[1302] State Papers, Dom., ccv, 54. Disborowe lent £5000, which he had succeeded in getting back; seven aldermen £19,500, of which £11,700 still remained.
[1303] Add. MSS., 22,546, f. 185, and 18,986, f. 176.
[1304] The methods of these gentlemen were sometimes directly ancestral to those of their successors in the prize courts of the beginning of this century. In one case a ship was condemned and its cargo sold, apparently on their own sole authority; the Admiralty Court ordered restitution, and then the Commissioners presented a bill of £2000 for expenses (State Papers, Dom., 26th Feb. 1655). A contemporary wrote, ‘It was nothing for ordinary proctors in the Admiralty to get £4000 or £5000 a year by cozening the state in their prizes till your petitioner by his discovery to the Council of State spoiled their trade for a great part of it,’ (T. Violet, A True Narrative, etc., Lond. 1659, p. 8).
[1305] State Papers, Dom., xc, 2.
[1306] Ibid., 18th March 1654.
[1307] Resolutions at a Council of War on board the Swiftsure: The humble Petition of the Seamen belonging to the Ships of the Commonwealth. These two broadsides are in the British Museum under the press mark 669 f. 19, Nos. 32 and 33, ‘Great Britain and Ireland—Navy.’
[1308] State Papers, Dom., lxxvi, 81; 1645 (? Oct.).
[1309] State Papers, Dom., clxxiii, 26th Oct. 1657; Morris to Navy Commissioners.
[1310] Add. MSS., 9304, f. 129. The Sapphire seems to have been the crack cruiser of her time. The contrast between that which, with all its faults, was a strong administration, morally stimulating to officers and men, and the enervating Stewart régime is illustrated in the life and death—if the expression be permitted—of this ship, and exemplified in the grim entry in the burial register of St Nicholas, Deptford, under date of 26th Aug. 1670, ‘Capt. John Pearse and Lieut. Logan shot to death for loosing ye Saphier cowardly.’
[1311] State Papers, Dom., clxxxii, 8; 6th July 1658.