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Privateering as an Investment Strategy
(Hint: The Only Yields are Literary)
By: Gerry Scott

A depiction of a Sailing Vessel from Description d’Univers, by Allain Manneson Mallet, 1683.

A friend’s generous and thoughtful gift of a print depicting a late 17^th century sailing ship led me to consider what I might contribute to his site by way of a thank you.  Since the site deals with thoughts on art, jazz, and investments, and frequently discusses books that deal with those subjects, I thought bringing his readers’ attention to three books on the unlikely union of high-seas adventure in pursuit of wealth and English literature might be appropriate.

In the early 18^th century there was a great deal of interest in England in the possibility of reaping financial reward from trade with what was then known as the South Sea, on the model of the success of British trade with the East Indies.  At the time the South Sea comprised the southern Pacific Ocean that washed upon the shores of South and Central America from Tierra del Fuego (and Cape Horn) as far north as California.  While there was indeed wealth to be made in trade with the region, there was a major flaw in the scheme for British investors in that it overlooked the strict proprietary interest the Spanish Crown maintained over its colonies.  So, despite the formation of the South Sea Company along the lines of the Honorable East India Company, and the extraordinary investment in it that ultimately led to the financially disastrous “South Sea Bubble,” it was highly unlikely that there would be much financial gain for British investors in the company’s stock.

There was, however, another tried and true way for loyal Britons to reap financial rewards from Spain’s colonies on the South Sea.  This method was known as privateering, in which a civilian ship captain would outfit a vessel as a warship, similar to that shown in the print, and sail it on behalf of the British government against the sovereign’s foes, seizing enemy merchant ships and plundering them along the way.  While this might sound like piracy, it was made perfectly legal by the ship captain obtaining a Letter of Marque from his government.  It was a plan that adventurous English sea dogs had followed since the days of Sir Francis Drake.

It was this second scheme of investment that a group of London merchants decided to follow when they banded together and outfitted two vessels as privateers, the Speedwell, and the Success.  The resulting voyage of the Speedwell was to ultimately play a role in the creation of one of the best-known English narrative poems of the 19^th century, while the voyage of the Success would present a brief moment in time, only recently discovered, when history and literature intersect in an extraordinary way.  Each of the three books dealing with these vessels has a role to play in recounting the events.

Of the three, the account written by one of the privateer captains is especially engaging.  A Privateer’s Voyage Round the World by George Shelvocke has been reissued in the Seafarer’s Voices series by Seaforth Publishing.  If you are unfamiliar with the series but are interested in accounts of life at sea told by those who lived it, then this series is well worth your notice.  Each volume is an abridged and edited version of the original, with footnotes and a useful introduction.  Vincent McInerney, who served in the merchant marine and worked for the BBC, provides the notes and introduction to Shelvocke’s account.

Shelvocke, who had been a lieutenant in the Royal Navy before undertaking his privateering voyage, originally published his account in 1726, four years after his 1719-1722 voyage.  He did so largely to counter legal charges (including piracy, ironically) brought against him by the Gentlemen Adventurers after his return to England, and to refute the character assassination job done against him by the former commander of marines aboard the Speedwell, William Betagh, who had published an account the previous year.

Shelvocke’s work is an interesting tale of lashing storms, a troublesome and untrustworthy crew, outlandish battles fought at sea and ashore, great privation and near starvation, and even a shipwreck on a deserted island, the same island that Alexander Selkirk – the model for Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe – inhabited.  But Shelvocke’s work is more than an adventure story, for he takes pains to include descriptive passages of the things he has seen that address natural history, anthropology, and geography, helping to place him in the category of the literary gentleman-scholar and appealing to Europe’s keen interest in reading travel literature describing the wider world at the time.

What gains Shelvocke’s real contribution to literature, however, is a brief passage in which he records that while rounding Cape Horn, his second in command, Simon Hatley, in a melancholy fit, shot a solitary albatross that has been accompanying them for several days.  Some seventy years later, William Wordsworth was reading Shelvocke’s book at precisely the time that his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge was working on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and was in need of a deed that would render the protagonist of his poem cursed.

The second book of the three is The Speedwell Voyage by Kenneth Poolman, who served in the Royal Navy during World War II and went on to work for the BBC.  Poolman blends Shelvocke’s narrative with that of the antagonistic Betagh and the journal of George Taylor, Chief Mate aboard the Success to give a fuller account of the voyages of the two vessels.  While the differences in the interpretation of events between Shelvocke and Betagh, as each strives to tarnish the other’s image as much as possible, is unresolved, the harrowing stories of both vessels make interesting reading.  Additional insight is also given to the curious relationship, or lack thereof, between Shelvocke and the commander of the Success, Captain Clipperton, who may likely have been unhinged.

The third book to deal with the voyage is The Real Ancient Mariner, Pirates and Poesy on the South Sea by Robert Fawke.  The author has set himself the task of trying to flesh out the life and career of Simon Hatley, Shelvocke’s melancholy second in command who gains his place in history by potting the unfortunate albatross looking for companionship in desolate seas.  And, remarkably, he succeeds in putting quite a bit of flesh on Hatley’s bones.  In doing so, he casts a wider historical net describing earlier voyages, the privateering literature of the day, and discovering, along the way, that during the brief time that the Speedwell and the Success cruised in company, Hatley was aboard the Success to represent Speedwell’s interests and so were the models for two other literary characters, Alexander Selkirk, the inspiration for Robinson Crusoe, and William Dampier, whom Jonathan Swift used as inspiration for his Gulliver.

For interesting nautical reading with a literary flair, these three books each pay dividends.

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On the recommendation of my good friend David, I have been perusing The Lewis Mumford Reader. It might be accurate to describe Lewis Mumford as a modern polymath and an apologist for the American mind. Born in 1895 his work describing the importance of American philosophers – particularly Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman and Melville – sounds remarkably relevant, even today.

One of the more interesting essays in the collection included his description of how the Renaissance ultimately led to the creation of the American Way. This line of thought started off with Mumford’s observation that the Renaissance didn’t represent a new beginning, but instead marked a start of the disintegration and fragmentation of the old. In his view, the Renaissance was not so much a “rebirth” of Western Civilization as the death knell of the medieval world.

Where the consensus considers Copernicus, Galileo, Leonardo and Newton standard bearers for an inevitable march forward Lewis Mumford offers a more nuanced view. Specifically, that the work of these and other innovators was a pitched battle against entrenched interests, in particular the Roman Catholic Church. Piling on over time, this combined force of new ideas served to finally undermine the power of outdated institutions and allow for something new to be built on a firmer foundation. That something new was most clearly expressed in the new world of the New World.

Moby Dick is undoubtedly one of the finest works of American literature and one I only came to appreciate in the last couple of years. The notion of facing a task so daunting that it can’t truly be described speaks to the idea of looking at a wilderness and seeing our place, however unlikely, in the midst of it. And not as Manifest Destiny but woven in as part of the very fabric of everything that wilderness encompasses.

While poetry has rarely found a place on my reading list, Lewis Mumford caused me to read The Leaves of Grass for the first time (another embarrassing fact). There is, indeed, a way of speaking of the American Way which is sorely missing from today’s mindless bloviating by politicians and pundits. We should be proud, not ashamed of our America.

America, by Walt Whitman

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,

All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,

Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,

Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,

A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,

Chair’d in the adamant of Time.

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