Spaniards in 1708. The almost chronic condition of war between the Barbary States themselves had nothing to do with Innocent XFs Holy League of 1684, though it was reopened only a year later with Mezzomorto's resumption of Algerian interference in Tunisian politics. Between 1685 and 1705 Tunis was three times besieged (and in 1694 occupied) by Algerian armies. Shaaban Dey's sensational success at Tunis in 1694, moreover, was accomplished at a time when the Algerians had repeatedly to send armies west and south-west against the hordes of the restless sultan of Morocco, Muley Ishmael; somewhat like that of Poland, it was the classical situation of Algeria to be caught between two other (and wealthier) powers. The real meaning of these constant expeditions and bloody engagements is far from clear, ibut at least it needs to be more widely recognised that the Maghreb was in turmoil throughout the European conflicts of 1688—1714. The internal instability of Tunis and Algiers alike in these years was bound up with this fact, far more than with the failing authority of Istanbul. For more reasons than one, therefore, it should be clear that the mere preservation of friendly relations with Barbary depended on re1 To Seignelay, 10 May 1690, in E. P l a n t e t (ed.), Correspondence des Deys d'Alger avec la cour de France 1579—1833, vol. I, Paris 1889, p. 239.

A Letter-Book of Robert Cole, 1694-1712

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sident diplomats of exceptional finesse, intimate local knowledge and certain cash resources. They were never men of more than consular standing; but from 1683 the British crown, which had had a more or less continuous record of consular representation at Algiers since 1585, raised the status of its representatives at both Algiers and Tripoli to that of "Agent and Consul General". Until the nineteenth century these were to be the only British consuls directly remunerated by the crown. Their allowances of £ 600 a year, together with "extraordinary" expenses, were paid out of the Civil List, like those of the regular diplomats, with whom the two consuls-general also shared the privilege of a personal chaplain. Such an exceptional status reflects the political importance of posts which could not be financed out of levies on shipping {consulage), for neither Algiers nor Tripoli were places of great commerce, even for the French, who had such substantial interest in the trade of Tunis 2. For the unusually long and eventful period 1694—1712 the British Agent and Cónsul-General at Algiers was Robert Cole, who had been taken captive thither at some date not later than 1678 and who died intestate there on 13 November 1713 without having returned home. There are a few references to him in the well-known publications of Joseph Morgan 3, at one time his chancellor, who describes him as "that highspirited Gentleman, that true Lover of his Country" and "a great Favourite of the A l g e r i n e s " , so deep in their attack on Oran that the Spaniards tried to prevent decent burial of his corpse four years later. Otherwise he is known almost entirely from such official dispatches to the Secretaries of State in London as have survived in the Public Record Office, very unequally distributed over the years and about half of them confined to 1710—12; there are less than forty in all down to 20 June 1706, after which there is a lacuna (roughly coincident with Lord Sunderland's tenure of the southern secretaryship) until 13 April 17104. The main interest of these dispatches, which often duplicate each other for fear of non-arrival, was summarized not long 2

D. B. H o r n , The British Diplomatic Service 1689—1789, Oxford 1961, pp. 236—245. 8 A Complete History of Algiers (2nd edn. London 1731), preface, and Several Voyages to Barbary, London 1736, part II, p. 134. Cf. Sir G o d f r e y F i s h e r , Barbary Legend: War, Trade and Piracy in North Africa, 1415—1830, Oxford 1957, pp. 281—7 and (for the list of consuls) p. 307. London Gazette, no. 5284. 4 Sftate] P[apers] 71/3 and 71/4. There are also two early letters (1684—7) in the Bodleian Library at Oxford (Rawlfinson] A. 189, fos. 137, 416—8) to the earl of Dartmouth, as admiral, and one of 1707 to Bishop Compton of London (ibid., C 984, fo. 165), acknowledging the arrival of a chaplain. All Souls College, Oxford, possesses a letter of 1 Feb. 1681 from Cole to Francis Baker (consul at

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ago by the late Sir Godfrey Fisher. They contain a good deal of political news (in the spirit of Charles IPs valuation of consuls as "intelligencers"), details of shipping incidents (rarer than might be expected before 1710), proposals for revision of the passport system, an occasional list of Barbary rovers, and painful requests for the payment of the consul's "extraordinaries" or even his arrears of salary. A constant refrain in this correspondence is the difficulty of conducting it at all in time of war, at any rate until Britain really dominated the western Mediterranean, which was not before 1705. Cole fears that his news will be stale by the time it reaches England, if it does so at all, and he complains of waiting too long for advices from home, which in any case might be intercepted by the French. He was largely dependent on communications with Leghorn (Livorno) and these, such as they were, were normally in French bottoms — "a very uncertain conveyance" in war-time. Ships carrying letters to or from him were liable to confiscation in a French port, along with their cargo. In 1695 he judged it absolutely necessary to buy his own settee "to run backwards and forwards with advices to Leghorn, [the] Fleet and other parts"; but she was captured next year by the French 5. He also hired a brigantine, but could not man her. More than once he took the risk of employing Algerine corsair captains, with some of whom he was on close personal terms, hoping they would meet an English cruiser. Since English naval appearances were rare at Algiers, it was hard enough to communicate even with the fleet. Some packets for the commanders in 1695 were returned "adrift" from Genoa. On another occasion he risked one for Admiral Rooke by an English merchant house at Tetuan — "and so far it may hapjpen for Spain." A direct passage ¡to Malaga or Cartagena was seldom obtainable. In these circumstances letter-writing was bound to be opportunistic and anything up to a year might elapse before a correspondent received an answer. On 10 and 12 February 1695 Cole replied to letters variously written between June and October of the previous year. Most of them had reached him (with one from Leghorn dated 3 November) on 24 November 1694. "Long look'd for come at last", he wrote to a London friend on 10 March 1695: "I received yours of the 27 July on 24 November and [was] pleased to see you then amongst the land of the living." These uncertainties, like the uneven character of the Public Record Office files, lend interest to the discovery of a manuscript letter-book Tunis, but then in London), ences of the Divan on such 5 S. P. 71/3, pp. 639, 650, 1696. A settee (s i t e a) was

showing that Cole was already admitted to the audioccasions as the reception of a French envoy. 677: to Shrewsbury, 10 Sept. and 12 Dec. 1695, 26 Aug. a small two-masted, lateen-rigged vessel.

A Letter-Book of Robert Cole, 1694-1 712

33

kept by Cole at intervals between 29 August 1694 and 2 May 1701, formerly in the possession of the late Sir Bruce Ingram and purchased by me in 1967. It is a substantial ledger-type volume, measuring 42,5 X 27,5 cm., bound in sheepskin and containing 138 unnumbered folios in excellent condition, 49 of which are blank. Some letters are undated and others, as noted by Cole himself, are slightly out of sequence6. They cover two short periods, the second of which happens to be one of the gaps in the State Papers Foreign: 29 August 1694 — 1 February 1696 and 10 March 1700 — 2 May 17017. In all, there are copies of nine dispatches to various Secretaries of State which are not to be found in the Public Record Office, in addition to a number of letters addressed to naval commanders on the Mediterranean Station, one of whom, as Captain John Neville, had been acting consul at Algiers in 1682—3. There are several letters to Richard Yard of the Treasury, one to Josiah Burchett and another to William Bridgeman of the Admiralty, and one to Lord Paget as ambassador to the Porte. About a dozen entries concern the British consuls at Tripoli, Tunis, Leghorn and Alicante; but Cole also had correspondents at Tetuan, Cadiz, Lisbon and Coimbra, as well as at Marseilles in peace-time. Together with his London correspondence — notably with Sir Thomas Vernon, Alexander Cairns, Samuel Nash, John and Francis Newland — this group of letters sheds a little welcome light on economic conditions at Algiers, as also on Cole's own trading activities. Finally, there are a few revealing family letters: to his wife Mary, who refused to share his loneliness; to his brothers Thomas and Lawrence, Customs collectors at Cowes and Portsmouth respectively; to "Sister Grove", wife of Robert Grove, bishop of Chichester, and to "Sister Per" with her daughter, "Niece Betty". Because of their close friendship, which aroused jealousy among his relatives, Cole's exceptionally full and frank letters to Thomas Baker and his wife — always addressed as "my Patrona" — fall into the family ca6

Erasures and an occasional blank for a date suggest that some are really drafts rather than copies; two are superscribed "did not goe" and one folio has been cut out. None appear to be in Robert Cole's own (clear) hand, unlike many of his letters in the State Papers; he sometimes refers to his „screvan" or scrivener, and this may at times have been one of the two nephews Benjamin and Wyndham, who lived with him on and off from 1696 at latest. This being so, I have not scrupled to modernize the highly erratic spelling and punctuation. References are to the Letter-Book unless otherwise stated. It is now in the Bodleian Library. 7 The gaps in a letter-book containing so many blank pages are hard to explain otherwise than as a failure of office organization. Cole sometimes wrote his letters "at the gardens"; on another occasion he admits that a copy was made on loose paper and since lost. Yet he was careful to send duplicates and even triplicates, on different dates. An intermittent but painful illness, which took a new turn in January 1696, might explain some failures in his record-keeping.

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tegory, although they contain much that Baker was expected to pass on to political and official circles at home. Baker was Cole's immediate predecessor (and instructor) at Algiers (1690—4), which he quitted as late as March 1695, after discharging a special peace mission to Tripoli8. He evidently enjoyed the confidence of the Algerian authorities, who were in the habit of nominating both British and French consuls 9. Cole acknowledged that he owed his office to Baker's influence and he continued to rely on it for obtaining his arrears of salary when the Bakers had moved to London. Cole's own (temporary) successor, Thomas Thomson, was even to allege that Baker "was partner with him in the salary" 10, a suspicion which derives no support from their intimate correspondence but which could have been fostered by Baker's handling of the consul's accounts in England. Both had an interest in the cargo of the P e l e g r i n a pink, which sailed from Amsterdam for Algiers in December 1700, a trading venture to which the consul pinned high hopes, having sent his nephew Wyndham to Europe for the purpose; as supercargo, Wyndham insured the voyage at Amsterdam and sent the policies to Baker, who had been instrumental in enabling the young man to kiss the hand of King William. Besides "the infallible rules" which guided Cole's conduct at Algiers, Baker also introduced him to the house of Nash, whose interests at Tetuan later involved him in "a world of trouble", and perhaps to other business correspondents. They frequently executed small commissions for each other. A postscript of 10 March 1701, for example, begs Baker to procure 8

He had been consul there from 1676, the year of Sir John Narborough's treaty of peace with Tripoli, until 1686, when he became briefly Clerk of the Checque at Deptford dockyard. He was a protégé of Lord Nottingham, but occupied no office more important than that of a Commissioner for Registering Seamen after 1695. His brother Francis had been consul at Tunis for twelve years in the last two reigns, according to a letter from Thomas of 7 Sept. 1694, requesting (vainly) that Francis might now be appointed at Tripoli. 9 Many examples in E. P l a n t e t, op. cit. The first entry in the Letter-Book is a translation of a letter from Haji Shaaban Dey to King William III, 26 April 1694, requesting the favour of Cole's appointment as one in whom the whole Divan, including the Aga of the Janissaries, have full confidence „because of the extraordinary experience he hath gained in this country." 10 S. P. 71/4, fo. 240: to Dartmouth, 3 Dec. 1712. This insinuation is to be found much earlier, with other scurrilous remarks on Baker and Cole, in the anonymous letter-book of "a Merchant at Algiers" (Bodleian, Rawl. A. 343, fo. 136) for 1692—6, which can now be identified as the work of John Butler, an impecunious and malicious man who lived for a time with Baker. Butler claimed that Baker first offered him the consulate for a consideration of £ 100 p.a. in return for seeing to the payment of the salary in London "and with all because he was the person that raised it to £ 600 a year". Elsewhere (fos. 73,75) he hints that Cole never intended to return to England because he was not free to do so.

A Letter-Book of Robert Cole, 1694-1712

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28 yards of cloth for the Dey, including seven of "not too light a green". To his "most cordial friends" Cole entrusts a horse and saddle for King William "which you will know how to present and improve I hope to my interest" (22 August 1700); in March 1701 he mentions six other Barbs, probably from "such pretty horses as I am master of" and ready for sending were it not for British customs duty — "so please to advise with Mr. Marshall about a man of war's touching here to carry them off about July" n. In addition to purchases and gifts for Mrs. Baker — green and crimson damasks, a white petticoat, a carpet, wine, ostrich e ggs — Cole looked after a tavern rented for her in Algiers, possibly out of kindness to a slave: wine being discouraged by Islamic law, it was the public ("Beylic") slaves who kept the taverns when they could raise the money to do so 12. The consul's letters to his Patrona, one of which is full of distressing private emotion, display an intimate frankness towards political personalities: "By gar, Madam, I shall be glad when it comes to the turn of you know who... I cannot forbear asking of questions. Why has my Lord Jersey been so long Secretary — something he does that won't bear water or too great a favourite?" In November 1700, when this was penned, Jersey was still the Secretary of State to whom Cole was answerable. As must be second nature to anyone living in a Muslim country, he took pains to oblige many people with small favours. The duke of Albemarle, the earl of Abingdon, and Sir George Rooke were among the personalities for whom he reserved mares. Having sent ten sheep to Rear-Admiral Neville, "in which pray eat my health", he later fears a "darkness between us". At the same time (August 1694) he presents Russell, Commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean fleet, with a damascened gun and scimitar and in April 1695 tells him that "Your sashes are preparing and so is your embroidered handkerchief". He was hurt when Commodore Aylmer failed to acknowledge some tigerskins and when five years later, as admiral, Aylmer showed some unaccountable "disgust" after being his guest: "I cannot endure the thoughts of any of His Majesty's captains or other of his subjects going from hence with laments of a poor entertainment or a cold kitchen, esteeming the reputa11

This was the great period for the introduction of Barb and Arab sires in the breeding of English race-horses, described by G. M. Trevelyan as not the least of Lord Treasurer Godolphin's great services: England in the Reign of Queen Anne, vol. I, London 1930, pp. 184—185. It is interesting that Cole usually sent a Barbary mare. 12 See M o r g a n , Several Voyages, I, 45. Cf. J o s e p h P i t t s , A True and Faithjul Account of the Religion and Manners of the Mohammetans (Exeter, 1704), p. 17: "But tho' Wine be forbidden, yet there is no Punishment for those that drink it; notwithstanding none use to drink it but the Rascality."

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tion of my post far beyond a little expanse..." Cole's liberality — he took pride in bottling his own wines — was on this occasion not beyond sending the bill to Jersey: "...since I am the sole house on the place I could not avoid entertaining great numbers of that fleet, which lay daily on me a charge, my Lord, too great and heavy for me to bear..." It may well have been this particular claim which in June 1700 caused William III personally to find the consul's bill unreasonable 13. Details of Cole's "extraordinaries" may be read in the Calendar of Treasury Books. Except for postage and the cost of clothing and feeding "delivered-up men" (the occasional redeemed slave or prisoners handed over by the French consul), together with Exchequer fees and the like, these items concern presents to Turkish office-holders or benefactors 14. They were mostly small — for example, 86 aspers "to Ishmael Hogga. favourite secretary, at circumcising his son, a caftan" or 21 piastres to Mustapha, his new dragoman — although the customary gifts to a new dey, his marriages or the birth of a son, could be expensive, as was the celebration of Mustapha Dey's rout of the Tunisians in 1700: on successive nights then Cole received "all the ladies of the first rank, all which I entertained magnificently with fireworks, dancing on a stage and music both Moorish and Christian, with throwing in the square rich perfumes and sending 'them custard, cheesecake, sweetmeats and other toys". With Mustapha Dey (1700—5, known to the Turks as "Upright Whiskers") Cole enjoyed the kind of intimacy at which he always aimed but which was hard to maintain for long in the circumstances of the time: "The Dey is a very kind neighbour, I share very often with him in his presents from the Alcaides and others out the country; he has frequently made me his returns of thanks for my care of his house in his absence." 15 At the worst of times — Shaaban Dey was "a greedy monster" — Cole had his friends at court. Ibrahim Delli Dey (1709—10, "the Fool") was to tell him that he had lived too long in Algiers and knew too much 16. We can believe him when he writes to Secretary Vernon: "It's a truth undeniable that without the punctual payment of my Extras, the interest [that] with so much difficulty I have got in this government cannot be kept on foot." And to Yard of the Treasury: "I do aver that interest purchased by such small sums goes further than any reasons that can be given to this rugged government 13

To Baker, 10 March 1701; the letter to Jersey is undated but belongs to 1700. Cf. Calendar of Treasury Books, vol. XV, 25 June 1700. 14 Ibidem, XIII, 340—2, and XV, 178—9, prints bills dated at Algiers on 2 March and 6 October 1697. They are expressed in dollar aspers, worth 3s. 6d. sterling ; n London and slightly less than two plate dollars or piastres in Algiers. 15 To Baker, 29 Sept. 1700. 16 S. P. 71/4, fo. 91: Cole to Dartmouth, 13 April 1710.

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in matters of dispute." The French consul, Durand, frequently made the same point17. Curiously enough, he and Cole each considered the other better supplied with funds. Cole particularly cultivated the corsair captains and the officers of "the King's House," where prize business was conducted and new slaves sold, after one in eight had been selected for the public service and the rest exhibited in the market-place. An undated letter to Baker, apparently written early in 1696, claims that "I have a very good understanding with all the captains, who come very frequently and freely for my table, where we never fail to sacrifice bottles to your lady's health, being very fresh in the memory of your friends." His "great friend", he adds, is Abderhaman Hogga (Khoja), who figures as captain of the G o l d e n O r a n g e T r e e , 32 guns, in a list of the Algerian navy compiled on 4 September 1694 — a total of fifteen ships (and 406 guns), with four more and a galley on the stocks. Few of the captains (r a i s) were renegades by this date, but one of them, commander of the H a l f M o o n , 22 guns, appears to be that "Mustapha, English renegade, well-wisher to us" mentioned in a letter to Neville of 20 October 169418. Cole's "particular good friend" in the King's House in 1700, Mustapha Khoja, is described as "the honest Turk" and "favourite screvan [iscrdvener]" — a description applied three years earlier to Ishmael Khoja. The rapid turnover of officials in the flux of Algerian politics added to the consul's difficulties. In November 1700 "my friend in the King's House, Mustapha Hogga, has broke his heart, with what apprehensions I knew not... his successor must be made my friend, which will cost money... The bowstring in my time, though Shaaban Hogga was a bloody man, was never so much in use as now..." 19 The consul's frequent interventions in the King's House were chiefly occasioned by the arrest of Englishmen found by the corsairs on vessels with whose flags Algiers was at war, or by the bringing up of English vessels themselves. In the first category only men working for wages 17

To Vernon, 10 March 1701; to Yard, 29 Sept. 1700. Cf. S. P. 71/4, fo. 40, to Vernan, 11 Sept. 1702: "It's not to be supposed that the bare name of a Salary and Extras can keep on foot our Interest here." For Durand, see P l a n t e t , op. cit, t. I, 555 n. 18 Both Abderhaman Khoja and this Mustapha Rais reappear in a French list of 1686 (Bodleian, Rawl. A. 189, fo. 209), which gives a total of 29 ships and 910 guns. In neither is Mustapha described as a renegade, but following his name in the 1694 list are the words "was B urn as [?Burns]," which identifies him in the 1686 list. The decline of the Barbary fleet is evident from these figures. In 1676 it had totalled 43 ships and 2,210 guns, excluding brigantines and galleys (ibidem, A. 185, fo. 277). 19 To Baker, 14 Nov. 1700.

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faced the risk of enslavement and Cole, rightly or wrongly, was usually successful in arguing that they were passengers. In fact, the number of British captives was few indeed in his time, after Baker in 1695 had taken home 45 of them — all that then remained in Tripoli, Tunis ani Algiers "except one that refused his liberty." 20 In May 1701, however, it was necessary for the Admiralty to forbid naval officers from conniving at the escape of slaves. This was in response to pressure from Cole himself, who had been led into "a labyrinth of trouble" by the abduction of a renegade, Shaaban a l i a s Child, on board Commodore Munden's squadron — a breach of promise made worse by the fact that Shaaban's ransom price was as much as 2,000 piastres 21. Moreover, Cole and Munden had only just negotiated an agreement with the Dey to release ships and their crews found in future without the requisite passports, freight being paid even on the confiscated cargoes22. The "gripeing of slaves" weakened the influence which Cole had procured with the Dey for punishing infringements of the Articles of Peace and Commerce by Algerians. Worse, it set at risk "the sinews of th2 good understanding we have with this government." His best friends were saying that "under pretence of friendship His Majesty's captains come hither to rob them of their estates."23 Six years earlier he had been much embarrassed by a former servant of his, John Butler, "by reason of his constant dealing and intriguing with slaves, a thing wholly to be avoided by any man who would live easy and reputably here." 24 The consul's pleading had often to be exerted on behalf of British shipowners and masters who neglected to obtain an Admiralty pass in accordance with Article IV of the 1682 treaty. This was sometimes because they wished to conceal their intention of sailing southward from French privateers, but Cole always resisted the term "Mediterranean" passes — "a proper name for them When a chain can be stretched from Gibraltar over. You know, Sir, the Algereens rove the seas over..." 25 He feared that the British naval presence in the Straits 20

S. P. 71/3, pp. 609 ff., Baker to Shrewsbury, 20 Feb. 1695. To Baker, Munden, and Jersey, 14 Sept. 1700; to Vernon, 10 March 1701. In 1688 the British Government offered at last 300 piastres as the market price of an escaped shipwright. 22 S. P. 71/4, fo. 19, Articles signed by the Government of Algier, 17 Aug. 1700. They are printed, after the terms of the 1682 treaty, as an appendix to M o r g a n's History of Algiers. 28 To Baker, 8 Feb. 1701. 24 S. P. 71/3, p. 617, to Shrewsbury, 19 Feb. 1695. On 14 March Cole added that Butler had been "intrinsic" with the French consul and his dragoman, an English renegade to whom he was considerably in debt. This and other references are confirmed by Butler's letterbook in the Bodleian Library. 25 To Admiral Rooke, 12 Feb. 1695. 81

A Letter-Book of Robert Cole, 1694-1712

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28

would encourage the laxity of merchantmen . Indeed, he had a poor opinion of the passport system altogether, feeling that it gave the Algerines a large advantage and "an unaccountable authority", that it lined private pockets and bred incidents, whereas there were better means of establishing British ownership — such as were used in the cases of vessels deserted by their crews on the appearance of a corsair 27. Passes were particularly deceptive in time of war, when British crews carried a high proportion of foreigners, so that the authenticity of a pass might be questioned. Early in 1696, in fact, he was able to obtain the Dey's agreement, against fierce opposition from the corsairs, to suspend the system, which in the Cole-Munden agreement of 1700 was prorogued until September 1701; and in 1703 special provision was made for plantation vessels and British prizes. But Cole failed to get admiralty passes abolished and in 1710 had much trouble arising out of the issues of passes by the Governor of Gibraltar, which were not valid and were stopped at his instance in 1711: "the unhappiness is that poor men, whilst they are made to believe the validity of such passes, think themselves secure, and by this means are unexpectedly brought into captivity." He hoped to supply Gibraltar himself, in conjunction with British merchants in Algiers and Oran 2S. By that time Cole could describe himself "as Chief Contractor for Corn" to the forces of Charles III in Catalonia. Evidently the years had brought some success in business. In the period covered by the Letter-Book he seems to have been the only regular British merchant in Algiers, for Butler's speculative transactions were fitful and he enjoyed no credit in London. The dey claimed in April 1694 that it was five years since a British merchantman had appeared voluntarily there. However that may be, Cole's partner in Algiers, Samuel Robertson, went home in 1693, still claiming a debt of 1,260 piastres owed by Cole, Butler told his friends in London that this was therefore the time to 26

To Sir Thomas Vernon, 12 Feb. 1695. In 1702 the Dey forbade his captains to enter the English Channel (S. P. 71/4, fo. 41), which his predecessor in 1687 had refused to do (Bodleian, Rawl. A. 189, fo. 137). 27 S. P. 71/3, pp. 638—40, to Shrewsbury, 10 Sept. 1695. As an example of the problem created by desertion, see ibidem, pp. 675—9, to Shrewsbury, 26 Aug. 1696. Cf. S. P. 71/4, f os. 124—5, to Dartmouth, 14 April 1711: "The Dey but chiefly the captains are very stiff in adhering to the Letter of the Treaty... out of an apprehension of frauds... and because being ignorant of the Christian Charracter they are not able to distinguish when a pass is authentiek." The captains insisted that the majority of the crew of a British vessel ought to be British, though the Dey was willing to compromise at 50%. Even this was more than Britain was willing to guarantee in war-time. 28 Ibidem.

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Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760

break into a trade hitherto engrossed !by Cole and Robertson. On 16 February 1695 Cole was writing to Alexander Cairns, a new partner in London, about raising a cargo for the care of "our house" 29. In April his letters30 fear "a sequester of my salt" and the loss of six chests of wine on a Livornese settee seized by the French; he also acknowledged a receipt from Messrs. Sollicoffer and Alphusua of Leghorn for ten barrels of red herring, prize goods from Algiers. In August 1700 he was asking for two blank counterparts of admiralty passes as he sometimes bought prizes "for my own proper account" 31. By then he was proposing to invest as much as £ 1,000 "in a small cargo I propose from London hither", with Thomas Baker and Samuel Nash each going shares for £ 500: Nash was to charter a vessel on condition that the master "shall serve me to any port in the Straits to the westward of this place, Cadiz or Lisbon as we shall agree" 32. On 27 December he asks Nash to advise "whether I cannot have from England in a foreign bottom iron, pilchers [pilchards], butter, salmon, red and white herring, two 14-inch cables, and said vessel to touch at Cadiz or Alicante to take in 20 or 30 quintals of poor jack [cod]." On 10 March 1701 he was thanking Baker for advancing £ 1,100 to Wyndham Cole at Amsterdam for the return cargo of the P e l e g r i n a , a pink "above 220 tons" which had sailed from Algiers via Marseille, after the original idea of sending her to Alexandria with rice and freight had been given up owing to the season. Wyndham was expected to bring iron and deals from Holland, as well as a housekeeper ("with a side saddle if she be a horsewoman"); but the consul was on tenterhooks about his unexplained delays, fearing that the price of iron at Algiers, where Swedish was selling at 22 piastres per quintal ("a brave price"), would fall once the Turkish ships returned from the Levant33. On other occasions the consul acted as a factor, charging 29

This follows a passage in which Cole says that, some gentlemen having let him down, he has "one that will be concerned £ 1000 which I shall be able in a short time to get together [and] possibly may find some other that will come in as much more, which will be cargo enough or as -much at least as at first shall require till the concerned shall find themselves treated fairly and with advantage." The evidence for the breakdown of Cole's partnership with Robertson is in Bodleian, Rawl. A. 343, fos. 3 and 6: cf. Calendar of Treasury Books, X (pt. 1), 135. 30 To Mrs. Cole and Thomas Baker, 14 and 20 April. 81 To Burchett, secretary of the admiralty, 22 Aug. 1700. The request was ignored. 32 Cole reported to Nash from time to time on the affairs of "your house at Tetuan," which traded with Algiers. On 10 March 1701 he tells Nash that he has been overstocking Mr. Spencer there. Cole also corresponded with Antonio Bacher,' who had a business in Tetuan. 83 To Wyndham Cole, 27 Dec. 1700. The quintal at Algiers was "the greater quintal" of 175 (not 150) Ib. An earlier letter to Sir Thomas and Mr. Thomas Ver-

A Letter-Book of Robert Cole, 1694-1712

41

5% commission and brokerage in addition to 2% consulage. When he had "no advantage" in a lading, a present of sweetmeats was not enough 34. In his advice to other merchants, Cole stresses the unpredictability of the market in Algiers and the violent price fluctuations there; it was a "barren place" for exports and yet difficult as a rule to obtain cash for imports. Powder and shot and naval stores were usually a good market, but difficult to come by when the European powers were at war; rice too was fairly safe (its exportation being contraband), as were Swedish iron, superfine wool, sponges, Tunis caps and D j erba fruit; salt "is never very dear here, but always money to be got by it"; oils were uncertain 3S. Sugar depended, like some other commodities, "upon hits of prizes", since the Algerine corsairs regularly hung off Portuguese coasts; in 1700 the arrival of a prize with 25,000 deal boards — "so that this place is supplied for some years" — made Cole regret that he had just ordered 6,000 deals from Holland 36. According to Butler, the 1694 expeditions to Tunisia, which removed a large portion of the Turkish aristocracy, (brought a "deadness" upon business at Algiers. On the other hand, a war indemnity in ready coin could touch off a boom: cloth was in good demand after the victory over Murad Bey in 1700 37. The consul non of London says that he is to take their commissions for Cairo before leaving, but strongly discourages them from sending a vessel themselves to Algiers. There are other references in the Letter-Book to Alexandria voyages, no doubt also connected with pilgrimages to Mecca. On 27 Dec. 1700 Cole is awaiting a ship from Alexandria belonging to the Vernons (whom he advises to send him only cloth fit for Egypt), while the Neptune brigantine (Henry Thomas) at Algiers has just been offered a freight to Alexandria; earlier she had intended to go in ballast to Smyrna and there lade for home. The Pelegrina reached Algiers on 9 April 1701, but Wyndham was back in London early in 1703 (S. P. 71/4, fo. 49). 84 On 14 Nov. 1700 he tells Emanale! and Antonio Vaz, of Coimbra, that a gift of sweetmeats and snuff was not enough to reward his service in obtaining a corn cargo for them at Tabarca; in writing the same day to John Freemantle and Company of Lisbon, he says he expected 20 piastres, "there 'being an old English proverb that it's merry in the trade when beards wag all." The export of corn was formally prohibited by Muslim law, so that influence was required to obtain a licence. 85 Much of this advice is contained in a letter of 24 Jan. 1701 to John Goddard, the new consul in Tunis. The price-currents sent by Butler to his correspondents in 1693—4 {Bodleian, Rawl. A. 343, fos. 32 and 64) list also spices, ginger, cochineal, indigo, cotton wool and yarn, black and white beads, lead and redlead, nails and quicksilver. 86 To the Vernons, undated. 87 To the Vernons, 3 Sept. 1700: "...but send none but what fit for Alexandria." Cf. 12 Feb. 1695 to same (when Shaaban Dey had just made himself master of Tunis): "Cloth is greatly wanted, so as all northern goods." For Butler's comment on the slump in Algiers in December 1695, cf. Bodleian, Rawl. A. 343, fo. 111.

