[72]. Lord Byron would have us believe that the Corsair’s life was a dainty one; but of all the seafaring classes, none “roughed it” more thoroughly than the pirate and privateersman. Dampier says grimly, “’Tis usual with seamen in those parts to sleep on deck, especially for privateers; among whom I made these observations. In privateers, especially when we are at anchor, the deck is spread with mats, to lie on each night. Every man has one, some two; and this, with a pillow for the head, and a rug for a covering, is all the bedding that is necessary for men of that employ.” (Dampier’s “Voyages,” vol. ii., 1699.) Some curious descriptions of the habits and appearance of the typical pirate of the last century will be found in “A New Account of Guinea and the Slave Trade,” written by Captain William Snelgrave, and published in 1754. This man was taken by pirates during a voyage to the coast of Guinea in 1718. “There was not in the cabbin,” says he, “either chair or anything else to sit upon; for they always keep a clear ship ready for an engagement; so a carpet was spread on the deck, upon which we sat down cross-legg’d.” When night came the captain was asked to provide Snelgrave with a hammock, “for it seems every one lay rough, as they called it, that is, on the deck, the captain himself not being allowed a bed.” He gives us a taste of their manners. “I got into the hammock, though I could not sleep in my melancholy circumstances. Moreover, the execrable oaths and blasphemies I heard among the ship’s company, shocked me to such a degree, that in Hell itself I thought there could not be worse; for though many seafaring men are given to swearing and taking God’s name in vain, yet I could not have imagined human nature could ever so far degenerate as to talk in the manner those abandoned wretches did.” I find a formidable figure in this portrait. “As soon as I had done answering the captain’s questions, a tall man, with four pistols in his girdle and a broadsword in his hand came to me on the quarter-deck!”
It always seems to be the haughty Don who, in the old stories, yields Jack the rich booties. Here, for example, is a passage from the “Annual Register” of 1762: “The Hermione, a Spanish register ship, which left Lima the 6th of January, bound for Cadiz, was taken the 21st of May off Cape St. Vincent, by three English frigates, and carried into Gibraltar. Her cargo is said to consist of near twelve millions of money, registered, and the unregistered to be likewise very considerable, besides two thousand serons of cocoa, and a great deal of other valuable merchandize.” Take these items from her papers: One thousand one hundred and ninety-three quintals of tin—a quintal, I may say, is one hundred pounds—two millions two hundred and seventy-six thousand seven hundred and fifteen dollars in silver and gold, coined; twenty-five arobes of alpaca wool, and five thousand two hundred and forty-three arobes of cocoa. A man did not need more than one capture after this pattern to settle him as a fine old English gentleman, and to qualify him to start a noble family. The mere rumour of such a haul as this would suffice, in those fighting days, to cover the seas with privateers.
Another paragraph, one year later: “Five waggon loads of money, escorted by a party of soldiers, were lately brought to the Bank from Portsmouth, by the Rippon, man-of-war, from the Havannah.” In these piping times of peace one is apt to forget how very well the mariner did in the years when his cutlass was never out of his hand. The value of the prize-goods taken at the Havannah in 1763 amounted to £154,855 10s. 11d., of which the admiral took nearly £90,000, the commodore £17,206, captains £1125 each, and the lieutenants £86 1s. each. And the privateerman fared as well as the naval officer. Not long after the Centurion took the Manila ship, two privateers, the Ranger, of Bristol, and the Amazon, of Liverpool, captured the Sancte Ineas, a Spanish man-of-war, bound from Manila to Cadiz, laden with gold, silver, silk, coffee, china, cochineal, and indigo, and declared to be the richest prize taken since the galleon by Admiral Anson. All through the story, from Elizabeth to the beginning of this century, you hear of the privateers arriving with rich prizes. “Letters from Fowey state the arrival there of the Lord Middleton, richly laden with cocoa, indigo, coffee, quicksilver, valued at £45,000, taken by the Maria privateer, of this port.” “Came in the Earl St. Vincent, fourteen guns, Captain Richards, privateer, of this port, with the New Harmony of Altona, from Smyrna to Amsterdam, with cargo valued at £80,000.” And so on by scores.
There were Customs’ seizures, too, such as we never hear the like of now. You read of an officer of Excise at Falmouth seizing on board a ship twenty-seven thousand five hundred and twenty-nine pounds of tea, and nine thousand gallons of brandy! “The officer by this gets £3000. It is the greatest seizure of tea ever known.” Or, “Arrived, the Providence, smuggling lugger, of Palferro, with nine hundred and seventy ankers of brandy and thirteen tons of tobacco, sent in by l’Oiseau, of thirty-six guns, Captain Linzee.” The old reports teem with examples of this kind.
Yet, spite of rich prizes, smuggling captures, and the like, Jack was always hard up, and by impecuniosity in a chronic state of being “forced from home and all its pleasures.” There was alive in 1790 an old man, one John Holmes, the only survivor of the crew who accompanied Anson round the world. He was in the most distressing poverty. He would tell the story of the fight between the Centurion and the galleon, and of the prize-money that fell to the men’s shares; but when asked what he had done with the substantial sum which had come to him, his answer was, “Alas! sir, I was a sailor.” Sir George Rooke put it more nobly, if less pathetically. When he was making his will, some friends who were present expressed their surprise that he had not more to bequeath. “I do not leave much,” answered the old heart of oak, “but what I do leave was honestly acquired; it never cost a sailor a tear or my country a farthing.”
