Logo DBNL
Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden. Deel 92 (1977)

Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden. Deel 92

(1977)– [tijdschrift] Bijdragen en Mededeelingen van het Historisch Genootschap–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende

The North Sea in Wartime (1688-1713)
J.S. Bromley*

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

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

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 1693-1695. What figures we have for English ports show a rather different pattern: a truly

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

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 Flekkrø (‘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 avocatoria 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.

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

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 97, 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,

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 entrepôt 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 débâcle of 1710 in the North, it is true, Norway's (and especially Bergen's)

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, Jørgen thor Møhlen'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, Pallacios, Samuel Teixeira, Jacob Abensoer... Pallacios 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 Jessen, 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 supose par une obligation simulée qu'il a presté une somme à un marchand danois; cette somme est employée à 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 appartient et est pour son compte; mais avant que le chargement parte, il fait une rétrocession à 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 considération de ce qu'il luy a presté son nom, que pour l'engager à réclamer le vaisseau, en cas qu'il soit pris par les corsaires françois.

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 of 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 indicate38., there

was room for the Scandinavians - until the great débâcle 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

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 facie 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-

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

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

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 Resolutiën’ - 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

court at Middelburg added to its sins by doing the same68.. Some cargoes to France had a British taint, but these were usually found in bona fide (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

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 l'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

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

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 be employed both as Convoys and Cruizers, and not to be taken therefrom by any other service84..

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

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 traffic (not foregetting 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

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 entrepôt 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

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 were99., 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 £ 2,000,000100.. 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 ship-

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

French corsairs in the North Sea increased again in 1710-1711106.. 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 commissioned107..

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

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, to the 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

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

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

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 refit119.. 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 dépositaires (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..

Although the majority are described as ‘marchands’ 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 Ruyter. 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 Zee-

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.


Vorige Volgende

Over dit hoofdstuk/artikel

auteurs