42

Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760

advised his correspondents never to send too great a quantity of anything and sometimes to send piastres rather than goods. In this he was not altogether disinterested, since he could dispose of plate dollars at 6°/o profit in exchange for aspers. If goods were sent in a French ship, moreover, he would not make use of his interest; there would be no consulage for him 33. Similarly, he would discourage correspondents from sending cargoes that might compete with his own ventures: "I'll christen my own child first." There was of course nothing as yet improper in Cole's commercial activities as such, although the French Crown was already trying to forbid private trade to its consuls and in 1684 the British government had been advised that, in the special circumstances of Algiers, it was incompatible with the public service 39. Cole's official salary was supposed to compensate for poor consulage income; but even had that allowance and his "extras" been more punctually paid, he had a gentleman's way of life to maintain and nieces to think of; he was not to know that he would die in harness. His correspondence leaves no doubt of a strong sense of public service; in any case, to the end, he was afraid of earning rebukes from London and understood perfectly the ease of incurring them in Algiers, where there were gossiping enemies enough 40 . He leaves the impression of a sensitive man, not without compassion for the innocent or at times for himself, as when defaulting shipmasters expected him to get them out of trouble or when he had to put up with violent words from the Turkish authorities. "Sir," he wrote to his partner Cairns as early as 1695, "my misfortune hath ever been to be concerned with sharping, shirking, tricking fellows, which hath made me thus unhappy in my declining years." 38

To Daniel Newland and Robert Cross, of Alicante, 4 Oct. 1700. Both Captain John Neville and Samuel de Paz, a Tangier merchant, advocated a high salary — but only two-thirds of what Cole received — so as to discourage consular trading, implying that Consul Martin had weakened his public position by accepting prizes on credit from "a subtil, cunning people" who were apt to demand full payment just when he had some public request to make of them (Bodleian, Rawl. A. 257, fos. 21—57). Cf. Y. D e b b a s c h , La Nation /raneáis« en Tunisie, 1577—1835, Paris 1957, pp. 185—194. 40 Cf. his advice to Wyndham Cole (at Leghorn), 3 April 1701: "...you have abundance of eyes over you, therefore once again have a care, for every little false step in you will be taken notice of to your prejudice..." Cole hoped that his nephew would eventually succeed him in the consulate, but Wyndham, the son of Lawrence and Elizabeth Cole of Portsmouth, died on 16 July 1706, according to a certificate written by Robert Cole and interleaved in his Letter-Book. 39

4

THE NORTH SEA IN WARTIME, 1688-1713 Introducing extracts from the king-stadholder's correspondence with Heinsius, Leopold von Ranke observed that 'brought together in anything like completeness and sufficiently elucidated, it would be a history of the age'1. Anyone who has broken the seal of the confidential letters of Marlborough and Godolphin to each other between 1701 and 1710 must feel likewise2. And yet how much remains to be elucidated! How recall the once passionate drama in such dead questions as the Protestant Succession or the Barrière? Louis XIV, especially if we have pro-French inclinations, has become so much less threatening than the Jacobin crusade or the Napoleonic tyranny; indeed, the more we have been taught of the party strife in countries opposed to him, the more sympathetic do we risk becoming to the rationality and courtesies, if also at times the despair, that inform the correspondence of the Great King's servants. When the political quarrelling is analysed, much of it is found to revolve round personal, local or at best domestic issues which strike us as trivial by comparison with the foresight and single-mindedness of a William III. His stature, like that of Godolphin, is increased by the trouble they caused him, so that we can admire the man without fully sharing his inspiration. But correspondingly, historical justice to the troublemakers - particularly perhaps to the Dutch vredesvrienden (peace party) - requires that fuller account be taken of the relentless, day-to-day pressure of two long wars on civilian life. 'War-weariness' is too often a historian's deus ex machina, a phrase empty of living content, supported at best by reference to crushing taxes, the alarming growth of public borrowing, strategic or diplomatic stalemate, the distortion of international traffic. My purpose now is to address your minds to this last element, which had moral besides economic implications. The North Sea, with its crowded shipping lanes of great antiquity, is intimately known to us and I need not spend time describing the tightly woven tapestry of the * Revised from a lecture delivered to the general meeting of the Nederlands Historisch Genootschap on 8 October 1976 at Utrecht. I am deeply grateful to Prof. dr. J. C. Boogman and to drs. G. N. van der Plaat for assistance in preparing the text for publication. 1. A History of England (6 vols., Oxford, 1875) VI, 277. 2. See Henry L. Snyder, ed., The Marlborough - Godolphin Correspondence (3 vols., Oxford, 1975).

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Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760

trades which united it. Enough to remind you that its shores embraced Europe's two greatest ports at this time, Amsterdam and London, and that over threequarters of England's shipping tonnage, as well as most of Scotland's, was owned on the coast which faces yours. In our economy it had much greater relative importance still than it was to have as the eighteenth century, with the expansion of colonial trade, wore on. And in the period I have chosen it linked two allies whose most sustained effort through two long wars was made in the Spanish Low Countries, with all that this implies for the safe passage of troops, supplies, remittances and not least of vital correspondence. It happened that these, like all the trades and fisheries of the area, were continuously threatened by the presence in our midst of the naval base of Dunkirk, with its old experience of warfare on commerce and the most belligerent of French corsairs, at a time when the guerre de course was prosecuted with as much vigour and optimism as the submarine wars of our own century. For these reasons alone, the North Sea, a dangerous one at all times, can offer us some sort of case-study of the impact of war, so much neglected by the economic historians. In studying it, moreover, we are able to take account of the role taken by the neutral shipping of Denmark and Sweden, especially when there was no licit trading with the enemy. This was extremely important during the Nine Years War, and again in 1703-1704, when William III and his political heirs managed to impose an unprecedented embargo on Dutch trade with France, thereby dislocating Holland's 'mother commerce' with the Baltic. Not only that: William began by attempting also to prohibit all Scandinavian trade with France an act of economic warfare more audacious, I believe, than anything of its kind before the age of Napoleon. So we shall need to look a little beyond the North Sea, into the Baltic and the Bay of Biscay, if we are to judge the impact of twenty years' life- and-death struggle upon those who lived around it. First, a necessary word of caution. War, we know, works with paradoxical effects on an economy, stimulating sectors concerned with military supplies and protecting others from normal competition3, while tending to create scarcities, raise costs, and alter the preferences of investors almost from year to year. At the same time, a total war economy was unthinkable in this period of limited State power, even if William took certain steps towards it, as in initiating the treatment of corn as contraband when the French were starving in 1693. Indeed, the business and personal lives of Europeans stood to be more direly affected by a bad harvest - or a run of poor harvests such as afflicted Scotland in the 1690s - than by war itself. Within terms of the incidence of war itself, London prices in those years reflect both the national debt and the contrary (deflationary) action of a drain of capital 3. For examples (e.g. in metallurgical production) in this period, see A. H. John, 'War and the English Economy, 1700-1763', Economic History Review, 2nd ser. VII (1954-1955) 329-344.

The North Sea in Wartime, 1688-1713

45

to the Continent, which in turn enabled English exporters to cash their bills more quickly from the remittance specialists than from foreign customers, while it contributed in the Dutch Republic to a price-rise4. That Dutch prices nevertheless followed a downward path in 1702-1708 but rose sharply in 1709-1710, as did the English, perhaps tells us more about the state of the harvests than that of the war, although we must allow something for the course of events in the Baltic, where the repercussions of Tsar Peter's victory at Poltava were combined from 1709 with a visitation of the plague to make trading conditions more difficult than they had been since 1700, the first year of those northern hostilities to which historians too often attribute a kind of blanket effect, with insufficient regard for the tides of war : these short-term fluctuations are concealed by the habit of taking decennial averages5. As a general index to the pressure of war on the United Provinces, the activity of the specie trade seems preferable to the controversial evidence of prices, despite the fact that it must tell us something about all the belligerents and in particular which side Spain was on. Measured by the metal reserves of the Bank of Amsterdam, the Spanish Succession War exerted a much harder strain than all but the last two years of its predecessor. Still more significant, for the leading centre of international payments, the scale of discounting, though not always of the total balances or the number of account-holders, follows closely the curve of the metal reserves6. Moreover there is a broad concordance between this and the Amsterdam shipping figures. Here, since I do not wish to weary you with statistics, let us be content to notice a marked dip for the first two or three years of each war and another one as the wars drag to a finish; but with the difference that the second and longer war shows a more depressed profile, unrelieved by any striking recovery such as occurred in 16931695. What figures we have for English ports show a rather different pattern : a truly

4. J. Keith Horsefield, British Monetary Experiments, 1650-1710 (Cambridge, Mass., 1960) 5-12; D. W. Jones, 'London Merchants and the Crisis of the 1690s', in P. Clark and P. Slack, edd., Crisis and Order in English Towns 1500-1700 (London, 1972) 322-327 ; N. W. Posthumus, De geschiedenis van de Leidsche lakenindustrie, II (The Hague, 1939) 1001, 1010, 1142. 5. Yearly numbers of ships (both ways) paying Sound tolls, according to N. E. Bang and K. Korst, Tabeller over Skibsfart og Varetransport gennem 0resund, 1661-1783 ..., I (Copenhagen, 1930)42-55: 1700 = 2,866; 1701 = 3,193; 1702 = 2,828; 1703 = 2,415; 1704 = 2,994; 1705 = 2,821; 1706 = 2,913; 1707 = 2,524; 1708 = 2,664; 1709 = 2,296; 1710 = 1,413; 1711 = 1,600; 1712 = 1,626; 1713 = 2,293; 1714 = 2,466; 1715 = 1,561; 1716 = 1,236; 1717 = 1,091; 1718 = 1,309; 1719 = 1,943; 1720 = 2,417. 6. J. G. van Dillen, Bronnen tot de geschiedenis der wisselbanken, II (The Hague, 1925) 985; cf. the graph at p. 392 in idem, Mensen en achtergronden (Groningen, 1964). The figures are conveniently printed in The New Cambridge Modern History, VI (Cambridge, 1970) 902.

46

Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760

sensational drop in the Nine Years War but a more modest one later, also with a tendency to recover towards the end of each war7. Unless Amsterdam's trade was considerably more vulnerable to privateering attack than England's - I will look into this later - the explanation of this broad contrast is likely to be found in what was happening to the city's Baltic connections. We can hardly fail to be impressed by the drastic decline in Dutch sailings through the Danish Sound during the Nine Years War8. Only in 1700 were they affected by the outbreak of the Great Northern War, so the decline is most likely attributable to the virtual cessation of Holland's complementary trade with western France in wines, brandies and salt. What is harder to interpret are the still lower levels of these sailings in the next war, after 1705, when an open trade with the French ports (under passes issued by Versailles) was resumed on a large scale until 1710, at the end of which year the French government stopped it, at some cost to its own exporters, in order to force the Republic to make a separate peace. What contrivances Dutch merchants adopted for maintaining some shadow of this almost essential traffic I hope to study in more detail on a later occasion. It is clear enough, however, that many of them 'coloured' cargoes to France during the years of prohibition on board neutral ships, if they did not also own the ships themselves. To understand this, I must next turn briefly to the Scandinavians themselves. The fact is that the northern neutrals moved into the carriage of French salt, wines and brandies for themselves, on a wholly unprecedented scale, from 1691, after the Allies had abandoned the attempt to bring them into their own blockade - so much so that the Danes by 1695 were said to be losing their taste for Rhenish and even beer9. The clearance of two hundred Swedish bottoms from Bordeaux alone in the two wine-years 1703-1705 may come as a surprise to anyone who supposes that the war in Poland absorbed all Sweden's shipping resources. During the 1690s these had increased to 'no less than 750 ships'10. Like the Swedish, the 7. Graphs for convoyen and licenten, incoming vessels and lastgeld in Algemene Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, VII (Utrecht, 1954) 313; table of English clearances in Ralph Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry (London, 1962) 26. 8. Bang and Korst, Tabeller, I, 38 ff., 147 if.; cf. 10-yearly averages tabled in A. M. van der Woude, Het Noorderkwartier (A. A. G. Bijdragen, XVI; 3 vols., Wageningen, 1972) II, 383. 9. Oscar Albert Johnsen, Innberetninger fra denfranske legasjon i Kjobenhavn vedrerende Norge 1670-1791,1 (Oslo: Norsk Historisk Kjeldeskrift-Instituut, 1934) 201-202. Cf. Bang and Korst, Tabeller, I, 30 if. for figures of ships out of French ports (expressed as 3-year averages). If only because of Danish and Swedish holdings on the Elbe, to say nothing of Norway and Gothenburg, their figures understate the Nordic trade with France. For example, departures from Bordeaux alone (admittedly far the most important) in the wine-year (1 Oct. - 30 Sept.) 1704-1705 totalled 36 for Denmark, 33 for Norway, 119 for Sweden, and 9 for Danzig: C. Huetz de Lemps, Geographie du commerce de Bordeaux a la fin du regne de Louis XIV (Paris-The Hague, 1975) 63. Cf. my article, 'Le commerce de la France de l'ouest et la guerre maritime, 1702-1712', Annales du Midi, LXV (1953) 49-65, where the statistics relate to calendar years; see below, pp. 389-406. 10. E. F. Heckscher, An Economic History of Sweden (Cambridge, Mass., 1954) 113-114.

The North Sea in Wartime, 1688-1713

47

Norwegian and Danish marines had long been stimulated, at Dutch expense, by the English Navigation Acts ; but the Nine Years War imparted a much stronger boost: Danish tonnage virtually doubled between 1688 and 1696, while the Norwegian expanded nearly threefold11. These merchant fleets entered the French trade in"strength, moreover, just when they were called upon to carry a much higher proportion of timber, naval stores, iron and copper to their principal markets in the Texel, Thames, Humber, Tyne and Forth12. The wars of the Grand Alliance presented them with an unprecedented opportunity. Almost the only point on which the Northern Crowns co-operated, although by no means without friction, was to provide each a warship, two or three times a year, for their joint convoys to Dunkirk and beyond. In the winter of 1693-1694 Jean Bart himself came to the rendezvous at Flekkr0 ('Vlecker' on the old Dutch maps, at the entrance to Christiansand sound), and there are indications that Danish corn-shippers would have liked more such escorts, even if there were runners who preferred to sail under Ostend colours and get themselves captured, collusively, by Dunkirk privateers - a method which sometimes suited the Holsteiners and the Danish communities on the Elbe, at Glückstadt and Altona (and Swedish Stade on the opposite bank), which were subject to Imperial law and consequently to the avocataria prohibiting trade with France13. I have no French figures for the Nine Years War, but in the eighteen months June 1703-December 1704, there were entered at Bordeaux alone no less than 66 vessels from Stockholm and 42 from other ports under Swedish domination, 41 from Copenhagen, 45 from Norway, and 29 from the little ports of Slesvig-Holstein. By 1712 (again without Dutch competition) these last, to the number of 53, are virtually the only Scandinavian survivors in the Gironde - sad testimony now to the maritime hostilities, outside as well as within the Sound, between the Northern Crowns14. Just when the French Crown embarked on an extremely rigorous economic blockade of the United Provinces at the end of 1710, the Northern marines had at last begun to cripple each other. 11. Respectively, 23,799 and 40,319 laester in 1696: J0rgen H. P. Barfod, Danmark-Norges Handelsflade 1650-1700 (Kronborg, 1967) 86-87, 160-197. Cf. Bengt Lorentzen, Bergen og Sj0farten, I (Bergen, 1959) 245; P. J. Charliat, ed., 'Mémoires inédits de thor M0hlen a la cour de France', Ber gens - Historiske Forening, XXXIII (1927) 11 ; Wilhelm Keilhau, Norway and the Bergen Line (Bergen, 1953) 35-36. 12. R. Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry (London, 1962) 334-336; B. Boëthius and E. F. Heckscher, Svensk Handelsstatistik 1637-1737 (Stockholm, 1937) Iv; T. C. Smout, Scottish Trade on the Eve of Union 1660-1707 (Edinburgh, 1963) 153-161. 13. Under conventions dated 10 March 1691 and 27 March 1693: see G. N. Clark, The Dutch Alliance and the War against French Trade 1688-1697 (Manchester, 1923) 103-105; Charliat, 'Mémoires inédits', 314; Johnsen, Innberetninger, 75, 99,106-107,129-139,164, 196. 14. Bordeaux, Archives) D (épartementales de la) Gironde, 6B 124 and 125: 'Lettres de mer', 28 June 1703 - 24 Dec. 1704 and 6 Nov. 1711-12 Nov. 1712. Cf. Huetz de Lemps, Geographie, 63, for departures 1703-1705: Swedish total 198; Danish-Norwegian 128; Slesvig-Holstein 52.

48

Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760

I have emphasised this Scandinavian intervention in the Biscay trade not only as a comment on the failure of the king-stadholder's precocious conception of economic warfare, but because without it - and that of the Hanseatics - the privateers of south-east England, Zeeland and even Dunkirk would have had a poorer time of it and spared all the belligerent powers a sequence of diplomatic embarrassments, not to mention the fierce rows which blew up between The Hague and Middelburg over the 'political' suspensions ('surcheances') of prize cases in 1703-1705, before Zeeland valour was bought off by a doubling of the premium awarded for capturing enemy warships on any sea15. Although most of the arrested neutrals, with or without their cargoes, were released in the end, the interruption of their voyages could be prolonged, expensive and embittering, not least when princes and their ministers had a stake in the cargoes, as was true of all Danish ministers, or when the privateers exploited technical faults in passports approved by them16. When corn was unilaterally added by the Maritime Powers to the contraband list, in 1693 and 1709, arrested cargoes were taken out and paid for ; but often, in other cases, on the plea of just cause of seizure, owners failed to recover costs and damages17. In the Nine Years War, not least whenever there was a harvest failure in France, the English navy took a big hand. In fact, the High Court of Admiralty had far more neutral cases to try than even the Conseil des Prises, while in this respect the prize business of the admiralty at Middelburg, for all the embarrassment it created at

15. I may refer to my article 'Les corsaires zélandais et la navigation scandinave pendant la guerre de la succession d'Espagne', in M. Mollai, ed., Le navire et V economie maritime de V Europe, below, pp. 43548. These disputes did not reach flash-point in the time of the king-stadholder, though he complained of the Zeelanders and sometimes cancelled their commissions. 16. Ibidem, 93-95. The many ambiguities surrounding the authenticity of Danish passes are conveniently summarized by Hugh Greg, the British chargé d'affaires at Copenhagen 1692-1701, in P(ublic) R(ecord) O(ffice), SP 75/23, fos. 16-22, 28-31; cf. copy of his 'present thoughts' (early 1694) in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Rawl. A 345, fos. 245-250, containing an analysis of Danish obligations under the traite provisionnel of 30 June 1691, as modified by Van Amerongen's seven 'elucidations and amplifications' before ratification of the Convention on 25 December. D'Usson de Bonrepaus, French ambassador at Copenhagen 1693-1697, expressed admiration for Amerongen's cleverness, in a retrospective 'Relation des negotiations d'Usson de Bonrepaus', Archives des Affaires Etrangères, Danemark 36, fos. 24-26 v. Cf. S. P. Oakley's unpublished London Ph.D. thesis, 'William III and the Northern Crowns during the Nine Years War' (2 vols., 1961) especially ch. vi-vii. 17. 'Just cause of seizure' occurs frequently in the judgements of the Conseil des Prises. The English attitude to demands for compensation was stated by the Admiralty judge Sir Charles Hedges (PRO, SP 75/23, fo. 127 v.): 'That the Crown of England is not answerable for the actions of the Privateers ... where the parties who pretended to be injured... shall prosecute them for satisfaction'. Instead, complainants too often resorted to diplomatic protests: half a dozen examples in PRO, SP 75/23, fos. 106,109, 112. If the captor was a naval ship, on the other hand, the Privy Council might order release of a prize before it came into court at all: ibidem, fos. 109V-110: 'The Arms of Frederickshall', Olafsen, and 'The Gilded Unicorne', Tortensen, both discharged by the Prize Officers.

The North Sea in Wartime, 1688-1713

49

The Hague, looks modest enough by comparison with either18. There is no parallel to Admiral Rooke's seizure of an entire Swedish convoy of 90 sail in 1697; and as many Swedes had been awaiting judgment in London in March 1694, when also the Dutch held 50 and the French 3019. This is an untypical year because so many of the Allies' interceptions in 1694 were cornships, while at the same time the States General were freely arresting Danes in Dutch harbours by way of reprisals for the stopping of a score of'Great Flyboats' at Elsinore20, so let me also mention a list of 71 claims put in by Christian von Lente, Danish Resident at The Hague, on 21 May 1693 to the British government; although it is true that 34 of these vessels were restored or discharged, Lente omitted 61 others which had been confiscated - a total of condemnations in London to date, therefore, of 98, mostly with the cargoes21. With others still to come22 - and with the Dutch abandoning for Denmark, though not for Sweden, their old principle of 'free ships, free goods' - it does not look as if the judicious d'Usson de Bonrepaus, looking back on his disappointing embassy to Copenhagen (1693-1697), was exaggerating all that much when he wrote that the Maritime Powers had arrested nearly all Danes bound to France in these years23. This, he thought, they owed to the 'elucidations' cleverly added by Van Amerongen to their Convention with Denmark of 1691, renewed in 1696 and far more oppressive than the earlier treaties of the Maritime Powers with Sweden, which Stockholm refused to revise: for instance, Danes, but not Swedes, would be protected only when carrying to an enemy port - and this directly there and back goods that 'do really belong and without any Collusion belong to real Danish subjects, living without the bounds of the Empire, and sworn to ... '. Thus, strictly, the Swedes could carry Danish goods, but not vice versa; and foreign masters, 18. Infra, n. 114. The admiralty board admitted that it might err under pressure of business: Algemeen Rijksarchief, The Hague (ARA), Staten Generaal, Admiraliteitsarchieven 2525, 26 March 1704. 19. Clark, Dutch Alliance, 113-114. 20. The circumstances are detailed by Greg, PRO, SP 75/23, fos. 270-282. The London Gazette, no. 2949 (12 Feb. o.s. 1694), reported the seizure of between 30 and 40 Danish ships at Amsterdam. On cornships taken into Dover by English privateers, cf. ibidem nos. 2937-2938 (1 and 5 Jan. o.s. 1694). 21. PRO, SP 75/23 fos. 101-113, 248-249; 34 names in Lente's list appeared on a similar one presented by Scheel, Danish Resident in London, on 9 May o.s. 1692 (on which a copy of Hedges's comments is in the Bodleian Library, MS. Rawl. A 345, fos. 297-301), but not in Scheel's list of 15 ships of 4 Jan. o.s. 1692/1693 (SP 75/23, fos. 3-4). Cf. Hedges to Nottingham, 26 May o.s. 1692, London, British Library (Reference Division), Add. MS. 9764, fos. 19-29. 22. The notes by Owen Wynne in Codrington Library, Oxford, Wynne MSS. LR2 E23, for July 1694 to Oct. 1695, sum up the arguments of the parties in dispute: on 27 July 1694, when 39 Danes were restored (some upon bail and time to prove property), the Danish Resident was present in court. 23. 'Relation Bonrepaus'.

50

Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760

owners and freighters, to comply with the Convention, would have to take an oath to reside in Denmark-Norway, with their families, for ten years24. Diplomacy in the northern capitals in this period had a dramatic quality all its own, but clearly the twin realm was much more vulnerable than Sweden to pressure from the Maritime Powers, as we are again reminded by their dictation of a settlement over Gottorp at Altona in 1689 and Travendal in 170025. At Stockholm they had to rely on Bengt Oxenstierna, the powerful if greedy chancellor, to resist a strong French party and to thwart Danish initiatives there for an armed neutrality. When the Maritime Powers sought a new commercial treaty with Sweden, they got nothing better than a renewal of the 1661 treaty with England, and that not until 1693, with a promise to compensate for ships and goods taken up26. This harsh contrast is the more ironical when mercantilist Sweden's high-handed treatment of foreign merchants is compared with poor Denmark's dependence on them. Bonrepaus had not lived six months in Copenhagen before remarking that fresh meat was served in only a dozen houses there27. The city's economic build-up belongs to the eighteenth century. As yet agricultural produce, with cattle and horses on the hoof, from Jutland or Holstein, was about all the country had to export. Its trade deficit with Europe was balanced by Norway's sawn and mast timber, skins, stockfish and trainoil, with some inferior tar and copper; in wartime too, Bergen's shipowners developed an entrepot traffic in wines and brandies. But the sister-realm herself was chronically short of credit. Scottish and Dutch skippers bought most of their supplies for cash at the loading-places ; English importers more often paid in bills but extended long credit and bore all shipping charges - in the case of timber always a high proportion of the total landed cost28. Until the great debacle of 1710 in the North, it is true, Norway's (and especially Bergen's) 24. Greg's 'thoughts', Bodleian Library, MS. Rawl. A 345, fo. 249. He does not regard as essential the ambassadorial 'recommendatory letters' for which the Convention provided ; Bonrepaus admitted his incapacity to issue these 'lettres d'accompagnement' on any sound basis, but the Danes pressed for them (Johnsen, Innberetninger, 81-82,144 if., 177-178, 210). 25. See Preben Torntoft, 'William III and Denmark-Norway, 1697-1702', English Historical Review, CCCXVIII (1966) 1-25; R. M. Matton, Charles XII of Sweden (London, 1968) 21-22, 60-63.86,99-118,125-139. 26. Clark, Dutch Alliance, 101-106, 112-113; cf. 'Relation Bonrepaus', fos. 27-29, and Greg's dispatches in PRO, SP 75/23, fos. 243-250. 27. Johnsen, Innberetninger, 91. 28. Smout, Scottish Trade, 154-158; J. Le Moine de l'Espine, Le négoce d'Amsterdam, in Lucas Jansen, De koophandel van Amsterdam (Amsterdam, 1946) 382; H. S. K. Kent, 'The AngloNorwegian Timber Trade in the Eighteenth Century', Economic History Review, 2nd ser. VIII (1955-1956) 67-69. De l'Espine mentions other Dutch exports, but most of these depended on the existence of a French and Spanish trade with the United Provinces. The Scots might take corn when they had it; the Orkneys relied on the Norwegian market to take their surplus (Smout, Scottish Trade, 51, 75, 81, 154). Kent, 'Anglo-Norwegian Timber Trade', 71, gives figures of deal imports to London and the outports, respectively 16,500 and 11,000 Hundreds in 1700; 16,000 and 7,500 in 1706; but only 10,000 and 4,000 in 1710.

