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Transnational Trade in the Wartime North Atlantic: The Voyage of the Snow Recovery

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2011

Thomas M. Truxes
Thomas M. Truxes
Affiliation:
THOMAS M. TRUXES is visiting lecturer in history at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.
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Abstract

The voyage of a small ocean-going trading vessel, of a type known as a snow, provides a window into the world of wartime commerce in the late colonial period. In March 1760, the snow Recovery, which was owned by a consortium of North American and Irish businessmen, traveled from New York City to Belfast, Ireland, and from there to the tiny Dutch island of Curaçao. From Curaçao, the snow sailed north to the Bay of Monte Cristi in Spanish Santo Domingo, where it loaded French sugar and coffee, mostly purchased through Spanish intermediaries, for sale at the German port of Hamburg. Upon leaving the bay for a brief stopover in New York, the Recovery was seized by a British warship and carried to Jamaica for condemnation in the court of vice-admiralty. This trading venture tells us much about mid-eighteenth-century Atlantic markets, their fluidity, adaptability, and responsiveness to change, as well as their integration into a single system of production, commerce, and finance.

Type
Special Section: Trade in the Atlantic World
Information
Business History Review , Volume 79 , Issue 4: Trade in the Atlantic World , Winter 2005 , pp. 751 - 780
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2005

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33 Receipt book of the commissaries and paymasters of the Province of New York, 3 Apr. 1760 (Cruger, Robinson & Livingston), NYHS; Truxes, ed., Letterbook, 58-59.

34 “Mr. Thomas Greg [has] received a commission to send to New-York sundry artificers, to wit, a gunsmith, house carpenter, blacksmith, cooper, bricklayer, and a leather dresser” (Belfast News-Letter, 6 Mar. 1760).

35 HCA 42/92 (Recovery), PRO/TNA.

36 Jacob Walton's three remaining sons, Thomas (b. 1736), Abraham (b. 1738), and Gerard (b. 1741) each held shares in the vessel, but only Jacob Walton Jr., along with Waddell Cunningham and Thomas Greg, had a financial stake in the cargo. HCA 42/92 (Recovery), f. 5, PRO/TNA; Walton genealogy (undated), Walton family papers, NYHS). About the time of the snow Recovery's departure from New York City, Greg, Cunningham & Co. and Walton & Co. were joint owners of a “flag of truce” cargo carried from Philadelphia to Port au Prince aboard a two-hundred-ton British trading vessel, the ship Nancy, Bartholomew Rooke, master. The ship Nancy, which had carried no French prisoners into Port au Prince, exchanged its North American cargo for 260 hogsheads of sugar and a quantity of indigo for a return voyage to New York. On 2 Feb. 1760, the third day of its homeward-bound voyage, the Nancy was seized by two British warships (HMS Lively, Captain Frederick Maitland, and HMS Cerberus, Captain Charles Webber) and condemned in the court of vice admiralty in Jamaica. HCA 45/3 (Nancy), PRO/TNA.

37 New York State Archives and Records Administration, Albany. New York Council minutes, vol. 25 (1755-64), 300-1; Letters and Papers of Cadwallader Colden, vol. 6, pp. 33, 210-11; O'Callaghan, ed., Calendar of Historical Manuscripts, 738; New-York Gazette, 4 Feb. 1760 and 28 Jan. 1762. William Walton Jr. was married to the eldest daughter of Lieutenant Governor James Delancey (see Scott, Kenneth, ed., Genealogical Data from the New York Post-Boy, 1743-1773 [New York, 1970], 64Google Scholar), and Jacob Walton Jr. was married to the niece of John Cruger, mayor of the City of New York. Harrington, New York Merchant, 13, 39.

38 CO 5/1226, f. 328, PRO/TNA; New York Mercury, 1 Jan. 1759; Truxes, Thomas M., Irish-American Trade, 1660-1783 (Cambridge, 1988), 116–17Google Scholar.

39 Add. MSS 36,213, f. 52, BL. A persistent shortage of flaxseed in Ireland resulted from the common practice of pulling flax green in the finer branches of the linen manufacture. See Truxes, Irish-American Trade, 193-94.