The wonder is that ships went so richly laden in those war times. If it was thought proper to convoy vessels of comparatively small value, it was surely desirable to guard against the cruisers and the privateers the vast accumulations of money and plate which were to be met with in Spanish, French, and Dutch bottoms in the corsair-infested Narrow Seas, in Biscayan parallels, and in the wide Pacific Ocean. Anson’s galleon was, indeed, a powerful ship for those times, yet she proved no match for the slender and crippled company of men who attacked her. Had she been convoyed, had she been in company with other vessels of her nation, the British commodore must have languished in vain for the immense treasure in her. The need of a guard, an auxiliary, of some protection to supplement her own powder and shot seems to us, gazing backwards with clear perception of the issues which followed, essential to the safety of the plate or treasure ship in times when it would appear that the stoutest-hearted of Spanish or French captains were unable to rally their men when the English colours at the masthead acquainted them with the nationality of the foe. For example: On November 6, 1799, there arrived at Dartmouth a Spanish ship, of six hundred tons burden, named the N.S. de Piedat, prize to a privateer called the Dart. She mounted sixteen carriage guns, carried seventy men, and was fitted up for close quarters, that is to say, she was furnished with “barricadoes” as a refuge for her crew in case of being boarded. She struck to the privateer, however, after firing only two guns, though the Englishmen mounted but fourteen four-pounders. Nevertheless, seventy seamen—Spanish sailors—in a ship of six hundred tons seem a feeble company to send along with such wealth as lay in the N.S. de Piedat’s hold. Here is her value: one hundred and forty-two thousand one hundred and seventeen silver dollars, thirty-eight thousand nine hundred and forty-nine dollars in gold doubloons, thirty-one ingots of gold, five ingots of silver, forty-two bales of fine beaver, twenty-one thousand and sixty-one hides in the hair, three bales of fine wool, one bale of fine fur. The rest of the cargo, exclusive of the gold and silver, was valued at £80,000. The Dart carried sixty seamen. What conceivable chance would seventy Spaniards have against such a crew as the Dart could oppose to them—fellows whose living depended upon plunder, and who could almost count upon the enemy’s striking after the first hail or after the first two shots? It was a very cosy haul for the Dart’s people. Small wonder that the privateer should have formed an abounding ocean element, when the character of the prey and the quality of the baggings are considered. “Eight ships long expected from New Spain, and another from Buenos Ayres, arrived at Cadiz the 21st of this month. The cargoes of these ships are valued at eleven millions of dollars, of which the registered gold and silver amount to near nine millions.” Such paragraphs are again and again to be met with in the news sheets of old times.
And depend upon it, if the privateersman’s mouth watered over such items of intelligence, they were also read with a swelling heart by the King’s Navy man. Prize-money is sweet, and it ought to be sweet, for no reward is more gloriously and heroically earned. What is there in cash—be it prompt or otherwise—to compensate a man for a leg or an eye? “Went down into the Sound, La Nymphe, of thirty-six guns, Captain Douglas. She received this afternoon nearly £30,000 prize-money, and sailed directly on a cruise.” How agreeable this is to read, though it is all over, years and years ago! In fancy I behold the jolly red faces of those lively salts, pigtails on back, and quids standing high under their cheekbones, sheeting home the Nymphe’s topsails, their hearts full of the Sukes and Sals who have faded out with the receding shore, and their minds busy with dreams of the dollars this new cruise shall tassel their pocket-handkerchiefs with. “The great sales for prize-goods captured in different vessels of the enemy by our cruisers and sent in here (Plymouth) began this day. The prize-vessels and goods of different kinds fetched great prices, and were bought up with avidity by purchasers from London, Liverpool, Bristol, Falmouth, Exeter, etc., much to the satisfaction of the captors.” Much to the satisfaction of the captors! The fancy leaps to the sound of these century-old words. Hamoaze is full of prizes—the brilliant victor with the proud St. George’s Cross at her peak strains lightly at her hempen cable in the Sound, her yards braced to a hair, the white line of hammock cloths crowning her defences, her tompioned guns grinning like muzzled mastiffs through her ports, the red-coats of marines dotting her almond-white decks, an epaulet or two flashing aft, and the sale proceeding ashore “much to the satisfaction of the captors.” Ay, Jack’s grin, though one, two, or three centuries old, is a living thing yet. The trophies of an amazing naval history are wreathed around his purple smile. What, after all, was Britannia’s true Archimedean lever but the mariner’s pigtail; and what the fulcrum but the mountain of treasure from which the sailor gathered his little pocketful under the name of Prize Money?
PECULIARITIES OF RIG.
I had been talking with an old seaman about the races between an English and an American yacht. My companion was a man who had spent the greater part of his life at sea, and was a sailor in the sense that includes not only smartness, alertness, and skill in those duties expected of seamen, but thorough knowledge of all that concerns ships, both in the fabrics of their hulls, and in their masts, yards, rigging, and canvas. He said to me that he was not sorry the Yankee had beaten the Englishman, because it might cause yachtsmen to see that beam must still be regarded as a condition of speed, and that the notion that swiftness was to be obtained by a shape that answered to Euclid’s definition of a line had been carried considerably too far. One thing leading to another, he spoke of schooner yachts, and said that, so far as racing was concerned, he fancied that the schooner rig was gradually sliding out of date.