THE AFFAIR OF THE VLIEGENDE HERT – PART 5

(This post is a continuation of The Affair of the Vliegende Hert – Parts 1, 2, 3, & 4. If you haven’t done so already, it’s best to read those posts before continuing on here.)

The total cost of refitting the Vliegende Hert, remember, was 1,869 Salé ducats. The question we’re going to address in this post is how much 1,869 ducats represented in the 1620s. To do that, we need to look at the relative value and buying power of Salé ducats (the currency used in Salé in the seventeenth century).

Seventeenth century currency is complicated. The various currencies in use at that time were not decimal. They derived directly from the monetary system established during Charlemagne the Great’s reign (at the end of the eighth and beginning of the ninth centuries). Carolingian currency consisted of livres, sous, and deniers. The Carolingian system was notional, though: it specified relative values rather than coins in circulation. The only Carolingian coins actually struck were silver deniers (pennies). The Carolingian livre (French for ‘pound’) literally referred to a pound weight. Out of that livre, 240 deniers (silver pennies) could be struck.

This is the origin of the eccentric ratio of traditional English coinage (1 pound = 20 shillings = 240 pence) and of other coinages of the time like the French (1 livre = 20 sou = 240 deniers) and Italian (1 lire = 20 = soldi = 240 denari).

We know the exchange rate between Salé ducats and English pounds in the 1620s: 1 Salé ducat equaled 8 English shillings.

So the total cost of outfitting the Vliegende Hert, in English pounds was just under £750 (1,869 ducats x 8 = 14,952 shillings = equals £743 12s).

It’s useful to know how much refitting the Vliegende Hert cost in English pounds because wages in seventeenth century England are fairly well documented. Farm laborers in England at the time earned about £8 to £10 a year, city laborers £10 to £14, skilled craftsmen £12 to £20. London wages were higher, £18 for laborers and £30 for skilled craftsmen. These are imprecise estimates, based on idealized 5‑day, 50‑week years, but they still provide a rough gauge with which to assess the relative cost of things.

The total cost of refitting the Vliegende Hert, then, was the equivalent of no less than 75 years’ wages for an ordinary farm laborer and nearly 23 years’ wages for a skilled London craftsman.

Serious money indeed.

Little wonder that the Barbary corsair raïs who acquired the Vliegende Hert tried to be reimbursed for his investment.

This brings us to a final question: How much booty and how many captives would a corsair captain need to take in order to turn a profit?

We can work this out by imagining an ordinary corsair cruise, one that was neither a failure nor a grand success.

Let’s say that a corsair expedition from Salé captured three merchant ships: one ship with a crew of fifteen (an average sized crew for a merchant ship of the time), and nothing of particular value in terms of cargo; another with a crew of thirteen, and a cargo of Spanish wine; and a third with a crew of twelve, thirteen passengers, and nothing of particular value in terms of cargo. Let’s also say that the ship transporting the wine was considered worth keeping and was brought back to Salé along with the captives and the wine.

So the total catch would have been one captured ship, about 80 tuns of wine—a merchant ship with a crew of 13 would have had a burthen (i.e., cargo capacity) of about 80 or 90 tuns—and 53 captives.

The captured merchant ship would have been worth somewhere around £700. Corsair booty, however, sold at steeply discounted prices—such booty was, after all, stolen goods—so the ship would not have fetched anywhere near that amount. It’s hard to know just how discounted the selling price would have been, but if we assume a discount of something like 40%, that probably would not be too far wrong. So we can guesstimate that the merchant ship would have sold in the Salé markets for about £400.

In the early seventeenth century, a tun of wine was worth something like £5. (A “tun” was the seventeenth century equivalent of the modern shipping container. Tuns were large barrels or casks, normally considered to hold about 250 gallons of liquid. The ‘tonnage’ of a ship was not a record of its weight but, instead, a record of the number of tuns it could transport.) So 80 tuns of wine would have been worth about £400. Again, though, the wine would have been sold at a discount. So the wine was worth perhaps £240 in the Salé markets. Taken together, both ships and the wine equaled a total of about £640.

There are not many details about the prices for which captives were sold in Salé. There is, however, quite a lot of documentation for Algiers. Captives in Algiers typically sold for somewhere between 500 – 1,500 doubles (the standard Algerian silver coin). Four and a half doubles were roughly equal to 1 Spanish piece of eight. One Spanish piece of eight was, in turn, roughly equal to about 4 English shillings. So 500 – 1,500 doubles would equal between about £22 – £66.

If we take a median figure of £30 per captive and assume the 53 captives were all sold at this price in Salé, the total worth of those captives would have been £1,590.

So the total proceeds of this (imaginary) corsair raid would have been about £1,630.

This sum of money had to be divvied up, though. One fifth (£326) went to the Caïd (the Governor) of Salé. There would also have been customs duties and various other fees to be paid, probably equaling about 10% (£163). So by the time all that was siphoned off, the amount left would have been reduced to a £1,141.

This amount, however, had to be divvied up between any backers of the expedition and the crew. The crew might have shared out perhaps 20% or the total profits (this is a guess, but a reasonable one). So the total profit would now be reduced to £913.

It is unlikely that the corsair captain would have been the sole the sole backer of the expedition. He might quite possibly own a 50% share, though.

This means the total profit for this (imaginary) corsair expedition for the captain would have been a little over £456.

The total cost of outfitting the Vliegende Hert, remember, was just under £750.

So a corsair captain’s profits from an ordinarily successful corsair expedition wouldn’t have been anywhere near enough to offset the cost of outfitting the Vliegende Hert.

No wonder the corsair captain tried to force the Dutch to pay those costs.

The amounts of money here are quite great for the time (£456 represents 45 years’ worth of wages for an ordinary English farm laborer of the time), but the profit margins were not particularly large.

So even after a reasonably successful corsair cruise, much of the profit was siphoned off into the pockets of the merchants, the Caïd, the port authorities, etc., and not as much ended up in the pockets of the corsair captains as one might initially think.

All of this means that most Salé corsair captains—and most corsair captains in general—probably did not do much more than eke out a living most of the time.

They would all, however, have been waiting for a big score that would bring them sudden huge profits. Those who—through luck or skill—managed to make one of those big scores became very wealthy men.  The rest survived as best they could.

Such were the times.