40 The English parliament's Staple Act of 1663 excluded Ireland from the privilege of importing sugar, tobacco, and certain other “enumerated” goods directly from the English plantations in America (15 Charles II, c. 7 [English]), but an act of 1696 put a complete stop to Ire-land's direct importation of “any Goods or Merchandize of the Growth or Product of any of His Majesty's Plantations” (7 & 8 William III [English]). For the 1731 act of the British parliament allowing the Irish importation of “unenumerated” goods, see 4 George II, c. 15 (English). The Irish parliament's flaxseed bounty and its extension to North American flaxseed were established by 6 Anne, c. 9 (Irish) and 7 George II, c. 10 (Irish).

41 Truxes, Irish-American Trade, 195-96.

42 Ibid., 194-96.

43 Customs 15, PRO/TNA.

44 Truxes, Irish-American Trade, 200-7.

45 Add. MSS 36,213, ff. 52, 63, BL.

46 New-York Mercury, 11 Feb, 1760; White, Philip L., ed., The Beekman Mercantile Papers, 1746-1799, 3 vols. (New York, 1956), vol. 1, pp. 351, 354–55Google Scholar (hereafter, Beekman Papers).

47 Beekman Papers, vol. 1, p. 354; New-York Mercury, 25 Feb. and 3 Mar. 1760; Bezanson, Anne, Gray, Robert D., and Hussey, Miriam, Prices in Colonial Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1935), 69, 416CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Truxes, Irish-American Trade, 284.

48 Beekman Papers, vol. 1, p. 355.

49 Belfast News-Letter, 8 Feb. 1760.

50 Add. MSS 36,213, f. 63, BL.

51 Add. MSS 36,211, f. 272, BL; New-York Mercury, 1 Jan. 1759 and 24 Mar. 1760; CO 700/New York 31, PRO/TNA.

52 Add. MSS 36,213, f. 60, BL. Sailing “north about Ireland” took vessels out of the most frequented paths of marauding French privateers and British warships bent on the impressment of British seamen. See Ford, Worthington Chauncey, ed., Commerce of Rhode Island, 1726-1800, Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 2 vols. (Boston, 1914-1915), vol. 1, p. 63Google Scholar (hereafter, Commerce of Rhode Island).

53 Stokes, George T., ed., Pococke's Tour in Ireland in 1752 (Dublin, 1891), 20Google Scholar; 27 George II, c. 3 (Irish); New-York Mercury, 25 Apr. 1757; Crawford, W. H. and Trainor, B., eds., Aspects of Irish Social History. 1750-1800 (Belfast, 1969), 86nGoogle Scholar; Cullen, L. M., An Economic History of Ireland Since 1660 (London, 1972), 84–87Google Scholar.

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55 Plan of the Town of Belfast.

56 Agnew, Jean, Belfast Merchant Families in the Seventeenth Century (Dublin, 1996), 105–6, 108, 114Google Scholar; Truxes, Irish-American Trade, 79.

57 Beekman Papers, vol. 1, pp. 337, 340; Customs 15, PRO/TNA.

58 For Greg & Cunningham and the flaxseed trade, see Truxes, ed., Letterbook, 71-72, 408.

59 Belfast News-letter, 29 Apr. 1757 and 3 May 1757.

60 Ibid., 8 Feb. 1760.

61 Truxes, ed., Letterbook, 40, 60-63, 79-81.

62 Truxes, “London's Irish Merchant Community.” For a broader perspective, compare Hancock, David, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735-1785 (Cambridge, 1995)Google Scholar; Price, Jacob M., Capital and Credit in British Overseas Trade: The View from the Chesapeake, 1700-1776 (Cambridge, Mass., 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and McCusker, John J., “Sources of Investment Capital in the Colonial Philadelphia Shipping Industry,” Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic World (London, 1997), 245–57Google Scholar.