The North Sea in Wartime, 1688-1713

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earnings from freights and charterparties enjoyed a wartime boom, thanks to the new openings in Biscay, the increased carriage of its English trade, and some substitution for Dutch carriers. On the other hand, timber exports were not what they had been ca. 1650; the fisheries suffered from poor catches in the 1690s; and well before the great fire of 1702 destroyed the Kontoir at Bergen, J0rgen thor M0hlen's famous industrial enterprises had come to grief in his West Indian ventures and an issue of paper notes which he could not honour, magnate as he was29. How in all these circumstances was Denmark-Norway to finance its expanding French trade? The corn shipped to France in time of dearth was handled with advances from Paris or Rouen by a few Copenhagen merchants whose very names tell a tale: de la Sablière, Pallados, Samuel Teixeira, Jacob Abensoer . . . Fallacies and Teixeira were correspondents of an operator called Alvarez at Danzig ; Abensoer, who also contracted for gunpowder and naval stores, came to Copenhagen in 1691 from Altona and represented Polish interests there at a time when he had six ships condemned by the prize court in London30. Such men, doubtless scenting the enormous potential of the neutral carriers, owned ships in partnership with Theodor Balthasar von lessen, head of the Tyske Kancelli (1688-1700), and others of the Danish court; their ships and cargoes appear in the prize courts of all the belligerents31. But were they always the true owners? Bonrepaus, who did his best to encourage their French connections, tells us in a pregnant passage32: J'ay découvert de quelle manière cela se fait. Un Hollandois ou un Hambourgois vient dans une ville de Dannemark, et súpose par une obligation simulée qu'il a presté une somme a un marchand danois ; cette somme est employee a l'achapt d'un vaisseau, de marchandises ou autres choses qui leur conviennent, sous le nom d'un Danois qui fait ensuitte le serment que le tout luy appartieni et est pour son compte; mais avant que le chargement parte, il fait une retrocession a l'estranger qui luy a presté cette somme, moyennant quelque petit intérest qu'il conserve dans ce chargement que l'estranger luy donne, tant en consideration de ce qu'il luy a preste son nom, que pour l'engager a réclamer le vaisseau, en cas qu'il soit pris par les corsaires fran9ois. 29. Keilhau, Norway, 38; F. N. Stagg, North Norway (London, 1952) 99 if. Johnsen prints thor M0hlen's fantastic proposals in 1699 for a European trading company to be financed by the French government (Innberetninger, 244-251,259-261,264-265); cf. Charliat, 'Mémoires inédits', 314. 30. PRO, SP 75/23, fos. 104-105; cf. Johnsen, Innberetninger, esp. 44, 48, 62-64, 68-69, 74. Details of other merchants in ibidem, 101,114,117,119,131,138,140,152,172,173,177. Bonrepaus listed 21 Copenhagen merchants trading with France, one of whom (Edinger) also worked for the Allies: Charliat, 'Mémoires inédits', 318 ff. 31. For claims of lessen and Reventlow (the chief minister) from the French see Johnsen, Innberetninger, 99, 108, 116, 145-146, 176; and from the English, PRO, SP 75/24, fo. lllv. Cf. Add. MSS. 24107, fo. 138 on the release of 'a small parcel' of wines, etc. claimed by Jessen and Count Joachim Ahlfeld: 'I think it is a respect due to their quality' (Hedges to Trumbull, 15 Oct. o.s. 1697). 32. To Pontchartrain, 30 Sept. 1693 : Johnsen, Innberetninger, 98.

52

Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760

It might be amusing to know more about the mechanism of these fictitious sales : to know for instance how far the well-worn insurance tracks to Amsterdam and Hamburg facilitated them, or bottomry bonds for the ships33. As Bonrepaus also observed, the 1691 Convention, by confining Danish trade with France to Danish subjects, forced them in effect to lend their names and flag to the enemy34. They could neither have financed this trade alone nor dispense with the accumulated business knowledge and connections ot the Dutch and Hamburgers at their French destinations, least of all Bordeaux, where even the more strongly placed Swedes had no consul till 170535. That is a cardinal date in this story, marking a resumption of the Franco-Dutch traffic for the first time in these wars - at the rate of 2,000 vessels a year according to the authoritative Conseil de Commerce in Paris. My own count of the French passports utilized suggests a much lower overall figure36, but it is high enough to imply an immense demand on the neutral carriers over the years when the Dutch were forbidden. When the Dutch did return to Bordeaux in strength, moreover, they came from all parts of Holland and also from Zierikzee, although hardly at all from Middelburg and Vlissingen, for whose capers Biscay steadily remained a favourite cruising-ground37. Even then, as the Sound registers indicate 38, there 33. One-eighth of 'The Jung Frow Hellena', a Swede condemned as Dutch on 23 Oct. o.s. 1695 (Wynne MSS., LR 2 E. 23), was alleged to have been mortgaged to an Amsterdammer. 34. 'Relation Bonrepaus', fo. 25. 35. Paris, A(rchives) N(ationales), F12 51, fo. 402v. : Conseil de Commerce, proces verbal, 5 May 1705. 36. Ibidem, 51, fo. 399 (21 April 1706) and 54, fo. 158 (23 March 1708); Amales du Midi, LXV (1953) 66. The totals for Bordeaux, La Rochelle and Nantes (easily the most important of French ports for this trade, for Dunkirk was still forbidden) are as follows: 1705 = 402; 1706 = 691; 1707 = 747; 1708 = 729; 1709 = 512; 1710 = 303; 1711 = 108. It still needs to be said that trading with the enemy did not depend solely on Dutch policy; no French passports were accorded during the year before the 'interdiction' of 1 June 1703, nor immediately after its lifting on 1 June 1704, and they were revoked by Ordonnance of 19 Nov. 1710, nominally to revive the course (AN, F12 55, fo. 182). On the passport system at Bordeaux see Huetz de Lemps, Geographie, 67-93. 37. AD Gironde, 6B 81 to 85 ('registre des passeports'): Northern Holland and ZuiderZee Southern Holland 'Holland' Zeeland

1704

1705

1706

1707

1708

1709

1710

— 11 — —

71 141 36 70

108 162 179 54

199 193 11 86

299 124 3 77

103 83 4 50

65 78 — 29

The Conseil de Commerce rejected the rumour that some of these ships gave information to the capers (AN,F12 51, fo. 85v.). 38. Bang and Korst, Tabeller, I, 30 if. The Conseil de Commerce liked a degree of competition, but the neutrals were given special favours such as the remission of tonnage duty. On 28 July 1705 it was ruled that the Danes might come in vessels bought from the enemy after the outbreak of war: Citoyen Lebeau, Nouveau code des prises ... (3 vols. Paris, an VII) I, 290-291.

The North Sea in Wartime, 1688-1713

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was room for the Scandinavians - until the great debacle of 1710. Significantly, however, the fact that they were coming in 1710 in mere driblets was used as an argument for revoking the passports of the Dutch, who would now be unable to fall back on a Scandinavian disguise and so find themselves that much more in a hurry to make peace39. Earlier French rules concerning the neutrals showed full awareness of wolves in sheep's clothes40. One wolf was Hamburg, whose role almost throughout these wars was formally that of a belligerent, doing its best to be treated as a sheep. Its local politics could be stormy. The Senate, always under strong pressure from the burghers and reluctant to publish the Imperial avocatoria prohibiting trade with the enemy, twice dragged its feet for over a year after the Empire had gone to war - and made little effort to enforce the avocatoria when they had been published. Hamburgers were trading with hostile Spain and pressing for French passports even before the Emperor followed the States General in lifting the Allies' Interdiction of 1703-170441. But this time, unlike 1689-1697, the French were slow to co-operate: it was said that the Hamburgers would mask Dutch ships, or bring Baltic produce of high value which was not allowed to the Dutch. Their merchant fleet in 1706 was estimated at 400 vessels - twice as many as Bremen and Lübeck combined42. When permission was eventually given to Hamburg in 1706, it was for light ships only, to come in ballast and subject to securities which the Hamburgers, suggestively, had tried to avoid. With the renewed embargo on the Dutch some of these restrictions were relaxed by 1711, when the three Hansa cities between them loaded 32 ships at Bordeaux, rising to 77 in 171243. However, the indications are that a great deal of 39. AN, F12 55, fo. 185 : this was a heavy price for the French to pay - the whole prosperity of a wide area between Loire and Gironde, and its fiscal resilience. 40. 'Reglements' of 17 Feb. 1694 and 23 July 1704: Lebeau, Nouveau Code, I, 188-189, 283-289; concerning the Danes in particular, ibidem, 281-282, 290-291. 41. Britain gave approval on 23 November 1705, but did not mention Spain, with which she was now resuming trade herself: PRO, SP 82/21, fos, 30, 158, 208; SP 82/22, fo. 22 (Wich to Harley, 17 July, 30 Sept., 14 Dec. 1705, 6 March 1706). AN, F12 51, fos. 235v. (23 Jan. 1704), 333 (10 June 1705), and Marine B7 230 (Nov. 1703). 42. AN, F12 51, fos. 351, 396v., 416: the figures are those of Abbe Bidal, the French envoy who stayed on at Hamburg throughout this war, although in 1691 he had had to leave, much to the displeasure of Louis XIV. 43. Ibidem, fos. 420, 425-426 (14 and 21 July 1706); cf. Marine B7 225 (Bidal to Pontchartrain, 30 June, 3 July, 1702). Departures from Bordeaux under Hanseatic flags are recorded in AD Gironde, 6B 82 to 86 as follows: 1706 1707 1711 1712 1708 1709 1710 1 Hamburg 10 17 15 7 41 9 — — — Lübeck 2 1 9 19 Bremen 4 5 2 1 6 17 1 16 20 12 8 77 32 The 1711-1712 figures would have been higher had the Hanseatics been allowed to buy Dutch ships and employ Dutch crews.

54

Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760

the earlier Danish-Swedish commerce with France (and at times Spain) was on Hanseatic account, an outstanding example being the predominantly Hamburger interest in the Swedish convoy arrested by Rooke in July 169744. To understand this we need only remember the Swedish and Danish territories on the lower reaches of Elbe and Weser, particularly the little towns of Altona, Glückstadt and Stade on the difficult estuary of the Elbe, where it was often necessary to unload cargoes into lighters for transport up to Hamburg. Swedish passports were readily available from the royal representatives at Stade (and for that matter in Swedish Pomerania). At Danish Glückstadt and Altona, described in 1691 as owning a mere half dozen ships of their own, it was said that over two hundred borrowed their flag45. Any connection with these places, or with Stade, created a prima j"ade suspicion in the prize courts ; indeed, for the belligerents, it was entirely a diplomatic question whether all Danish and Swedish possessions in the Empire should not be treated as falling within its jurisdiction, and therefore subject to the avocatoria as the captors of prizes argued46. In this as in other ways, French policy usually showed more consideration for the Swedes. An ordonnance of 23 January 1704 ruled that all Denmark's dependencies in Germany (but not Sweden's) were to forfeit their neutrality47. Sweden's client, the duke of Holstein-Gottorp, who by 1704 was paying off his grievance against the Maritime Powers by aiding French capers at Heligoland48, was sometimes treated as a 'prince neutre', sometimes not, his position being further complicated by his possessions in Slesvig, which included the key ports of Husum and Tonnang (Tonningen) and lay outside the avocatoria, whereas Holstein itself did not; as if to make doubly sure of its safety, a Tonnang vessel might arm itself with papers from the innocent duchy of Slesvig. But even that was no sure protection, as the number of Slesvig vessels belonging to Flens-

44. Clark, Dutch Alliance, 114; cf. Bodleian Library, MS. Rawl. B 383, fo. 534, and Johnsen, Innberetninger, 75, 230. 45. Martangis, French ambassador at Copenhagen, 12 June 1691: Johnsen, Innberetninger, 34. Cf. ibidem, 77 for the belief at Versailles that Altona, 'presque un faubourg d'Hambourg, fait a présent tout le commerce de cette ville': the writer (6 April 1693) was almost certainly Pontchartrain, of all French ministers the one who had most to do with prizes. In a report of 4 Jan. 1692/1693 on 15 arrested 'Danes', Hedges notes 9 of Altona and Glückstadt. Of 7 ships which were the subject of the Swedish envoy's complaint to the States General in 1696,4 came from Stade: ARA, Admiraliteitsarchieven 2519, 18 Jan. 1696. The dispatches of Sir Paul Rycaut (British Library, Reference Division, Add. MSS. 19515 and 37663 and Lansdowne 1153 C and D) are illuminating on the abuse of Danish passports by Hamburgers 1689-1693. 46. AN, Marine C4 262, fos. 146-147, and 267, fos. 298v.-300v. : cases of 'Le Cavalier de Riga' (1696) and 'Le Bien Arrive' (1704). 47. Lebeau, Nouveau code, I, 283-284; AN, F12 54, fo. 123. But the French had deprived Stade of its neutrality in 1694-1697. 48. PRO, SP 82/21, fos. 28, 208 (Wich to Harley, 13 May 1704, 14 Dec. 1705).

The North Sea in Wartime, 1688-1713

55

burg, Sonderborg and Apenrade in the prize records of London and Middelburg attest49. In Slesvig they doubted whether the English lawyers fully grasped the solemn meaning of the river Eider50, and one can understand that even a well-meaning caper might fall into confusion about the legal status of any point on these coasts at any particular time. However, they very well knew that the whole area was under the economic dominion of Hamburg, which indeed handled a large part of England's exports to Denmark51, besides the general commission business it performed for British exporters, particularly after 1689, when the Merchant Adventurers lost their monopoly, with its Hamburg staple. The Conseil des Prises naturally gave short shrift to such a case as the 'Galère de Tonningue', whose owner was described as a citizen of Tonnang but an 'homme de négoce' of Hamburg; though he had indeed assumed the citizenship of Hamburg to assist restoration of the galley when it was in English hands, he now maintained that he had had the whole Hamburg cargo transported to Tonnang for shipment52. Holstein ships, like so many others, might fetch coal and salt from Newcastle, or export pipestaves to Cadiz, but whale products had more obviously to do with the Hamburg fishery, discouraged as this became from French attacks53. Like the Elbe navigation, Danish or Swedish, the seagoing vessels of Slesvig-Holstein were frequently manned by Hamburgers, whether or not they owned the ships: and a Hamburg shipmaster would naturally suggest a Hamburg owner54. The same applies to the many neutral ships which carried a Dutch master, usually one who had taken out burgersbrieven at some Baltic port. Of course, we must 49. For Zeeland see ARA, Admiraliteitsarchieven 5654, 17 Oct. 1703, 'Lijste van de Pretense Deensse en andere Neutrale Schepen' sent by J. Nachtegaal to St. Gen. ; for Husum, cf. ibidem 2524, 6 June 1703, etc. 'De Hope van Apenrade' was there till 1707. 50. PRO, SP 82/21, fos. 41 (John Scarlett, Husum, 26 June 1704) and 162 (Wich to Harley, 28 July 1705). 51. Ibidem 104/4, Memorial concerning Trade between Denmark and Hamburg, 1702. 52. AN, Marine C4 269, fos. 248-249 (17 Oct. 1706). 53. E.g., cargo of 'Anna Katharina' of Husum, F. Petersen : PRO, H(igh) Qpurt of) A(dmiralty) 32/48. Although the cruises of Duguay-Trouin to the Arctic in 1702-1703 were only moderately successful, the destruction of the enemy's whale fishery remained a fixed objective at Versailles. Dutch sailings to Greenland slumped from 208 in 1703 to 130 in 1704 and an average of 125 from 1705 to 1714, according to the figures in Gerret van Sante, Alphabetische Naam-Lyst van alle de Groenlandsche en Straat-Davissche Commandeurs .,. (Haarlem, 1770); cf. Van der Woude, Het Noorderkwartier, II, 427. Wich at Hamburg, 13 June 1704, refers to 'the loss of the Greenland fishery', for which the Hamburgers bought 30 Danish passports in 1694: PRO, SP 82/21. fo. 36; cf. L. Brinner, Die Deutsche Grönlandfahrt (Berlin, 1913) 228-230. 54. French prosecutors made much of this : e.g., among the confiscations, cases of 'L'Espérance' of Glückstadt and 'La Marguerite' of Altona in AN, Marine C4 257, fos. 234v.-235, and 259, fo. 89v.; cf. ibidem 261, fo. 82, 'St. Pierre' of Lübeck, whose master obtained Stade citizenship. Examples of abuse of Slesvig and Holstein papers in ibidem 266, fos. 27v.-28v., 'Fortune de Toningue', and 267, fos. 173v.-174, 'Armes d'Husum'.

56

Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760

allow for some who lived there before the wars, like so many of the Scottish55, but the majority were recent arrivals, even if they did not always take their wives with them56; they would have understood Karl Pietersen, of Ameland, who confessed that he lived at Stade, as shipmaster and owner, 'seulement pour naviguer avec plus de sécurité'57. The formalities were so simple that an Irishman, who was established master of a Swedish vessel at Amsterdam, received there not only a royal passport and flag but the freedom of Stockholm58 ; and indeed there are instances of Dutch masters taking control of a neutral vessel at Amsterdam itself, including one who had taken oath before the ambassador at The Hague in 1680 to acquire Stockholm citizenship but not been there since59. J. J. Kuiper, master of the 'Juffrouw Anna' of Karlskrona - Dutch-built like so many other neutral vessels - had the honesty to depose that 'il demeure où il se trouve', but that his owner's father lived in Amsterdam60. While there can be no doubt that war stimulated a certain migration of owners and masters from belligerent to neutral countries, thus adding to the Nordic melting-pot, it is clear that neutrals found it hard to obey the direct-voyage rule imposed by the belligerents. In peace, when ships were free to pick up cargoes according to circumstances, their capacity was already under-utilized61. War accentuated some of the causes - slow turnround and voyages in ballast - while introducing rigidities of its own. Thus a French destination was no protection against French corsairs for neuters which called at enemy ports en route for, say, Bourgneuf or Bordeaux. But since Britain and the Republic on the whole absorbed far more Baltic commodities than the French wanted, a call at Newcastle or Amsterdam, Rotterdam or London, whence cargo or ballast to Bourgneuf or Bordeaux, was better economics than a single voyage outward in light cargo or ballast. So the direct-voyage rule to or from France, though it was prescribed by the Convention of the Maritime Powers with Denmark as well as by French law, was 55. E.g., Alexander Gill at Stockholm (ibidem 264, fo. 82, 'Etoile du Jour'); Alexander Moncrieffat Danzig (ibidem 266, fo. 105, 'Pelican Doré')56. E.g., the masters of 'St. Pierre' and 'Fortune', both of Stockholm (ibidem 257, fo. 157, and 275, fos 43-44), and Willem Tuissen, at Stade (ibidem 266, fo. 108v.-109, 'Dauphin'); Bowe Janssen, at Danzig, had left two children in the Vlie (ibidem 275, fo. 84, 'St. Pierre'); cf. the master of 'Les Armes de Stettin', who was born in Edinburgh and lived at Emden (ibidem 267, fo. 172). On the general practice in Sweden, see the case of 'Neptune' of Carlshaven (Karlshamn)', Claes Backer, PRO, HCA 32/47. 57. Ibidem 261, fo. 18v., 'St. Pierre'. 58. Ibidem 259, 14v.-15v., 'Faucon Jaune', Jacob Gait. 59. Ibidem 261, fos. 112-113, 'Comte de Vrede', Claessen; cf. ìbidem, fos. 70-71, 'Dauphin Blanc', 135-137, 'Demi-Lune', and 262, fo. 142, 'Fortune Dorée' of Danzig. Tuissen (supra, n. 56) took over at Rotterdam. 60. Ibidem 264, fo. 66, 'Demoiselle Anne'. 61. See R. Davis, 'Merchant Shipping in the Economy of the Late Seventeenth Century', Economic History Review, 2nd ser. IX (1956-1957) 59-73.

The North Sea in Wartime, 1688-1713

57

frequently flouted62; many were the neutrals caught straying from the course implied in their bills of lading, with or without the weather conniving63. Crews, indeed, were sometimes hired at Dutch ports of call. However, if Scandinavian sails were frequently worked by Dutch seamen, one might equally call attention to the number of Scandinavians in Allied service, despite the militia obligations which kept many of them from emigrating: in 1691 it was claimed that the Maritime Powers employed 8,000 Danes and Norwegians, though this was a French guess64. A kind of lingua franca of the North Sea could make it difficult to distinguish them from the Dutch seamen. It is astonishing how many neutral skippers were unable to produce in court a bill of sale for their foreign-built ships, unless it were a defective one - for instance, with no price stated. It could happen that the buyer's indenture had been mysteriously left with the Dutch seller, which would delay trial, although I have come across only one case of a master, a Holsteiner, lamely agreeing 'qu'il ne connoist pas particulièrement les propriétaires de son vaisseau'65. Nevertheless, the prize courts often released a ship when they condemned the cargo. So far as this is not evidence of diplomatic courtesy - what the Zeelanders called 'politique Resolution' - it implies genuine changes of ownership. Cargoes, of course, were an entirely different matter. While charterparties were exceptional, bills of lading often covered goods freighted on enemy account, occasionally being sent even overland66. During the years of prohibition, the prize court at London confiscated friendly as well as enemy cargoes on board the neutrals, while usually restoring the ship itself67. The 62. E.g., PRO, HCA 32/65, 'St. John', Blom, and 'Juffrouw Regina', Giese, both of Stockholm; ibidem 64, 'Juffrouw Catharina' of Flensburg, whose master received his pass by post to Amsterdam; ibidem 86 (1), 'White Bear' of Stockholm, whose master received orders at Elsinore to accept cargo at Amsterdam before going on to Bordeaux, where he was laded by Philip Vandenbranden, a 'Flanderkin' ; and ibidem 77 for the case of T. Hielman, master of the 'Patience' of Karlshamn, bound for Bordeaux, who received orders at Amsterdam to exchange his Karlshamn pass for one sent by his owners to Amsterdam. Cf. Huetz de Lemps, Geographie, 70. I have come across a number of such cases for 1696 in AD Gironde 6B 123 ('Lettres de mer'). 63. E.g., AN, Marine C* 259, fo. 104, 'Comtesse de Samsoe'; 261, fos. 47v.-48v., 'Amitié'; 262, 84V.-85, 'Cheval Marin Doré'. 64. Johnsen, Innberetninger, 64, 73. 65. AN, Marine C* 262, fo. 170, 'St. Nicolas'; ibidem fo. 145v., 'Liberté de Stade'; ibidem 269, fo. 209v., 'Pigeon Bleu'. 66. E.g., ibidem C* 255, fo. 192, 'Roy de Danemarck'; PRO, HCA 32/54, 'Copperberg', Mandahl; ibidem 11, 'St. Peter' of Arendal. The 'Koperberg' had been freed by the States General on 21 June 1704: ARA, Admiraliteitsarchieven 5655, 18 June. 67. E.g., PRO, HCA 77, 'Princess Hedwig Sophia', 'Pellican', 'Patientia', and 'Patriarch Abraham', all of Stockholm ; 85, 'Vreede' of Flensburg. The last four were laden in 1704 at Bordeaux by Hendrick Lutkens, alternately described as a Hamburger and a Dutchman; the 'Vreede' also by a Hollander, D. Devisch (wines, brandies, plums, molasses), for Hamburg or Emden. Although the 'Pellican's' cargo was for carriage to Hamburg, the mate, a Hamburger, explained in court that delivery would not necessarily be taken there; the master of the 'Patriarch' (who lived at Stettin)

58

Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760

court at Middelburg added to its sins by doing the same 68. Some cargoes to France had a British taint, but these were usually found in bonafide (though under British law illicit) Irish bottoms for which the French, needing salted beef and pork for the Antilles (and with Irish Jacobites well established as business houses at Nantes and elsewhere), poured out passports69. England herself at this time was more interested in her Iberian trade, sometimes covered by false Spanish papers. These subterfuges, generically known to contemporaries as lorrendraijerij (anglice 'lorendrayery') and based on the closely knit trading communities of the northern seas, at a time when mercantilist economics and economic warfare were driving artificial political wedges into them, present an awkward commentary on the trade statistics of the day. For instance, is it certain that Dutch commerce with the Baltic, or the numbers of Dutch skippers passing that way70, as distinct from Dutch shipping paying toll at the Sound, contracted so much during the 1690s? The tolls paid by English ships would be a poor indication of the nation's unprecedented demand for iron, masts and naval stores, even allowing for the development of its Archangel trade after 1699, when the Muscovy Company lost its monopoly. That Dutch traffic to Archangel then multiplied still further is indeed a pointer to a shortfall of tar, hemp and potash from Baltic sources71 : and yet it was in 1708 that the Dunkirkers, highly expert in the scrutiny of ships' papers, could claim that the

claimed that his orders were for delivery at Emden 'if he came into the North Sea there by contrary winds, but better still for Stockholm'. The 'Uhlostadt' of Stockholm cleared thither at Bordeaux, and later escaped confiscation at Brest on the strength of it, but her true bills were for Emden : ibidem 85. The Consell de Commerce thought that half the Dutch passports (which it authorized itself) were on French account: AN, F12 54, fo. 158,23 March 1708. 68. See the 'Lijste van de Pretense Deensse etc.' in ARA, Admiraliteitsarchieven 5654, 17 Oct. 1703: 'Juffrouw Margarita', 'Vijf Gebroeders', 'Concordia'. The captors allege that the first and last were disguised for Sonderborg by Arnoldus van Leeuwen, a substantial Dordrecht merchant who had obtained the citizenship of Sonderborg (after failing at Flensburg); the 'Hope', Christiansen, a Holsteiner sailing from Harlingen, was accused of trading from Bordeaux to Hamburg; cf. the 'Landgrave von Hesse Cassel', Bilbao to Hamburg (ibidem), 69. Ibidem, 'Propheet Daniel' (Bordeaux to Dublin) and 'Henry and Mary' (Viana to Limerick, allegedly on French account). Cf. PRO, HCA 32/77, 'Prince Frederick', with an English supercargo who owned half the lading from Bordeaux to Copenhagen. Passports were accorded to Irish vessels from Bordeaux alone, 1704-1712, at an average rate of 41 a year, rising from 26 in 1704 to 75 in 1712. In the same period Scottish passes totalled 101 : most of them were issued in 1704-1707, between the passage of the Edinburgh parliament's Wine Act and that of the Union. In 1702-1703 and 1703-1704 numbers involved were only 7 Irish and 6 Scots (Huetz de Lemps, Geographie, 62). The Scots were of course well placed to make use of the constant passage of Norwegian ships to France. France was short of lead, produced in the Lanarkshire hills (Smout, Scottish Trade, 8, 10, 225), and in 1706, when the Union looked likely, the Rouen Jacobite Arbuthnot proposed passes for 20 Scots ships a year to bring it (AN, F12 51, fos. 422v.-423). 70. Cf. Van der Woude, Het Noorderkwartier, 377, 388. 71. See J. M. Price in New Cambridge Modern History, VI, 841-844. Amsterdam alone increased its importation of Archangel tar from 18,000 tons in 1698 to 60,000 tons in 1713.

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Swedes alone were carrying half the enemy's trade72. If we add the 'pretense Deensse', such an estimate may not be too fanciful. But the risks of 'lorendrayery' contributed, along with higher wartime wages and insurance rates, to the cost of freights, normally borne by belligerent merchants. I would suggest that its techniques, as well as its costs, helped to thin out the number of these in some trades, not necessarily involving contraband or naval contracts. There indeed, in the dealings of the English Navy Board with its Baltic suppliers, 'the tritons swallowed the minnows completely'73. But elsewhere, in the prize courts, a few names recur in connection with fraud and collusion : Peter Abestee of Copenhagen, J. P. Heublein of Stockholm, C. J. Mohrsen of Bergen, Andrew Vanderhagen at Amsterdam, Abraham Vanderhagen of Zierikzee, Peter van Arken of Ostend, Derijck Robijn of Dunkirk, Stephen Creagh at London, Daniel Denis at Bordeaux - besides those whom we have met already. The list could with some trouble - for the prize documents make miscellaneous and difficult reading - be lengthened and include members of the consular establishments. There are signs, too, that shipbrokers (courtiers) played a part in the supply of ad hoc documents to the practitioners of free trade, like that John Danielson of Middelburg who 'procured' Jacob Hies from Ostend to be a burgher and next day produced his burgersbrief, Middelburg pass and States pass, for a trip to Bourgneuf74. In Dunkirk at least, some brokers promoted privateering armaments75. Their wartime role would be worth closer investigation. The 'lorrendraijerij comme on 1'appelle'76 was not only practised on 'runners', sailing without convoy, for convoys were highly vulnerable too. Besides the disadvantages of convoys when they came to market, even one of thirty sail (let alone one of three or four hundred) would have its stragglers. The Dunkirk capers, in particular, were trained to insinuate themselves like pickpockets in a crowd, especially as they learned to join forces in a manner to which most privateers were recalcitrant; quite often, too, they attached themselves to the naval squadrons 72. AN, F12 54, fo. 123. Admittedly they had an axe to grind : the Conseil des Prises, which took decisions by majority vote, was showing undue tenderness to Swedes. On the other hand, Bonrepaus, in his 'Relation', fo. 30, had found the Conseiltoo inflexible in sentencing Danes. 73. John Ehrman, The Navy in the War of William HI 1689-1697 (Cambridge, 1953) 60. 74. For Van Arken, PRO, HCA 32/92 (1), 'Hope de Middleborough'. Cf. J. Olsenkemp, master of the 'Charles de Stromstatt', who shortly before leaving Amsterdam handed his passport 'suivant 1'usage ordinaire ... au nommé Cornelle Dolt, courtier de tous les Maitres des Vaisseaux de Nations Etrangères', and later received a different one, 'qu'il a pris sans y faire reflexion': AN, Marine C* 269, fo. 204. 75. F. Morel and P. Struve are so described in the roles de capitation for 1708 : Dunkirk, Archives Municipales, série 236. In the same year the intendant refers to N. Thibergé as 'courtier jure et aubergiste': AN, Marine B3 155, fo. 151. 76. ARA, Admiraliteitsarchieven 2524, 11 Aug. 1703.

