THE PRIVATEERS OF RHODE ISLAND.*
NaartecAxsErr Bay, of which Bristol, Rhode Island, is the chief town, claims to be the Vinland of the Norse Sagas, and in later ages to have been a prolific nursery of slave trader and privateers. Mr. Munro writes affectionately of his " Old " Bristol—a port which West Country Englishmen might more accurately name New Bristol—and is evidently in full sympathy with his stout- hearted forbears who were able so satisfactorily to combine stern New England Puritanism with money-making upon the high seas. And as the eternal boy reads of the voyages of the buc- caneers in their own words he will of course ask himself whether it was not much jollier to live at a time when morals had not evolved their modern complications. Rum and slaves figure as an elegant combination by means of which Bristol of Rhode Island amassed much wealth. The slave traders issued forth of the port lightly laden with casks of rum and sailed for the West Coast of Africa ; with the rum they bought a full " live cargo," which they conveyed to the West Indies, taking great care, as Mr. Munro assures us, not to waste any valuable lives on the voyage. At the end of the second leg the slaves were turned into their equivalent in molasses, with which the ship stretched out on its third and last leg to Bristol, where the molasses became the raw material for more rum and more voyages. The profits, we are told, were enormous—there was a handsome " turn " on each leg- end nothing in the trade did hurt to the most tender of eighteenth- century consciences !
In the war of 1812-14 American privateers made to almost complete sweep of English ships in the North Atlantic, and rolled in the dollars by the bucketful. Our war with America early in the last century is not for us a pleasant memory, and we have decided tacitly to forget the whole of it except the fight between the ' Shannon' and Chesapeake.' It is an exasperating way which we have. In New England, whose privateers gave us so very thorough a dressing down, the war is still vividly remembered. And no wonder ; for at ports like " Old " Bristol men waded in English dollars.
Perhaps James De Wolf's little ship ' Yankee '—of which Mr. Munro gives us a full account, together with the log of one voyage— was the moat romantically successful of all the American privateers. Yet there were many others, and several of them took prime cuts off the fat English joint. We may accept Mr. Munro's judgment that " not the United States war vessels, marvellous though their achievements were, but the privateers that sailed out of Bristol and Baltimore and many ports of New England, brought the war of 1812 to an end."
Mr. James De Wolf, ex-slave trader and a highly respected citizen, was one of the first to perceive that the English Navy could • Tees of as Old Sea Port. By Wilfred Harold Munro. of Brown Unlversltv. Lor.don : Humphrey Milford. Rs. 6d. net.]
not possibly protect the North Atlantic against the depredations of fast raiders whose heels could save them from warships and whose guns were too powerful for lightly armed merchemtmen. He obtained a commission—what our grandfathers called a " letter of marque "—in July, 1813, for the 'Yankee,' equipped her with guns and a crew of old man-of-warsmen, and made an agreement with his ship's company by which half the net profits went to the owners and half to the officers and crew. The plunder was to be divided into shares, of which the Captain, one Oliver Wilson, a veteran of twenty-six, got sixteen, the First Lieutenant nine, and so on down the grades of rank to the boys, who were entitled to one share each. The Yankee,' says Mr. Munro, was immediately and immensely successful, though he points out that the privateers,
which did very great damage to the enemy—our unhappy selves—
often reaped no corresponding advantage. The Yankee,' however, managed to do both things. During her first cruise of less than three months she took ten prizes, paid for herself many times over, and yielded a dividend to the adventurers of seven hundred dollars a share. One hundred and forty pounds is not a bad purse for a coloured boy who received one share ; the Captain, aged twenty-six, got £2,240. We read that the sailors of Bristol " almost fought for a place on her decks for her second cruise," which lasted for one hundred and fifteen days and yielded the beggarly dividend of 338'4 dollars a share. Captain Oliver Wilson now seems to have stood out—perhaps he thought that the third time might be less lucky, perhaps he knew that an English frigate and a fourteen-gun brig were outside on the watch for him. Elisha Snow came in as Captain, evaded the frigate and brig, cruised for the usual three or four months, and returned with 173'54 dollars a share. The decimal points suggest the pious accuracy with which these Puritans divided their spoil ! The fourth cruise was almost a failure. The privateer had to be content with two prizes only,
and a wretched dividend of 17'29 dollars a share. Thomas Jones was the Captain this time, rice Elisha abandoned to the ravens as
no good, and there was a slump in the Yankee' stock on the Old Bristol Exchange. "There was no competition for berths on the fifth voyage," says Mr. Munro sadly. " Indeed, some of the sailors swam ashore before the privateer left the harbour of Bristol." There seemed to be more probability of an English prison than wealth in America. Nevertheless, Captain Elisha Snow was willing to take command again. The cruise was not finished as planned, because the Yankee' was driven into New Bed- ford by an English man-of-war and the crew deserted her, Four prizes only were taken, of which three were of no value what- ever. But here comes the surprise of the story, and the hoisting of Elisha Snow upon a pinnacle of fame and dollars. The fourth prize was a fully rigged ship whose cargo sold for more than half-a- million dollars ! The voyage that seemed no good, that which had been so little popular that some of the sailors swam ashore before the ship left Bristol, became the most profitable of the whole series. Captain Elisha Snow, whom we have pictured to ourselves as hungry, desperate, and on his uppers," netted 15,769%9 dollars
for his very own share. Two coloured boys—with the delightful names of Jibsheet and Cockroach—who had served throughout the series of cruises, got respectively 738.19 dollars and 1,121%8 dollars. It was the forlornest and the luckiest cruise made by any privateer during the whole war. Then came the sixth and last cruise. Elisha backed out—ho was too wise to try another fall with fate—and William C. Jenckes came in. One prize yielded 70,000 dollars, and another, estimated to be worth 200,000, was lost on Charleston bar on the way in. Altogether the ' Yankee ' in her six cruises captured British property valued at five million dollars and made a million dollars of profit. There was no Excess
Profits Tax in those happy days. ,
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