PRIVATEERING

See Also: KANDY PORRIDGE; PIRACY; THE TOWER OF LONDON Prisoners, Sir Walter Raleigh; TRADING COMPANIES

Three Privateers

Privateering was a means by which governments were able to partially outsource the conduct of naval warfare to experienced seamen and merchants. The practice dated back to at least the 13^thC. In terms of the law, what distinguished privateers from pirates was that the former were granted Letters of Marque by a state. These documents gave them licence to attack the vessels of a nation with which that country was fighting a war.

In Western Europe different states had different ways of commissioning privateers. France had a centralised model in which ships were equipped by the state, which then leased them out. In England, the privateers, or more likely their financial backers, had to pay to fit out their own vessels. However, they were allowed to retain all of any profits that were made as a result of the voyage.

Aside from the physical threats posed both by the sea and by the violence that could be involved in encounters with representatives of the nation whose interests were being attacked, privateering expeditions could be dangerous to the participants because of the internal rivalries that often existed within a crew. The awareness of the proximity of their mortality could place interactions on an intense plane. Mutinous attitudes amongst the ordinary seamen were frequently bubbling away. In some instances, this could lead to the privateers turning pirate, in others there might be renegotiation of arrangements on board the vessel including the precise terms of the legal framework under which she was being sailed.

While many officers were from materially-comfortable, middle-class backgrounds, and had received a schooling that was informed by the Classics, they often nursed intense antagonisms towards one another. The need for a vessel to be navigated in the event of a number of senior crew members dying meant that most voyages started with a superfluity of men who had the necessary expertise. Often they were inclined to look upon their colleagues as being their competitors. The fractiousness of on-board relationships could be accentuated by the fact that for much of the time there was too much alcohol available and sometimes not enough water.

That a crew set out in a ship was by no means a guarantee that the voyage would conclude with the same men returning on-board the same vessel. If an expedition was successful, it might well capture other craft. Often these were retained because they could be sold, thereby releasing the capital that had been invested in their construction. From starting out as a single ship or pair of ships, a small flotilla might develop. Its new members would have to be manned, which meant that in turn the composition of the original crew would be changed. In addition, personnel might transfer away or join as the result of either encounters with other non-hostile craft at sea or visits to ports.

Spain regarded the Pacific as being her own private sphere. The state's attitude aside, the ships of other European powers kept out of the ocean because of its great distance and the awfulness of trying to sail around Cape Horn. Spanish sailors almost never did, instead they and goods, notably the silver that was mined in what is now Peru, crossed the narrowest portion of Central America by land. In 1702 England and Spain joined opposing sides in the War of the Spanish Succession. This meant that Madrid's interests in the western hemisphere were subjected to privateering by men who held Letters of Marque that were issued by the English state.

William Dampier was one of the people who was well-placed to exploit the conflict. He had taken to the waves in the 1660s and had experience of being a privateer on the seas of Latin America. As a sailor, he was highly-respected for his navigational expertise. However, what set him apart from his fellow seamen was his interest in garnering non-maritime information. During his voyages he had taken notes about what he saw and experienced. In 1697 his book Voyage Round The World had been published.¹ For a time, he had been taken up by the literary and political establishments.

In 1702 a syndicate of investors whose members were based in both London and Bristol commissioned Dampier to command a privateering expedition. This was composed of two vessels. The principal one was The St George, while the smaller Cinque Ports was intended to fulfil an ancillary role. The venture's other officers included John Clipperton, who was appointed as the Mate of the former, and Thomas Stradling, who was hired to be the latter's First Mate. The Cinque Ports's crew included Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor. At sea, the craft's original captain died. The position was then filled by Stradling. Tensions between him and Dampier developed to the extent that in 1704 the pair agreed to go separate ways.

The Cinque Ports called in at the Juan Fern ndez Islands, which lie to the east of the central portion of South America's western coast. By this juncture, Selkirk had reached the conclusion that the vessel was no longer seaworthy. Therefore, he asked to be left upon one of the archipelago's islands. Stradling agreed to this and had some provisions placed ashore for him. Just before the craft set out to sea again, the Scot changed his mind and asked to be taken back on board. His plea was ignored.

