THE DUTCH CONNECTION: PRIVATEERS, PIRATES, CORSAIRS 5

Last week, we looked at how Dutch privateers reacted when they thought they were being cheated out of their fair share of the profits. This week, we look at a case study (so to speak): a Dutchman named Claes Compaen, who began his piratical career as a licensed privateer attacking—and looting—Spanish shipping but then turned pirate.

In 1609, the Republic of the Netherlands negotiated a truce (the Twelve Years’ Truce) with Spain. As a result, Dutch privateers suddenly found themselves out of a job. It wasn’t this peace with Spain that turned Claes Compaen into an outlaw pirate, as it did so other Dutch (and English) privateers. With Compaen, it was personal.

Compaen was born in Oostzaan (then a village north of Amsterdam) in 1587. As many young men did, he went to sea, trading in far-off places like Guinea, on the west coast of Africa. He must have been a canny trader, for he prospered. By the early 1620s, when he was in his mid-thirties, he had amassed considerable capital and was a captain in the Dutch merchant marine.

The Twelve Years’ Truce with Spain ended about this time (in the spring of 1621). With the renewal of war, privateering was again looked upon as a patriotic duty. It was also, of course, profitable—at least potentially. Compaen decided to sink his capital into a privateering expedition.

After going through the necessary first step of registering as an official government sponsored privateer and receiving approval from the appropriate Admiralty, Compaen received a letter of marque legally sanctioning him to attack and loot Spanish shipping. He equipped his ship, acquired a crew, and set out.

He was apparently as successful at privateering as he had been at trading, for he consistently returned with sizeable loads of booty. He encountered a problem, though. It is unclear exactly what happened, but, one way or another, Compaen was denied what he considered to be a proper share of the profits from his privateering expeditions.

The legality of prizes brought in by Dutch privateer captains was adjudicated by the Admiralties. These Admiralties were also involved in the sale of the booty, however. It seems that some of the men of the Admiralty that assessed Compaen’s booty were corrupt. Privateering could generate a lot of money, and where there is a lot of money available, there are, inevitably, crowds of people squabbling to get access to it.

As we have seen in previous posts in this series, much of the profit that privateering generated went to the investors, men who were already wealthy and influential, leaving the sailors who did the actual privateering with relatively little to show for their efforts.

Dutch privateer captains typically received about 1% of the total profit, plus various other perks. Compaen seems to have been denied even that. He himself once claimed that the final reason he turned against the Admiralty was a large cargo of sugar he had brought in that the Admiralty confiscated, refusing to allow him any share of the profits of its sale.

Whether it was the purloined sugar or something else, the Admiralty’s actions outraged Compaen, and he decided to strike out on his own.

Compaen was clearly very astute, though, for he knew better than to openly contest the wealthy and influential men of the Admiralty. Instead, he set about organizing what he claimed would be a new privateering expedition, for which he received the Admiralty’s official blessing and a letter of marque. He then bought a ship from the widow of a dead captain. The ship—the Walte—was 200 tons, 25 meters (80 feet) long, and armed with 17 canons. This was just the right size for a privateering/pirate vessel: small enough to be nimble and maneuverable, but large enough and well-armed enough to be a serious threat. Compaen hired a crew of 80 to man it.

One version of the story has it that he had run out of funds by this time, and that he used his reputation as a successful privateer captain to borrow a further 8,000 guilders (a sizeable sum of money) from local financial backers, including men from the Admiralty. As a final gesture, he invited these backers to a celebratory dinner onboard his new ship.

It was an opulent occasion, with generous quantities of food and drink—and contented smiles all around, one imagines. At the end of it, Compaen presented his backers with the bill for the meal, claiming he had spent the last of his money to equip the expedition. His backers paid up. Compaen no doubt seemed to them to be exactly the kind of captain they wished to cultivate: effective at sea, but a man who did not complain or dispute their judgement about how to apportion the booty he brought in.

The next day, Compaen and his eighty men set sail in the Walte.

