THE AFFAIR OF THE VLIEGENDE HERT – PART 3

(This post is a continuation of The Affair of the Vliegende Hert – Parts 1 & 2. If you haven’t done so already, it’s best to read those posts before continuing on here.)

The follow-up letter that the gentlemen of the States General wrote to the Moroccan Sultan Moulay Zaydan on behalf of the owners/backers of the Vliegende Hert was dated May 21, 1627. This was almost two years after Moulay Zaydan’s original response. The cause of the delay is not clear. From the tone of the States-General’s response, though, it seems as if Moulay Zaydan’s letter might have taken a very long time to reach the Netherlands.

Here is the relevant section of the letter:

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We have received Your Majesty’s letter. Your Majesty has deigned to make an inquiry, upon our recommendation, concerning the vessel the Vliegende Hert, which has been left by Captain Jan Jansz. Ververen in the hands of the Caïd of Sale until the ship’s owners can come to claim it. We thank Your Majesty very much.

However, as the said letter also indicates, the Caïd refuses to return the said vessel unless he is reimbursed for the costs incurred in preparing it for a sea voyage. Having received a new request from the shipowners to represent them, we do not feel we can refuse, and so we must insist to Your Majesty that the pretensions of the Caïd are, in our opinion, totally unfounded. It was not, indeed, for the needs of the ship that he equipped it, as the ship could very well lie moored in the harbor awaiting the arrival of the shipowners without requiring such expenditure. Instead, it was done with the voyage he wished to make in mind, a voyage from which he alone profited.

That is why we request Your Majesty to support the shipowners’ rights and to order that the ship, or its value, be returned and that the said shipowners be discharged of all such expenditures that have not been made in their interest. We are quite ready to repay this service to Your Majesty.

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If the States General ever received a response form Moulay Zaydan, it has no survived. It seems likely that they never received a response, though, because their next letter of complaint, dated September 3, 1627 (three months later), was addressed directly to “the Caïd of Salé, and to his Admiral.”

There was, of course, no practical way to bring the raïs who had taken the Vliegende Hert on a corsair cruise and billed the shipowners for it “before the courts.” Indeed, which courts, exactly, would these have been? However, the States-General (or, more likely, the owners/backers) were apparently still not ready to consider a compromise solution. They focused instead on the ethics of their claim for restitution:

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Some time ago, at the request of the shipowners of the Vliegende Hert, the ship that Captain Jan Jansen Ververen left in your hands, we requested His Royal Highness, His Majesty of Morocco, to take the necessary measures for the said vessel to be restored to the aforesaid shipowners. It has pleased His Majesty to reply that you have demanded the reimbursement of the expenses which have been incurred to prepare the vessel for the sea. We cannot but respond to His majesty, and to you, that, in our opinion, this request is unfounded, because, as the aforementioned shipowners say, it was not for them that you refitted the ship for a sea voyage, but for yourselves, and that you took the profit from the trip.

That is why we ask you not to impose unfairly upon the said shipowners the expenses which have not been incurred by them, but to restore to them the said vessel, or its full value, as is only fair and reasonable.

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The above letter is the final one in the series of documents that have survived relating to the affair of the Vliegende Hert. So we do not know how—or if—the affair was eventually resolved. It isn’t hard to guess how events transpired, though.

Salé at this time, remember, was a corsair capital—that is, a pirate capital. Trying to employ an ethical argument, as the gentlemen of the States General did, to convince a pirate captain to give up a ship he had recently acquired (a ship originally outfitted for piracy and a ship he had acquire for free) seems rather like trying to talk an African lioness into relinquishing an antelope she has just killed.

Here is how things likely worked out.

Once Captain Jan Jansen Ververen had absconded with his ill-gotten fortune and the Vliegende Hert lay abandoned in the Salé harbor, the Caïd went to see the Admiral of Salé. In this case, the term ‘Admiral’ was not a nautical one. The Salé ‘Admiral’ didn’t command the fleet of Salé corsair ships out at sea. Rather, he was a combination Harbor Master and Customs Official, and he also sat in on the deliberations of the Ruling Council of the city—which is how the Caïd and he would have known each other.

The Salé Admiral was not merely a bureaucratic city official, though; he was also a corsair captain.

So the Caïd likely went to him and said something like the following: “There’s this Dutch privateer ship just sitting in the harbor, doing nothing. I can arrange for you to have possession of it so you can take it out for a corsair cruise—and we can split the profits.”

How could the Admiral resist an offer like that? Not only a free ship, but a free Dutch privateer ship, specially equipped for piracy.

So the Admiral of Salé was the raïs who took the Vliegende Hert out corsairing.

It’s impossible to know which of them—the Caïd or the Admiral—came up with the idea of charging the Dutch for the cost of equipping the Vliegende Hert for the corsair cruise. Such brazen chutzpah was not uncommon, though. These were, after all, pirates—men who could be utterly ruthless when circumstances called for it, and whose daily lives must have been filled with callous opportunism.

Since the Admiral of Salé had been out in the Vliegende Hert on a corsair expedition during the summer of 1625, and since the ship still hadn’t been returned two years later in the spring of 1627, it is likely that he commanded the Vliegende Hert for several summers worth of corsair expeditions (corsairing was a summer occupation in Salé)—probably splitting the profits from at least some of those expeditions with the Caïd.

It is highly unlikely that either man ever had any serious intention of returning the Vliegende Hert to its rightful owners.

Such was life in the turbulent seventeenth century.

The story of the Vliegende Hert is interesting enough in its own right, but it also provides us with something quite unique. Remember what Moulay Zaydan wrote in his letter to the States General:

“The Caïd saw fit to ask Our High Lordship’s authorization to sail the ship under command of some raïs, which was granted. The raïs so authorized proceeded to repair the ship and to provision it with all that was necessary. The costs of these repairs reached the approximate figure of twenty thousand ounces, as you can see by examining the enclosed receipt written by the raïs himself.”

That “receipt written by the raïs himself” is a unique document. It lists the complete, itemized cost of equipping a ship for a corsair expedition.

To see this complete receipt, go to The Affair of the Vliegende Hert – Part 4.

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For those who may be interested, the letters quoted in these posts can be found in Les sources inédites de l’histoire du Maroc, première séries, dynastie Saadienne: archives et bibliothèques des Pays-Bas, tome IV (The Unpublished Sources of Moroccan History, First Series, Saadian Dynasty, Archives and Libraries of the Netherlands, Volume 4).

Les sources inédites, première séries is an invaluable, multi-volume series in which is collected virtually every hand-written letter or report ever composed by any European concerning Morocco during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The editor, Henry de Castries, sent a hoard of indefatigable scholars to libraries and archives across Europe to troll through their contents and carefully transcribe everything relevant they found—a monumental undertaking. He then published it all in a series of well-organized volumes over a number of years in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The contents of Les sources inédites are all rendered into French from their original languages. The English translations in these posts are my own.

The November 4, 1624, letter from the States-General of the Netherlands to Sultan Moulay Zaydan can be found in SIHM P-B 4, pp. 31-3.

Moulay Zaydan’s July 25, 1625 reply to the Sates-General can be found in SIHM P-B 4, pp. 135-136.

The States General’s May 21, 1627 letter to Moulay Zaydan can be found in SIHM P-B 4, pp. 158-59.

The States General’s September 3, 1627 letter “the Caïd of Salé and to his Admiral” can be found in SIHM P-B 4, pp. 175-76.