63 Truxes, Irish-American Trade, 147-69.

64 Customs 15, PRO/TNA.

65 Belfast News-Letter, 1 May 1753 and 15 Sept. 1758; Truxes, Irish-American Trade, 42, 165-66.

66 Beekman Papers, vol. 1, pp. 355, 360-61, 365.

67 HCA 42/92 (Recovery), ff. 35-36, PRO/TNA.

68 Belfast News-Letter, 30 Oct. 1747, 7 Nov. 1755, and 20 Aug. 1756.

69 “The only proper and legal Method to establish the Reputation of the Port is to cause the Statute [regulating the Irish salted-beef industry to] be rigorously put in Force and Execution,” declared a committee of beef and pork exporters at “a Meeting of the principal Merchants of the Town of Belfast.” Belfast News-Letter, 2 Nov. 1756.z

70 “Carcasses of four hundred weight and upwards will be most saleable.” Belfast NewsLetter, 15 Sept. 1758.

71 Truxes, Irish-American Trade, 154-55.

72 HCA 42/92 (Recovery), ff. 35-36, PRO/TNA.

73 Truxes, Irish-American Trade, 159.

74 New-York Mercury, 1 Jan. 1759.

75 “There is still many Complaints from all Places to which our Butter is exported,” wrote the Belfast weigh-master just after the war, “notwithstanding the very high Price that Commodity is now sold at and has yielded for several Years past.” Belfast News-Letter, 24 Jan. 1764.

76 Belfast News-Letter, 24 Jan. 1764.

77 Beekman Papers, vol. 1, p. 365.

78 Add. MSS 36,213, f. 63, BL.

79 Cork Evening Post, 9 June 1760.

80 Ibid. “[François] Thurot, with a small expeditionary force… captured Carrickfergus in February 1760. The countryside at once rose in arms against him, and thousands of volunteers flocked to defend Belfast. Thurot, seeing that the position was hopeless, withdrew his forces, only to be met and defeated by a British squadron.” Beckett, J. C., The Making of Modern Ireland, 1603-1923 (London, 1966), 196Google Scholar. For the danger presented by French privateers at the time of the snow Recovery's departure, see Cullen, L. M., Anglo-Irish Trade, 1660-1800 (New York, 1968), 87Google Scholar.

81 Steele, Ian K., The English Atlantic, 1675-1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (Oxford, 1986), 3–18Google Scholar.

82 Add. MSS 36,213, f. 63, BL.

83 Goslinga, Cornells Ch., The Dutch in the Caribbean and the Guianas, 1680-1791 (Maastricht, 1985), 120Google Scholar.

84 “The port of Willemstad was opened to foreigners against a recognition fee of 5 (later 8) per cent of the value of their cargoes.” Ibid., 81.

85 Klooster, Wim, Illicit Riches: Dutch Trade in the Caribbean, 1648-1795 (Leiden, 1998), 59–172Google Scholar; Klooster, Wim, “Curaçao and the Caribbean Transit Trade,” in Postma, Johannes and Enthoven, Victor, eds., Riches From Atlantic Commerce: Dutch Transatlantic Trade and Shipping, 1585-1817 (Leiden, 2003), 203–18Google Scholar; Goslinga, Dutch in the Caribbean, 78-83.

86 Pitman, Development of the British West Indies, 195.

87 “Supplies to French Troops in America, 1757,” Peter Force papers, Library of Congress.