As matters turned out, his opinion had been correct, the ship's condition soon proved to be a liability. On the high seas, Stradling and the crew transferred themselves to a pair of rafts. The captain and seventeen of his men succeeded in landing on South America's western coast. The Spanish authorities there took them prisoner. They were transferred to Lima, where they were incarcerated.

Following Dampier's parting from the Cinque Ports, matters had not gone well for him. In large part his troubles had derived from his poor relations with his men. In 1707 he returned to England penniless. In the interim the war in Europe had been going well for Britain and her allies. There was a danger of peace. This would end the opportunities for privateering. Amongst Bristol's merchant community the sailor found a receptive audience to his proposal that another expedition should be financed that would seek to attack the fabulously valuable annual Manila-bound convoy as it sailed southwards along the western coast of the Americas. It did this in order to avail itself of the trade winds that blew westwards across the Pacific.

Two vessels, The Duke and The Duchess, were soon fitted out. The syndicate took precautions with regard to the undertaking's command. Firstly, it appointed double the usual number of officers. Secondly, Dampier's controversial reputation prompted the investors not to put him in charge of the enterprise. Instead, they selected Woodes Rogers, who was one of their own number, his family being well-established members of the city's haute bourgeoisie. The Duchess's crew included as its Third Mate one Simon Hatley.

In summer 1708 the two craft set sail. Early the following year the ships called in at the Juan Fern ndez Islands. There, their crews discovered Selkirk, who had been a castaway for over four years. He was taken on-board the former vessel. Dampier held the man's seamanship in good regard. Therefore, Rogers appointed him to be the ship's Second Mate. Although the expedition had been going well, it was not without its internal tensions. In order to try to relieve these a degree, the Bristolian instituted a system by which each boat had a plunder manager present on the other in order to assess how much booty she was carrying.

In February 1709 Hatley transferred to The Duke in order to fulfil this role on behalf of the crew of The Duchess. As a result, for several weeks, he, Selkirk, and Dampier were all sailing upon the same vessel. The trio were to act as the prototypes for three of the principal creations of English literature.² In May Hatley was appointed to command one of the vessels that the expedition had captured. However, he lost contact with the rest of the flotilla. Lacking food and water, he made landfall. He and his crew were taken prisoner by the local authorities. They were sent to Lima. There, they discovered that their fellow inmates included Stradling.³

The main body of the expedition intercepted two Manila-bound vessels. The first of these it captured, while the second one was able to beat off its attack. The venture had succeeded in its objective. The participants then commenced their journey back to Europe. They travelled westwards, thus seeking to circumnavigate the globe. Their destination was London since the plunder would fetch the most there when auctioned off. On their final approach, the group did not sail through the English Channel. Rather, they navigated clockwise around the British Isles. They did this in order not to fall prey to the French privateers who were operating from the ports of northern France.

The War of the Spanish Succession was beginning to wind down. In 1710 Queen Anne had appointed Sir Robert Harley to be her first minister. She did this so that Britain could extricate herself from the conflict. However, in order that the country s negotiating position should not be undermined, he had to maintain her armed forces upon a war footing. This was very expensive to do and was only possible with the support of City of London-based financiers. Many of these men had developed close associations with the politicians who had been ousted to make way for the knight and his associates. He was presented with a way out of his predicament when a group of money men, who had not been part of the previous arrangement, offered to set up the South Sea Company as a means of helping to service the government's finances.

The purported purpose of the enterprise was to take up the trading opportunities that it was widely assumed Britain would be granted by Spain at the conclusion of the upcoming peace negotiations. That The Duke and her associates had captured a Manila vessel and circumnavigated the world would have made them objects of considerable interest but for them to arrive as the newly established Company had become the talk of London made them of even greater interest than they would have been had it not.

Rogers wrote an account of the expedition. This was published as A Cruising Voyage Round The World (1712). The book included a description of the discovery of Selkirk upon one of the Juan Fern ndez Islands. The following year the Peace of Utrecht ended Britain's participation in the war against France and Spain. In 1714 the dying Anne dismissed the Earl of Oxford (as Harley had become) as her first minister. The Hanoverian dynasty acceded to the British throne. The peer found himself to be politically a non-person.⁴

Oxford s political lieutenants found that they had fallen under official opprobrium through their association with him. Among the outs were the writers Daniel Defoe and the Rev Jonathan Swift; the pair had written propaganda at the minister's behest. In parallel, Defoe had become associated with the publisher Samuel Keimer,⁵ who had encouraged him to become more creative in his attitude towards his writing. The results had been well-received. Defoe's attitude towards maritime literature was highly condescending, however, he had been struck by Rogers's account of Selkirk's stranding.