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which got out of Dunkirk every year (though sometimes late) until 1710, well primed with information77. It is true that, even more rapidly than the diplomatic couriers brought news of enemy movements to Versailles and the French ports, advices reached London and the Dutch admiralties from Flanders or Dunkirk itself that Jean Bart, or St. Pol or Forbin, was at sea; messages flew to the outports and put the whole North Sea on the alert, keeping convoys in harbour or causing them to alter course78. But given a few hours' start, on a spring tide by night, the French cruisers could elude the Allied blockading squadrons, whose ships were dirtier, slower and not well provisioned for a long chase. How baffling this was is best gathered from the 'proceedings' of these squadrons - by no means uniformly a failure as an annual summer blockade, though they did subtract twenty or thirty men-of-war from the Confederate fleet - as narrated by Josiah Burchett, who as secretary of the Admiralty had the task of adapting English naval dispositions to the forays of Bart and his successors79. What happened when the convoys had to defend themselves, often heroically, was conscientiously recorded by Jhr. De Jonge80, but many lesser episodes were reported to the amirauté at Dunkirk81. In spite of sensational losses, which wrung angry letters from the king-stadholder to Heinsius besides bringing deputations to The Hague from Amsterdam and arousing storms in the Westminster parliament, notably in 1693, we can see how well the convoys on the whole performed their duty82 ; there was no parallel in the North Sea to the case of the 'Smyrna convoy' in 1693, unless it was Forbin's razzia towards Archangel in 1707, but this was more spectacular than profitable83. At 77. For movements at the Sound, Marstrand and Flekkro, see Johnsen, Innberetninger, passim; cf. Henri Malo, Les corsaires dunkerquois et Jean Bart (2 vols, Paris, 1913-1914) II, 175, 215, 226-227. Thus the French embassy at Copenhagen obtained advance notice of Dutch sailings through Danish sources at The Hague, or from Danzig: Johnsen, Innberetninger, 46, 85. On 23 July 1697 Bonrepaus reported the arrival of 400 sail at Elsinore under two Dutch escorts, which turned for home two days later with 50: ibidem, 239. Cf. J. C. de Jonge, Geschiedenis van het Nederlandsche zeewezen (5 vols, Zwolle, 1869) IH, 495. 78. A notable example was Bart's summer campaign in 1696: Malo, Jean Bart, II, 312-313. Cf. Josiah Burchett, A Complete History of the most Remarkable Transactions at Sea (London, 1720) 549-551, 636-640, 660-661. 79. On the difficulties of obtaining prompt Dutch co-operation, ibidem, 437, 440, 550, 637. 80. De Jonge, Nederlandsche zeewezen, III, 264, 337-340, 407-417, 499-506, 714-715; IV, 31-32, 78-83. 81. There is a series of these 'declarations de capitaines', with gaps for certain years, in AN, Marine C4, 252, 258, 263,268,272-273,276; the 'declarations' for 1710-1711 are now in the naval archives at Cherbourg. 82. Ranke, History of England, VI, 289, 291 ; De Jonge, Nederlandsche zeewezen, III, 377-379, 414, 507; F. A. Johnston, 'Parliament and the Protection of Trade 1689-1694', The Mariner's Mirror, LV1I (1971) 399-413. 83. See H. Malo, La grande guerre des corsaires: Dunkerque 1702-1715 (Paris, 1925) 71-73, 82; cf. Mémoires du comte de Forbin (2 vols., Amsterdam, 1748) 239-252. For the loss of a large part of the Anglo-Dutch convoy to Smyrna, etc. in 1693, see De Jonge, Nederlandsche zeewezen, III, 349-362.

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least during the Nine Years War the joint Danish-Swedish convoys had more to fear, and in 1703-1705 as much from privateers perhaps as from the Confederate navies. The periodical uproar in the English parliament, while it was fed by stories of poor convoy discipline and graft, owed more to miscarriages at sea in general, of which, shocking as they were, hugely inflated figures were bandied about. Hence cruisers were as important as convoys. As the Admiralty Lords put it, the Trade cannot be secured by Convoys and Cruizers only, but by a sufficient number of Shipps to he employed both as Convoys and Cruizers, and not to be taken therefrom by any other service8*.

By tacking three clauses to a money bill in 1694, the Commons succeeded in setting aside 43 ships, over and above 'convoys to remote parts', for trade protection: they did the same in more explicit form in 1708, prescribing no less than nine cruisers for the northeast coast of Great Britain alone, which shows some tenderness for Scottish resentments of long standing85. One may compare this proportion of nearly one half of the total British 3rd to 6th rate ships in commission in February 1708 with the numbers allocated to trade protection by the Dutch navy in 1696, when it was still powerful: rather more than a third of the comparable rates - 35 out of 93. If we include 'convoys to remote parts' the English allocation is higher still86. After 1702, of course, the defensive emphasis in Dutch policy became stronger, on sea as well as land, revenues and the naval establishment finally contracting together until in 1710 there was scope only for the force in the Mediterranean and the squadron that sailed out every year to meet the returning East-India fleet near the Orkneys, with results only too clearly written in the French prize judgements87. When we look closely at the employment of English cruisers and convoys, nevertheless, we notice how over-stretched they were. A convenient official account for 1694 shows that less than half the cruisers were engaged in North Sea work. Of these, most were concentrated off the Dutch coasts - between Zeeland and Dover early in the year, then in the Broad Fourteens between Texel and Maas - with a 84. Bodleian Library, MSS. Rawl. A 450, fo. 30, copy of letter from Admiralty to Secretary Trenchard, 11 Sept. o.s. 1693. 85. 5 and 6 Will, and Mary, c.l, ss. Ixix-lxxii; 6 Ann., c. 65. Cf. Johnston, 'Parliament', and Smout, Scottish Trade, 67. 86. De Jonge, Nederlandsche zeewezen, III, 746-749: as measured by gunpower, the proportion was just over a quarter. Cf. the lists in J. H. Owen, War at Sea under Queen Anne (Cambridge, 1938) app. B. 87. The whale-fishery traditionally looked after itself, but in 1703 four escorts were reported to Duguay-Trouin at Jan Mayen island: Le Nepvou de Carfort, Histoire de Du Guay Trouin (Paris, 1922) 224; cf. A. Bijl Mz., De Nederlandse Convooidienst 1300-1800 (The Hague, 1951) 92-95.

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view to intercepting French cornships; only a dozen were plying, intermittently, between Tynemouth and the Downs, several of these being detached to guard the mackerel and herring fisheries off Yarmouth and the North Foreland in summer and autumn88. On the other hand, the majority of English short-haul convoys are to be found in the North Sea: up and down the east coast itself, in 1694 (but not always) as far as the Forth, and shepherding the crowded trafile (not forgetting His Majesty's person - eight warships for each crossing) to Holland, Hamburg, Elsinore and Gothenburg - from the Forth, Tyne, Humber, Yarmouth roads, and Thames; the recently established packets between Harwich and Den Briel sailed without convoy (and sometimes fell into enemy hands)89. Various combinations were possible - thus the relatively strong Gothenburg convoy could see the Hamburg trade within fifty miles of Heligoland - and to these we have to add the recoprocal services provided by the United Provinces to Leith, Hull and so on, besides the Dutch fishery guardships moving between Orkney and the Dogger Bank, or off Yarmouth, according to season. It all begins to resemble a map of the London Underground until we recollect the caprices of the winds, the unpredictable timetables, the scarcity of escorts (and in England of crews to man them)90, the many places struggling to keep their transport moving without benefit of convoy - so numerous as to make one ask whether the whole system may not have worked to the advantage of the greater terminals and junctions. To perceive something of the political repercussions of wartime losses, we need some idea of who the losers were. Here, since I face an audience which may not be familiar with the coaling staithes of Northumberland or the drowned valleys of Suffolk, I may claim a privilege like that historian of the English Channel who announced: 'The scope of this book is the English shore of the Channel'91. At this 88. House of Lords Manuscripts, new ser. /, (1693-1695) (London, 1903 ; reprinted 1965) 474-483. Half a dozen were 'off Dunkirk' where the blockading squadron fluctuated in strength, the Dutch usually watching the east channel and the English the west. On the fiasco of the September bombardment and the smoke-machines invented by Mr. Meesters, see Burchett, Complete History, 502-504, 527-529; there was a second attempt in August 1695. Cf. Malo, Jean Bart, II, 267-292. 89. See J. R. Bruijn, 'Postvervoer en Reizigersverkeer tussen de Lage Landen en Engeland ca. 1650-ca. 1870', in P. W. Klein and J. R. Bruijn, ed., Honderd Jaar Engelandvaart (Bussum, 1975) esp. 33-37. There are details in Kenneth Ellis, The Post Office in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1958), who notes the increased volume of official correspondence in wartime; cf. a charming evocation in Charles Wilson, Holland and Britain (London, s.a.) 35-38. In 1693 the French government offered a premium for their capture. Of several packets taken into Dunkirk in 16911693, at least one was the Dutch (Malo, Jean Bart, II, 207, 242 n., 248); during the next war, several appear in the Dunkirk prize jugements and in the captains' declarations, but it is not certain which service they were operating - most probably the Dutch. 90. See (e.g.) House of Lords MSS. 1693-1695, 494; Ehrman, The Navy, 109-120; J. S. Bromley, The Manning of the Royal Navy: Selected Public Pamphlets 1693-1873 (London, Navy Records Society, 1976 for 1974) xxv-xxix, 1-70. 91. James A. Williamson, The English Channel: A History (London, 1959) 13.

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time England's coastal still exceeded her foreign-going tonnage and nearly threequarters of it was on the east coast. It was easily dominated by the colliers - of Whitby, Scarborough, Lynn, Yarmouth, Ipswich, Rochester, etc. - shuttling between Tyne or Tees and the Thames, where coal prices could be politically sensitive. Besides fuel, London obtained much of its food by this route, thanks to a vigorous use of the rivers, especially those which collect into the Humber; thus Cheshire hams and cheeses came to London from Hull, though with more difficulty than Kentish or East Anglian grain92. Only the little ports of Kent, however, were now wholly subservient to the monstrous growth of the capital93. Tyneside, while rivalled by Sunderland and Leith as a coal exporter, was an industrial centre producing salt, glass, bricks, iron or steel tools and heavy forgings, heavily reliant on Sweden; in 1686 nearly as many ships cleared from Newcastle to 'nearby' Europe as from London94. Hull's industrial hinterland, too, between Ouse and Trent, gave it not only a coastal traffic in its own right but a growing volume of imports from Scandinavia and of exports to Holland95. The Bounty Act of 1689 boosted its corn exports, and still more those of East Anglia, when harvests were good. Eastern and even western Scotland, despite a prolonged economic crisis in this period, maintained multiple links with Scandinavia, Hamburg, Bremen and Rotterdam (and Aberdeen with Veere); Scotland also had the unusual distinction during the wars of increasing its share of the herring market beyond the Sound96. Most of Scotland's imports from England came in coasters, especially from London ; but manufactured and entrepot goods also arrived from the United Provinces, which had a strong stake in Scottish shipowning, notably at Bo'ness97. Before noticing wartime losses it is pertinent to recollect that the characteristic vessels in these trades - the flyboats and pinks, the barques and brigantines, the ketches and hoys - were extremely numerous and of small tonnage: barely 80 tons 92. Davis, Shipping Industry, 33; T. S. Willan, The Early History of the Don Navigation (Manchester, 1965) 5. For the cargoes moving between London and the outports in 1683, see idem, The English Coasting Trade 1600-1750 (Manchester, 1938) 204-207. 93. And Chatham dockyard, which explains the considerable imports of Baltic timber and naval stores at Rochester, besides much activity at Ramsgate. The Thames estuary between Rochester and Whitstable was famous in the Netherlands for its oysters. See D. W. Chalklin, SeventeenthCentury Kent (London, 1965) esp. 170-178. 94. Edward Hughes, North Country Life in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1952) 12-13, 61, 159; idem, Studies in Administration and Finance 1558-1825 (Manchester, 1934) 406-408; T. S. Ashton, Iron and Steel in the Industrial Revolution (Manchester, 1924)21,55,110;S. Middlebrook, Newcastle upen Tyne: Its Growth and Achievement (Newcastle, 1950) 88, 109; Davis, Shipping Industry, 211. Cf. Willan, Coasting Trade, 206. 95. Gordon Jackson, Hull in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1972) 7-10,26-32, 51-54, 335-341. 96. Smout, Scottish Trade, 153-166,185-194,223. Some of Glasgow's trade to Holland went out into the Forth, where Bo'ness was the key point, but it already had direct contacts with Scandinavia; its vessels also carried Ulster produce (ibidem, 144-145). 97. Ibidem, 55-56. For trade with England and the Netherlands, ibidem, ch. ix.

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on average in the clearances for Holland and Germany (London included) in 1715-1717, and about 30 tons for Flanders, although the average collier had an estimated capacity of 140 tons in 1702, when there were nearly 1,300 of them - perhaps a superfluity, though incidentally not confined to the transport of coal98. This is the one clear case, apart from the slavers, in which the master and other shipowners, whoever they were", owned also the cargo between loading and delivery; but it is true in general that many merchants were shipowners, often freighting their own ships on their own account as well as chartering or freighting others. Master mariners were often merchants too, or on the way to becoming merchants. Many small vessels were entirely owned by them and so represented a sizeable part of their savings ; buying a ship was a way of rising to be shipmaster. In parallel, a fresh fisherman's capital was locked up in his boat and gear. The recent expansion of English tonnage generally had indeed imposed a huge strain on the nation's capital stock - Sir William Petty, the pioneer statistician, estimated it at no less than ten per cent, exclusive of real estate. Of course shipowners divided their risks, as freighters and insurers did, thus limiting their losses but making it the more likely that they would not escape some. The London insurance market was still immature: it could not cope with such a disaster as overtook the 'Smyrna convoy' in 1693, and later it was claimed that the failures of underwriters in these wars had run to f2,000,0001 °°. Above all, shipowning itself was still so unspecialized an occupation that a great many investors were at risk. They embraced hundreds of ancillary dealers and craftsmen, such as victuallers, distillers, brewers, vintners, ironmongers, fishmongers, cheesemongers, bakers, salters, apothecaries, warehousekeepers, packers, corn-factors, oil-men, shipchandlers, shipwrights, ropemakers, sailmakers, gunmakers, compass-makers, coopers, joiners, painters, blacksmiths, turners, sword cutlers, upholsterers, glaziers, haberdashers and even barbers101. What is less obvious, English ship98. Davis, Shipping Industry, 209-211; T. S. Ashton and J. Sykes, The Coal Industry of the Eighteenth Century (Manchester, 1929) 199-200; cf. Willan, Coasting Trade, 16. Some colliers already exceeded 400 tons. Besides being switched to the Baltic trade, they are found in the prize records carrying coal, fish, bottles, etc. simultaneously: e.g., 'John and Marian' of Yarmouth (AN, G5 253, 21 March 1712). On the question of a superfluity, see Hughes, North Country Life, 173, 203-204. Ashton and Sykes, 249, tabulate coal exports from the Tyne 1700-1710, showing troughs in 1702,1706-1707,1710 (when there were disturbances among keelmen and shipmasters). 99. Hughes, North Country Life, 162 ff., 201, shows that some parts in ships were held by mineowners. 100. Davis, Shipping Industry, 127, and 'Merchant Shipping in the Economy of the Late Seventeenth Century', 71 ; C. Wright and C. E. Fayle, A History of Lloyd's (London, 1928) 42-51. 101. All prominently represented in PRO, HCA 25/14-20: letter of marque bonds, 1702-1708; giving security for the good behaviour of a privateering captain (or more commonly of an armed merchantman) these could, and as a rule probably did, imply an interest in the armament. At Dunkirk, the principal armateurs (dépositaires) are almost interchangeable with their 'cautions'. On English shipowning generally see Davis, Shipping Industry, ch. v.

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owning extended far beyond the quaysides and counting houses, thanks to the exceptional protection afforded by the law to this type of partnership and to the ease of moving in or out of it102. If it is true that merchant groups were as a rule identified with particular trades, and also as either importers or exporters, evidence is now accumulating that landowners from Kent to Scotland shipped cargoes at their own risk and sometimes held parts of the ships as well ; they too have their nimbus of corn-dealers, brewers, maltsters, and so on103. Whatever the extent of these interests, so much agricultural produce was lifted coastwise, in any case, that even Members of Parliament for inland shires shared the alarms aroused by miscarriages at sea104. Only by recognizing such facts as these - and their echoes in a noisy journalism is it possible to understand British insistence, from 1706 onwards, in making the destruction of Dunkirk a sine qua non of a European peace settlement. Godolphin found it curious that the States General should have resisted this, even if only to use it as a bargaining point in the early Barrier negotiations : as he wrote to Buys, 'in this we cannot doubt of your concurrence, since that place is equally pernicious to the trade both of Holland and England105'. There were grounds for that assumption in the series of plakkaten (1697-1704) awarding a differential premium for enemy warships captured or destroyed in the North Sea: even when the Zeelanders, on 28 July 1705, obtained equal rates beyond the Straits of Dover, as a trade-off for no longer molesting neutral shipping in any trade permitted to Dutch nationals, it was stipulated that privateers must first cruise for a fortnight between Shetland and Dover. While this compulsion is enough to remind us that the Zeelanders - in my view the most formidable privateers on any side in these wars (though fewer than thirty at sea on average for 1702-12) - preferred to operate outside the North Sea, the premiums awarded in 1703-1705 suggest that they found plenty to do here: a total of fl. 638,825 for 113 awards. Although the figure jumped to fl. 927,950 in 1707 and to fl. 706,700 in 1708, for 71 and 56 awards respectively - reflecting the fact that the Channel Soundings, Biscay, the Iberian coasts and the Mediterranean were more remunerative cruising-grounds - there are indications that captures of 102. Ibidem, 102-104. 103. D. W. Jones, 'London Merchants', 326; Chalklin, Kent, 171-172; Smout, Scottish Trade, 72-76. Dr. Smout has argued (ibidem, 272) that the increasing interest of the Scottish nobility in export trade was a major reason why they supported the Union. 104. Johnston, 'Parliament', 403. 105. According to Burchett, Complete History, 435, its destruction by bombardment was considered as early as 1691. From May 1706 Godolphin repeatedly urged Marlborough to attack it and on 14 June wrote to him that 'If wee can't gett Dunquerk by arms, wee must not now think of peace without a condition to demolish it and spoyl the harbour': Snyder, Marlborough Godolphin Correspondence, 563, 570, 587. The demolition was proposed to Buys on 3 Sept. 1706 (ibidem, 666). Cf. J. G. Stork-Penning, Het Grote Werk. Vredesonderhandelingen gedurende de Spaanse successie-oorlog 1705-1710 (Groningen, 1958) 272-275.

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French corsairs in the North Sea increased again in 1710-17II106. On the other hand, I have identified only 33 Zeeland privateers condemned to Dunkirk for the whole of the Spanish Succession War - rather more than ten per cent, say, of those commissioned1 °7. Analysis of the sentences handed out by the Conseil des Prises during this war sheds further light on Godolphin's assumption. As against 340 British (including at least 38 Scottish) prizes, no less than 387 Dutch were brought into Dunkirk, while the number of Dutch vessels ransomed is nearly twice the British: 411 compared with 226 (including some 50 Scots). Furthermore, the value of the Dutch ransoms is three times the British: fl. 945,415 (say, £94,000) compared with £ 32,580 (Scottish £ 5,980). But this is not all, for on the enemy side the Dunkirkers did not have the North Sea to themselves. Contrary to my own earlier supposition, the small privateers of Calais, which were numerous, were at least as active in the North Sea as in the English Channel, and not merely in the Straits of Dover, where operations could be inhibited by the naval rendezvous in the Downs. If they took fewer Scottish prizes than did the Dunkirkers, they ransomed rather more : 68 against 50, to an approximate value of £ 6,250, and mostly after 1706. Within the North Sea alone their British ransoms as a whole numbered 371, over twice as many as their Dutch ransoms (171), although here the respective values were approximately equal: £ 33,900 and fl. 333,750 (say £ 33,000)108. The 106. Figures collected from ARA, Admiraliteitsarchieven 2524-2526, 2438, 2528-2533; awards declined to 26 in 1710 but rose to 47 in 1711 (ibidem 2536-2537), although by these dates, if not already by 1707, the awards were in arrears, so that they become a less reliable index of year-toyear activity: see 'Some Zeeland Privateering Instructions: Jacob Sautijn to Captain Salomon Reynders' in Ragnhild Hatten and J. S. Bromley, ed., William III and Louis XIV ( 1968), below, chapter 18, pp. 407-34. The plakkaten of 31 May 1697,6 June 1702,28 July 1705 and the ampliatie (doubling in 1704 of premiums for the North Sea only), with various elucidations, will be found in C. Cau's Groot Placaet-Boeck (The Hague, 1658-1796) IV, 217-219, 1268-1269; V, 300-315. 107. AN, G5 234-255, 'Dépouillement des jugements de prises juin 1702 a dec. 1713'. What follows is based on this source. A few of the prizes or ransoms declared at Dunkirk were the work of Calaisien corsairs; equally, the Dunkirkers occasionally declared their prizes at Calais. Both occasionally used Ostend (1702-1706) or Nieuwpoort, as well as Le Havre: these have been allocated to Dunkirk and Calais respectively. The Dunkirk figures also include a small number of prizes taken to Brest and Cadiz. The Calais figures refer only to actions known to have occurred in the North Sea; there were perhaps as many more in the English Channel. 108. The British figure is more likely to be an under-estimate since it excludes a number of cases where the place of capture remains undetermined. Ransom figures are occasionally expressed in livres tournois, which I have converted at 15 to £1 sterling; 12 and 16 It were rates quoted in declarations to the Dunkirk amirauté on 5 Sept. 1696 and 18 Oct. 1707 (AN, Marine C4 263 and 272). Dutch ransoms are usually given in florins, or 'argent de banque d'Hollande', occasionally as 'livres d'Hollande', which means florins too, not £vl. There are a few references to ecus and to huis d'or (read as 4 and 20 livres). Most ransom figures include a small sum (usually £5 or 50 fl.) for the capitarne preneur. At Dunkirk this was known as pluntrage, representing a valuation of the captured captain's personal belongings and sometimes those of his officers and crew as well: see Arch. Mun. Dunkerque, 202, no. 9 (5 Aug. 1744). By ordonnance of 2 Dec. 1693 (Lebeau, Nouveau

The North Sea in Wartime, 1688-1713

67

number of British prizes taken into Calais (126) also exceeded the Dutch (86), apart altogether from what were taken in the Channel. When contemporaries referred, therefore, to the ravages of the Dunkirkers, they were including, whether they knew it or not, a substantial fraction of damage attributable to the men of Calais, and this relatively at British expense. The Calaisiens, moreover, willing to ransom for such tiny sums as £ 6 (a Scottish ferry boat), not infrequently got their ransoms paid on the spot or from the shore without troubling to take a hostage : so far as British coasts were concerned, they displayed a peculiar readiness to pry into bays and estuaries. If we combine the depredations of Calais and Dunkirk, the crude totals of losses by British and Dutch are roughly equal: 466 and 473 prizes, 597 and 582 ransoms, respectively. Yet the average Dutch ransom (fl. 2,190 or £ 219) was twice the value of the British (£ 111). Can the same be said of the prizes? No firm conclusion can be drawn from the evidence available. The British losses to the Calais corsairs within the North Sea consisted very largely of colliers, cornships, and other coastal or fishing vessels; and Dunkirk's record would look less impressive if I had not included in it some prizes taken in the Channel (off Beachy Head or even in the Soundings), mainly from the Iberian, Mediterranean and overseas trades the majority, it is true, bound to (less commonly from) London. However, we are comparing British and Dutch losses, not the performances of Calais and Dunkirk. So there is some significance in the fact that only a round forty Dutch ships were intercepted by the Dunkirkers when bound to or from southern Europe (mainly Lisbon), Guinea, Angola, Surinam and the West Indies, whereas British losses on these hauls, tojthe Dunkirkers alone, were half as many again109. It is more surprising that the Dutch lost fewer than sixty vessels out of the fleets trading with Archangel, Norway and the Baltic, the British about thirty: a tribute to the convoy system. As a rule, these last cargoes - worth less as a rule than those from southern Europe and considerably less than the tropical commodities - were a debit to northern Holland, especially Amsterdam, whose overall losses in 1702-1713 might be reckoned at less than eighty voyages, including a few ransoms110. Only a dozen code, I,186-187) the maximum ransom was 10,000 livres and the minimum 1,000, refusal of which led to sinking: since we are dealing here primarily with losses, I have included such rare cases in the prize totals. 109. To Dunkirk only: Mediterranean, 6; Spain and Portugal, 27; Azores, Canaries, 6; Guinea, 2; West Indies, 14; other colonies, 9; East Indies, 2. Some of these were of course taken outside the North Sea, in one case off Cape Clear, while another 21 prizes were intercepted off the south coast of England. 110. In 1702 the 'Esperance' and the 'Jeune Estienne et Andre', bound from the Baltic to Amsterdam, were ransomed for 1,200 and 3,900 florins ; the former was from Danzig in grain (AN, G5 235, fo. 1); in 1709 a Scot bound to Danzig paid £250 (ibidem 248, 1 July). Given the rough manners of the captors and the fatigues of going hostage, it cannot be assumed that these vessels and cargoes were worth a lot more to their owners.

68

Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760

voyages were to or from Portugal and the Mediterranean, perhaps a couple from the West Indies, and one in ballast to the East; on these hauls Rotterdam and the Zeeland ports experienced more disappointments111. Relatively, the outstanding victim was the versatile Zierikzee : forty ships taken prize - from Norway, Hamburg, Tyneside, Scotland, Ireland and Portugal - in timber, coal, lead, butter, fruit, wines, coffee, shrimps and salmon, not to mention oysters from Rochester and Falmouth and its own fishing vessels, mostly with cod. To this we must add thirty or forty Zierikzee ransoms, nearly all ex-fishery, at prices ranging between fl. 1,250 and fl. 2,400. It was, in fact, the herring and cod fisheries of Zierikzee and, above all, of the Maas ports that accounted for the bulk of all Dutch ransoms - Maassluis in particular, with fifty laden fishing vessels carried off to Dunkirk in addition (compared with nine of Vlaardingen)112. The cost of this one war to the fisheries of the Maas towns alone might be conservatively computed at fl. 1,250,000. No great sum perhaps for Amsterdam to reckon with? So was it because the privateering war was felt most acutely on the Maas and in Zeeland that the great city apparently cared so little for the demolition of Dunkirk? The hypothesis might be strengthened if we knew more, first, about the relative stake of southern Holland and Zeeland in the trade with the British Isles and, second, about that of northern Holland in the cargoes carried by neutral and Hanseatic shipping. Both Hamburg and Stade in this war suffered severely from the Dunkirkers, the Norwegians and Danes less so than in the previous war113. Was it only for diplomatic reasons that Zeeland's interference with all these did not endear that province to the Hollanders? As during the first half of the Nine Years War, foreign envoys (including the Imperial ambassador) had some sharp words for the alleged malpractices of Middelburg and Vlissingen during the earlier years of its 111. The total losses of Middelburg and Vlissingen, excluding privateers but including half a dozen slavers, were approximately 15 in each case, compared with Rotterdam's 23. 112. But Vlaardingen lost 10 to the Calaisiens, Maassluis 14 and Zierikzee 11. Delfshaven and Schiedam suffered lightly at the hands of French corsairs; nor was Dunkirk responsible for the decline of the herring fishery of Enkhuizen, noticed by Van de Woude, Het noorderkwartier, 403. By international convention, the fresh fishermen were left alone, so long as they carried no salt or barrels: see (e.g.) ARA, Admiraliteitsarchieven 2756, letters of 31 July 1702 and 12 March 1703 from Vergier at Dunkirk. But in this something depended on local agreements: thus in 1708 the Amsterdam admiralty is found proposing the same freedom for the Texel fishery as the Zeelanders enjoyed with Dunkirk (AN, F12 54, fos. 163v.-170). Breaches were sufficiently frequent to give rise to an Anglo-French treaty between the belligerents in May 1708, renewed in 1710, though complaints from both sides continued till the end of the war. No such treaty was made with the Dutch, because they wanted it to extend to their cod and herring fisheries. 113. 34 Hamburgers were taken to Dunkirk and two were ransomed; but there were also 21 prizes allegedly belonging to Stade and 29 Swedes. Cf. 19 Norwegians, 7 Danes (but only one of Glückstadt and none of Altona in this war), a dozen Holsteiners and 11 Danzigers. All five of the prizes flying the flag of Brandenburg were alleged to be on Dutch account, as was one bound to Emden and several to Hamburg. Bremen lost seven vessels captured and three ransomed, mostly trading with London; one Lübecker was ransomed, as were two of Rostock.