88 Klooster, Illicit Riches, 97.

89 Pitman, Development of the British West Indies, 330.

90 Pares, Richard, Colonial Blockade and Neutral Rights, 1739-1763 (Oxford, 1938), 207–8Google Scholar.

91 Goslinga, Dutch in the Caribbean, 115-18, 189.

92 Harrington, New York Merchant, 192; CO 5/1227,1228, PRO/TNA.

93 Klooster, Illicit Riches, 100-1; Amelunxen, C. P., De Geschiedenis Van Curaçao (Amsterdam, 1980), 95Google Scholar.

94 As quoted in Goslinga, Dutch in the Caribbean, 95.

95 Pares, Yankees and Creoles, 50.

96 Harrington, New York Merchant, 192; Klooster, Illicit Riches, 100.

97 Thomas Riché letter books, 21 Mar. 1759, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

98 Cork Evening Post, 14 July 1760; Lydon, Pirates, Privateers and Profits, 117-18.

99 Cork Evening Post, 20 Oct. 1760.

100 Add. MSS 36,213, ff. 60, 63, BL.

101 HCA 42/92 (Recovery), f. 30, PRO/TNA.

102 Add. MSS 36,213, f. 61., BL.

103 Log of the Privateer Duke of Cumberland, 1758-60, NYHS.

104 Adm. 51/3792, PRO/TNA; Add. MSS 36,213, f. 52, BL.

105 Commerce of Rhode Island, vol. 1, p. 7911; MPG/1/598, PRO/TNA.

106 Add. MSS 36,213, f. 60, BL; Adm. 1/236, f. 156, PRO/TNA.

107 MPG/1/598, PRO/TNA.

108 Adm. 1/236, f. 156, PRO/TNA.

109 This was the estimate of Rear Admiral Charles Holmes (Adm. 1/236, f. 158, PRO/TNA). The number of vessels trading in the bay varied but was typically between 40 and 100. Vice-Admiral Thomas Cotes reported 140 in February 1760. See Pares, War and Trade, 457n.

110 CO 5/20, ff. 32-3, PRO/TNA; SP 42/41, f. 455, PRO/TNA; WO 34/29, f. 173, PRO/TNA; Calendar of Home Office Papers of the Reign of George III, 1760-11775], 4 vols. (London, 1878-1899), vol. 3, p. 4; Kimball, ed., Correspondence of William Pitt, vol. 2, pp. 348-49; log of the privateer Duke of Cumberland.

111 Add. MSS 36,211, f. 247, BL.

112 New-York Gazette, 27 Aug. 1759.

113 Ibid., 22 Oct. 1761.

114 Add. MSS 36,213, f. 64, BL.

115 Spanish peasants established a settlement at Monte Cristi in 1533 on a site explored and named by Christopher Columbus in 1493. That settlement continued until 1606, when it was leveled by Spanish authorities for its illegal trade with pirates. See The Columbia Gazetteer of the World, Cohen, Saul B., ed. (New York, 1998), 2033.Google Scholar

116 Adm. 1/236, ff. 156-57, PRO/TNA; Add. MSS 36,213, ff. 60, 65, BL; Pons, Frank Moya, The Dominican Republic: A National History (Princeton, N. J., 1998), 73–76Google Scholar.

117 Adm. 1/236, ft 156-58, PRO/TNA.

118 Sir Burrell, William, Reports of Cases Determined by the High Cowt of Admiralty (London, 1885), 226Google Scholar.

119 Adm. 1/236, f. 159, PRO/TNA.

120 MPG/l/598, PRO/TNA.

121 Add. MSS 36,211, f. 273, BL; Add. MSS 36,213, ff. 44, 60, 64, BL; MPG/1/598, PRO/TNA; Burrell, Reports of Cases, 226. A sailor aboard the vessel that departed Monte Cristi in company with the snow Recovery testified that “one of the Owners of a small Craft [in the shuttle trade to St. Domingue] resides at the Cape [and] is a French Subject.” Adm. 1/236, f. 337, PRO/TNA.

122 Pargellis, Stanley M., ed., Military Affairs in North America, 1748-1765: Selected Papers from the Cumberland Papers in Windsor Castle (New York, 1936), 376Google Scholar.

123 HCA 45/3 (Gideon), PRO/TNA; Add. MSS 36,212, f. 95, BL; Add. MSS 36,213, f. 55, BL.

124 Add. MSS 36,211, f. 276, BL.

125 Add. MSS 36, 211, ff. 62, 246, BL; Chalmers: New York, vol. 2, ff. 61, 63.

126 Add. MSS 36,213, ff. 52, 55, 64, BL.

127 Chalmers: New York, vol. 2, f. 61.

128 CO 5/20, ff. 151-52, PRO/TNA.

129 Add. MSS 36,213, f. 54, BL. “Neat,” a term common in eighteenth-century business usage, has the same meaning as “net.”

