THE AFFAIR OF THE VLIEGENDE HERT – PART 1

On November 4, 1624, the States-General—the governing body— of the Netherlands sent an official letter of complaint to Moulay Zaydan, the Sultan of Morocco. The text of this letter (originally written in Dutch) contained the following:

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Laurens Rutgertsz. and other shipowners and backers of the ship the Vliegende Hert, all inhabitants of the Netherlands, have informed us of the following.

These petitioners equipped the said ship to go on a privateering excursion, with a commission from the Prince of Orange, and placed it under the command of a certain Jan Jansen Ververen, with the intention of causing as much damage as possible to our common enemy, the King of Spain, and his supporters.

As a result, the aforementioned captain sailed from Amsterdam on April 5.

The petitioners believed that this captain, according to the promise he made before the noble lords of the Admiralty of Amsterdam, would post a proper and sufficient bail in the Dutch province of Zealand, and that, accordingly, he would, in all honesty, conduct himself appropriately at sea and would not in any way exceed his commission.

But this captain, having gone to sea without leaving any bail as security, as he ought to, had the audacity to sell the cargo of the petitioners’ ship under his command to a certain fluyt [a kind of ship] out of Sétubal [a seaport located on the coast of Portugal, just south of Lisbon] with a cargo of salt bound for Dunkirk, where its owners were domiciled.

He was then at sea for some time until he met up with the fluyt again at Salé. There, the fluyt’s captain adroitly and craftily unloaded from Ververen’s vessel a variety of merchandise that he then put aboard other ships ready to leave this port.

When all this was accomplished, Ververen received a large sum of money. He then abandoned his ship and his men after having, according to what the petitioners have learned, recommended the said ship by a letter, which he wrote in Spanish, into the custody of the Caïd, or Governor, of Salé, with an express request to hand over this ship only to the petitioners or their agents. Then he snuck off on another ship and disappeared.

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So Captain Jan Jansen Ververen managed to pull off a major scam.

He received an official privateering commission authorizing him to attack Spanish shipping—a letter of marque—from Maurits van Oranje, Maurice the Prince of Orange, the Stadholder (Head of State) of the Republic of the Netherlands. Having received this letter of marque, he promised that he would post a security deposit. This was standard practice as a way to ensure that privateer captains stayed within the limits of their commission. If they did not, they forfeited their deposit.

Up to this point, Captain Ververen was no different from any Dutch privateer captain, all of whom had to go through this same process before being legally authorized to attack Spanish shipping (the Republic of the Netherlands and Spain were at war at the time).

Captain Ververen’s next step, however, launched him on a different course entirely.

He took his ship, the Vliegende Hert (the Flying Deer) to sea without paying any security deposit. He then quickly sold his cargo—though it is unclear what exactly that cargo was—to a Dunkirk ship (“a certain fluyt out of Sétubal with a cargo of salt bound for Dunkirk, where its owners were domiciled”) and agreed to meet up with that same ship again later at Salé.

Though the letter from the States-General omits mentioning it, Dunkirk, located at this time in the Spanish Netherlands, was a notorious privateer base which the Spanish used to harass Dutch shipping. During the 1620s, Dunkirk privateers—Dunkirkers, as they were known—took an average of over 200 Dutch ships a year. So not only did Captain Ververen illegally sell his cargo, he sold it to an enemy of the Dutch Republic—to one of the very people he was supposed to be to attacking, in fact.

The letter from the States-General also glosses over what happened next.

After meeting the Dunkirker, Captain Ververen took the Vliegende Hert out on a summer-long, illegal pirate expedition. After all, the Vliegende Hert was equipped and crewed for a privateering cruise, and how else did Captain Ververen manage to arrive in Salé with a brand new load of merchandise (“the fluyt’s captain adroitly and craftily unloaded from Ververen’s vessel a variety of merchandise”)?

That cargo of stolen goods was sold by the Dunkirk Captain at Salé to several local merchants who then shipped it out. This is surely why Captain Ververen and the Dunkirk Captain chose Salé as the port at which to rendezvous. Salé was a corsair capital par excellence at this time, and the extensive pirate market there was an excellent place to unload stolen goods—guaranteed no questions asked. Moreover, the Dunkirk Captain had to have been familiar with Salé and its markets in order to conduct matters so efficiently, so it is unlikely that he was just a random, innocent merchant caught up unexpectedly in all this.

It seems likely that the two captains already knew each other, that they had their plan worked out in advance, and that Captain Ververen’s privateering expedition had been a scam right from the start. This would explain why the Dunkirk Captain was willing to go to such lengths to help Captain Ververen sell his booty at Salé.

On the other hand, of course, Captain Ververen might simply have been such a slick salesman that he managed to talk the Dunkirk Captain into believing it would be worth his while to participate in the Salé resale scheme—for surely the Dunkirk Captain received a cut of the profits.

Whatever the particular details might have been, the plan worked, and both men went swanning off with their ill-gotten fortunes and were never heard of again.

Except for the arrangement with the Dunkirk Captain, which he seems to have honored, Captain Ververen behaved like an unprincipled scoundrel throughout. Not only did he renege on the privateering commission he had received, he also abandoned both his ship and his crew, taking all the profits of the summer’s plundering with him (minus the share the Dunkirk Captain received).

Captain Ververen did, however, try to return the Vliegende Hert to its rightful owners. Perhaps he felt a pang of conscience, or at least a vestigial sense of responsibility. In any case, he wrote to the Caïd (the Governor) of Salé requesting that the Vliegende Hert be returned to its Dutch owners. There is no knowing what might have prompted him to pen such a letter, nor why the Caïd of Salé was so willingly compliant in taking responsibility for the ship, but the end result was that the Vliegende Hert ended up moored at the Salé docks during the winter of 1624-25 rather than being abandoned and left to rot or be stolen.

The next step should have been quite simple: the Dutch owners should have made arrangements to have their ship sailed to Holland so that they could recover their stolen property. End of story.

The next step wasn’t simple, though, and the Vliegende Hert’s winter in the Salé harbor certainly wasn’t the end of the story.

To find out what happened to the Vliegende Hert, go to The Affair of the Vliegende Hert – Part 2.