The North Sea in Wartime, 1688-1713

69

successor; but the dozen privateers of Dover and the Cinque Ports, which throve entirely by arresting Scandinavians and Hanseatics in the Straits, were more obnoxious still. In the years 1703-1705 (before the bottom dropped out of their business when the Dutch opened their licensed trade with France), with the help of the navy, these privateers brought up no less than 37 Danes, 36 Norwegians, and 75 Swedes, together with 18 of Slesvig-Holstein - figures which aroused turmoil in the colleges of commerce at Copenhagen and Stockholm114, and which enable us to see Zeeland's fifty odd arrests in clearer perspective115. In the Nine Years War, again in 1703-1705, neutrals had less to fear from Dunkirk itself. Dutch partowners or freighters, with their strong interest in Scandinavian bottoms, must have been aware of that. Perhaps they also understood that the notorious 'Nest of Pyrates'116 was not without troubles of its own. As reflected in the reports of the Dunkirk captains, there were ten mediocre campaigns for every successful one: long is the tale of sprung masts and parted cables, of guns and boats jettisoned in flight, of strikes and mutinies. Prize crews were grudgingly spared and many captures proved ephemeral, the Ostend capers habitually recovering them around the banks during the Nine Years War117 and again after the capitulation of Ostend in July 1706; subsequently the French caught 31 of them. But here is a warning not to equate interceptions with the far lower numbers of prizes condemned. So is the action of the admiralty courts of Bergen and Christiansand in sometimes restoring prizes taken by Dunkirkers in Norwegian waters or simply brought in there without good reason, although Bonrepaus used his influence to get these cases reconsidered at

114. PRO, SP 75/25, Vernon to Hedges, 9 June, 15 Sept., 27 Oct. o.s.; SP 95/16, Jackson to Hedges, 27 Aug. 1704, enclosing a protest from 49 Stockholm burghers, complaining of excessive legal costs, 'unheard of and unreasonable Interrogatorys', pillage and damage to cargoes, so that these were often 'hardly worth the freight and custom afterwards'. The figures have been collected from the prize papers in HCA 32/45-92. Not all these prizes were restored quoad navem or quoad bona, or both: ibidem 47/21 and 48/6. Cf. G. N. Clark, 'Neutral Commerce in the War of the Spanish Succession and the Treaty of Utrecht', British Year Book of International Law (1928) 69-83; but it is erroneous to state that these ships were detained only when outward bound (ibidem, 72). 115. For all the national and international fuss they aroused, I can find in the minutes of the Zeeland admiralty board traces of not more than fifty neutral and Allied cases in 1703-1705, the period of crisis. Some were admittedly protracted and releases often occurred only after a composition out of court between the parties. While the board favoured this procedure, it was alive to the danger of collusion. It was disciplined, like the captors themselves, by the 'Placaat noopende de Commissievaarders' of 28 July 1705 in Cau, Groot Placaet-Boeck, V, 306-310), which reserved the grant of commissions to the States General: summary in my chapter on Jacob Sautijn, William III and Louis XIV, 170-171. 116. Defoe's Review, no. 52, 27 July o.s. 1708 (New York, Facsimile Text Soc., 1938, V, 20). 117. In a letter from Dunkirk to Valincour, secretary to the Conseil des Prises, 16 June 1696, Vauban assessed the number at two out of three.

70

Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760

Copenhagen: no business, he said, gave him so much trouble118. In fortified harbours like Bergen, the amtmann might send his soldiers on board a prize and there would be friction ; alternatively, the captors might seduce Norwegian magistrates and merchants with cheap prize goods, which in turn paid for fresh provisions or a refit 119 . This might be contrary to Denmark's Convention of 1691 with the Maritime Powers, who eventually (in 1701) applied enough pressure to stop the practice120, with the result that the Dunkirkers henceforward were to find it harder to pay their bills : a diplomatic success that has not received due recognition, and one that well illustrates how effectively the writ of Copenhagen now ran in Norway, try as might the King of Denmark and Norway to be all things to all powers. In the Spanish war, the corsairs were more discreet, making less use of their Norwegian refuges and avoiding fortified harbours, though partly perhaps because they then sailed more frequently into the English Channel121. This shift certainly made for better dividends at Dunkirk, especially at the height of the privateering war in 1707122. Nevertheless, the turnover among its promoters, the depositares (boekhouders) was high. There were at least 127 of them between 1688 and 1697, but few stayed the course for long and there were bankruptcies among those who did123. 118. Johnsen, Innberetninger, 184 and passim. 119. Bergen was the best market ; in 1693, according to Bonrepaus, there was competition there to buy them (ibidem, 94). For a summary of violent incidents, see AN, Marine B3142, fos. 318-319. 120. Ibidem, 181-182, 192, 215, 221. Article iii of the Treaty of Odense (20 Jan. 1701) between Denmark and the Maritime Powers forbade the King's 'ports and rivers' to all warships other than convoys. The Convention of 1691 had gone no further than prohibit the taking of prizes on the coasts. Denmark tried unsuccessfully to neutralize the entire Kattegat and a belt 5 or 6 leagues wide between Lindesness and Trondheim; the coast of Jutland was dangerous enough to neutralize itself to a distance of 4 or 5 German leagues (Johnsen, Innberetninger, 38-39, 52). 121. AN, Marine C* 268, 272-273, 276 ('dèci, de capitaines'). Forbin's violation of territorial waters near Vard0 in 1707 and Admiral Norris's seizure of cornships in the Kattegat, in 1709, greatly embarrassed the Danish Court : Johnsen, Innberetninger, 279-284,287-289 ; PRO, SP 75/27, Pulteney to Boyle 13 and 20 July 1709. 122. I have attempted a provisional assessment in a paper contributed to Michel Mollai and Ulane Bonnel, edd., Course et piraterie: études presentees a la Commision Internationale d'Histoire Maritime a I'occasion de son XVe colloque international ... San Francisco, aoùt 1975 (Paris: Ed. du Centre Nat. de la Recherche Scientifique, 1975, in roneo) 231-270. Bonrepaus considered that the habit of visiting Norway favoured the pockets of captains to the prejudice of their investors: Johnsen, Innberetninger, 170. See below, pp. 435-48. 123. Notably Jacques Plets and Guillaume Taverne, brother of Nicolas, who was far and away the most successful of all Dunkirk annateurs, remaining in the business throughout the wars; Jan Rycx, his associate in over 50 armaments down to 1695, fades out at this point. A dozen insolvencies are minuted in AN, G516*, 'Estat de ce qui est deub au greffe de l'Admirauté de Dunkerque', 26 March 1702. The dépositaires are precisely known for the periods Sept. 1688-June 1689 and Feb. 1690-May 1695 from surviving actes de caution in AN, Marine C4 253, 255,257, 259; otherwise their names have to be gleaned from the 'declarations des capitaines', a series with gaps for Sept. 1689-March 1693, Jan.-Oct. 1695, May 1702-July 1703, Oct. 1704-Feb. 1707. The functions of a dépositaire resembled those of a Dutch boekhouder, for which see J. R. Bruijn, 'Kaapvaart in de tweede en derde Engelse oorlog', Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, XC (1975) 408-429.

The North Sea in Wartime, 1688-1713

71

Although the majority are described as 'rnarchands' in the capitation rolls, and a few were members of the magistracy, they include an assortment of innkeepers, brewers, apothecaries, surgeons, brokers, naval officers, pursers, shipmasters, ship's carpenters and sailmakers, notaries and commis des traites. Even the men of substance among them were constantly complaining - of the high wages and flightiness of seamen, of their king's tolerance of enemy traders, and the obstructiveness (or worse) of their local amirauté, with which they conducted a running quarrel124. But what captains! In fighting quality, Mattheus de Wulf, Cornelis Meijnne, Crombrugghe and Simoens, Saus and Baeteman, the Glasson brothers, the Bart family, and a hundred others, were opponents worthy of the Zeelanders, in some cases related to them and schooled like them (through Jean Bart) in the tradition of De Ruy ter. What seamanship, what patience and ruse and sometimes bullying - chasing a hundred sail for every ten visited and searched (if not boarded with cutlass and small arms), zig-zagging from coast to coast as the winds dictated, joining and parting company from sunset to sunset, infiltrating convoys before dawn, scrutinizing like learned doctors the papers of the innocent and guilty alike, bargaining for ransoms and setting fire to the obstinate, removing here a few barrels of butter or herring and there a spare sail or cable, pillaging the money and personal possessions of passengers, anchoring in dead water on the Dogger Bank or judging the tidal caprices of Pentland Firth. At times, as in 1695-1696, the nimbler ones penetrated the inland waters of the Dutch Republic and notably between the Wadden islands and the Friesland shore, notwithstanding the death penalty placarded by the States General on 24 February 1696125; in 1708 we find the Amelanders seeking neutral status126. Evidently, the 'nuisance value' of the capers, if that is all it was, is not to be calculated in terms of prizes and ransoms alone. It will bear repeating, lastly, that so long as the French king's base in the North Sea, on which he spent so much, sheltered even a modest naval squadron, no Zee124. AN, G 5 16* and MarineB 3 60, fos. 68-75; 81, fos. 12-13,43,55,69,264-265; 133, fos. 14-15; 142, fos. 629-634. 125. De Jonge, Nederlandsche zeewezen, III, 465-466. Examples from 1696, post-dating the plakkaat, in AN, Marine C* 263, fos. 71-72, 75, 116 (all 'dans les Wattes'); for 1695, ibidem 258, fo. 115 ('entre Vlie et Texel'), 144v.-145 ('devant Zelande'), 208v.-209 ('proche d'Amelandt'), 234v. ('dans les bañes de Flessingues'); and for 1704, ibidem 268, fos. llv.-16 (Ems), 153 ('rivière de Mildebourg'), 223 ('dans la Mense'). Cf. ibidem, fo. 237, for a petition of several merchants of Colchester, asking that Capt. Jan Tilly be kept prisoner till the end of the war, 'attendu que ledit capitarne Tilly a tousjours fait le commerce des huiltres en temps de paix avec eux et par consequent qu'il a une entière connoissance des endroits de la rivière de Londres où ils ont des bastimens ...'. The specialist in these exploits was the eccentric Louis le Mei, for whom see Malo, Grande Guerre, 178-203. 126. AN, F12 54, fo. 137.

72

Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760

lander and no Englander would ever be free from the nightmare of a 'descent', especially while Scotland's allegiance hung in the balance. That the alarms of 1696 and 1708 came to nothing should not mislead us. Rumours of preparations long preceded them and it was anyone's guess what their objective was. When Forbin came out with the Pretender in 1708, there was a run on the Bank of England, not for the first time; but panic too in Zeeland and Rotterdam127. Men waited for the new or the full moon, and kept an anxious eye on their weathercocks. 127. Sir John Clapham, The Bank of England (2 vols, Cambridge, 1944) I, 62; Snyder, Marlborough-Godolphin Correspondence, II, 1028; Stork-Penning, Het grote werk, 145, 184-185.

View of Dunkirk at the end of the reign of Louis XIII

5 THE IMPORTANCE OF DUNKIRK RECONSIDERED, 1688-1713 From Pierre Faulconnier to Emile Coornaert,1 Dunkirk and Maritime Flanders have been fortunate in their historians, more so perhaps than most other maritime regions of France, but they have never studied its trade and privateering in the systematic quantitative manner recently devoted by Professor Jean Delumeau and his pupils at St.-Malo. If this were possible, would the city of Jean Bart retain quite that pre-eminence as a corsair base which it has been customary to take for granted, at least during the years 1688-1713, before Vauban's fort and harbour works (incomplete even in 1702) were demolished at the Peace of Utrecht? Some extraordinary claims have been made by historians, as (for instance) that the Dunkirkers took 6,436 prizes in the Nine Years War of 1688-97, and that the gross value of their take in the War of the Spanish Succession exceeded 82 million livres or even £6m. sterling. It is supposed that they had as many as a hundred privateers at sea simultaneously at certain times, and that all this, though of vital importance to the English, was comparatively unimportant to the Dutch, who had not insisted on the demolition during the 1706 peace negotiations or later.3 In an essay written twelve years ago, I attempted in a rough and ready way to measure the privateering activity of the French coasts between 1702 and 1713.4 Excluding ransoms, recaptures, and releases, the records of the Conseil des Prises give the following results, out of nearly 4,550 prizes: Brittany 1,282; Dunkirk (with Nieuport and till 1706 Ostend) 993; Calais to Granville 785; western Mediterranean (principally 1

Faulconnier, Description historique de Dunkerque, 2 vol., Bruges, 1730; Coornaert, La Fiandre frartfaise de langue flamande, Paris, 1970. 2 A. de Saint-Léger, La Fiandre maritime et Dunkerque sous la domination franose (16591789), Paris-Lille, 1900, p. 390; Henri Malo, La Grande guerre des corsaires: Dunkerque (1702-1715), Paris, 1925, p. 126; G. N. Clark, 'War Trade and Trade War, 1701-1713', The Economic History Review, 1st series, vol. 1, p. 263. In his Review, no. 81 (12 Dec. 1704), p. 338, Defot alaready claimed that D. had 'cost this Nation above 5 Millions'. ' Malo, op. at., 127; G. van den Haute, Les Relations anglo-hollandaises au debut du XVIII'siède, Louvain, 1932, p. 298; Roderick Geikie and Isabel A. Montgomery, The Dutch Barrier 1705-1719, Cambridge, 1930, p. 9. Cf. [Jonathan Swift], Some Remarks on the Barrier Treaty between Her Majesty and the States-General, London, 1712. 4 "The French Privateering War 1702-13", Historical Essays 1600-1750 presented to David Ogg, ed. H. E. Bell and R. L. Ollard, London, 1963, below, pp. 213-41. 5 Paris. Archives Nationales, G 5 234-255, Dépouillement des jugements des prises.

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Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760

Marseille and Toulon) 684. By comparison, the number condemned to ports between Sables d'Olonne and the Pyrenees was no more than 191. When a methodical count can be made of vessels and cargoes sold abroad, we may expect it to improve the performance of the Breton ports and of Marseille - Toulon far more than that of Dunkirk, whose privateering was largely concentrated in the North Sea, with less freedom to sell in foreign ports. This was almost entirely so during the Nine Years War; from 1706, perhaps a year or so earlier, when the Dunkirk frigates came out more regularly into the Channel, as far as the Scillies or even Cape Clear, at least during the winter months, more of their prizes were sent into Calais or Le Havre but it was rare for them to sail south of Ushant, whereas the Iberian coasts were of course a major cruising-ground of the Malouins. It also seems very likely that the Malouin contribution to the Breton total will loom far larger, when full analysis can be undertaken, than the mere 374 prizes brought into St.Malo itself (though it exceeds the combined figure for Marseille and Toulon), for many of their armaments (notably those of the Trouin brothers) were based on Brest, where 506 prizes were condemned; Nantes was less important than Morlaix, but both had close connections with St.-Malo. For this reason, the accounts of the Admiral's tenths which have survived for the period 15 December 1705 to 31 December 1706 must underrate St.-Malo by comparison with other ports.6 Here are the leading figures in descending order: Dunkirk: Toulon: Brest: St.-Malo: Cadiz: Morlaix:

293, 634 199, 572 162, 694 134, 323 79, 828 73, 033

11. 6s. 2d. for 11. 6s.,8d. for 11. 2s. for 11. Is.,6d. for 11. 18s..3d. for 11. 5s..3d. for

154 items 94 items 51 items 71 items 19 items 30 items

An 'item' could of course mean a ransom or part of a cargo, not necessarily the whole produce of a vessel and cargo: even so, the variations from place to place in the average value of an item work in favour of St.-Malo. If there is not much difference in average value between St.-Malo and Dunkirk themselves, it is still true that Malouin captures would have contributed substantially, and the Dunkirkers very little, to the results of Brest, Cadiz and Morlaix, which show much higher averages. This clearly implies that the Malouin prizes were more valuable on average than those of Dunkirk for the year in question. The same is likely to be true for earlier years, if not for the later ones (for 6

Ibid. G 5 281.

The Importance of Dunkirk Reconsidered, 1688-1713

75

7

Malouin privateering results declined steeply after 1706). . St.-Malo, with Brest, was better placed for living off Anglo-American commerce as well as the trades of southern Europe (including Spain in 1688-97 and Portugal in 1703-13). Very few such prizes entered Dunkirk in 1707, even though this was its peak year of the war as measured in numbers of prizes and ransoms: PRIZES AND RANSOMS ADJUDICATED AT DUNKIRK 1702-13 (Source: Arch. Nat. G5 234-255)

1702 1703 1704 1705 1706 1707 1708 1709 1710 1711 1712 1713

p. 28 81 82 98 83 137 86 90 66 86 74 48 959

R.

14 60 61 46 73 102 78 94 61 62 61 14 726

TOTAL 42

141 143 144 156 239 164 184 127 148 135 62 1,685

NUMBERS OF PRIZES AND OF RANSOMS ADJUDICATED AT DUNKIRK

7

See graph in J. Delumeau et al., Le Mouvement du port de Saint Malo 1681-1120: hilan statistique, Paris, 1966, p. xvi (reproduced from Hist. Essays presented to David Ogg, p. 218). Cf. J. S. Bromley, "The Trade and Privateering of Saint Malo during the War of the Spanish Succession", below, pp. 279-95.

Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760

76

These are provisional figures and they certainly underestimate the performance of Dunkirk, especially from 1706/7 when there is evidence of Channel cruising between October and April and later of one or two sallies as far south as Cape St. Vincent;8 against this, Ostend was by then in enemy hands. Nevertheless, the totals for 1707-8 and 1711 are higher, particularly for ransoms, than those which can be compiled from the lists supplied every week or two in port correspondence with the minister of marine, as the prizes came in:9 PRIZES BROUGHT INTO DUNKIRK (R = Ransoms) DUTCH

SWEDES AND OSTENDERS HAMBURGERS

YEAR

BRITISH

1707 1708 1711 (to 18 Nov. only)

44+R16 29 + R24 35 + R25

47 + R40 20 + R29 24 + R16

10 + R1

108 + R65

91 + R85

25 + R1

8 7

OTHERS

TOTAL

3 4

4 6

3

5

108 +R57 67 + R53 74 + R41

10

15

249 + R151

It will be evident that ransoms bulk large in the Dunkirk tally and it should be possible in due course to provide a fairly exact enumeration of them. The controleur Vergier, who looked after a prize business for the intendant (and who became president of the Chamber of Commerce in 1700), reported their amounts, which can often be checked against those reported by the captors - sums seldom exceeding 3,000 Hires orflorinsor the equivalent in sterling, converted at a usual rate of 15 livres in the ransom bills, although in 1708 alone there were one or two English and Dutch ransoms in excess of £200 or 3000 fl. The controller's totals for 1707 and 1708, when reduced to livres, are respectively 133,700 and 111,470, to which should be added up to 5 per cent for the 'chapeau' of the privateering captain and sometimes the 'plontréage' for his officers and crew (both being customary claims to the personal effects of their opposite numbers among the prisoners), not to mention the frequent requisition of victuals, tackle and instruments of which the captor found himself in need. Since the victims were nearly always fishing vessels or small coasters, even these small sums must have been felt as a hardship, not only to the hostages. Hundreds of Dutch, English and not least poor Scottish shipmasters suffered in their pockets (many more than once), hundreds of other seamen in their persons; masters refusing ransom had 8

On 1 Dec. 1708, 4 leagues off the Cape, Capt. J. Pour (or Poer) effected "une société verhalle pour le restant de leur course" with Capt. C. Saus and N. Baeteman: Arch. Nat., Marine C4 273, declaration dated 2 March 1709. 9 Ibid., Marine B3 142, 154, 151, 191. The lists of "prises amenées" in ibid. 165 are unfortunately missing for May—June and Oct.—Dec. 1709.

The Importance of Dunkirk Reconsidered, 1688-1713

77

to watch their property destroyed. Dunkirk's pre-eminence in this line of business would have had an effect on foreign opinion in this respect, therefore, out of all proportion to the value of ransoms to their recipients, after deduction of the admiralty tenth and/rais des justice. We should recall this when contemporary London journalists refer to 'that nest of pirates'. From time to time Vergier sent the minister a rough guess of the value of a prize recently brought in. Such estimates were unusually frequent in 1711. Together with the ransoms, they add up (for ten and a half months only) to 1,731,240 livres. Since these were estimates before trial we may safely take it that this is the gross value and that it would comfortably exceed 2m. livres if it were complete. It is reasonable to compare with this figure one which is more certainly known, that for 1706, which can be placed at rather more than ten times the Admiral's tenth (293,634 livres) as various prize accounts show.10 Faulconnier in fact records a total of 30,500,000 livres for 1702-12 inclusive, 'sans y comprendre les Bätimens ennemis que nos Armateurs ont menez en France et en Espagne, où ils ont été vendus', by comparison with 22,167,000 livres for the previous war.11 It is tempting to accept these figures. Not only did he derive them from the records of the Dunkirk Amirauté, but his total for the number of prizes (1,665) is remarkably close to the figure derived from the judgments of the Conseil des Prises. If he is right, we get an annual average for the Nine Years of War of nearly 2.5m, and for 1702-12 (ten and a half years) of nearly 3m. These figures consist with what we can ascertain independently for 1706 and 1711 so long as they are read as the gross and not the net product - i.e. before deducting the tenth and other outgoings which could add up to a good deal. Even allowing some addition for prizes sold elsewhere, they do not leave much room for Henri Male's 82m, which was achieved by treating Faulconnier's sum total as if it were merely the produit net.12 Nor would Saint-Léger's 6,436 prizes for the 'War of the League of Augsburg' now appear anything but fanciful unless they were very small prizes indeed. Instead of Sir George Clark's 'six millions sterling' for 1702-13, we should be thinking of something like £2m. 10

Ibid. B3 178, fos. 122-30. Description. II, 101, 166. He clearly refers to sales - i.e. gross product. 1 Op. at., p. 126. Male's assertion is not in this instance founded on any precise source. Even if he were justified in reading Faulconnier's figures AS produit net, instead of produit brut, it would still be impossible to follow his summary method of converting one into the other. For a like robust calculation see his Corsaires Dunkerquois et Jean Bart (1662-1702), 2 vol., Paris, 1913-4, II, 418-9. In converting Malo's figure for 1702-13 into sterling, Sir George Clark has somewhat overvalued the livre tournois, which the Dunkirk ransom bills in 1704 fixed at 16 livres to £1 and in 1707-8 at 15 11.; the rate used between London and the Channel Islands in 1702-8 was 14 11., but as many as 18 11. were being quoted by Nov. 1712. 11

78

Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760

How much of this was at British expense it is still impossible to say. The table based on Vergier's lists for 1707-8 and 1711 certainly does not suggest a striking British preponderance in the sheer number of vessels taken, although it betrays a clear Dutch lead in the suffering of ransoms, thanks to their vulnerable herring and cod fisheries. On the other hand, a very high proportion of the Dutch prizes were also fishing vessels codfishers returning to the Maas or Zierikzee from the Dogger Bank or Iceland, herring busses to Schiedam or Vlaardingen from the British coasts, sometimes arrested 'devant leurs filets'. The length of Britain's east coast of course afforded a much wider invitation to intercept coasters (caboteurs), the strong tides and shallows of the Dutch coast a corresponding deterrent; but many barques longues and chaloupes from Dunkirk made nothing of entering the Scheldt or even the dangerous 'Watten' behind the Frisian islands, an obvious trap for the fishing of Ems, Weser and Elbe or of Holstein, despite its risks.13 The Dunkirkers habitually zigzagged across the North Sea, 'de coste a coste' according to weather or intelligence, perhaps via the Dogger. More Dutch than British victims were also privateers themselves and thus usually without cargoes, although any prize in their possession might also fall to the new captors: a scrutiny of the rapports des capitaines, which survive for Dunkirk over six separate periods amounting in all to half the waryears,14 shows that combats were of regular occurrence, which is far from the impression I formed when reading in the Malouin reports, admittedly a somewhat hasty reading. The Malouins had the Channel Islanders at their threshold, but the Dunkirkers had the Zeelanders and (except for 1702-6) the Ostenders. This was a major circumstance for the course of Dunkirk. Time and again captains or prizemasters report the loss of their prizes on nearing home, even to the small Ostenders, which seldom carried as many as ten guns. After the placaeten of 28 July 1705 all Dutch privateers were required to cruise for a fortnight between Shetland and the Straits of Dover before sailing further afield. The fighting quality of Middelburg and Flushing was enhanced by the 'praemie' (gun-money) awarded from 1697 for the capture or destruction of enemy ships of war. It is significant that the rate was doubled on 20June 1704 for the North Sea only, and that this 'ampliatie' was only extended beyond those waters a year later on 13 Striking examples in the rapports of Louis Le Mei dated 12 April 1696 and 21 Aug. 1703, Arch. Nat. Marine C4 263 and 268. On the navigational risks see always the novel by Erskine Childers, The Riddle of the Sands, London, 1903. 14 Nov. 1688-Aug. 1689; April 1693-Dec. 1694; Oct. 1695-Feb. 1697; July 1703Sept. 1704; March 1707-Jan. 1710; July 1712-May 1713. Unimportant before 1695-6, the Islanders greatly extended the intensity and range of their operations in 1702-11, when 608 prizes (incl. ransoms and recaptures) were taken into Guernsey (177 commissions) and 151 into Jersey (64 commissions): see below, pp. 339-87.

The Importance of Dunkirk Reconsidered, 1688-1713

79

condition that the North Sea cruising requirement had been fulfilled. 6 Like the fearsome placaci of February 1696, imposing death on enemy privateersmen who entered the binnenstroomen (inland waters) without a protecting fleet, these measures must be seen as a tribute to Dunkirk, and (less so) to Calais, for no other enemy privateers were conspicuous in the North Sea. The premiums recorded in the Zeeland Admiralty archives at The Hague17 give us some idea of the number of French warships and privateers thus taken or destroyed inside and outside the North Sea: Í703 Number of awards: Total sum in

ns:

28 203,000

1704 45 211,850

1705

1707

40 223,975

71 927,950

1708 56 706,700

It may be noted in passing that the year 1707, when premiums reached their maximum - only 26 were paid in 1710 and 47 in 1711 — also saw the highest total of Dunkirk prizes. Unfortunately, the Dutch records do not always make it clear where a warship was taken or destroyed. Since the Zeelanders were also very active in Biscay and beyond, it would be misleading to suppose that this kind of remuneration was achieved entirely, or even mainly, at the expense of Dunkirk. But there was, of course, another though spasmodic obstacle to the free departure and entry of its larger warships - the Anglo-Dutch summer blockade, an almost annual affair from 1692, accompanied by bombardments in 1694-5. It was still British doctrine in 1708 that 'the blocking up Dunkirk with a squadron' was more effective than 'the strength of every particular convoy', though 'the Dunkirk squadron' might also take time off to escort convoys; after the 'alarm' of Forbin's expedition to the Forth in 1708, there was talk of trying to choke the harbour-mouth or the channels. These measures should not be written off as total failures. Had it been so, a blockade costing the British and Dutch fleets twenty or thirty line-of-battle ships would not have persisted. And, weather permitting, they did contain the more heavily armed Dunkirk warships. In July 1697, Jean Bart mounted the tower of St. Eloi daily to observe the blockade: to slip out, he needed to make up to twelve leagues unseen - and the nights were too short. Conversely, in August 1691, de Méricourt's squadron could not get in because it could only enter the channels enßle and with most sails furled, to say nothing of having to anchor in the violent currents of the banks in an onshore wind and so without freedom to manoeuvre in the face of attack; only vessels 16 J. S. Bromley, "Some Zeeland Privateering Instructions: Jacob Sautijn to Captain

Salomon Reynders, 1707", William III and Louis XIV: Essays 1680-Í720 by and for Mark A. Thomson, ed. R. Hatten and J. S. Bromley, below, pp. 407-34. 17 Algemeen Rijksarchief, Admiraliteits 2524 et seq. and 2438.