130 Add. MSS 36,213, f. 64, BL.

131 HCA 42/92 (Recovery), f. 29, PRO/TNA.

132 Add. MSS 36,213,1 64, BL.

133 HCA 42/92 (Recovery), f. 29, PRO/TNA.

134 Ibid.

135 Beekman Papers, vol. 1, p. 333.

136 HCA 42/92 (Recovery), f. 29, PRO/TNA.

137 Add. MSS 36,213, f. 62, BL.

138 HCA 42/92 (Recovery), f. 28, PRO/TNA.

139 Add. MSS 36,213, f. 64, BL.

140 “The effect of war upon this economy was at once to increase the price of imports and lower those of island produce.… A pound of sugar or coffee could only buy a quarter, a sixth, or some said an eighth of the European goods which it bought before the war.” Pares, War and Trade, 328.

141 Add. MSS 36,213, f. 64, BL.

142 Mercer was reluctant to go beyond his instructions: “I should have filled her up on your Account,” he wrote to New York, “but really I durst not venture, as the Men of War takes every thing they meet with from this Place.” Ibid., f. 64.

143 Beekman Papers, vol. 1, p. 352.

144 Commerce of Rhode Island, vol. 1, pp. 80-81.

145 Add. MSS 36,213, f. 54, BL; HCA 42/92 {Recovery), f. 30, PRO/TNA. It is likely that Mercer covered the shortfall by drawing against McCarty & Co. at Cape François, a firm that took a large share of New York City's trade at the Mount. Pares, War and Trade, 379.

146 Add. MSS 36,213, f. 64, BL.

147 Ibid.

148 New-York Gazette, 27 Aug. 1759.

149 Add. MSS 36,213, ff. 54, 64, BL.

150 Add. MSS 36,213, f. 54, BL.

151 “The 30th Instant the Harlequin Privateer belonging to you is come and takes care of the Recovery; Captain Castles spared him a Pair of her Guns, as the Harlequin lost some of hers in a Gale of Wind.” Add. MSS 36,213, f. 64, BL. Once a pilot boat, the forty-five-ton sloop had a share in twenty-one prizes (thirteen unassisted), nine of which were brought into the port of New York. Lydon, Pirates, Privateers, and Profits, 156, 158, 160, 163, 254; Truxes, ed., Letterbook, 87-88,194n, 207n, 217n, 284n.

152 Add. MSS 36,213, f. 56, BL.

153 Adm. 51/4223, PRO/TNA.

154 John Harris Cruger was a “New York factor” in Kingston, Jamaica, the nephew of John Cruger, mayor of New York City, and related by marriage to the Waltons. HCA 42/92 (Recovery), f. 4, PRO/TNA; Adm. 1/236, ff. 281-82, PRO/TNA; Harrington, New York Merchant, 13, 39.

155 Add. MSS 36,213, ff. 60-61, BL.

156 HCA 42/92 (Recovery), ff. 1-3, PRO/TNA.

157 Add. MSS 36,213, ff. 56, 58, BL.

158 Pares, War and Trade, 460.

159 HCA 42/9 2 (Recovery), ff. 4, 7, PRO/TNA.

160 Add. MSS 36,213, f. 52, BL.

161 HCA 42/92 (Recovery), ff. 37-38, PRO/TNA.

162 Commerce of Rhode Island, vol. 1, pp. 79-80, 86.

163 HCA 42/92 (Recovery), ff. 38-39, PRO/TNA.

164 Add. MSS 36,213, f. 53, BL; New-York Gazette, 24 Sept. 1761.

165 At the time of the reversal of the verdict against the snow Recovery, Waddell Cunningham was facing criminal charges in the New York Supreme Court of Judicature in a case related to trading with the enemy. See Truxes, “Case of the Snow Johnson,” 155-56.

166 New-York Gazette, 3 and 24 Sept. 1761.

167 Pennsylvania Gazette, 10 June 1762.

168 Barbieri, Katherine and Levi, Jack S., “Sleeping with the Enemy: The Impact of War on Trade,” Journal of Peace Research 36 (July 1999): 463–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Gowa, Joanne, Allies, Adversaries, & International Trade (Princeton, N.J., 1994)Google Scholar.

169 Meinig, Atlantic America, 267-70; Elizabeth Mancke, “Empire and State,” British Atlantic World, 192-95; Liss, Atlantic Empires, 48-74.