When captains of any nation at war held recruiting “rondies”, they found themselves out-shone by the blandishments of privateers. In those days, there were no organised recruiting establishments, no basic training camps, and no Admiralty department responsible for assigning draughts of men to ships fitting out, or replacing men who had been killed, crippled, discharged, or lost to desertion. A Royal Navy captain had only a limited time to attract trained, experienced hands, wide-eyed young volunteers who would be deemed Landsmen, and scour the dregs offered by the Impress Service to complete his ship’s complement. If he couldn’t, he lost his precious active commission and another officer took his ship, and his place. Some warships had to sail with just enough people aboard to work the ship to sea, perhaps hundreds of men short, to save the captain’s full-pay job! God forbid that a warship and a privateer were fitting out in the same port at the same time, for it would be the privateer that would always win!
Privateers operated in every corner of the world where ships of an enemy nation traded, and no seas were immune. Some French privateer captains, mostly from St.-Malo, were spectacularly successful in the Indian Ocean against convoys of the British East India Company, which bore rich cargoes to and from China, India, and the Far East. Some even dared to engage warships, and win, though that was usually the last thing a privateer would risk. If the privateer lost, it was all up, and even if they escaped with damage, that had to be repaired in port, resulting in long down-times with no profit, and a loss of money to pay for the repairs. A fast-sailing privateer’s speed was her best defence.
As Falconer noted in his dictionary, privateers sorta-kinda agreed to follow Navy rules when applying for their Letters of Marque and Reprisals, but once at sea it was “Katy bar the door”. Or, as it was said in Pirates of The Caribbean, the Pirates’ Code was not like real rules, but more like… guidelines, and so was a privateer’s behaviour. Indeed, some of the really successful privateers were ex-pirates temporarily made legitimate; conversely, once a war was over, the most successful privateers turned pirate. They swung both ways!
Bermuda, and its mysterious magnetic variations-there is no good explanation for them that I’ve heard of. I don’t know if there really is a Bermuda Triangle, but the latest Admiralty charts I used when writing this book note the swings of several degrees from Magnetic North that are not seasonal, have nothing to do with sunspots, and aren’t caused by phases of the moon. They caution all mariners to be excrutiatingly cautious when navigating Bermudan waters.
Basil Hall, a Midshipman aboard HMS Leander working out of Bermuda during the Peace of Amiens, related several accounts of his time there in Every Man Will Do His Duty: An Anthology of Firsthand Accounts from the Age of Nelson (edited by Dean King et al., Owl Books, Henry Holt and Co.), which I found useful. Hall had little good to say of Bermudan pilots, citing a captain who found himself trapped in a maze of reefs and coral heads when putting out to sea. For a huge sum, a pilot offered to conn him free, which the captain paid. The pilot led him and his ship into an even worse spot, then demanded a second large payment. The captain paid again, but once safely free and in deep water, the captain got his own back by threatening to take the pilot to Charleston and sell him for a slave if he didn’t get all his money back!
From Basil Hall, we also get Bisquit the dog.
Leander ’s captain and officers had pure-bred hounds aboard for hunting ashore, and the Midshipman’s mess found themselves a dog for their own hunts, an incredibly ugly mutt they named Shakings, a term for scrap rope ends and ravellings. Shakings was too friendly, too playful, especially with the officers’ pack, and was put ashore several times, but he always mysteriously turned up aboard again after a few days. Shakings sealed his own fate by putting his shore-mudded paws on the First Officer’s snow-white breeches. The next day, he was gone forever, drowned by the ship’s cook at the officers’ behest, dumped overboard tied up in a bread-bag with a 24-pounder shot. That will most definitely not be Bisquit’s fate!
That xebec that Lewrie’s squadron captured in his absence in American ports-in A Sailor of King George: The Journals of Captain Frederick Hoffman, RN, 1793-1814 (U.S. Naval Institute Press), Hoffman related his early days as a Mid and Lieutenant in the West Indies, chasing French and Spanish privateers in the Florida Straits and on the northern coast of Cuba with its myriad of “pocket harbours”. He saw many lateen-rigged xebecs in the coasting trade and some fitted out as very fast, weatherly, and manoeuvrable privateers for short raiding cruises. The Spanish had known of their good qualities since the days of the Reconquista, and the depredations of Barbary Corsairs, and brought the type from the Mediterranean, early on in the colonial days. See, I didn’t make it up!
Spanish Florida and lower Georgia were very sparsely settled in the early 1800s, and there were no settlements at what is now Miami, or in the Keys. The border country had been a battlefield between the Spanish, English, and French since the 1500s, and if Whites weren’t at each others’ throats, it was the Indians who raided, and the British colonists who made war on them in return. Governour Oglethorpe lured emigrants to lower Georgia to form a barrier against those raids, to protect his crown jewel, Savannah. Brunswick, Sunbury, Midway, and Darien are real places, and there are many historical sites from the colonial era and the Revolutionary War era to visit, including some restored forts. And, of course there are the Sea Islands. Cumberland Island is pretty-much off-limits for all but day-trippers, unless you’re one of the Kennedys, St. Simon’s is more touristy, and Jekyll, which I’ve visited several times, is much more laid back. Good luck, though, if you go in late summer; it’s “love bug” season. After driving from I-95 to Jekyll Island, I had to use half a bottle of windshield cleaner and a Dobie scrub pad to see where I was going!
Lewrie’s assault up the St. Mary’s River is based on an actual event. In July of 1805, HMS Cambrian (40) captured a French privateer, the Matilda (10) off Spanish Florida, and put a British crew aboard led by Lt. George Pigot (2)-(not guns, the second of that name on the Navy List!) with orders to enter the St. Mary’s in search of a rumoured Spanish privateer. Pigot went much further than Lewrie did, a whole twelve miles, and way beyond the edge of my coastal chart, under fire by sharpshooters on both banks, captured the privateer, and brought her out. When I found that incident in Clowes’s The Royal Navy: A History from the Earliest Times to 1900, Volume Five, near places where I had previously visited, my course was set. I knew where Alan Lewrie would go and knew what he would be doing in the momentous year of 1805… the year of Trafalgar.
News travelled no faster than ships in those days, so rumours of Missiessy and Villeneuve bringing fleets to the West Indies, with Admiral Horatio Nelson in pursuit, came to Lewrie weeks and months after the actual events. He still has no idea whether the French will attack the Bahamas or not. If, Nelson brings them to battle, he also does not know whether to fear for his youngest son, Hugh, now a Midshipman in HMS Aeneas, or not, if battle is joined.