80

Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760

drawing little water could cross the banks even at high tide.18 What the battleships of the 'Maritime Powers' could not accomplish was to some extent open to the small and nimble capers of Ostend, which hovered round the Dunkirk shoals even in winter. In March 1690 already, the naval minister was informed that 'il a esté pris et repris par les Ostendois, dans la rade et a la vue de ce port, pour plus de 2 millions d'effets . . ,'19 Except in 1702-6, they specialized in picking up Dunkirk prizes as they neared home, like the birds of Herodotus who lived off the food in the crocodile's teeth. These tactics, favoured by geography, were facilitated by the Dunkirkers' own tendency to rely on weak prize crews. Vauban went so far as to claim that two prizes in three were lost in this way.20 Let this at least warn us not to equate the losses and inconveniences suffered by the enemy with the prizes actually sentenced to the Dunkirk captors. They were clearly very much greater, even if the original owners recovered their property on paying salvage to the recaptor. Vauban thought that the Ostenders would only be driven off if there were a naval squadron to cruise regularly among the banks, or between Thames and Maas. The galleys stationed at Dunkirk from 1702, or their brigantines and chattes, afforded only spasmodic protection of local waters. The two frigates built and armed by the Chamber of Commerce in 1704, and commanded by two veteran corsairs, Cornil Saus and Nicolaes Baeteman (a Catholic Zeelander by origin), won golden opinions from the intendants for their gallantry in counter-privateering and were rewarded with medals and swords by the king, but this 'terreur des Zelandois' could only cover its costs by commerce warfare. Thus, after taking part in Forbin's expedition to the Forth in 1708, they were equipped to harry the convoys passing between Holland, Hamburg, England and Ireland; before the year was out, they were sending prizes into Cadiz and Corunna. From spring 1709, now in more powerful ships hired by a private armament from the king ('au cinquième des prises pour le Roi'), the Auguste (56) and Blackball (50), they were back to North Sea work and again early in 1711, when Saus was on the lookout for the crossing of the duke of Marlborough. By the end ofthat year he was in poor health, but 'Niela' Baeteman was still at sea in 1712. l He had first commanded a Dunkirk frigate, the Fantaisie, in 1692, for the privateering owners Jan Rycx and Nicolas Taverne. Saus had served this partnership 18 Arch. Nat. Marine B3 63, fos. 36v-7, and 97, fos. 50-1. J. H. Owen, War at Sea under Queen Anne 1702-Í708, Cambridge, 1938, pp. 66-7, 268-70. 19 Ibid. B3 62, fo. 59, Sieur de Caux - Pontchartrain, 12 March 1690. 20 To Valincour (secretary to Amirai de France and to Conseil des Prises), 16 June 1696, ibid. B 3 95, fo. 497v. 21 Ibid. B3 132, fo. 432; 133, fo. 48; 155, fo. 74; 165, fo. 17V; 191, fos. 7, 31, 49, 559. Cf. Malo, La grande guerre, pp. 204-16.

The Importance of Dunkirk Reconsidered, 1688-1713

81

since 1689, first in an 8-ton chaloupe, then in a 45-ton baroque longue, finally graduating to a frigate in 1691; altogther he was commissioned on thirteen occasions before June 1695 (always with Taverne after the bankruptcy of Rycx in 1694).22 Saus, a seaman and warrior with the stamp of Jean Bart, had a long and successful career as a corsair, with more public spirit than most. Nevertheless, as he appears in the port letters of 1705-11, he endured many disappointments. Trusted as he was by the intendant Duguay, he could not always obtain the naval vessel he wanted from the minister Pontchartrain. Established captains were particular on this subject and it was one of several reasons for the prolongation of negotiations between their financial backers and the navy whenever a king's ship was to be hired. In the Spanish Succession War especially, this was regular practice, encouraged, at times urgently, by the navy itself; but more than one group of promoters, and often more than one captain, might have eyes on the best sailers. Saus did not always get what he wanted, and like all the Flemish seamen his feelings could be easily hurt by the French administrators. In addition, these more substantial armaments could be held up for months by the bargaining that went on between promoters and Crown - a fascinating theme at Toulon and Brest as well, but too large to discuss here. Heroes like Saus and Baeteman would have little to fear from mutinies, but they would not necessarily find it easy to recruit speedily, even when an agreement with the Crown included a clause promising use of the levees under the Inscription Maritime. In spite of such an undertaking in April 1711, Saus went to sea four months later seriously undermanned - 200 short out of 1,200 needed: the intendant blamed the commissaries at Abbeville and Dieppe, above all the intendancy of Le Havre, for this shortfall.23 Nor was Saus immune to the usual problem of deserters whenever his ships entered harbour. This was doubtless less of a problem, however, than it was for the Malouins, whose privateers had many more opportunities to call at other French (and later, Spanish) ports. It is true that the Dunkirkers made much use of the Norwegian fjords, especially in the Nine Years War, for repairs and refreshments. In the early days they tried to sell prizes there; but this practice soon gave rise to diplomatic embarrassment and some violent incidents at Flekker and Christiansand in 1693-4, with the result that it was allowed only when distress could be proved, and fortified harbours came to be avoided. Nonetheless, in 1707, Forbin was armed with letters to 22 Amirauté de Dunkerque, actes de caution, in ibid. C4 252-3, 255, 257, 259 (with a gap from Aug. 1689 to end Jan. 1690); for Rycx, see Malo, Jean Bart, II, 357-8. 23 Arch. Nat. Marine B3 191, fos. 270-1, 426. I have discussed the value of the Inscription Maritime for privateering in "Projets et contrats d'armement en course marseillais 1705-1712", below, pp. 243-78.

82

Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760

Norwegian merchants in case he needed to sell prizes there.24 The armateurs constantly complained that their seamen deserted before sailing after accepting advances in cash. Jean Bart, writing in 1690, could remember a time when they were to be had in plenty for 8, 9, or 10 'escus sur la main': now they were asking at least 21 or 22, 'disans que c'est bon marché vendré leur liberté, craignant tout a fait les prisons de nos ennemis où ils patissent beaucoup et sont fort long temps sans être echangez'.25 Not only had this fear dried up the traditional flow of immigrants, but it was stimulating an outflow to Ostend, which had no prisons and enjoyed reciprocal treatment therefore at Dunkirk. However, the advances did not fall when swift exchanges of prisoners were arranged with the admiralty colleges of Zeeland and Holland. Detention there became so brief that the Dunkirk seamen were accused by their employers in 1708 of giving themselves up too easily to the enemy, and thus of being in a position to collect further advances for another armament on return home. By that date 30 ecus was the going rate and cases were quoted of a seaman accepting advances for four different ships at a time; on average, for four engaged you obtained two. Apparently, the Amirautés took no steps to punish this cheating. Bitter as they were about it, employers had no alternative but to entice men away from each other. In 1696 the intendant Céberet said that they were offering up to 40 or 50 ecus - a rate also experienced at St.-Malo.26 In theory, unless there had been a contract with the Crown, these men should normally have been Flemings only, the French being subject to conscription. It is clear that they were capable of evading it in order to serve with the capres, just as English seamen avoided the pressgangs for the potentially higher rewards of privateering, regarded by some contemporaries, including King William III, as a source of naval weakness. This is why French naval officers sometimes asked for a temporary stop on the departure of the capres, too. It is not clear how far the port authorities connived at their taking French matelots. Lempereur, as commissaire de marine at Dunkirk, denied that he did so, 24

Besides sundry references in the declarations des capitaines, see "Memoire touchant les prises que les Vx. du Roy ont autrefois menés en Nordvegue" [1707], Arch. Nat. Marine B3 142, fos., 318-9; for Forbin, ibid. fo. 225. Cf. Oscar Albert Johnsen (ed.), Rapports de la legation de France a Copenhague (correspondence consulaire) relatifs a la Norvège, I (Oslo, 1934), 71-4, 78, 166-70, 209, 273, 279, 286. 25 Arch. Nat. Marine B3 60, fos. 68-75, "Memoire au reguard de la Course a Dunkerque", 6 Jan. 1690, signed by Jean Bart, Charles Elinck, Remer Brijs, Nicaise Cornelissen and four others; cf. ibid., fos. 3-7 for the supporting views of the intendant J.-B. Patoulet. 26 Ibid. B3 154, fos. 17-18 (22 Jan. 1708); B3 93, fo. 197 (20 Sept. 1696); B3 115, fo. 545, "Memoire presenté a Monseigneur de Pontchartrain touchant la course par les sindicq de St.-Malo au nom de tous les armateurs" (undated).

The Importance of Dunkirk Reconsidered, 1688-1713

83

claiming that he could tell a Frenchman amid two hundred Flemings; but his letters from St.-Malo in the next war show that he did his best to get round the rules, a common compromise being to bind the corsair to return the men so lent by February, in time for naval service if required. It was alleged that Provengaux found it easy to pass themselves off as Italians or Spaniards, although the Malouin crew-lists show that it was a very marginal occurrence there.27 All this certainly made for bad blood between navy and privateering promoters. Because of their frontier situation, however, the navy had to handle the Flemings gently. They would not readily serve under French officers. This fact, together with the exemption of the Flemings from conscription, was of course a special asset to the Dunkirk course, not shared by St.-Malo or even to the same extent by Marseille, despite the foreign element in its population. Viewing the course as always from his experience at Dunkirk, Vauban wanted to attract more foreigners, claiming in 1693 that they once built up a seagoing population of 6,000, of whom as many as three-quarters would be at sea at any one time. He must have been recollecting the great days of 1672-9, when Jean Bart made his reputation as a corsair. Bart himself, however, had put this figure at 4,000 - enough to man forty privateers in his opinion whereas in January 1690 it had fallen to no more than 500. Was he right? Unfortunately, the commissions for the preceding six months are missing, but those recorded between 13 October 1688 and 12 June 1689, a total of 46, are mostly for small vessels - barques longues, corvettes, shallops, even a tartan - several of which were commissioned twice. Frigates (of widely differing tonnages), along with a few flyboats and 'navires', are as numerous for the closing months of 1688, but not for the first half of 1689, since autumn was the best time to arm against enemy convoys and frigate campaigns lasted longer:29 DATE OF REGISTRATION

1688 (13 Oct. -31 Dec.) 1689(31Jan.-12June)

27

NO. OF COMMISSIONS 70-300TX. 6-40TX.

1 =tx1750 ( 3 _6(= 390 tx.) 19

13(=358tx.) 14(=234tx.) 27

Ibid. B3 68, fo. 83 (27 Jan. 1692); Trans. Soc. Guernesiaise, XVII (1964), 637-9. Vauban's views as reported by Patoulet, lOJuly 1693, in Arch. Nat. Marine B3 75, fos. 68v-9; Bart's in mem. cited above, note 25. 29 Ibid. C4 252. The registrations of commissions at Dunkirk from 1 Feb. 1690 to the end of 1694 tend to be concentrated in the months of Sept.-Oct. and again April-June. Duguay urged the minister on 13 June 1708 to hasten the allocation of royal frigates to private armateurs on the ground that October and November "sont des mois d'or pour la course de ce pays cy" (ibid. B3 154, fo. 364). 28

84

Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760

There are at this date no indications of the size of the crews, but from later evidence in the declarations des capitaines we may infer that the larger vessels carried one man for every ton, whereas the ratio was nearer two to one in the case of the lightly armed barques and chaloupes, which clearly relied more on boarding with cutlass and firearms than on gunpower - a 10-ton shallop would only carry a couple of stone-throwers (pierriers). But even a frigate would not campaign for more than three months, so that complements must to some extent have included the same individuals. It is unlikely that the crews much exceeded 2,000 men in all during the winter of 1688-9. Of these some three hundred would have been raised from 'France' for the two royal frigates commanded by Jean Bart; as a rule, there would also have been a minority of landsmen (volontaires) and boys (mousses), who accounted for between an eighth and a tenth of any naval or privateering crew, and sometimes a higher proportion of soldiers. Allowing for casualties and the slow operation of prisoner-exchanges at this date, Bart's estimate of 500 seamen may not have been unduly pessimistic by January 1690, especially if he meant it to refer only to able seamen. Since he was trying to prove a case and was a natural laudator temporis acti, we should probably not err very far if we merely doubled it. At all events, the absence of any large armaments during the first half of 1689 could well imply a scarcity: in raising up to 2,000 men of all kinds in the closing months of 1688, Dunkirk's existing resources (over and above trade requirements) had been strained to the utmost. If we cast forward to the beginning of the next war, or rather to the second half of 1703 (when figures are available from captains' reports),30 we find a higher proportion of frigates and this time with the numbers of all crews. Eliminating the navy and double counting, we have a total of 2,212 men and boys for 30 vessels (1,969 tx.), and an average crew of 77. This becomes 108 for March - December 1707, when the course of Dunkirk attained its peak: 3,770 men and boys for 35 vessels (tonnages, however, not always stated).31 Average gunpower has also nearly doubled (17:9), although it did not stay as high in subsequent years, when it oscillated between 13 and 15. Sixteen of these privateers now carry 18 to 26 guns, few less than 12. These were magnitudes hitherto more characteristic of St.-Malo which, for the whole of 1707, however, commissioned no more than twelve frigates of 18-30 guns. For St.-Malo, as it happens, a large number of crew-lists survive for these years, whereas we have none for Dunkirk. They yield 30

Ibid. C 4 268. Ibid. C 4 272: boys are sometimes separately enumerated. H. Malo gives details of tonnage, guns and crews of Dunkirk privateers in listing the captains, with their successive commands, at the end of his books; but there are too many gaps in the sources (unstated) for these to be exhaustive. 31

The Importance of Dunkirk Reconsidered, 1688-1713

85

the following comparison:32 1703

No. ofprivateers Tx. (average) Crew (average)

1704

32 50 165.2 115.6 119.1 91.1

1705

54 133.5 95.9

1706

1707

24 24 153.9 127.0 114.0 95.9

170H

1709

17W

1711

28 28 34 36 168.4 100.4 80.0 91.5 129.3 83.8 77.6 85.3

These figures are not such as to make the less satisfactory calculations for Dunkirk look unrealistic. Malouin seamen themselves were subject to the Inscription Maritime and in fact regarded as the best available to the intendant at Brest; but they constituted only a third of the crews, the rest coming from other parts of Brittany and Normandy, or even further afield, and containing a high proportion of soldiers and volunteers - as much as a quarter in 1705, the peak year, when the total force (subject to an element of double counting) exceeded 5,000 officers and men. Even an incomplete set of crew-lists suggests a force of 3,000 to 4,000 in other years, though it is known that manpower resources were under strain by 1705 because of heavy losses to the enemy and later also because of the South Sea armaments in which St.-Malo took the lead. 3 Our general conclusion must be that Dunkirk's manpower resources for privateers were never higher than 4,000, including landsmen, boys, soldiers, and probably a number of captives (upon whom pressure was certainly exerted in Brittany), 34 though this was obviously a game that two could play; we do not know whether the Flemings of Dunkirk ever took service with the Zeelanders, but it seems unlikely that none ever did so. Apart from this, we can be sure that Dunkirk recovered its men from Dutch captivity far more quickly than did St.-Malo from England: so the same force could be stretched further. In addition it does not seem unreasonable to postulate a doubling of the available seagoing manpower between 1688 and 1707, or that the increment mostly came from other French ports as trade and naval employment diminished. The population of the town certainly increased quite rapidly during the Nine Years War, somewhat more slowly after that - to 14,274, according to the dénombrement of March - April 1706.35 It is an index of growing prosperity, but it excludes the floating population drawn to any frontier place under wartime conditions. It would include some of the privateering officers among the chefs defamilie, but by no means all: of the captains, about four in five at most are described as 'bourgeois de 32

Trans. Soc. Guernesiaise, XVII (1964), note 33. Cf. the lists in Anne Morel, La Guerre de course a St.-Malo (1681-1715), Paris, Académie de Marine, n.d., pp. 174-240. 33 See below, pp. 285-8. 34 J. S.Bromley, "The Jacobite Privateers in the Nine Years War", Statesmen, Scholars and Merchants; Essays . . . presented to Dame Lucy Sutherland, ed. A. Whiteman et al., (1973); below, pp. 143-4. This chapter discusses Jacobite armaments at Dunkirk as well as St.-Malo. 35 Faulconnier, Description, II, 130; cf. ibid. 96, 104, 109 for 1685 and 1695-6.

86

Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760

Dunkerque' or 'demeurant en cette ville' in the commissions recorded for 1690-5, but in their rapports captains quite frequently give the address of their principal amateur- in Dunkirk the 'depositaire' - as their place of domicile. A few are known to have taken service at St.-Malo or elsewhere at other times. Flemish names always preponderate among them, in the proportion of about two Flemings to one French (often a naval officer), leaving aside some of uncertain origin and a few who were plainly British Jacobites.36 Assuming a manpower limitation of 4,000 and an average crew of 100, and accepting Vauban's estimate that only three-quarters of the nonnaval seamen would be away at any one time, we should not expect more than thirty corsairs to have been at sea simultaneously. This is exactly the figure expected by the intendant Duguay for October 1706 and also the one he gives as actual at the end of 1707, apart from nine naval vessels armed en course; he implies that there had never been more. So much for Henri Male's claim that there might be as many as a hundred out at a time.37 He is nearer the truth in asserting that the typical caper would sally forth several times a year. In due course it should be posible to establish this from the declarations des capitaines, provided allowance is made for losses and for relàches at Dunkirk itself in the course of a single campaign of two or three months. The declarations also show that completely fruitless cruises were common enough, while those yielding no more than a ransom or two were still more numerous. Nevertheless, both the declarations and the count of prizes suggest that the momentum gained in 1707 was fairly well maintained down to the end of the war, despite the disincentive to investment always created by peace negotiations and despite the British occupation on 19 July 1712, which did not interfere with continued campaigning against other enemies who had not accepted the Cessation of Arms: there were 135 prizes and ransoms sentenced in 1712 (and 62 in 1713), compared with 148 in 1711. Between 1 July 1712 and 20 May 1713 no less than 31 dépositaires were still active, as compared with 40 named in the declarations of March-December 1707 but only 15 in those of July-December 1703. Of these, five names recur in 1707 and three as late as 1712: Matthew Harries or Harris (a Jacobite), Gaspard Bart (younger brother of Jean, 1663-1726), and Nicolas Taverne (whose family was later ennobled).3 Taverne had been arming privateers throughout two wars, ever since October 1688, at first with his brother Guillaume but soon also with Jan 36 For Robert Dunbar see T. C. Smout, Scottish Trade on the Eve of Union 1660-1707, Edinburgh-London, 1963, pp.. 68-70, 208. 37 La grande guerre . . ., p. 127. 38 A. Lesmaries, Jean Bart: ses origines et ses proches, Dunkerque, 1933, pp. 171, 183, 189, 200.

The Importance of Dunkirk Reconsidered, 1688-1713

87

Rycx, before the latter went bankrupt in 1698. Between 18 October 1688 and 13 May 1695 one combination or other of this trio handled 73 privateering armaments out of a total of 413; Nicolas himself directed 22, mostly medium-sized frigates but graduating in 1694 to the Soleil Doré, 30 guns.39. As it was rare for any depositane to continue in this business for more than three or four years, if indeed as long as that, the case of Nicolas Taverne is the clearest demonstration imaginable that it could sometimes pay off; nor did he tire of it, unlike Danycan de Lépine and other successful promoters at St.-Malo, which indeed can produce no comparable example of such perseverance. He was regarded by the intendant of Flanders, Le Blanc, as a man of good faith. This was more than contemporaries usually had to say of Jacques Plets, who was frequently associated with another prominent armateur of the Nine Years War, Jean-Baptiste Bart, but a bankrupt by 1700 and still burdened with creditors in 1711. Perhaps this is why he was a notorious donneur d'avis, constantly ready with grandiose schemes for the ears of the court; his son-in-law, Jean Moisnet, écuyer conseiller secrétaire du Roi', raised the finance for St. Pol's expensive but disappointing naval armament at Dunkirk in 1704. Plets had wide knowledge of foreign trade, however, as well as imagination and broad views: so it is possible that he exercised some real influence on the course even after his sensational bankruptcy (which may or may not have been due to privateering speculations).40 These qualities were certainly needed if the course was ever to be more than petty larceny, commingled as that might be, and often was, with extreme audacity in the enemy's bays and estuaries. Reading the 39

Arch. Nat. Marine C4 252-3, 255, 257, 259. These registrations may be compared with those for St-Malo in A. Morel, op, at., pp. 106-73, and for Marseille in Arch. Dep. Bouches-du-Rhónc IX B 3 and 4: DUNKIRK

1688 1689 1690 1691 1692 1693 1694 1695 40

29 31 ( 6 months) 50 (11 months) 37 (9 months) 37 89 89 62 ( 6 months) 394

ST-MALO

MARSEILLE

TOTAL

10 30 33 37 52 51 49 71 333

? 19 34 27 36 20 26 19 181

39 80 117 101 125 160 164 152 938

Journal de Jean Doublet de Honßeur, ed. C. Bréard, Paris 1883, 175-6; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Rawlinson A 326, fo. 131v; Arch. Nat. Marine B3 127, fos. 75 V 6, Lcmpereur, 18 Feb. 1706; ibid. B3 203, Le Blanc, 7 Jan. 1711. On 22 Sept. 1707 Plets produced a projet for attacking the Dutch India fleets both outward and homeward when they met at Capetown in the spring; failing that, Forbin was to imitate the exploits of Maurice of Nassau in Brazil (ibid. B3 142, fos. 567-72).

88

Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760

reports of the captains, one is indeed struck by the Dunkirkers' habit of hanging on the skirts of convoys and, better still, getting among them during the night. This is why some contemporaries thought so highly of the smaller privateers, which also of course enjoyed the advantage of being able to sail close inshore - for those coastwise cutting-out tactics in which the Channel Islanders excelled. Vergier thought that the capers of 6—12 guns did most damage, with least risk of ruining their owners.41 More powerful privateers were needed to tackle the big Anglo-Dutch convoys - from Archangel, from the Baltic, from Hamburg, from America or the Indies. So was good timing and information: in this respect the French corsairs were kept primed with intelligence reaching the naval ministry - more than could be said for the British admiralty, but then privateering was hardly there the great national institution which the French made of it in this period. A third requirement was willingness to join forces. On this point the rapports leave a strong impression that agreements between captains at sea to sail in company or en société — till the end of a current month, for a fortnight, ten weeks, or till the end of their campaign - were not only a commonplace but honestly adhered to, even after separation by weather or the chase. Such undertakings usually provide for the interests of a privateer which was to be given the unrewarding job of escorting the joint prizes home. The Conseil des Prises had of course to judge disputes between them, but my present view is that these were not disputes between partners to a cruising contract. In short, one has the impression that the captains, many of them, shared a high degree of solidarity, especially among the Flemings. This could well prove to have been a salient feature of the Dunkirk course. Some of them, like Saus and Baeteman, were capable of regular squadron warfare. Except for the peculiar case of Marseille, whose galleys certainly featured in privateering armaments, Dunkirk was unique among French privateering bases in being also a naval arsenal. This was why it had been, and still was, the object of so much public expenditure and engineering skill. Had it been otherwise, it would hardly have occupied its privileged niche in the treaties of Utrecht. Its only European parallel was Middelburg, where privateering and naval requirements also competed — very much to the disadvantage of Zeeland's contribution to the Dutch fleet after 1702.42 There were occasions when the Dunkirk naval officers, trying to complete their complements, wanted an embargo on the departure of capers, unsuccessfully. More commonly, 41 Ibid. B3 120, fo. 73, 17 May 1703: " . . . nous avons observé dans la derniere guerre et dans celle cy que ce ne soni pas les gros bastiments qui out fait en ces mers le plus de tort aux ennemis. Au contraire ils ont presque tons ruiné leurs armateurs . . . " 42 J. C. de Jonge, Geschiedenis van het Nederlandsclie Zeewczen. 3rdedn., Zwolle 1869, III, 569-73, 611-12.

The Importance of Dunkirk Reconsidered, 1688-1713

89

the authorities desiderated their subordination to the purposes of the navy - a purpose achieved for the Scottish expedition of 1708, when no less than 19 privateering frigates were attached to Forbin's squadron of nine battleships.43 Eight privateers, too, had obeyed his signals off Beachy Head on 13 May 1707 in falling on a Downs convoy and hauling off twenty merchantmen - colliers, cornships, etc. which were the daily stuff of their activities, if just the sort of'maigres richesses' to arouse the chevalier's contempt for so many prizes. But this kind of 'following' was usually fortuitous. Corsairs had everything to gain from the support of naval cruisers, which drew the enemy's attention to themselves; but their relatively small gunpower greatly limited their claims on the fruits of any combined operations, much as the government wished them to work with the navy. 45 It was through the loan of naval vessels to private armateurs that this could best be achieved, even though some of the commands might have to go to naval officers. The whole matter of these arrangements requires deeper research. Meanwhile it may safely be asserted that the promoters of them at Dunkirk did not always come from the business community. They were not infrequently naval officers; the sieur Gavois was an écrivain on the Brest establishment, the sieur Lambert a 'lieutenant d'artillerie et de galiotte' at Dunkirk. In 1710 a major proposal came from the king's proctor at the Calais admiralty, Ponthon.46 It is possible that promoters like these were able to capture the savings of members of the privateering interest, leading members of whom certainly took part in financing the two Chamber of Commerce frigates; but so far I have found only half a dozen regular depositares who negotiated for the hire of a naval ship. Jacques Plets, it is true, busied himself with strategic schemes for the Chevalier St. Pol's disastrous armament of 1704, but the director here was his son-in-law, a Paris financier, and Moisnet's principal Dunkirk associate was Jacques Voille, who held the office of Trésorier de France at Bourges and was director-general of naval victuals for Flanders and Picardy, by 1707 also agent for the Trésorier General of the galleys. These two, with Anne-Henry Delezat and Charles Bougier ('intéresse aux affaires du roi'), held the mast contract for Brest in the name of Simon Coulange. Their company underwrote the shares in St. Pol's armament, whose outfit cost 355,000 livres, and was left with a 43

Listed in Faulconnier, II, 146. Memoires du conte de Forbiti, chefd'escadre (1656-1710), ed. J. Boulenger, Paris 1934, p. 205; cf. Arch. Nat. Marine C4 272, deci, of "Messire Claude de Forbin", 24 May 1707. 45 Ibid. B 75, fos. 112-14, "Memoire touchant les armements en course a Dunkerque par M. de Luzancay", 26 Dee. 1693; B3 122, fo. 436, Barentin, 14 Aug. 1703; B3 127, fo. 115, Duguay, 23 July 1705; B 3 191, fo. 322, Duguay, fos. 312-15. 46 Ibid. B 3 127, fo. 250V; B3 133, fos. 440V, 445; B 3 154, fos. 40-2; B3 177, fos. 332V, 433. 44

90

Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760

good many still on its hands when St. Pol sailed in July; it was hoped to make up the balance of public subscriptions out of prizes. Owing to the complex liquidation of this affair, which has been summarized by Henri Malo, we have for once a list of the shareholders, among whom Voille himself was much the largest, followed by Baren tin, intendant of Flanders.47 It is possible that the Dunkirkers withheld their confidence in this case because of Plets's association with it. As Duguay wrote to Pontchartrain, 'la première chose que le Public demande en ces sortes d'affaires c'est de sgavoir qui luy rendra compte de l'armament'; it needed someone like Voille with an established reputation in Paris.48 What the marine intendant seems to me to be implying is that it was no good looking to local finance for an enterprise of this magnitude, involving six warships with an aggregate strength of 120 guns and 1,380 officers and men. The 66 subscribers included four from Brussels besides the Elector of Cologne, then at Namur; the duchesses de la Ferté and de Ventadour; the marquis de Beringhen, premier écuyer ('Monsieur le Premier'), and Coursy, governor of Valogne; the Presidents Vigneron and Bonjounier; Bourdelin, conseiller au Chatelet, and 'M. le juge fermier-général'. Most noticeable is the presence of high naval personnel: Bégon and Robert (the intendants of Rochefort and Brest), Le Vasseur of Toulon, Le Brun of Dieppe, Bigot de la Mothe of Brest (with the maréchale and comtesse de la Mothe), the Chevalier de la Pailleterie of the Marseille galley fleet, and the directeur des vivres at Brest, Albus. There are others from Le Havre, Brest, La Rochelle and Bordeaux. Was some official pressure used, as in the familiar case of the state's colonial companies? Are we in the presence of croupiers connected with Moisnet's financial enterprises? No one needs to be reminded of the navy's dependence on the traitants 'financiers'. Henri Malo, followed by Charles de la Roncière, launched the notion that there was a strong court interest in privateering investment.49 We can hardly avoid supposing that courtiers influenced the decisions of the Pontchartrains, father and son, as ministers of marine - for example, in the choice of captains of the larger corsair armaments or of the ships for them. But that they were in any way significant investors remains to be proved. Whatever may be true of such enterprises as those of Seignelay in 1688—90, my own view to date is that the great mass of routine privateering was financed in the ports, and for the most part selffinancing. Such information as we have from the actes de société of St.47

Malo, Grande Guerre, pp. 29-38; cf. Arch, Nat. Marine B3 132, fos. 388-98, and B3 133, fos.. 78-100, 415, 434, 455, 480-4. 48 Ibid. B3 123, fo. 63. 49 Malo, Jean Bart, II, 177; La Roncière, Histoire de la marine fran$aise, 3rd edn., Paris 1932, VI, 161-2.

