THE DUTCH CONNECTION: PRIVATEERS, PIRATES, CORSAIRS 4

Last week, we looked at what motivated Dutch privateers to take the risks they did. This week, we’ll look at how such men reacted when they thought they were being cheated out of their fair share of the profits.

First, a little background, though…

The business of privateering was carefully controlled. It had to be in order to prevent things from getting out of hand. The control system contained three interlocking parts:

1.the government actors
2. the financial backers
3. the privateers themselves.

The government actors provided the legal authorization and generally oversaw the various steps in the process. The financial backers raised the capital necessary to get the ships equipped for their sea voyages. The privateers sailed the ships.

If you wanted to launch a legal privateering expedition in the Republic of the Netherlands at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the process went like this.

First, you had to get the sponsorship of one of the five Admiralties—Amsterdam, Friesland, Noorderkwartier, Rotterdam, or Zeeland—that supervised all Dutch Naval and merchant shipping. Next you had to apply for and receive an official letter of marque issued by the Stadtholder—the titular head of the Dutch Republic.

Once you had the sponsorship of an Admiralty and had acquired your signed, legal letter of marque, you were in a position to raise the funds necessary to finance the privateering expedition. Very wealth men might individually finance an expedition, but this was pretty rare. Mostly, the money was raised via consortiums. Pooling the cost like this had the benefit of reducing both the financial outlay of each individual contributor and of lessening the financial risk if the expedition failed to produce a return—which happened not infrequently, privateering being a chancy enterprise (something like a quarter of all privateer ships sank, or were captured, or returned without significant booty).

Sometimes the captain of the privateer ship would be part of the consortium; sometimes the consortium would hire a captain. In any case, a captain had to be found. That captain was then responsible for the critical decisions required in outfitting the ship and hiring the crew.

One final step was still necessary before a privateering expedition could officially be launched. The consortium financing the expedition (and sometimes the captain himself) had to post a security bond, typically known as caution money. This bond would be refundable if the expedition went well, but if the captain transgressed the limits of his letter of marque—if, for example, he attacked a ship belonging to a friendly nation—the security bond would be forfeit.

After all the necessary steps had been taken—getting approval from one of the Admiralties and receiving the letter of marque, arranging financing, outfitting the ship, choosing the captain and crew, paying the security bond—the privateer ship was ready to set out to sea in search of enemy vessels to loot (for Dutch privateers in the early part of the seventeenth century, this basically meant Spanish ships). Most cruises typically lasted a few months. Some, however, could last a full year, or even two, if the waters the ship intended to hunt in were far off—like the Caribbean.

Once a privateer ship had completed a successful cruise—and not all did—it typically returned to its home port with the booty it had taken. Such booty consisted mostly of fairly pedestrian items such as herring, butter, salted meat, wine, beer, grain, cotton, ironmongery, cloth, fruit, salt, hides, lumber, etc., but could also include the occasional spectacular haul of treasure from, say, a Spanish galleon returning from the new World laden with gold and silver. Frequently, the booty also included the ship(s) the privateer had attacked. All this was sold off at auction back at the privateer’s home port.

Before any booty thing could be sold, though, it first had to be evaluated by an official Prize Court that judged whether or not it was lawful. The legitimacy of the privateer enterprise, remember, depended on legal authorization and control.

Auctions for the sale of booty were advertised ahead of time in flyers and newspapers, and buyers flocked to see the merchandise on offer. Even after the inevitable escalation of prices during the bidding process, the cost of everything was still relatively cheap, for the items on sale were, after all, stolen merchandise and sold for well below market value.

Once everything had been auctioned off to the highest bidder, the profits were divvied out.

Despite all this careful regulation of everything, however, there was also considerable squabbling and disagreement over who was entitled to shares of the profits and how much each contributor should receive—and also a certain amount of corruption. At times, the whole process could devolve into an ugly feeding frenzy.

The losers were frequently the Captain and crew of the ship.

Take the Spanish silver fleet that Commander Piet Hein’s corsair fleet captured, for example (see last week’s post).

When the loot taken from these ships was divvied up, the shareholders of the WIC—the Westindische Compagnie (the West India Company), the organization that had backed the privateer expedition—took a full 50 per cent; the Stadholder received 10 per cent; and each member of the government received 1 per cent.

Piet Hein, the Commander of the privateer fleet, received 1/10 of 1 per cent.

The captains, officers, and ordinary seamen of the privateer fleet each received only tiny fractional percentages.

Piet Hein’s share came to just under 12,000 florins (some sources say he received only 7,000 florins). This was very real money in a world where the average laborer earned less than 100 florins a year, but miniscule compared to the total amount of the haul. Each member of the government received ten times what Piet Hein had—a compensation they had done nothing to earn.

Some of the privateers were so incensed at the blatant unfairness of it all that they tried (unsuccessfully) to storm the headquarters of the WIC in Amsterdam to demand fairer compensation, for they were convinced that the company directors had purposely understated the total amount of Spanish treasure taken so that they could pay out smaller dividends to the privateers.

Piet Hein, infuriated by how little he and his men received, resigned in disgust.

The taking of the Spanish silver fleet may have been a one-off event, but the kind of squabbling that it precipitate was not. Such acrimonious falling outs occurred with fair regularity. When money was at stake—especially when it was a lot of money—the various claimants inevitably ended up arguing over who got what.

Sometimes, there was no resolving those arguments.

Privateering may have been officially a legal, regulated enterprise, but it still involved robbery and destruction and so was in essence piratical. Piracy was, of course, a violent profession, and the men who practiced it became hardened, not only to the violence itself, but also to the sort of utterly ruthless calculations that piracy demanded.

In other words, they grew to be hard men used to taking what they wanted against the will of others.

Such men had only a limited tolerance for being cheated.

A fair number of them rebelled against what they saw as unfair treatment.

They quit the privateering business and became outright, lawless pirates.

After all… Why brave all the discomfort and danger and take all the risks just to have other people hoover up most of the profits? Why not just take all the profits for yourself?

Next week, we’ll look at an example of one such Dutch privateer captain who had had enough of being chested, and who went rogue and became a lawless pirate—and an astonishingly successful one at that.