The Story of the American Merchant Marine. John Randolph Spears

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СКАЧАТЬ Edward Randolph was sent over especially "Impowered" to prevent "Irregular Trade," and the letters he wrote to the "Lords Commissioners of the Council of Trade and Plantations"^[1] are full of references to the ways of the smugglers. Other letters of the period, especially those of Governor Bellomont, are similarly interesting.

      At first the evasions were quite open. It is related that Skipper Clæs Bret loaded the ship De Sterre in the Chesapeake "in the name of an English skipper," and sent her to the Island of Jersey. Virginia officials must have aided this transaction. Weeden quotes from the Massachusetts archives the story of another Dutch skipper whose ship was seized because he "broake his word to the Governor in not clearing his ship to belong to the English." Governor Andros, who tried to enforce the laws, complained because there were "noe Custom houses," and because the "Governor of Massachusetts gives clearings, certificates and passes for every particular thing from thence to New York" without inquiring whether these things had been lawfully imported into Massachusetts.

      The king's instructions to Governor Dongan tell him how "to prevent the acceptance of forged Cockets (which hath been practiced to our great prejudice)." A cocket is a document given by a customs officer to a merchant as a certificate that the goods have been entered according to law. Randolph reported (April, 1698) that he had asked the Governor of Pennsylvania "to appoint an Attorney Generall to prosecute" certain men who had aided in an evasion of the laws, "but he did nothing in it." In the same year Randolph was arrested in New York by aggrieved merchants because he had, as he alleges, seized a smuggler in Virginia, and although his case seems now to have been according to law, Governor Bellomont had much difficulty in getting him out of jail. No one sympathized with a revenue official.

      Before Bellomont's time no official except Governor Andros had tried to enforce the navigation acts. When Bellomont took office, he found all New York opposing him in his efforts to enforce them. When the ship Fortune, Captain Thomas Moston, came to port, bringing cargo worth £20,000 direct from Madagascar (where it had been purchased of a gang of pirates), and Bellomont asked Collector of Customs Chidley Brooks to seize her, he replied that "it was none of his business, but belonged to a Man of Warr; that he had no boat; and other excuses; and when I gave him positive commands to do it, which he could not avoid, yet his delay of four days" gave the smugglers time to unload and conceal all of the cargo except a part estimated to be worth £1000. Thus runs one of Bellomont's letters. He also acknowledged that several cargoes had already been smuggled in without his learning the fact until it was too late to intercept them.

      In Boston, as Bellomont learned, there were various ways of smuggling. "When ships come in the masters swear to their manifests; that is, they swear to the number of parcels they bring, but the contents unknown; then the merchant comes and produces an invoice, and whether true or false is left to his ingenuity."

      "If the merchants of Boston be minded to run their goods," he continues, "there's nothing to hinder them. Mr. Brenton, the Collector is absent and has been these two years; his deputy is a merchant; the two waiters keep public houses, and besides that, that coast is naturall shap'd and cut out to favour unlawful trade." It was a "common thing to unload their ships at Cape Ann and bring their goods to Boston in wood boats." If that were thought too expensive the goods could be "run" within the city, where there were "63 wharfs," or in Charlestown, where there were fourteen more, all unguarded. French and Spanish ships were bringing many goods to Newfoundland and the ports of Canada, where they met New England ships ready to "swap" cargoes. There was lively trade carried directly to the ports of Canada and to the French and Spanish ports of the West Indies.

      After returning to New York from Boston, Bellomont wrote that "Nassaw alias Long Island" was notorious for smugglers and pirates. "There are four towns that make it their daily practice to receive ships and sloops with all sorts of merchandise, tho' they be not allowed ports." They were "so lawless and desperate a people" that the governor could "get no honest man" to go among them to collect the revenue. From Long Island the goods were brought to New York by wagons and small boats. "There is a town called Stamford in Connecticut colony" where "one Major Selleck lives who has a warehouse close to the Sound. … That man does us great mischief with his warehouse for he receives abundance of goods, and the merchants afterwards take their opportunity of running them into this town." During Bellomont's time Selleck's warehouse was the favorite resort of the merchants doing business with the Madagascar pirates. Selleck had £10,000 worth of the goods which Captain Kidd brought from the East.

      Turning now to the stories of the pirates, we read that when one Captain Cromwell, a pirate with three ships, manned by eighty men, came to Plymouth in 1646, and remained five or six weeks with the Pilgrims, Governor Bradley referred to the visit in these words:—

      "They spente and scattered a great deal of money among ye people, and yet more, sine, than money."

      The statement that the Pilgrims (of all others!) entertained the pirates so well as to detain them for weeks in the harbor is somewhat shocking to one not fully acquainted with the conditions of commerce in that period. The facts regarding the pirates seem worth, therefore, some consideration.

      While pirates were found upon the ocean as soon as other ships in the early history of the world, some of the piracy affecting the early commerce of the colonies grew out of a curious system of private reprisals that was previously countenanced by European governments. Thus, when the Inquisition in the Canary Islands seized the property of Andrew Barker, an Englishman, in 1576, and he was unable to obtain redress from any Spanish authority, he, with the permission of his government, "fitted out two barks to revenge himself." He captured enough Spanish merchantmen to recoup his loss with interest. His commission was called a letter of marque and reprisal.

      Then recall the system of forcing trade that was practised in the West Indies. Sir John Hawkins sold slaves to the Spanish at the muzzles of his guns. Eventually Sir John's fleet was "bottled up" in Vera Cruz by a Spanish squadron and destroyed. Drake was one of the men ruined by this act of Spanish "perfidy," and to recoup his losses he began the series of raids by which he acquired fortune and a title.

      Reprisals led to wanton aggressions, like those of the buccaneers, and wanton aggressions produced reprisals again. All governments encouraged their merchantmen to rob those of rival peoples as a means of promoting commerce, just as the warring fur traders on the American frontier were encouraged in their fights waged to the same end.

       The encouragement of reprisals was at all times more or less covert. In war times the armed merchantmen were openly commissioned and sent afloat not only to prey upon the ships of the enemy but upon those of neutral powers as well. It was the theory of all statesmen that the best way to encourage the shipping of one nation was to injure as much as possible, and by all means, the shipping of all rivals. As late as the end of the eighteenth century the Barbary pirates were subsidized by some governments to encourage them to prey upon the shipping of rivals.

      At one time the privateer captain was the judge of the offending of the neutral. Later, when privateers were obliged to carry captured ships before a court of admiralty, the difference between the robbery as committed by the privateer and the confiscation ordered by the court was found only in the course of procedure.

      A theorist here and there denounced the systems of reprisals and privateering. Governor Bradford was worried somewhat by the doings of Cromwell's men. Government officials denounced as pirates the privateers who smuggled in goods instead of bringing them in openly and paying the usual fees and duties. But the state of civilization warranted the Pilgrims in the warmth of the reception they gave to the pirates.

      How far the piratical cruisers influenced the American merchant marine is not definitely told in the documents, but it is certain that damage was inflicted. We get a glimpse of a vicious raid in the story of a French pirate (perhaps he had a commission, however) named Picor, who landed on Block Island in July, 1689. The pirates "remained in possession of the island, plundering the houses, and despoiling СКАЧАТЬ