THE AFFAIR OF THE VLIEGENDE HERT – PART 2

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

During the winter of 1624-25, the Vliegende Hert lay moored at the dock in Salé, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco.

Back in the Netherlands, the owners/backers of the ship received word of where she was. They were businessmen who had invested money in a privateering expedition in expectation of making a large profit. So they were, naturally, not at all happy about what had happened. But they were also clearly an influential group, for one of them—Laurens Rutgertsz.—was able to convince the gentlemen of the States-General—the governing body of the Republic of the Netherlands—to intervene directly on their behalf.

And so a second official letter of complaint, dated November 4, 1624, was sent to Moulay Zaydan, the Sultan of Morocco, who was also—at least nominally—the sovereign of Salé. The gentlemen of the States-General concluded their letter with the following:

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Laurens Rutgertsz., as the principle interested party, has declared his readiness to act in order to take possession of the vessel and the merchandise which the aforesaid captain has misused, and humbly begged us to write on behalf of him and the other petitioners to Your Majesty, that he may recover his ship and his merchandise. We ask you to have them delivered to the aforesaid Admiralty of Amsterdam, who will dispose of things as is proper.

We have thought it our duty to recommend this affair to Your Majesty most earnestly, praying that the said Laurens Rutgertsz.’s suit should be favorably received, and that you will give orders to the said Caïd [Governor] of Salé so that the said vessel and its goods should be returned to the petitioners. If Your Majesty will do us this very pleasant service, we are quite ready to return aid to you in your own affairs.

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The States-General wrote their letter requesting that Moulay Zaydan intervene in the affair of the Vliegende Hert because, in 1610, the republic of the Netherlands and Sultan Moulay Zaydan had signed a treaty guaranteeing not only that each side’s ships would not be attacked at sea by the other’s, but that their ships would also be guaranteed safe harbor in each other’s ports. The States-General was thus simply requesting that Moulay Zaydan live up to his treaty obligations by ensuring that a Dutch ship moored in one of his ports was returned to its rightful Dutch owners.

Moulay Zaydan sent the following reply, dated July 25, 1625, to the Sates-General:

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There came to our Sublime Court a man of your nation carrying a letter from you. He introduced himself as the agent of the owner of a ship that Captain Jan Ververen had abandoned at the port of Salé—well protected by Allah. Our servant, the Caïd of the said port, sent to Our High Majesty a letter from the captain who had deserted his ship. Moreover, he [the Caïd of Salé] did all that was necessary for the custody and preservation of this vessel, and spent on this task four ounces [an ounce was a silver coin] a day.

Despite this care, the ship eventually began to deteriorate, which happens, as you know, in such a situation. This is why the Caïd saw fit to ask Our High Lordship’s authorization to sail the ship under command of some raïs [“raïs” means “captain”] 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. The repairs completed, he set sail and has not yet returned from his expedition.

The issue of this ship can be resolved in three ways: the first is the reimbursement by the shipowners of all refitting costs paid by the said raïs who, once reimbursed, would hand over the ship; the second would be to bring the said raïs before the courts in a legal action for the restitution of the said ship; the third would consist of an amicable compromise.

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So what happened here was that, after being repaired and refitted during the winter of 1624-25, the Vliegende Hert was taken out for the summer corsair season under the command of a Salé raïs. Moreover, this raïs was insisting that, as a condition of returning the ship to its rightful owners, he be refunded all the money he had invested in fixing it so that it was is proper shape for his corsair expedition.

Not surprisingly, this demand outraged the owners/backers of the Vliegende Hert. Not only had their own considerable investment in Captain Ververen’s privateering venture born no result, they were now being asked to finance this raïs’s corsair venture as a condition of getting their ship back. One can only imagine the scene when they first heard the news.

No doubt, they saw Sultan Moulay Zaydan as being complicit in this—to them—disgraceful swindle. But despite Moulay Zaydan’s regal language in  his letter (“Our servant, the Caïd of the said port …” “This is why the Caïd saw fit to ask Our High Lordship’s authorization…”), his response shows, in fact, that he did not have much real control over this situation and demonstrates just how limited his power as Sultan actually was at this time.

During much of the first half of the seventeenth century, Morocco was gripped by a very nasty civil war. When the Moroccan Sultan al-Abbas Ahmad al-Mansur died (of plague) in 1603, a violent struggle for power arose between his three sons: Abu Faris, Muhammad al-Ma’mun, and Moulay Zaydan. By the late 1620s, only Moulay Zaydan was still standing.

This multi-decade, fratricidal melee was so brutally devastating that an early eighteenth century chronicler of Moroccan history described it as dreadful enough to make the hair of a suckling infant turn white. So though Moulay Zaydan was nominally the victor, and nominally Sultan of Morocco, the country he presided over was, in fact, in a state of pretty much constant, churning, bloody chaos throughout his lifetime—a chaos which Moulay Zaydan’s sons were forced to contend with after his death and which eventually proved their undoing.

As a result of all this, Moulay Zaydan had severely limited control over the country he was supposed to be ruling. Moreover, in May of 1627, Salé declared itself an independent republic owing no fealty to Moulay Zaydan or any other Lord.

So when the gentlemen of the States-General had requested Moulay Zaydan to “give orders to the said Governor of Salé so that the said vessel and its goods should be returned to the petitioners,” Moulay Zaydan was unable to do so. Despite any pretense of his to the contrary, Salé was beyond his influence in matters such as these. The best he could manage was to forward on the raïs’s bill for the refitting of the ship and say, essentially: “You need to work this out among yourselves.”

Neither the owners/backers of the Vliegende Hert nor the gentlemen of the States-General were prepared to negotiate with underlings. From their perspective, it no doubt seemed far preferable to deal with the sovereign himself. The gentlemen of the States-General didn’t seem to grasp—or perhaps refused to acknowledge—how weak Moulay Zaydan’s hold on power actually was. With what seems a rather naïve confidence in the inherent power of monarchy, they wrote a further letter of complaint to the Sultan on behalf of the Vliegende Hert’s owners/backers.

To read the letter the gentlemen of the States-General sent to Sultan Moulay Zaydan, and to see how events unfolded from here, go to The Affair of the Vliegende Hert – Part 3.