8
Prizes
The man who had once been accused of deliberately trying to lose his vessel to privateers found, now that the tables had been turned, that he showed a real aptitude for the trade; for state-approved piracy was effectively his profession now. John Deane set sail in June 1718. He had only been at sea a month when the Samson and the Pearl returned to Revel with four Swedish vessels in tow. Two of the prizes may have been captured by Deane working in conjunction with the Pearl, or the Pearl may have captured them herself. But half the tally belonged to Deane. In fact John Deane had employed an outrageous degree of panache to snare his two captured vessels. Deane had disguised the Samson as a Swedish ship and sailed her right into Burgs Vic harbour in Gotland. He had joked and laughed with the gulled Swedes and then took two of their ships away from them. It was a cavalier beginning to a grand run that would total twenty-two prizes.
Once the initial quartet of prizes had been delivered, the Samson and the Pearl returned to the open sea to hunt for more. The prizes mounted up. In an echo of the incident that had cost him his reward the previous year, John Deane was afforded the opportunity to demonstrate the correct way of dealing with a stricken enemy trapped in shallow waters. Deane was in pursuit of a Swedish privateer. The privateer tried to evade the Samson by sailing into a creek where she knew the pursuing frigate was too big to follow. The Swedes had started to carry their guns ashore. Deane manoeuvred the Samson as close to the creek as was safe to do so without grounding his own ship. Then Deane ordered his men to fire the Samson’s cannons and force the Swedes away from their own guns. The Swedes succeeded in getting four guns off the boat, then decided to cut their losses. The Swedes torched their own ship. John Deane dispatched a pinnace. The men in the pinnace were ordered to board the burning Swedish vessel where they successfully retrieved the enemy’s guns and ammunition.
While John Deane was chasing privateers, Peter the Great was preoccupied with building a new haven at Rager-Wik. The plans came to nothing and he ordered a house built for himself instead. In August the Samson and the Pearl returned to Revel. They were quickly refitted and set out for the third time that year to hunt for enemy ships. The Samson and the Pearl rewarded the confidence placed in them and returned with more prizes.
The rest of the summer played out like some sort of farcical martial children’s game as ships were taken and retaken by an array of different nations. The Swedes recaptured two ships the Russians had taken as prizes. One of those ships was retaken by the Russians. The Dutch and the English seized two of their own ships that the Russians had undiplomatically taken as prizes. There were further tensions between the Russians and the Dutch over the issue of saluting. Two Russian officers were imprisoned by the Governor of Pilau in retaliation against the Russians when they took two enemy ships within proximity of his castle. But two new ships were added to the Russian fleet, the Lesnoy and the Hango Head.
As winter settled and 1719 was ushered in, there was a slew of promotions among the high-ranking officers of the Russian fleet. Rear Admiral Paddon, who had made such a mess of Apraxin’s orders to drill the Russian fleet, had died and was replaced by Prince Menishikoff. The feuding Captain Commodores Sievers and Gordon were promoted to rear admirals of the blue and red respectively. Admiralty College was now fully established. The new institution’s responsibilities were to manage pay, victualling, issuing orders to flag officers and publicising the details of court martial. Men-of-war and galleys were made ready for the new campaigning season and midshipmen were introduced to the Russian navy for the first time.
The ice thawed. Deane and the Samson sailed out alongside the Pearl, the Pink Alexander, the Elias and the Lansdowne. The captains opened their orders. They were commanded to ‘obstruct, as much as possible, all trade to and from Sweden by making prizes of all nations tracking thither without exception’. The transports were instructed to reach the Swedish shore near Karlskrona by nightfall. The cruisers were to stay hidden until dark and then rendezvous with the transports. A coordinated incursion into Swedish territory was to take place. The intention was to snatch ‘what people of fashion should fall in their way, in order to get intelligence on the real state of the Swedish fleet,’ and then, ‘by an alarm given […] facilitate the intended descent in a different quarter’. In other words, once the Swedish fleet’s strength and position had been determined, the Russians would launch a land assault on Swedish territory, in an agreed location, where the Swedish navy was unlikely to be.
The cruisers approached the prearranged destination. There was a conference. Present at the conference was Count Nicholas Golovin, a protégé of Peter the Great. Although Golovin only held the rank of a lieutenant it was publicised that he would ‘command the present descent’. The feeling among those who outranked him was that the tsar was creating an opportunity for the count to notch up a victory so that he might later be preferred with some degree of credibility. But the count was not so keen to grasp the nettle presented to him by his ruler and patron. He wanted to know whether there were enemy soldiers in the coastal villages before he led the descent. His reluctance delayed the mission.
John Deane received fresh orders. He was to set out in the Samson on a three-day intelligence-gathering mission. He returned with three prizes. He handed certain captured passengers over to be interrogated. It was hoped that the information gleaned might provide more clarity as to whether the proposed descent into Sweden was to take place. Nothing came of the interrogations. The descent was no nearer happening.
Deane and the Samson were dispatched for another three days. This time the Lansdowne sailed with the Samson. Deane was given command over both vessels. Deane’s verdict on the Lansdowne was that she was ‘an old and crazy’ ship, ‘altered from forty to twenty-four guns’. Deane’s mission this time was to ‘cruise near the river of Stockholm’ in search of the post yacht that ferried mail from Stockholm to Visby. The ‘river of Stockholm’ was in reality a fjord. The fjord became Deane’s hunting ground for seven rather than the three days ordered. In that brief space of time, John Deane was terrifying in his industry. He captured fourteen prizes and took an extremely valuable prisoner, Captain Monsieur Van Merch, privy councillor to the king of Prussia. Van Merch’s currency as a captive rested in the fact that he had recently been present in Stockholm and was conversant with the state of things internally in the enemy country. The Samson and the Lansdowne sailed back to the fleet with a flotilla of prizes and their valuable captive. They were obstructed by a savage gale. The prizes were not up to sailing in such violent conditions. The Samson and the Lansdowne arguably were, but had spread their crews so thinly among the captured vessels that they had rendered themselves vulnerable to the hostile elements. Deane and his small fleet were forced to sail for the protection of Revel.