The Importance of Dunkirk Reconsidered, 1688-1713

91

Malo, incomplete as they are, suggests as much; nor is the list of owners necessarily extensive, two to ten subscribers being fairly characteristic.50 In analysing the shareholders in the privateers of Marseille, I occasionally encountered the names of naval personnel not only from Toulon but also Rochefort, together once with that of Du Trousset de Valincour (secretary of the Amiral de France), but few names of courtiers: so far as that analysis went, it showed that the numerous investors were predominantly local people. Dunkirk was not a business centre in the same class, but armateurs should have been easily capable of financing its medium-sized frigates, to say nothing of smaller vessels: no figures of cost have been found here, but at Marseille in 1709-12 a 10-gun barque could be bought, equipped, manned and provisioned for less than 25,000 livres, a 4-gun pink for less than 15,000.51 A few ransoms might not cover more than half such a layout, but it did not need many mediocre prizes to do so. A successful house like Bart or Taverne could well afford to stand losses of this magnitude. In fact, Vergier's list of'prises amenées' for 1711 shows an average rough estimation of 27,000 livres, omitting ransoms and two exceptional prizes worth respectively 100,000 ecus and 250,000 livres. On this scale, three prizes estimated at 100,000 livres were good business after a fortnight's cruising, though Vauban could describe them as not very considerable.5 The capers could easily keep going on what Forbin despised as 'grosses marchandises' - the coal, oil, wool, corn, fruit, fish, potash, tiles, planks, metals and naval stores that make up so many of the standard North Sea cargoes53 - and there was always a chance of something more exciting. The question of course remains: what sort of market existed for prize goods? To a large extent, they helped to feed, clothe and build Dunkirk and its neighbourhood, sometimes when Baltic commodities were in short supply. But its warehouses were often crammed and its harbour choked with sometimes useless vessels. A great deal was sold into the Spanish Netherlands when the course of war permitted; the French 50

Arch. Dép. Ille-et-Vilame, Amirauté de St.-Malo, 9 B 167-8 (for 1702-13). Rev. D'Hist. Econ. et Soc., L (1972), pp. 83-6, 98-103. 52 Arch. Nat. Marine B3 191; for Vauban, ibid. B3 138, fo. 425. 53 Such cargoes were also fairly typical of the neutral vessels (mainly Swedes and Danes) arrested on suspicion of enemy ownership or for other reasons, especially in 1693-7 and 1704. The analysis of the sentences (jugements) registered in the Marine C4 series is a delicate matter, if only because parts of a ship as well as of cargoes might be condemned and the remainder released; there were also many appeals. Provisionally, for 1690-7, I estimate that 102 such vessels were condemned (and usually their cargoes as well, on the legal basis of robe d'ennemi) and 91 were released (but not necessarily with all their cargoes). Condemnations again exceeded releases in 1702-6 and particularly so in 1710-12. The Dunkirk captains were highly skilled at spotting defective ships' papers and often obtained a verdict of just cause of seizure when such prizes were released. This question requires fuller consideration elsewhere. 51

92

Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760

Atlantic ports shipped their exports to Flanders through Dunkirk; it is significant that when Ostend was lost, the Dunkirkers had considerable property invested there. As theirs was a free port, no duties were payable as a rule: some goods, including sugar and stockfish, had begun to be taxed on entry in 1690-2, but these franchises were restored in 1700.54 On the other hand, duties were payable on entry into the Kingdom and some goods prohibited there; but there was an important frigate trade (always resistant to proposed convoys) to other French ports, particularly Nantes, and in the Succession War to Cadiz, with a commission 'en guerre et merchandises'. However, the Chamber of Commerce itself, in 1707, named the enemy as providing 'le mouvement au capital que nous employons ensuitte a armer contr'eux'.55 Better still, the enemy paid cash, as he did for ransoms. Knowing what we do of the chronic dearth of hard coin in France, especially during the years after 1706, no stronger argument for the guerre de course could have been put forward. Unlike the Malouins and the Marseillais, or for that matter the flibustiers, Dunkirk was poor in piastres but it drew a steady income in 'argent d'Hollande'.

54

Faulconnier, II, 113-19; Arch. Nat. Marine B3 133, fo. 403V. Ibid. B3 142, fos. 629-34. The revocation on 19 Nov. 1710 of the passports issued in large numbers to the Dutch creates a problem: on these see my article "La France de rOuest et la guerre maritime (1702-1712)", below, chapter 17, pp. 389-406. Jean Meyer, "La Course: romantisme, exutoire social, realità économique", Annales de Bretagne, 78 (1971), pp. 307-44. 55

PRIZES BROUGHT INTO DUNKIRK, 1707 (Source: Archives Nat., Marine B3 142) EST. VALUE HONTH

Jan.

VESSEL

TONNEAUX

FLAG

ORIGIN

DESTINATION

CARGO

flute

450

Hamburg

Hamburg

London

textiles metals timber

Jan.

pink

250

Engl.

Hamburg

London

as above

Jan. Jan. Jan. Jan. Jan. Jan.

dogger ?

50

fishery Hamburg

Maas

cod

dogger

50 150 500 250

Dutch Hamburg Dutch Scots Danish Dutch

fishery

London ? Holland Amsterdam

Maas Lisbon Lisbon Lisbon

60 80 3/400

Engl. Dutch Engl.

Dover Amsterdam Canaries

Ostend Scotland London

cod corn masts + deals spices cacao metals packet copper

250

Dutch

Leghorn

Middelburg

Jan. Jan. Jan. Feb.

flyboat flyboat

pinnace

ketch flyboat

frigate (22 guns) frigate (16g.)

OR RANSOM

CAPTOR(S)

(R) 50, 000 ecus

2 corsairs (C)

~ Vaisseau du R°i armé en course (V. duR.) C R. 3000 florins"! 2C iWO, AA 000 AAA ffrancs J

2C C of Calais 300,000 fl. V. duR. &C.

] 150,000 livres

oil rice silks marble fruit

c V. du. R. + 3C 2C

MONTH

VESSEL

TONNEAUX

FLAG

ORIGIN

DESTINATION

CARGO

EST. VALUE OR RANSOM

CAPTOR(S)

(R)

Feb.

galliot

160

Prussian

Konigsbg.

London

Feb.

frigate (7g.)

90

Engl.

Portugal

London

Feb.

•?

Engl.

? coastal

•?

Feb.

packet (10g.)

120

Engl.

Gibraltar

London

Feb. Feb.

bark frigate (10g.)

40 150

Engl. Ostend

Portugal Cork

London Ostend

Feb.

frigate (2g.)

100

Engl.

coastal (deserted in Downs)

Feb. Mar. Mar. Mar.

dogger dogger frigate pink

50 50 100 80

Dutch Dutch Ostend Engl.

fishery Limerick Lisbon

Maas Maas Ostend London

Mar. Mar.

frigate (10g.) frigate

50 100

Ostend Dutch

Lisbon

corsair Flushing

Mar.

fri gate(20g.)

Dutch

Lisbon

Middleburg

tobacco

fishery

hemp potash wool wines fruit ?

C

C

R. £70 sterling (=1050/i fres)

wines (Fayal) as above butter hides tallow staves

cod cod butter fruit

salt fruit fruit sugar dyewood

C C C 3C

C

R.1500/iVre5

V. duR. + C C

3C J" ( i n d - l o f Nieuport)

2V. duR. + 2C

MONTH

VESSEL

TONNEAUX

FLAG

ORIGIN

DESTINATION

CARGO

EST. VALUE OR RANSOM

CAPTOR(S)

(R)

Mar.

bark

50

Engl.

Portugal

Mar.

frigate

50

Ostend

Ireland

(deserted off Beachy Head) Ostend

Mar.

? slaver

Dutch

Middelburg

Guinea

Mar. Mar.

dogger bark

80 50

Dutch Dutch

fishery Ireland

Maas Holland

Mar. Mar. Mar. Mar. Mar.

bark 2 fishing vessels frigate (18g.) frigate (10g.) brigantine

50

Scots Dutch Engl. Engl. Engl.

Ireland ? fishery p ?

Holland ? p

Portugal

London

Mar. Apr. Apr.

dogger dogger frigate

55 30 100

Dutch Swedish Dutch

Ireland Staden Flushing

p

Apr. Apr.

packet (10g.) frigate (22g.)

80 150

Engl. Engl.

London Leghorn

Ireland London

Apr.

packet (10g.)

90

Engl.

Leghorn

London

200 100

Lisbon Genoa Leghorn

wines teintures butter hides tallow metals cloth cod butter hides meat butter

C C 100, 000 ecus

+C C C

R.3000/íVr«

wines fruit hides (untanned) corn gunpowder groceries hides metals ballast wine oil silks as above

V. du. R.

C C 2C 2C C C C 2C

V. duR. 5C

dONTH

VESSEL

TONNEAUX

FLAG

ORIGIN

DESTINATION

CARGO

EST. VALUE OR RANSOM

CA1 J TOR(S)

(U)

150 80

Dutch Engl. Engl.

Virginia Portugal

Maas London London

150

Engl.

Carolina

London

?

120

Engl. Dutch

?

May

4 small vessels frigate (log.)

Lisbon

Holland

May

frigate (18g.)

28

Dutch

Venice

Amsterdam

May May May

brigantine bark brigantine

50 80 50

Engl. Engl. Engl.

London London London

Lisbon Ne w Engl. New Engl.

May May May May

frigate (8g.) fishing boat packet (4g.) frigate (18g..)

110 25 50 250

Dutch Dutch Engl. Swed.

Nantes fishery Dover Lisbon

Rotterdam Maas Ostend Staden (? Hamburg)

May

frigate (8g.)

150

Swed.

?

Staden (? Hamburg)

Apr. Apr. Apr.

dogger frigate (12g.) bark(4g.)

Apr.

frigate

Apr.

75

fishery

cod tobacco wines dyewoods rice dyewoods sugar tobacco tar

100,000 livres

C

R.£1000 fruit & almonds tobacco sugar & confitures rice oil raisins corn general cargo mackerel staves (recapture) cod ballast sugar tobacco 'bois des Indes' fruit tobacco brazilwood wine fruit

2C C. of Nantes C

C

V. duR. +5C - (incl. 2 Malouins)

V. duR. C V. duR.

2C

MONTH

TONNEAUX

VESSEL

FLAG

ORIGIN

DESTINATION

CARGO

EST. VALUE OR RANSOM

CAPTOR(S)

(R)

June

frigate (18g

June June

2 small vessels frigate (20g )

June

flyboat

June June June June July July July July July

boat 4 small vessels small vessel small vessel dogger frigate (log ) dogger (6g ) small v. frigate

July July Aug. Aug. Aug.

)

3 small vessels long bark (4§5-) 2 small vessels 3 small vessels ?

200

Alicante Gib.

London

Engl. Dutch

p

p

wines piastres ?

Genoa

Holland

oil

2C 2C

rice ? wines (recapture) fresh fish ?

R.5350fl.

C (ofNieuport) C 2C

R. 4000 francs

C

Dutch 10

70 170 150

2C

Engl.

Dutch Dutch Dutch Engl. Swed. Dutch Dutch Dutch Swed.

Dutch French Engl. Dutch Engl.

Bordeaux (French pass) fishery ? fishery ? p

Flushing p

? fishery Staden (? Hamburg)

p ? p

Lisbon corsair Amsterdam

p

?

Calais

corsair

p p

p p

p

p

2C

corn

~

-C of Le Havre

wool, etc.

p

Lisbon

R.£1150

corn flax wool linens muslins copper ? recapture ? ~| , h ?

R.1200/iVr«_ 200,000/iVrtt" 2C

R.4500fl. C

R. 10,000 livres

2C

R.£180

Faucon exStDomingue

vlONTH

VESSEL

TONNEAUX

FLAG

ORIGIN

DESTINATION

CARGO

EST. VALUE OR RANSOM

CAPTOR(S)

(R)

Dutch Dutch Dutch Dutch Dutch Scots

fishery ? fishery fishery Amsterdam fishery Danzig

boat(6g.) frigate (24g)

80 20 200

Engl. Dutch Dutch Dutch Dutch Swed. Dutch Engl.

fishery fishery fishery ? fishery (? Hamburg) Flushing Newcastle

Sept.

packet (6g. )

160

Engl.

E. Indies

Sept. Sept. Sept. Sept.

frigate (16g -) 10 small vessels 1 small vessel flyboat

150

Dutch Dutch Dutch Scots

Rotterdam ? fishery ? fishery Danzig

Aug. Aug. Aug. Aug. Aug. Aug.

dogger 3 fishing vessels dogger ftyboat 4 small vessels frigate (8g. )

Aug. Aug. Aug. Aug. Aug. Sept. Sept. Sept.

2 small vessels fishing vessel fishing vessel dogger 4 small vessels p

50

50 300 120

40

p

?

cod

?

? herring ballast herring iron bars tow (filasse) 1 cod herring cod ? cloth, etc.

p

Norway Edinburgh p p p

Maas p Stockholm corsair naval escort to colliers London

Bergen p p London

R.9000hVr« _ R. 10,000 livreT

C C. of St.-Malo C

_ C of Nantes (Cassard) R.£310 R.2000fl. ~

R.10,250fl.

c C C C of Calais C royal galleys

saltpetre muslins pepper cinnamon gums dyewoods ballast ? 1 linen potash

strugeion

2V. duR.

R.16,250/iVre5 R.3000fl.

3C C C 3C

MONTH

VESSEL

TONNEAUX

FLAG

ORIGIN

DESTINATION

CARGO

EST. VALUE OR RANSOM

CAPTOR(S)

(R)

Dutch Engl. Dutch Dutch Engl.

Middelburg Newcastle Amsterdam Amsterdam Hamburg

corsair Portsmouth London London ? Topsham ('Apson')

120

Engl. Dutch Genoese

Hamburg ('Kesmaden') Lisbon

90

Dutch

Surinam

London Portsmouth Falmouth Dublin Middelburg

Sept. Sept. Oct. Oct. Oct.

long bark (10g.) galliot smack galliot (2g.) long bark (2g.)

Oct. Oct. Oct.

pink smack

120 80

p

Oct.

frigate (4g.)

25

100 100 80

3C C

coal staves staves iron & zinc wool staves fine linen thread staves salt

~~| h- royal galleys 1 C

~~l _)r

c

3C

sugar

3C

oil

Oct.

galliot

100

Hamburg

Hamburg

London

Oct. Oct.

smack packet (5g.) (? slaver) long bark (2g.)

100 40

Hamburg Dutch

Hamburg Flushing

35 40

Dutch Dutch

Ireland Rotterdam

London Guinea (truck) Flushing Dublin

70

Dutch Engl. Engl. Engl.

Ireland ?

Rotterdam p

Virginia Newcastle

London London

Oct. Oct.

Nov. Nov. Nov. Nov.

hoy

dogger small vessel pink(8g.) pink

200 45

linens muslins staves copperplates ironmongery butter vinegar flax seed merceries butter ? tobacco coal salt barley

C C 3C

_ V. du R.

R.£70

~~| J~

C

3C C

MONTH

VESSEL

TONNEAUX

FLAG

ORIGIN

DESTINATION

CARGO

EST. VALUE OR RANSOM

CAPTOR(S)

(R)

Nov. Nov.

dogger flyboat(6g.)

50 400

Dutch Engl.

Ireland Archangel

Bruges London

Nov.

pink(4g.)

200

Engl.

Archangel

Hull

Nov. Nov.

? pink

•?

?

70

Dutch Dutch

Ireland

Rotterdam

Nov. Nov. Nov.

pink pink frigate (22g.)

70 70 200

Engl. Engl. Swed.

Newcastle Newcastle Hamburg

Nov. Nov. Nov. Nov.

flyboat(16g.) small vessel bark flyboat(2g.)

420

40 750

Dutch Scots Scots Dutch

Surinam ? coaster ? Perth Lisbon

London London Lisbon (? Cadiz, Marseilles) Amsterdam

Nov. Nov. Dec.

buss long bark frig. (20g)

80 35 250

Dutch Engl. Dutch

Libourne Lisbon Leghorn

Dec.

dogger (10g.)

200

Dutch

Lisbon

?

Hamburg Rotterdam

Rotterdam London Rotterdam

Rotterdam

butter masts hemp tar hemp ? butter tallow coal coal cloth

sugar ? herring salt wool hides chestnuts fruit oil rice marble gallnuts goatshair, etc. fruit

2C

-

C

R.4100fl. C 2C 200,000/iVre5

C

180,000/;Vre5~l_ R.£70 J~ V. du R. 4C (incl. 1 ofCalais) C C 200,000/11^5" ~ _

3C

dONTH

VESSEL

TONNEAUX

FLAG

ORIGIN

DESTINATION

CARGO

OR RANSOM

CAPTOR(S)

(R)

Dec.

frig. (10g.)

Dec. Dec. Dec. Dec.

ketch pink(5g.) bark bark

Dec. Dec.

small vessel small vessel

160

40 70 35 100

Engl.

Leghorn

London

Engl. Engl. Engl. Engl.

Lisbon Faro Lisbon Viana

London London London London

Dutch Engl.

\ 7. C" fishery

?"t ?

? coaster

V. duR.

oil

anchovies fruit 'balots' fruit fruit fruit fruit vin de Fayal ? p

C C C

3C (incl. 1 ofNieuport) A f\t\ i • R AOOlwres R. £300

f*

C

C

View of the English and Dutch fleet bombarding Dunkirk, 21 September 1694

6 JACQUES-WINOC PLETS, ARMATEUR EN COURSE (c. 1650-1716) On souhaiterait mieux connaltre les notables du Dunkerque de naguère. L'histoire héroïque, qui n'est pas forcément la légende, a voulu que nous soyons plus a l'aise avec nombre de ses capitaines, surtout corsaires, qu'avec ceux qui les armèrent, eux-mêmes beaucoup plus rarement qu'à Saint-Malo anciens capitaines. Ne se nourrit-on pas de stereotypes quand on veut citer tel ou tel armateur ? Mais a fortiori il doit s'agir de toute une hiërarchie, toujours changeante, de forts et de faibles, d'hommes honnétes et d'étres ambigus, de Flamands et de Francais, sans oublier quelques Jacobites : en fait, toute une gamme socio-professionnelle, partant des négociants et des grossiers pour arriver aux cabaretiers et aux maltres de métier. Si ce monde d'entrepreneurs a su présenter une fa$ade/ quasi-monolithique a propos des anciennes franchises, ou des rivalités avec d'autres ports, il serait naïf de ne pas en attendre maints désaccords personnels, voire des factions et méme des traìtrises. Farmi ces courants peu agréables au patriotisme local, la carrière de Jacques Plets (ou Pletz) nous offre une lumière relativement brillante. Tout au long du « crépuscule » louis-quatorzien, ce personnage equivoque projeta son ombre a travers comptoirs et tribunaux, soit comme armateur installa rue Saint-Jean, soit comme donneur d'avis, cloitré dans sa maison neuve, place Royale. II est de bonne regle de commencer par ce qu'on peut tirer des genealogies de Pierre Daudruy. Le 8 septembre 1680, la demoiselle Jeanne-Magdeleine de Brier (1661-95), de bonne souche magistrale, épouse le f ¡Is de Winoc Pletz, échevin, et de Marie Sachmoorter. Jacques-Wìnoc était déjà avocat ; devenu conseiller a l'Hotel de Ville en 1677 il était destiné a l'échevinage en 1687-8 (1). L'année de la mort de Jeanne-Magdeleine, il avait trois fils de mo ins de 14 ans et une filie qui épousera le sieur Anne-Henry Lezat, plus tard « Messire » de Lezat, avocat auprès de l'Amirauté de Dunkerque vers 1707 (2). En deuxièmes noces, entre 1697-1701, Jacques Plets s'attache encore au Magistrat, en prenant pour femme Marie Tugghe, veuve de Josse Nicolas Meulebegq, ancien bourgmestre dont la familie était liée aux Coppens et aux Faulconnier, done aux plus illustres families de la ville (3). Cette formation juridique et ces attaches plutòt de robe n'interdisaient en rien de s'adonner au négoce, lequel tirait a merveille profit des dons de l'avocat, n'était-ce que pour persuader les timides détenteurs de fonds en sachant interpreter un contrat : ('intendant Barentin fera état plus tard des « subtilités ordinaires » du sieur Plets « pour former des difficultés » (4). Daudruy qualifie notre

104

Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760

avocat de « doyen des marchands », ce qui paraìt assez exact pour les années 1690, a condition pourtant de ne pas le considerar comme leur porte-parole ; et le maréchal Vauban se réfère a une conversation qu'il avait tenue avec « Plets, Taverne et ses associés, qui sont les principaux armateurs de ce lieu » (5). Au lendemain de la guerre de la Ligue d'Augsbourg, on attribue a Plets une vingtaine de navires ; une escadre de cinq corsaires lui avait coüté une mise-hors de 300,000 l.t. (6). Mais que son succes dans le négoce ait precede la guerre apparali bien, du fait qu'il fut un des premiers a armer contre les Hollandais en octobre 1688 ; lorsqu'elle enregistra la commission du « Cheval Marín », capitarne Pierre Bart, fregate de 300 tonneaux, alors a Marseille, contrairement a tous ses règlements, l'Amirauté ne demanda a personne d'en « certifier » la caution, « la solvabilité du sieur Plets estant notoirement connue » (7). Il est a remarquer, en effet, que Plets ne cautionna que très rarement, et conformément a ('usage, les armements dont il fut le « dépositaire » -c'est-àdire le comptable et, le plus souvent, l'armateur principal— et encore moins les autres : circonstance qui en dit long sur un certain talent a cerner ses obligations. Là où il s'inscrit comme dépositaire, il se contente, contrairement a un Nicolas Taverne ou un Jean-Baptiste Bart, de certifier un autre. C'était bien Bart, cousin du chevalier et lui-même dépositaire très actif, qui cautionna les armements Plets en 1693. En régie générale, un tei service comportait un intérét, une part, dans l'armement. Qui done a voulu s'associer avec Plets comme caution ? Avant Bart, il y avait eu Jan Puydt, maïtre tonnelier, et Guillaume Henry, échevin de 1693 lorsque la ville dut racheter la mairie de l'Etat ; et après, Jean-Baptiste Gottro, écrivain de capre et dépositaire, lui, de quatre armements en course Ie 16 juin 1695, dont les cautions furent toutes certifiées par Plets, peut-ëtre Ie principal intéresse (8). Les actes de caution nous faisant défaut après cette date, nous ig norons si l'étroite liaison Plets-Gottro s'est poursuivie ou non. Probablement pas, puisque les associations d'affaires avec Jacques Plets ne duraient pas longtemps, nous Ie verrons. Remarquons que Ie dénombrement de cette année 1695 met Gottro dans la vingtième classe (sur vingt-deux) a capiter, avec les apprentis marchands et les clercs de notaire, tand is que Plets s'y trouve dans la onzième, avec « les marchands faisant commerce en gros », soutenu par trois valets et deux servantes (9). Faut-il suggérer qu'un dépositaire n'était pas toujours Ie plus intéresse, bien qu'à Dunkerque en 1710 on ait pu lancer cette plaisanterie : « si 1'on voit briller queJqu'un, J'on ne doute pas qu'il est ou qu'il a esté dépositaire ? » (10). Il est vrai que le dépositaire était celui qui se chargeait de la vente des prises, et qui souvent en achetait pour les revendré a meilleur prix ; dans l'ensemble, les depositares furent les grands gagnants de la guerre de course. Tout de méme, parfois, un commanditaire savait commander au commandité. A Dunkerque, en 1695, il n'y avait guère qu'une vingtaine d'imposes dans la classe de Plets, dont seulement trois autres grands armateurs en course : les frères Taverne, Guillaume et Nicolas, et le chevalier Jacques Géraldin, jacobite, mort en 1696. Avec eux, les deux autres dépositaires les plus actif s —Jan Rycx, marchand puis notaire, associò de Guillaume Taverne, et J.B. Bart- s'y trouvent dans les classes seize et dix-huit. Parmi eux, Plets ne s'est lié -d'après ce"que Ton

Jacques-Winoc Plets

105

sait faute d'actes de proprietà— qu'avec Bart et Nicolas Taverne, Ie seul en France a armer tout au long des guerres de la fin du grand règne. L'ai Mance Plets-Taverne nous est révélée au moment ou elle prend fin, en février 1696, dans une lettre au secrétaire d'Etat Louis de Pontchartrain, ou Plets se plaint des « menees et détours » de Taverne, qui venait de lui faire plusieurs requisitions devant l'Amirauté « fondees sur des chimaires » (11). Triste moment, car ils avaient partagé l'armement de cinq frégates ensemble, moitié-moitié, se constituant ainsi une petite escadre, formation chère a Taverne et une des r a ¡sons de sa réussite étonnante, comme le fut aussi le bon choix de ses capitaines. Le 30 mai 1693, cette escadre avait pris trois bàtiments richement chargés a Lisbonne, dont « ì'Amitié », construction hollandaise, pavilion suédois, maìtre Robert Jeff ray, écossais (12). D'où le drame qui en découla. « L'Amitié » et sa cargaison étant condamnées par le Conseil des Prises, on poussa les cris habituéis en pays neutre et on actionna la machine diplomatique. Sur appel, le Conseil Royal decida la mainlevée du bätiment et des dix-douzièmes de sä cargaison : seuls Jeff ray et deux autres devaient y perdre. Mais puisqu'il y avait eu juste cause de saisie, l'arret ne r est ¡t u a pas le fret, que pourtant, selon Jeffray, les preneurs étaient convenus de lui payer : « et le leur ayant demandé, ils avoient respondu qu'il estoit en effet acquitté, et que le sieur Palmquist, agent du Roy de Suède auquel ees maítres s'addressent ordinairement, l'a recue ». De Madrys, intendant de Fiandre, se renseigna a ce propos. Il apprend « qu'un des amateurs nommé Plets avoit promis au sieur de Palmquist.. . de payer le fret de ces marchandises, que le sieur Palmquist s'est plaint depuis qu 'on luy avoit manqué de parole. . . On m'assure aussi que le sieur Plets a nie a l'audience de l'Amirauté avoir ríen promis. . . » (13). Ayant élu domicile a Dunkerque chez « Les Trois Poissons d'Hot lande », le 22 mai 1694 Jeffray assigne Taverne a confirmer qu'il avait repu une quittance de Plets « pour sa part du payement de ladite somme » de 12,400 l .t. Le sergent de l'Amirauté interroge Taverne chez lui, rue Saint-Louis, la journée même et entend que Palmquist « estoit un fripon ». Tout de méme, le 14 juin 1695, Taverne paya le fret et remit Jeffray en possession de son bàtiment. Pourquoi cette volte-face ? La supplique qu'adresse Taverne a l'Amirauté le 7 octobre 1695 nous éclaire : ayant avancé 12,750 l.t. a Plets pour le fret, ce que « ledit mai tre n'a ríen dü recevoir. . . le suppliant auroit plusieurs fois requis ledit sieur Plets de luy renare et restituer son argent, ce qu 'il demeure en faute de faire » (14). Voici « les chimaires » alléguées par ce dernier, qui riposta en accusant son co-armateur de lui avoir volé jusqu'à 12,000 l.t. en sucre provenant de « Ì'Amitié ». Que Taverne veut bien reconnaìtre « que j'ay resté pour luy un bon compaignon et vray amis (sic), tout ceJa est bon mais c'est un compie qu'il me fault» (15). Plets fut-il coupable de mauvaise foi ? Plus tard ('intendant Le Blanc louera la bonne foi de Taverne, tandis que Duguay, intendant de la marine, plutòt admirateur de Plets, avouera qu'on l'accuse « a la vérité^de n'estre pas fidelle dans ses compíes » (16). On se souvient d'un episode raconté a sa fagon picaresque par Jean Doublet lors d'une audience avec Jéròme de Pontchartrain, récemment nommé secrétaire d'Etat a la Marine, en survivance de son pére :

