The outfit of this voyage amounted to £15,000, and the gross profits to £170,000. One third of this, or £57,000, was divided among the officers and seamen. In view of this enormous return for a two years' voyage, we can hardly wonder at the fact that in this age, and during a long succeeding period, nearly all navigation was privateering, and that all ventures upon the seas appear to the reader of the present day as little better than the marauding excursions of corsairs and buccaneers.
This is the proper place for speaking of the famous Company formed for carrying on trade with the Spanish possessions in the Pacific, which received, upon its calamitous failure, the name of South Sea Bubble. This Company was formed, chartered, and prospered and fell, soon after the return of Rogers and Dampier. It originated in 1711, with Harley, the Lord Treasurer, his object being to improve public credit, and to provide for the payment of the floating debt, amounting to £10,000,000. He allured the nation's creditors by promising them the monopoly of trade with the Spanish coast in America. They greedily swallowed the glittering bait, and dreamed of El Dorado and Peruvian Golcondas. This spirit spread throughout the nation, and, in 1719, rose to a fever heat of speculation. Sir John Blunt, once a scrivener, now a prominent South Sea Director, conceived the idea of consolidating all the public funds into one, and made the proposal to the Government. The Bank of England and the South Sea Company displayed the utmost eagerness to outbid each other in the offers made for this magnificent privilege. The South Sea Company finally bid seven millions and a half, and the bill then passed the two houses of Parliament triumphantly. The Directors immediately opened a subscription of a million, and then a second, both of which were eagerly filled. Every engine was set at work to delude the public: mysterious rumors were rife of secret treasures in America, of overtures made to Stanhope to exchange Gibraltar for a diamond-mine in Peru, and of inexhaustible piles of wealth which were only waiting to be snatched up by the fortunate subscribers to the South Sea stock. The Directors began to quote dividends of twenty, thirty, fifty per cent. They claimed that, being the only national creditor, they could soon dictate to Parliament and rule the country. The stock rose from one hundred and twenty-six to one thousand. The mania was universal,—statesmen, washerwomen, Churchmen, Dissenters, ladies of high and low degree, being all smitten alike.
Other bubbles were started by other companies, some of them for the most extravagant objects, such as The Company to make Salt Water Fresh, to Build Hospitals for Bastards, to Obtain Silver from Lead, to Extract Oil from the Seeds of Sunflowers, to Import Jackasses from Spain and thus improve the Breed of English Mules, to Trade in Human Hair, and for a multitude of other equally absurd purposes. The subscriptions thus opened amounted at one period to no less than three hundred millions sterling.
These projects, which rose rapidly one after another and danced in prismatic radiance before the public view, were regarded with jealous eyes by the South Sea Directors, who wished to have a monopoly of the trade in public credulity. They therefore applied for writs of "scire facias" against their managers, and, by showing them to be frauds, suppressed them. But in thus destroying the national confidence in bubbles generally they seriously undermined that enjoyed by their own. Distrust was now excited, and every one became anxious to convert his bonds into money; and then the enormous disproportion between the promises to pay on paper and the means to redeem in coin became evident to all. The stock fell at once, as the basis which sustained it was proved to be altogether imaginary. Thousands of families were reduced to beggary, and the rage, resentment, and disappointment were bitter and universal. The Company sank into nothingness as rapidly as it had risen to notoriety. Parliament passed a bill by which public confidence was in a measure restored, while the estates of the Directors and officers were confiscated and applied to the relief of the sufferers. The proposed commerce with the Spanish American provinces was naturally never opened, and the next expedition of the English to that quarter, so far from being a voyage for trade, was a very formidable excursion for plunder,—that of Lord Anson, in 1740. We shall refer to this at length in its proper place.
HAMMER HEAD SHARK.
THE EAGLE AND THE PIRATE.