Utrecht had not ended the underlying international tensions. Legally, Spain and Austria-Hungary were still in a state of war with one another. Madrid was unhappy with how she had been treated and was intent upon reasserting her influence within the Western Mediterranean region. As the 1710s progressed it became apparent that there was likely to be another conflict.

Edward Hughes had had a successful career as a Royal Navy officer. His share of the profits from captured enemy vessels had made him a wealthy man. He decided to orchestrate a privateering expedition against Spain's interests in the New World. It was intended that its ships would have Letters of Marque that would be issued by the government of the Austrian Netherlands.⁶ The Speedwell and The Success were fitted out for the venture.

Hughes appointed his old service colleague George Shelvocke to lead the expedition. The latter was a very able navigator who had never had the former's good luck. He had spent the years in the peace's wake in a state of near destitution. His appointment seems to have affected his judgement and he soon engaged in a number of actions that antagonised his employers. As a result, Clipperton was placed in charge of the expedition and Shelvocke was demoted to command The Speedwell, the smaller of the two vessels. On it, his Second Captain was Hatley. The anticipated Anglo-Spanish war finally broke out at the end of 1718.⁷ Therefore, when, a couple of months later, the expedition set sail, it did so with British Letters of Marque.

In 1719 Defoe's book Robinson Crusoe was published. The work was sated with its author's own religious and personal experiences. In essence, the volume was about the acceptance of Providence. It found a receptive audience and proved to be a commercial success. Appreciating the bounty with which fate had furnished him, the writer proceeded to produce a number of other Crusoe-themed works. The first of these appeared within the year.⁸ Swift found himself to be envious of Defoe s success. The two men had shared a distaste for accounts of long-distance voyages. The success of Crusoe induced the Dean to overcome this prejudice and seek to ape his rival.

As Swift started to compose his new work, The Success and The Speedwell sailed southwards on the Atlantic. Shelvocke was one of the wiliest sea dogs who had ever set out from Britain's shores. The miscalculation that had caused him to lose the command of the overall expedition was not going to recur. During the voyage, he systematically optimised for his own gain every situation that he could. The first thing he did was to make sure that The Speedwell lost contact with The Success. Upon occasion, he undermined his own immediate, tactical interests in the service of advancing his longer-term, strategic ones. It is highly probable that he orchestrated two mutinies against himself. This was probably done so that the vessel s written terms of association could be altered as part of the process of bringing each of the disorders to a negotiated end. The de facto compound effect of these changes was to furnish him with a more pliable legal base for promoting his own concerns against those of Hughes and the venture's other backers.

On the voyage across the Atlantic, Shelvocke had concluded that Hatley was insufficiently pliable to his will and so had taken against him. Cape Horn was rounded. In early 1720 the underling was given the command of The Mercury, a vessel that had been captured. This became separated from The Speedwell and was taken at sea by a Spanish craft. Hatley ended up being incarcerated in Lima a second time.

A couple of months later The Speedwell was wrecked in strange circumstances on one of the Juan Fern ndez Islands. There is a strong possibility that Shelvocke was responsible for this mishap . The wreckage was cannibalised and a new, smaller vessel was constructed. With this, the sailors soon proved to be able to seize a larger one, which they renamed The Happy Return.

By happenstance, in early 1721 Shelvocke re-encountered Clipperton at sea. For a while, their two craft cruised together in search of a Manila vessel. They did not meet with one. The Success s captain concluded that it would be in his own best interests, with regard to his future dealings with the expedition's investors, if he dissociated himself from the scheming old salt. Their ships parted. The latter continued to act as a privateer until he learned that peace had been re-established between Britain and Spain.

Shelvocke then sailed westwards across the Pacific. At Canton, he sold his vessel. The lion's share of the money that was raised was supposedly accounted for by harbour dues . He then secured berths for himself and his men on-board a ship that was returning to London. They arrived back in the city during the summer of 1722. The captain was accompanied by less than a sixth of The Speedwell's original 100-strong complement.