The first thing they did was accost a herring buss, one of the large fishing fleet plying the waters off the Dutch coast in the North Sea. After transferring a sizeable portion of the herring buss’s load of fish to his own ship (partly to serve as food for his crew and partly to sell for ready cash), Compaen presented the buss’s captain with an official looking but entirely bogus IOU from the Admiralty and sailed away. (The Admiralty never honored the IOU, and the fishermen were never reimbursed for their loss.)

After that, Compaen took his first prize as an outright pirate. Since he no longer had to return to his home port to have the booty assessed and portioned out, he split the profits evenly among his crew. This was a fairly radical approach to things, but it naturally made him popular.

It is not clear whether his crew knew all along that they had signed on for a pirate cruise, or if Compaen’s generosity won them over. One version of the story depicts him heaving both the ship’s Bible and the ship’s Log—both representing the legality of the privateering enterprise—over the ship’s side and into the sea to demonstrate the seriousness of his intentions. Whatever the case, his crew committed themselves to a life of piracy with him.

A short time later, a storm forced the Walte to shelter in the harbor at Vlissingen. The crew waited out the storm in the local taverns, where they no doubt spent much of their recently acquired loot. Word got around that Compaen shared booty evenly with his crew. As a result, when the storm subsided and the Walte took to the sea once more, fifty of the local men went eagerly along, swelling the size of the crew to 130.

Compaen launched his career as a pirate by hunting the waters in and around the English Channel, taking whatever ships he could, from Spain, Portugal, France, even the Netherlands. He was hugely successful, making use of a combination of artful deviousness backed up by violence where necessary—an approach that he had no doubt perfected in his days as a privateer.

He left English shipping alone, though, for he needed ports out of which he could operate, and he had found those ports in Ireland, at least for a time. He established commercial relations with the local English overlords there and sold them his pirate booty at discounted prices. This cozy relationship ended when he took some ships containing English cargo. The resulting fracas permanently closed Irish ports to him, and he had to look elsewhere for a home base.

Like others before him, he realized there was only one place to go: North Africa.

Compaen’s pirate career was astonishingly successful—he took over 350 ships. This number is even more impressive when one considers that Compaen was a pirate for only about four years, from 1623 to 1627. The amount of wealth he amassed from the loot taken from so many ships must have been huge—huge enough at any rate to by him an official pardon from the Dutch authorities.

Compaen came home from North Africa to accept that pardon.

He lived out the remainder of his days in ease and comfort. At least that’s one version of the story. Another version has him running out of money as he grew old and dying in wretched poverty.

Whatever the actual case may have been, Claes Compaen managed to do what few pirate captains did: he died peaceably in bed at a ripe old age (he died at 73, a very respectable age for the time).

For us, Claes Compaen provides an illustrative example of how the Dutch privateering enterprise could go wrong—large amounts of ready money floating around could all too easily lead to rampant corruption—and how the collapse of the system led outraged privateers to turn to outright piracy.

It is hard to gauge how many Dutch privateers became outlaw pirates in this way. It was likely a minority (though perhaps a significant minority). The majority of the men who turned to piracy did so for another reason entirely: the shock of the Twelve Years’ Truce that suddenly made privateering unnecessary and put thousands of hard working Dutch privateers out of work.

We’ll look at that next week.

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For those who may be interested…

The details of Claes Compaen’s life and career as a pirate come from a biography of him written by ‘the Schoolmaster of Oostaan’ (that’s all we know about him): ‘t Begin, midden en eynde der zee-roovereyen van den alderfamieusten zee-roover Claes G. Compaen van Oostzanen in Kennemer-landt : vervattende sijn wonderlijcke, vreemde en landts-schadelijcke drijf-tochten : waer in verthoont wordt, hoe hy met weynigh schepen de zee onveyligh ghemaeckt, een ongelooffelijcken buyt, en groot getal van schepen van alle landen gheroost, en afgeloopen heest (The beginning, middle, and end of the pirate Claes G. Compaen from Oostzaan in Kennemerland, encompassing his wonderful, strange, and destructive travels, wherein it is shown how he sailed the sea in many ships, acquiring an unbelievable amount of booty, and capturing a great number of ships from many lands). This biography was first published in 1659, a year before Compaen’s death. My thanks go to Joris van Os for his invaluable help with the Dutch text.

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