THE DUTCH CONNECTION: PRIVATEERS, PIRATES, CORSAIRS 2

This week, we look at the risks of being a privateer.

Whether you are a privateer, an orca, a cheetah, or a praying mantis, you risk your own safety every time you try to take down your prey. This is why predators typically target the young, the weak, and the sick whenever they can. Sometimes, however, there is just no avoiding the risks.

For privateers, those risks were very real—and brutal. How brutal? The description below of a fight at sea between several English ships and a Portuguese carrack provides a vivid example.

______________________________

Captain Joseph [the English captain] himself fired the three first shots [at the Portuguese carrack], which surely did them great mischief, as we imagined by the loud outcry we heard from them after they were discharged. This done, the bullets began to fly on both sides.

Our Captain, cheering his company, ascended the half deck, where he had not been the eighth part of an hour when a great shot [a cannon ball] from the carrack’s quarter deprived him of his life in the twinkling of an eye. It hit him in the breast, beating out of his body his heart and other of his vitals, which lay round about him scattered in his diffused blood…

Our ship played her part first [in a later encounter with the same Portuguese carrack], and ere she had been at defiance with her adversary half an hour, there came another shot [another cannon ball] from the enemy, which, striking one of our iron pieces [cannons] that lay on the half deck and broke into shivers, dangerously wounding our new Captain, the Master of our ship, and three other mariners who stood nearby. Captain Pepwel’s left eye was beaten all to pieces; two other wounds he received in his head; a third in his leg, a ragged piece of broken shot sticking out of the bone thereof, which seemed by his complaining to afflict him more than all the rest. The Master had a great piece of the brawn of his arm struck off, which made him likewise unserviceable for a time.

Thus was our new Captain welcomed to his authority. We all thought his wounds mortal, but he lived till about fourteen months after, when he died peaceably in his bed, after his return to England.

______________________________

Cannon balls were made of cast iron, which can be brittle. As the extract above illustrates, they could splinter upon impact. Cannon balls also had impressive penetrating power. Recently, a group of scholars connected to the Vasa Museum in Stockholm, Sweden, constructed a meticulously accurate replica of an early seventeenth century cannon—a twenty-four pounder: that is, a cannon that fired a ball weighing twenty-four pounds (10.8 kilos), with a diameter of 5¾ inches (14.6 centimeters). They also constructed an accurate replica of the side of an early seventeenth century ship. They then took the recreated gun and the ship’s side out to a firing range.

After shooting off a total of 54 rounds, they determined that one of these guns fired point blank—that is, basically straight ahead—had an effective range of a little over 3,000 feet (1,000 meters). With the barrel tilted at the maximum elevation, the gun could lob a ball almost 14,000 feet (4,200 meters), or slightly over 2.5 miles (4.2 kilometers). One of the test balls they fired—a 24-pound sphere of iron 5¾ inches (14.6 centimeters) in diameter, remember—passed entirely through the planking of the replica ship’s hull they had built, continued on for another 1,650 feet (500 meters), hit the ground, bounced, kept going for another 650 feet (200 meters), and then smashed into the trunk of a pine tree a foot and a quarter (40 centimeters) in diameter, splintering the tree apart and felling it.

So early seventeenth century cannons packed a serious punch.

Moreover, when a cannon ball passed through the wooden planking of a ship’s hull, it did not just create a hole. Most ships of the period were constructed largely of oak, which is very hard and resistant to rot, but which is also quite brittle. So when a cannon ball punched through the oak hull of a ship, it sent a cloud of jagged splinters flying across the deck. Small splinters might be little more than nuisance value—unless you got one in the eye. The large ones could break bones and eviscerate a man.

The potential risks of being a privateer, then, were very real indeed.

To compound all this, going to sea was a decidedly unpleasant experience in those days, even if you weren’t facing the possibility of a violent death. The food was bad, the living conditions crowded and appalling unhygienic. Diseases and vermin of all sorts ran rampant. Moreover, except for brief bouts of feverish action, privateers spent most of their time bored out of their minds, staring morosely at an empty horizon.

There is an old proverb about the sea: He that would go to sea for pleasure would go to hell for a vacation.

So what motivated men to brave not only the mortal danger but also and the dreadful living conditions at sea to become privateers?

Pirates had often ‘burned their bridges’ and in one way or another had no easy way back into ordinary society again, leaving them with little recourse other than to continue with their piracy. Privateers, on the other hand, were not outcasts. Thousands of men—young and old, fishermen, merchant seamen, brewers, ship’s carpenters, textile workers, cabinet makers, horse traders, merchants… many of them married with wives and children—chose the perilous life of a privateer, willingly embarked on an enterprise that was fundamentally uncomfortable, violent, and mortally dangerous.

What motivated them?

There were, of course, as many individual reasons as there were individual men—each man having his own personal motivations.

But there were two general—collective—reasons: patriotism and money.

We’ll look at those motivations in next week’s post.

______________________________________________________________________________________

For those who may be interested…

The description of the sea fight between the English ships and the Portuguese carrack comes from Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes, Volume IX, reprint, 1905, from Chapter VI “A Relation of a Voyage to Eastern India, Observed by Edward Terry, Master of Arts and Student of Christ-Church in Oxford: Sea-Fight with the Portugals,” pp. 7-8. Hakluytus Posthumus was originally published in 1625. I have (as usual) lightly edited the original text to make it clearer for modern readers.

The ballistic details of the twenty-four pound cannon replica built by the scholars of the Vasa Museum in Stockholm, Sweden, can be found in Fred Hocker, “Ships, Shot and Splinters: The Effect of 17th-Century Naval Ordnance on Ship Structure” and also in a fascinating lecture given by Hocker titled “Breaching Walls and Sinking Ships: The Performance of 17th-Century Artillery” that is available on YouTube:

The Performance of 17th-Century Artillery.

The example of the pine-tree-felling cannon ball comes from this lecture.

___________________________________________________________________________________