Shelvocke faced the hostility of Hughes. The guile that the former had deployed at sea continued to be applied. A legal action was launched against him in the names of the venture's backers. The returnee, probably through the judicious use of bribery, managed to persuade two of the plaintiffs to state that they no longer believed that there was a case to be answered. As a result, the action against him ground to a halt. Thereby, the old sea dog was rendered immune from future suits. Contemporaries believed that thereby he had succeeded in hoarding a fortune.

Hatley was released from prison in Lima. He returned to London. The last that is known of him is a report that he was planning to sail to Jamaica. Thereafter, he disappeared from the historical record.

The manuscript that Swift had been composing was based upon a fantastical, multi-author work that he had contributed to in the early 1710s. This was rewritten through the prism of Dampier's Voyage Round The World. The disappointments that the Dean had met with during his political and clerical lives had jaded his worldview. The privateer was someone whom he loathed. He recognised that, for all of the sailor s talents, achievements, and sophistication, the man had been someone who had been prepared to use violence to advance his own material interests. Gulliver's Travels was published in 1726. Like Robinson Crusoe before it, the book proved to be a popular success.

1726 also saw the issuing of Shelvocke's A Voyage Round The World. In part the volume sought to promote its author by undermining the reputations of his crew members. As part of an attempt to portray Hatley as being a morose individual, an incident was described in which the man had shot an albatross. Purportedly, this had been done in an attempt to change the direction from which the wind had been blowing. The episode seems to have happened while The Speedwell had been seeking to make her way around Cape Horn. The tome had modest sales in the years that immediately followed its publication. However, it proved to have durability and was still being read decades later.

In 1798 the poet William Wordsworth and the writer Samuel Taylor Coleridge set out to compose a joint poem that they provisionally entitled The Wanderings of Cain. As the work progressed, it became apparent that it was Coleridge's subject. His friend withdrew from the project but as he did so he suggested the albatross incident in A Voyage. Cain became the Ancient Mariner and his brother Abel the albatross. The seabird's killing enables the work to enter into a Gothic, supernatural realm. When, on the voyage, Hatley had shot the bird there had been no taboo about killing albatrosses. They had been regarded by seamen as being a source of fresh meat. The prohibition was invented by Coleridge. The Ancient Mariner was published as part of the two men's Lyrical Ballads (1798) collection.

Location: The Marine Coffee House, Birchin Lane, EC3V 9DJ. The booty from The Duke and The Duchess was disposed of in a series of auctions that held at the (now gone) coffee house. (blue, yellow)

Coleman Street, EC2R 5EH. Dampier died in a house on the street in 1715. (red, turquoise)

Ropemaker Street, EC2Y 9AS. Where Defoe died. (blue, orange)

¹. In the late 17^thC there occurred a trans-European fashion for books about long-distance maritime voyages. This started in The Netherlands. The first instance of one being published in English had been Basil Ringrose's Buccaneers of America (1685). This was an account an expedition that a party of pirates had made across the Isthmus of Darien, the narrowest portion of Central America.

². Robert Fowke The Real Ancient Mariner: Pirates and Poesy On The South Sea Travelbrief Publications (2010) 89. The association of Dampier (Gulliver) and Selkirk (Crusoe) with the vessel was well-known. It is Mr Fowke s achievement to have identified the presence of Hatley (the Ancient Mariner) on her as well.

³. Subsequently, Stradling was to escape. He was to be recaptured. However, he was to break out a second time. He was to make his way to France, where he was to be incarcerated for a third time. He escaped again and made his way to the Channel Islands, from where he was able to return to Britain.

⁴. The British seamen who were in prison in Lima were released.

⁵. Keimer was a member of the millenarian French Prophets sect. Following his association with Defoe, he cannot be found in the historical record for several years. In 1723 he reappears in Philadelphia. There, he hired Benjamin Franklin as a journeyman printer. The men s association did not prove to be a durable one, however, Franklin was to retain a respect for Keimer's skills both as a publisher and as a bookseller, if not as a printer.

⁶. The Austrian Netherlands was a group of small, associated states that occupied the territory that is now largely covered by Belgium.

⁷. The War of the Quadruple Alliance.

⁸. In 1721 Selkirk died from disease on-board the H.M.S. Weymouth while the vessel was serving off the West African coast.

David Backhouse 2024