THE DUTCH CONNECTION: PRIVATEERS, PIRATES, CORSAIRS 3

Last week, we looked at the risks of being a privateer. This week, we look at what motivated Dutchmen to take those risks.

Remember how we ended last week:

Thousands of Dutchmen—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?

Remember the answer:

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

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

Two centuries before the Americans launched their famous rebellion against the British, the Dutch launched their own rebellion—against the Spanish Habsburg Empire. This rebellion—known as the Eighty Years’ War (1568-1648)—dominated the lives of four generations. Dutch privateers played a crucial role in that struggle by attacking and looting Spanish shipping. More than this, however, those Dutch privateers were seen by their countrymen as intrepid freedom fighters fighting heroically to liberate their country from a tyrannical overlord.

And what young man doesn’t want to be a hero?

So over the decades of the Eighty Years’ War, thousands of Dutchmen, young and old (but especially the young) went to sea, braving the discomfort and the danger in order to liberate their country.

But they also went for another, more practical, reason.

There was a time in America when, if a young man wanted to make his fortune, the advice was: “Go west, young man. Go west!”

In the Netherlands during the Eighty Years’ War, that advice was: “Go to sea, young man. Go to sea and become a privateer!”

Crews aboard Dutch privateer ships were paid a regular monthly wage (like all seaman), but that by itself wasn’t the enticement. The real lure was this: they were entitled to a share in the profits gained from the booty taken from enemy shipping. This meant that privateering was the only career option for most people that offered the possibility of quick money in large amounts.

The rewards of a successful privateering expedition could be huge.

Perhaps the most spectacular Dutch example occurred in the summer of 1628, when a fleet of some fifty Dutch privateer ships commissioned by the WIC (the Westindische Compagnie, the Dutch West India Company) sailed to the Caribbean, where they managed to capture the Spanish silver fleet—the ships that annually conveyed to Spain the treasure the Spaniards extracted from their New World colonies.

The Spanish silver fleets carried then-exotic and valuable substances like cochineal (a carmine-red dye made from a type of insect), indigo (a blue dye extracted from plants), sugar, coca, tobacco, a variety of spices, exotic woods, bales of silks and furs, and innumerable assorted jewels. They also carried huge quantities of gold and especially silver—hence the name: the silver fleet.

The various ships that composed the silver fleet first gathered in the Caribbean and then set out together for Spain. Everybody wanted to capture the Spanish silver fleet, so traveling in a convoy provided the Spanish a degree of safety. This approach usually succeeded, and most silver fleets made the annual voyage back to Spain safely.

In 1628, however, the Dutch decided to attack the silver fleet in its home base, before it set out for the Atlantic crossing. They also decided to commit some serious resources to the project and put together one of the largest privateer fleets ever assembled—no less than fifty vessels.

The Admiral of this Dutch privateer fleet was Piet Hein. He was fifty-one years old at the time, an experienced seaman and captain. Moreover, as a young man in his early twenties he had spent several years chained to the oarbench of a Spanish galley. So he had a personal as well as a professional stake in attacking the Spanish.

Piet Hein’s large privateer fleet managed to surprise the Spanish. First, they swarmed aboard one of the large galleons in a daring midnight attack. Then they intimidated several other Spanish ships into surrendering, and, finally, they chased the remainder of the silver fleet into Matanzas Bay—a bay on the north shore of the island of Cuba, about 50 miles (81 kilometers) east of Havana—where they managed to take the trapped ships without much of a fight.

The illustration at the top of this post is a (rather fanciful) depiction of the Dutch trapping the Spanish silver fleet in Matanzas Bay. The inscription at the top reads: Verovering vande silver vloot inde bay Matanka (Capture of the Silver Fleet in Matanzas Bay). The man depicted in the cameo in the top left is Piet Hein (his name is rendered as “Pieter Pietersz. Hayn.”

The Dutch captured a total of sixteen ships containing not only vast quantities of merchandise but also an estimated sixty-six pounds of gold and 177,000 pounds of silver (in both bullion and coins).

The total value of it all was assessed at close to 12,000,000 florins—something approaching three quarters of a billion dollars in today’s currency.

All this wealth was divided up among the various stakeholders. Though the individual privateers themselves received only miniscule portions, the size of the haul was so colossal that they all received substantial sums—a far, far larger pay-out than they could have reasonably hoped for in any other occupation.

This capture of the Spanish silver fleet was a one-off event, never replicated again. But from the very beginning, the possibility of fabulous wealth just waiting to be plucked served as a lure to attract ambitious (and desperate) men to the Dutch privateering enterprise—despite the discomfort and the danger.

It also served as a lure for investors, who, though they did not share in the physical dangers, reaped a major part of the profits.

And this brings us to a new issue: the dynamic between the financial backers of a privateer expedition and the actual privateers themselves.

The privateers braved all the danger, endured all the discomfort, and took all the risks… while the wealthy financial backers sat back in comfort, sipping expensive wine by the fireplace and waited for their profits to come sailing in—or at least that’s how many of the privateers saw things.

Captains, officers, and ordinary seaman alike—they all often felt that they, who did all the hard work and took all the risks, were being cheated out of their fair share of the profits.

And at times they were.

We’ll take a look at that next week.