Sa Grandeur. . . m'arréta en me disant : « Tenez, voilà ce qu'on m'a écrìt de

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Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760

vaus maisj'ay esté informé du contraire, gouvernez-vous toujburs sagement ». Et il me laissa la lettre. Je ne sorty pai de l 'antichambre sans la lire et j'en rus surpris du contenu. Elie étoit du Sf Plets, grand armateur, qui écrìvoit faux mesme jusque centre Jes íntendants et J'éfaf major. Je gardayla dite lettre et partis pour Paris, où je ne fus que les deux jours, et pris ma route pour Calais. Et entre Calais et Graveline courant la poste, je passay proche d'une chaize d'où l'on me souhaitoit le bon jour et comme je me portois. J'arestay a la portière et fus très surpris de voir Plets me faire sy bon accueil, me demandant des nouvelles. Je desceñáis de cheval et donnay a mon postillón la bride, et dis a celuy de la chaise : « Arreste ». Je dis en frappant de mon fouet : « Comment coquin, avez-vous osé me parier ? ». Etredoublant mes coups du manche du fouet et des bourades du bout je l'obligeay de mettre pied a terre, et luy dis de tirer son épée. Il se jeta a genoux disant : « Que vous ai-je fait ? Je ne suis pas homme d'épée ». Je luy présente un pistolet et il Ie laissa tomber. Je Ie fis soufìer et je le blessay un peu a la lèvre d'en haut et me promif de ne s'en pasplaindre. Cette soirée-la, sa chaise s'étant « embarrassée dans les dunes » et les portes de la ville se trouvant fermées, « Ie pleureur. . . fut coucher dans la basse ville » (17). Tout de même, ne cédons pas trop vite a la pudeur choquée de Doublet. Si Plets a écrit « contre les Íntendants » il ne fait ríen d'extraordinaire ; pour Versailles, qui n'est jamais rassasié d'informations, la delation, on Ie sa ¡t, ét a it toujours un moyen de controle voulu. La Marine, elle, profitait aussi des renseignements que pouvait lui offrir tei ou tei négociant qui disposali d'un réseau de correspondants a l'étranger. Jérome de Pontchartrain exprimera plus tard ses remerciements pour les nouvelles que lui fournit Jacques Plets, comme Jacques Omaer, deux fois bourgmestre, l'avait fait pour ses prédécesseurs (18). Plets restart toujours bien place pour recevoir les nouvelles du Nord. A Copenhague, puis a Christiansand, il entretenait pendant la guerre de la Ligue d'Augsbourg son propre « commis », Nicolas Rémy, « frère » d'Omaer, souvent appelé « consul frangais » par les corsaires auxquels il rendait mille services : « jeune homme très intelligent », dit Bonrepaus, envoyé francais a Copenhague, qui fait tirer par Rémy sur Dunkerque les dépenses encourues en Norvège par Jean Bart (19). Plets était profondément engagé dans la fourniture a la Marine de marchandises du Nord, ce qui lui valait des relations avec Dantzig (Gdansk) et la Suède aussi bien que la Norvège. De Gdansk, les Dunkerquois fournissaient méme le port de Brest en mats et cables, en acier et fer blanc, comme d'ailleurs en témoigne le Journal de Doublet. Là, en 1693, Plets fit construiré « l'Aventurier Fortuné », 200 tx, destiné a la course (20). Son adjudication pour la mature remontait peut-être au debut de la guerre et dura au moins jusqu'en juillet 1696, lorsque Claude Thibeaudeau offrii de la remplacer sur le méme pied : 400 l.t. pour toutes sortes de màts, de 16 a 24 palmes (21). Se trouvait-il en difficultés ? Déjà, en avril 1692, ('intendant Patoulet l'accusait, avec d'autres, de s'y ¡ntéresser seulement pour en recevoir les avances royales, « sans aucun désir de /burnir ce en quoy ils s'engagení » (22). Pour satisfaire a ees obligations Plets eut recours a l'achat de marchandises de prises en 1689 et 1693, lesquelles n'étaient pas payees

Jacques-Winoc Plets

107

Ie 24 aoüt 1694 —il voulait troquer une cargaison contre d'autres marchandises— (23). Autant de signes avant-coureurs d'un crédit surmené ? On n'achetait pas en pays scandinave, on le sait, sans y porter vins, eaux-devie, et sel. Pendant un temps, Plets s'obligeait a fournir aussi a la Marine vins et eaux-de-vie, a meilleur prix (écrit ('intendant Ceberet) que les autres (24). Or, Dunkerque trafiquait « en France » en utilisant ses frégates corsaires, jusqu'à confondre course et commerce dans une seule campagne. C'était bien, on va le voir, une formule chère a Plets, qui savait aussi mélanger course et commerce dans le Nord. Il fallait toutefois s'assurer le concours des equipages. Le 24octobre 1695, celui du corsaire « Le Leopard Doré », 16 canons, capitarne Jacob Vriesche, refuse de repartir pour Bordeaux avant un carenage et en plus deux mois d'avance de salaires. Méme son de cloche le 12 décembre 1696, lorsque Andre Bart, capitaine de la « Sainte Marie », 30 canons, declare .182: " a galley is built to sail, and to row with oars, and measures twice her burthen or loading, and is broad and sharp, and carries twice the breadth in sail of common sailing ships . . . and is at double the charge in number of seamen . . . of force from 16 to 40 guns . . . ." 94—The Larke (1703) became the English Heart in 1705 (Priaulx Library, transcript of Pierre Henry's account book, f.41). I am unable to identify Le Pigeon listed by Tupper (see Lc Pelley, loc. cit., p.47), though a Fisher and Swallow were commissioned in 1702. Ollivier Mancel, who captained the Pigeon in 1703, according to Tupper, does not appear in the Letter of Marque Declarations till 1709. Perhaps there was some irregularity. The Pigeon was sold in London by Sir William Dobrée late in 1703 (transcript of Henry's account book, f.30). 95—Of privateers commissioned early in the war only the names of the Hanover, Nottingham, and Pembroke have the ring of a topical compliment (H.C.A. 26/17). 96—H.C.A. 26/1-3. The names of the captains, mostly as they signed themselves, and the years in which they were first commissioned were as follows: GUERNSEY—John Roland, 1690; John Stephens, 1691;. John Knap, 1692; Peter Cock, 1693; John Gruchy, 1695; Dennis Rousse, 1695; Thomas Le Mesurier, 1695; Peter Thoumes, 1696; Abraham Le Mesurier, 1696; Peter Tupper, 1696; John Luce, 1696; and John Oliver, 1696. JERSEY—James Lemprière, 1692; Jean Maugier, 1692; Daniel Jauverin, 1696; and Edward Browne, 1696. Of the Queen Anne captains, Peter Bonamy, John Turner, John Mattis and John Valláis (Guernsey), John Orange and Thomas Pipón (Jersey) had served as Lieutenants and/or masters of privateers under King William; Richard Robinson, John Dupré, Peter Du Froc(k), Thomas Naftel (Guernsey) and Andrew de Sainte Croix (Jersey) as gunners; Daniel Poundwell (or Pownell) and John Hubert (Guernsey), as boatswains. Seamen who had already «commanded privateers not infrequently served in subordinate offices afterwards. 97—There were three privateers of 200 tons, viz., the Chasse, the Guernsey Frigate and the Marquis d'Or (H.C.A. 26/15, 16).

The Channel Island Privateers

369

98—Jersey's Jolly Shallop, Captain Philip Shoosmith, was of 4 Ions and was armed with palcreros only (H.C.A. 26/19). Cf. the Two Brothers, Captain Browne, of 4 tons, whose commission was seen by F. B. Tupper, The History of Guernsey and Its Bailiwick (Guernsey, 1876), pp.385-6. 99—An exception was the Conqueror, which carried 50 rounds of great shot and 20 barrels of gunpowder when commissions were taken out by William Chaillon on 19th Aug., 1709, and 18th April. 1710 (H.C.A. 26/14). 100—Usually muskets; sometimes a few pairs oí pistols as well. 101—H.C.A. 32/74, deposition of Knap in Norn, ignot., a bark of Isle Dieu, January, 1705. At this point of his cruise Knap had already taken so many prizes that his crew was reduced to ten. The prisoners took the opportunity to escape by hiding among the rocks. 102—H.C.A. 32/74, deposition of de Ste-Croix in Notre Dame du Mont Vierge. It was also sometimes necessary for the captor to provision his prize before she was brought into port, e.g., in Marie Franose, H.C.A. 32/72(2). 103—H.C.A. 32/85(2), deposition of R. Knowles in Vigilance of Belfast, Knowles, 28th Aug., 1712; H.C.A. 32/46, attestation of Sullivan in Prosperity oj Waterjord, Moriarty. 104—H.C.A. 32/74, deposition of John Vallet, captain of the Flying Horse, in Norn, ignot., 18th June, 1705. 105—A. N. Marine, B3/198, ff.38, 105, 282; ibid. B3/190, ftl95, 206. 106—On 5th April, 1703, Hatton told Nottingham that there were nearly twenty Guernsey privateers (S.P. 47/2, f.51). C.S.P. Dom., 1702-3, p.675, wrongly paraphrases " over twenty local privateers," In fact, exactly twenty commissions had been granted by this date, but Daniel Poundwell was twice commissioned and one or two others may have been captured. No Guernsey prisoners had yet been returned, however, so that, omitting the crew of Poundwell's first ship, the Letter of Marque Declarations point to a total demand for 644 men. But the figures in the Declarations are not necessarily very exact and do not, of course, tell us how far one privateer may have borrowed men from another. Unless the privateers were all at sea at the same time some borrowing is likely to have taken place. 107—In the nature of the case, the English Prize Papers throw much light on French trade but only when they deal with a recapture do they tell us anything about our own. In the Sarah de Jersey, Esnouf, we learn ¡or instance that Philip Pipón, gentleman of Jersey and lord of the fee of Noirmoutier, with Captain Noè Le Cras and others, freighted corn from Portsmouth to Lisbon in 1707, the return cargo consisting of wine, oranges and lemons (H.C.A. 32/82). 108— The History of Guernsey (London, 1841), pp.131-2; Jugemenls, 5, f.118. The Royal Court apparently used the New Style of reckoning dates, which from 1700 was eleven days ahead of the Old Style officially used in England until 2nd Sept.. 1752. I have throughout adhered to the dates used in the documents. 109—Ibid. 110—Collier to Nottingham, 31st July, 1703, C.S.P. Dom. 1703-4, p.71. The Lieut.-Governor of Jersey acknowledged the receipt of instructions to seize deserters dated 27th April, 1703. Similar instructions were doubtless sent to Guernsey: see J. Le Pelley, loc. cit., p.45. Mr. Le Pelley also cites a report by Captain Atkins alleging the presence of 300 English seamen, including deserters, in Guernsey in 1696. Ill—That the efficacy of justice on the Island was subject to injury from quite small circumstances at this time is suggested by the Petition of the Lord Lieutenant, Bailiffs and Jurats of the Royal Court for money to build a new Court House and prison on 8th March, 1703. They staled that as there was then no prison in the island debts could not be recovered nor the sentences of the Court executed, C.S.P. Dom. 1703-4, p.351). 112—Jugements 5, f.126. See also the Privy Council Register for 26th May and 5th June, 1707, in P.C. 2/81/372, 376. Duncan, op. cit., p.132, states that Peter Dobrée, Agent to the Lord High Admiral, presented an Order in Council to the Royal Court for registration to the same effect on 15th July, 1707, but I have not found the evidence for this. 113—Jugements, 5, f.144. 114—Half the Guernsey Jurats invested in privateers, William Le Marchant, James Carey and Nicholas Thoumes (before he became a Jurat) especially heavily. John Renouf had done so in 1696, the year in which he was made a Jurat. Neither the Lieut.-Governor nor any member of the Andros family did so. In a case before the Royal Court concerning the disposal of two prizes in 1709, so many of the Magistrates were recused as to leave only the Lieutenant-Bailiff and one of the Jurats (Order in Council, 19th May, 1709, registered in Jugements 5, f.151). 115—C.S.P. Dom. 1703-4, pp.229, 506. 116—C.S.P. Dom. 1703-4, p.161. 117—C.S.P. Dom. 1703-4, pp.68, 208-9. 118—S.P. 42/118, f.333. 119—C.S.P. Don. ¡703-4, p.208. The petitioners slated that they had about 300 French prisoners, "lodged in a house on the sea shore and opposite Havre". On 5th April, 1703, Hatton had estimated that there were 400 French prisoners in Guernsey (ibid. 1702-3, p.675). According to tables prepared by the Commissioners of Sick and Wounded for the Secretary of State, there were 238 prisoners in Guernsey on 19th October; 277 on 4th November; 314 on 30th January 1704; 273 on 6th January, 1705 (S.P. 42/118, ff.338, 348; S.P. 42/119, f.32). I can find no tables for 1706-9, but in the table for 29th June, 1710 shows only 1 prisoner in Guernsey. On 17th August,

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1710 there were 101 and on 7th April, 1711, 168 (S.P. 42/121, ff.259, 286, and one folio unnumbered). From 1707 the practice of ransoming prizes at sea increased. In 1703, apparently, French prisoners escaped often (Jugements 5, f.97). 120—C.S.P. Dom. 1703-4, pp.209, 220. 121—Commissioners of Sick and Wounded to St. Sulpice, Commissaire de Marine at St. Malo, A. N. Marine, B3/123, f.458. 122—C.S.P. Dom. 1703-4, p.527. 123—Hedges had been Judge of the High Court of Admiralty since 1689 and did not relinquish that office when appointed Secretary of State; but I see no reason to suspect him of thinking of his fees on this occasion. 124—Commissioners of Sick and Wounded to Hedges, 4th March, 1704, S.P. 42/119, f.77. 125—The French authorities seem to have desired to get rid of their prisoners with the minimum of delay but both sides insisted on parity of exchange (C.S.P. Dom. 1702-3, passim). Early in 1704 they were authorised to pledge their King's honour that all English prisoners should be sent back, ransom being paid for any overplus at the rate of one month's pay for each man (ibid. 1703-4, p.510). 126—One cannot, for example, be sure that owners never took out Letters of Marque for trading or even fishing vessels. The number of such cases might constitute presumptive evidence of trade with the enemy, especially in the case of Jersey, only half of whose captains took any prizes at all. 127—There were many complaints of the sufferings of prisoners during the War of the Spanish Succession. For the condition of French prisoners in Plymouth, for instance, see A. N. Marine B3/123, fl.504-5, 555, 566-7. English prisoners returning from Diñan and St. Malo early in 1704 complained of exactions and hardships (C.S.P. Dom. 1703-4, p.576). But there is evidence that conditions at St. Malo and Diñan were relatively good, at any rate between 1702-08 (E. Dupont, Les Prisonniers de Guerre Anglais en France au XVIHe Siècle, Paris, 1915). The French documents strongly suggest that the situation of prisoners at Dunkirk was especially bad, but it is unlikely that there were any Channel Island prisoners there (A. N. Marine B3/122, f.464, and B3/128, f.586). Much suffering was occasioned on both sides by the dishonesty, or insolvency, of the victualling contractors; and the English Commissioners at any rate ordered delivery of rations in cash from the beginning of August, 1704 (A. N. Marine B3/123, f.590). Inevitably prisoners in France felt the successive bread famines also. 128—In Charles Galley de Rochelle, Chauvet, examination in Guernsey 17th January, 1710, of Edes, Barnes, Castell and St. Croix, H.C.A. 32/55. " Plunderage " almost certainly means pillage. The pillage of goods and merchandise found upon or above the gun deck of a prize taken in fight and not otherwise, except her tackle and furniture, was allowed to captors " without further or other account" by Proclamation of 1st June, 1702 (P.C. 2/79, ff.139-143). It had been legalised by statute (Marsden, Law and Custom, II., x.). 129—In Lyon Blanc, Baudry, examination in Weymouth, 29,th November, 1705, H.C.A. 32/69. The officers and crews of English privateers were sometimes hired by the month, without benefit of prize; for example, the Rainbow of London, Captain Young, in the Seine, H.C.A. 32/82. Cf. an entry in Henry's account book with reference to the " net proventi (appartenant aux bourgois) de la prise L'Hirondelle de Glaseo " (Tupper Transcript, f.42). 130—In Hopewell de Cork, Webb, examinations in Guernsey 15th February, 1712 and 5th April, 1714, H.C.A. 32/63. 131—Amirauté 4, ff.21, 31 and 5, f.13. At the rate of exchange of 14 livres tournois to the pound sterling employed for the conversion of prize appraisements by the officials responsible for the collection of the Lord High Admiral's tenths, these wages would amount to between 20 and 27 shillings a month. Compare the wages of 6-10 shillings a week earned by skilled craftsmen and others in Jersey towards the end of the 17th century cited by A. C. Saunders, Jersey in the \lth Century (Jersey, 1931), based on the Dumaresq MS. Tupper, op. cit., p.389, quotes penalties of 10 to 30 livres for minor offences in Guernsey promulgated between 1683 and 1695. 132—Amirauté 4, f.31. It was exceptional to carry a surgeon or doctor (H.C.A. 26/13-21). 133—In Union of Nantes. Andre, etc., examinations in Guernsey 6th and llth March, 1713. of Pietersen, De Portrou and Hughes, H.C.A. 32/82 (2). 134—Amirauté 5, ff.10, 16. Parker claimed payment of the product from the Sieur Jean Alez, armator of the privateer, .but was told by the Court to address himself to Captain Chubb's testators. The Court on 28th February, 1711, ordered Captain Rogers, one of the testators, to pay Parker, James Perchard, armator of the Union, was ordered to pay Le Ray on 27th February, 1711. 135—This may be the suggestion of an entry in Pierre Henry's account book: Peter Tupper owes him L58 19s. 7d. tournois " pour un huitième de 5 des chares de matelots a gages pour les bourgeois " (Tupper Transcript, f.42). 136—R. Pares, "The Manning of the Navy in the West Indies, 1702-63," in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th series, vol. xx, p.40. 137—Amirauté 5, f.6. On the evidence of the litigation £ seaman seems ordinarily to have been entitled to three shares, if the owners agreed to pay shares to the crew, and a lieutenant to about twenty shares (Amirauté 5, ff.8, 16, 26, 28). 138—The Court gave sentence on 17th January, 1713, against Samuel Dobrée, armator of the Btirrhett Gaily, Captain Courier, " concerning the wages he had stopped his seamen on account

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of mutiny," and Dobrée appealed to the Privy Council (P.C. 2/84, 1.303). George de la Gard likewise appealed against sentence given in the Court in favour of some seamen belonging to the Revenge Gaily, Captain Dumaresq, on a wages suit and was successful (P.C. 2/83, fi.174, 185). 139—Amirauté 4, f.21. 140—Amirauté 4, ff.31, 52; ibid. 5, ff.8-10; Jugeraents 5, f.119. Some of the families of the men who were lost on the Sailor's Prosperity, Captain Roche, which was presumed to have perished at sea in February, 1710, were said to be living in great distress (Union de Nantes, Andre, etc. H.C.A. 32/85E2]). 141—Amirauté 5, ff.26, 28. 142—The seamen were not always the injured parties. Several of them were prosecuted between 31st January and 20th February, 1710, for having broken their contracts. One of ihem, John Parker, who had seen long service as a lieutenant or master, failed to embark on three cruises (Amirauté 5, ff.ll, 13, 15). More serious were the cases of Dennis Rousse, captain of the Prosperous, and Henry Knap, captain of the Greyhound, both of whom had to be admonished by the Court to keep their engagements with their owners. The obligation placed on Rousse by the Court on 22nd May, 1703, was to return en course within fifteen days of his return to the island, provided the owners equipped him within that time; he had apparently left the island and was to return within fifteen days or be answerable for all damages (Amirauté 4, f.5; Jugements 5, ff.97-8). The lieutenant and ten of the crew of the Mordaunt Sloop, Captain Rawling (Roland?), refused to sail on one occasion on the ground of ill treatment by the captain (Amirauté 3: 28th and 3rd January, 1705). Two seamen of the Chasse, Captain Henry Brock, were convicted of selling prize merchandise (Amirauté 5, ff.22, 30, 34). 143—The French privateers proper captured by Guernseymen included the Faulcon of St. Malo (16 guns), Victoire de St. Maio (18 guns), Envíense de St. Malo (4 guns), Elizabeth de Calais (6 guns), Notre Dame de Bon Secours (6 guns), Jeune Veuve (6 guns), Anne Victoire of Cherbourg (no guns) and La Légere de Rochelle (14 guns). The Good Fortune of Ostend (6 guns) was a privateer commissioned by the Duke of Bavaria. Some of these, f ell prize to two privateers sailing in consort and some had had their crews weakened by the subtraction of prize crews (H.C.A. 32/58, 85 (2), 57, 46, 74, 64 (2), 50 (2), 69, 61 (2). The George (24 guns), taken by Captain Richard Pipón in the mouth of the Gironde, was a bigger catch but the Jerseymen took only three or four enemy privateers (H.C.A. 32/79, 48, 55, 94). The Entreprenant of St. Malo (30 guns) fell to Pipón in company with two Guernsey privateers after brief resistance (H.C.A. 32/57). The captured merchantmen included L'Aimable Marie de St. Malo (20 guns), the Saints Marie de Dunkirk (12 guns), and the Duke of Bavaria (14 guns) which carried the commission of the Marquis of Bedmar, Captain General of the Spanish Netherlands; the Bachelor's Endeavour (16 guns), which fell to Captain Peraud of Jersey, was a recapture and had only a small French crew on board (H.C.A. 32/50 (2), 71, .56, 51). A number of other prizes carried 2, 3 or 4 guns and small arms. France during this war used privateers and even naval ships for trading voyages and the term " armed merchantman " may carry a suggestie falsi at times. Some of them are included in the Account of all Ships of War and Privateers taken from the enemy to 15th Nov.. 1707, which was laid before Parliament on 20th Nov. and lists 24 privateers in the capture of which Channel Islanders had a hand (H.C.A. 30/774). 144—Tupper, op. cit., pp.385-6; examinations and appraisements in H.C.A. 32/47-86, 90, 92. Deponents were asked for information about the ship's position and other circumstances of a capture. 145—H.C.A. 32/50(2), 55, 61(¿), 56. Cf. the following extract from Captain Gruchy's journal for 23rd Jan., 1703, when he came up with 13 Ostend and French sail and captured three of them : " The Enemy put themselves in a posture of defence, and drew up in a line of Battle. 1 put my spizzle yard alongships, prepared my grapplings, and my men with Pistolls, cutlasses, pollaxes and Granados, appear'd ready to board some of them, upon which the said fleet dispersed and I pursued, and after a sharp dispute with the Commadore sayling through the body of their fleet, I boarded one of their ships of 4 guns and 6 Patereros and well fitted with small arms and liad a Letter of Mart, the Captain of which told me their Commadore was Capt. Peter Du Baert (nephew to the famous Jean Du Baert of Dunkirk) with a ship of six guns mounted, 6 Patereros, and 50 men and good small arms " (Sie. Barbe Ostend, H.C.A. 32/51). Gruchy in the Pembroke Galley, lost his topmast and had his sails and rigging much shattered. Some of the lost engagements may, of course, have been more severe: the Conqueror of Guernsey, Captain Durant, had four men killed and others wounded when she was captured by a Nantes privateer in 1712 (S. de la Nicolliere-Teijeiro, La Course et les Corsaires du Port de Nantes, Paris, 1896, p.72). 146—Depositions in Anne, Albey, Anne and George, Vaughan, Si. Anne de Guildo, Jerriguit, and Notre Dame de Vierge, H.C.A. 32/48, 50, 74. The prize crew on the Hopewell, Stafford, mistook Mont Orgueil for a Breton castle (H.C.A. 32/62). Cf. H.C.A. 42/20 in the Si. Nicholas, Dutot, an appeal against the seizure by H.M.S. Orford of a French trader which had just left Guernsey before the island had received advice of the declaration of war. French shipping in the harbours of Jersey and Guernsey when the war broke out was. however, released: 7 vessels in Jersey,-6 in Guernsey (C.S.P. Dom. 1702-3, p.101; S.P. 42/2, fi.26, 31, 42). 147—Chäteaurenault to Pontchartrain, Rennes, 5th Dec., 1704, A. N. Marine B3/126, f.321 ; Beauregard, capitaine de port at Lorient, May, 1707, A. N. Marine B3/147, f.12. 148—Deposition of f.e Cooq in Guernsey, 12th Nov.. 1702, H.C.A. 32/83.

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149—In St. Anthony de Dunkirk, depositions in Guernsey 13th Jan., 1704, H.C.A. 32/49. The captors were Powndwell, Robinson, Abraham and William Le Mesurier. 150—Depositions in Guernsey 1705, H.C.A. 32/85(1). 151—Andros to Hedges, 19th Jan., 1704, S.P. 47/2, f,217. 152—The master of the Swedish Fortune, Wiebes, was so deceived by Captain Roland, whom he desired to lend him a pilot to get into St. Malo (H.C.A. 32/58); cf. deposition of Le Clerc in the Swallow, Le Clerc, Weymouth, 12th Nov., 1705, H.C.A. 32/81. See Comer Williams, The Liverpool Privateers (London, 1897), p.130, for a Guernsey privateer which pretended to be a French privateer—with the Liverpool privateer as her prize in company—near the Gironde in 1757. 153—H.C.A. 32/79(1), deposition of the Lieutenant of the Chasseur, who added that " Hawkins' men beat him and his company most sadly after they had demanded quarter," one of them dying of his wounds and the Lieutenant himself being unable to move " for his hurts ". 154—Deposition in Belle Alliance, Roux, H.C.A. 42/20. 155—It was stated in the Galley de Caudas, depositions in Guernsey, 5th March, 1705, H.C.A. 32/61(2), that "it is the Gustóme here amongst the Privateeres when they make an agreement amongst the Captains to make itt by word of Mouth and not in writeing ". The Prosperous and Marlborough had not even been able to " change words " before their joint attack on the St. James of He de Dars in a fog (allegation ex parte Capt. D. Naftel, llth Sept., 1712, H.C.A. 32/67). Captain Oliver Mansell in the Terror stated that he had left Guernsey with the William Galley and Mary Sloop but had not promised to keep company as far as St. Malo (deposition in Guernsey 13th Feb., 1704, St. Peter de l'l sie au Moine, H.C.A. 42/20). 156—Deposition in Guernsey, 19th Oct., 1702, H.C.A. 32/60. 157—Interrogatories administered ex parte the William Galley, Capt. Brock, to J. Termison, a prisoner, and Termison's deposition, Guernsey, 5th March, 1706, H.C.A. 32/55. 158—Deposition of Le Mesurier, Guernsey, January, 1703, H.C.A. 32/58. The notes made in this case by Sir John Cooke, the Advocate General, are in the Bodleian Library, MSS. Rawl. 383, ff.607-8. 159—Depositions of Robinson, Le Mesurier and Guilmotte in Guernsey. 8th Oct., 1702, H.C.A. 32/48. 160—H.C.A. 32/72(2). 161—union de Nantes, etc., H.C.A. 32/85(2). 162—Information on these disputes comes mainly from the records of the High Court of Admiralty, which as a rule determined them. But the Roy_al Court seems to have taken cognizance of the detailed apportionment of shares in a joint capture. Thus, when a difference arose between the armators of two privateers on the subject of sharing the prize Jeune Franqaise of Calais " sur le pied d'homme pour homme," the Court ordered sale of the cargo by both armators jointly (Amirauté 4, f.12). Five captains were ordered to produce lists of their crews in connection with the capture of the Chasseur de Calais and three other prizes (Amirauté 4, f.24). On the other hand, it was apparently open to a captor to take to the Royal Court the larger question of his claim to any share at all in a prize if it was based on a contract or agreement made in the island. John Bowden, armator of the Prosperous Galley, Captain Hubert, brought such an action in the Royal Court in 1707 concerning differences with the armators of the Marlborough, Captain Naftel, about the claim of the Prosperous to have shared in the capture of the St. James of Ile de Dars. He lost his case and appealed to the Court of Jugements, where it was still depending in June 1710. On the 26th of that month Captain Hubert obtained a commission from the Admiralty Court to take evidence in the island on the matter, apparently without the knowledge of Bowden, who, however, agreed that the Commission should proceed. The armators of the Marlborough contended that Bowden and Hubert were out of power to prosecute before another Court while the case was before the Court of Jugements. The Royal Court, after summoning the Commissioners to appear before it, quashed their proceedings on 28th November Following an order of the Admiralty Court on 13th May, 1712, a copy of these proceedings was sent to Hedges, the Admiralty Judge, who issued two more Commissions for the hearing of witnesses in the island. These Commissions were executed in November 1712. The case is aa interesting example of the conflict between English and Channel Island jurisdictions and represented a victory for the Admiralty Court. H.C.A. 32/47; ibid. 32/67; Amirauté 5, f.3. ]63—Interrogatories to George Hughes, H.C.A. 32/85(2). 164—The batteries of La Rochelle could not be used when privateers appeared in the roads in May 1706 (A.N. Marine, B3/141, f.8). 165—C. Durand, Les Milices Gardes-Cotes de Bretagne de 1716 a 1792 (Rennes, 1927), pp. 11-15. The royal règlements of the 13th June 1708 and 2nd May 1712 aimed at the improvement of training and the creation of special detachments better armed than the capitaineries. ]66—A.N. Marine B3/124, ff.32, 35, 41, 43-45. Ricous, Marine Commandant at Lorient, intelligently argued that the replacement by a Royal nominee of a popular commander, one who had married in the district, was a mistake for recruiting reasons. 167—Ibid. B3/136, f.106. 168—Ibid. B3/124, f.359. 169—Thus Clairambault to Pontchartrain, Lorient, 6th June and 23rd July, 1707 (ibid. B3/148, ff.8, 118). Jean Vie. a prominent Nantes corsair, was so employed in 170