On October 4, 1799, despatches were received at the Admiralty from Captain Young, of the Ethalion frigate, announcing the capture of a Spanish vessel named the Thetis, from the Havannah, with one million and a half of dollars on board, besides a quantity of merchandise. Shortly after this came news of the capture of another Spanish galleon, the Santa Brigida, with treasure estimated at between two and three millions of dollars, in addition to a valuable cargo of cochineal, sugar, coffee, and the like. A few days later it was rumoured that Lord Bridport’s share alone of the prize-money amounted to £125,000. But the excitement caused by this great capture had led to much exaggerated gossip, and it was shown that if the prizes yielded £800,000, then Lord Bridport, who, as commander-in-chief, shared one-third of an eighth, would get about £33,000. The other two-thirds of an eighth went to subordinate flag officers, who reckoned on £10,000 apiece, whilst the four captains of the frigates divided £50,000.

On the 29th of the same month a singular procession in honour of this great capture passed through Stonehouse and Plymouth to the dungeons of the Citadel. First went a trumpeter of the Surrey dragoons, sounding a charge; then followed two artillery conductors, an officer of the Surrey dragoons, an officer of artillery, Surrey dragoons, two and two, with drawn sabres; a band of drums and fifes, playing “Rule Britannia” and “God save the King;” then sixty-three waggons full of dollars, in nine divisions of seven waggons. On the first waggon a seaman, carrying the British over the Spanish jack, and two officers of marines, armed. On the centre waggon a seaman carrying the British ensign over the Spanish ensign, midshipmen armed with cutlasses. On the last waggon a seaman with the British pendant flying over the Spanish pendant; armed mariners and seamen, two and two: a band of drums and fifes playing “Britons, strike home!” armed seamen with cutlasses; an artillery officer; two officers of marines, armed; Surrey dragoons, two and two, with drawn sabres, and two trumpeters sounding a charge closed the procession. Both to larboard and starboard of this procession walked a number of armed sailors and midshipmen.

It is eighty-seven years since this remarkable parade took place. Long ago death wrested the bugle from the trumpeter in the van and sounded his charge. Those dollars lying piled in sixty-three waggons have been spent a hundred times over. The ringing cheers of the thousands of spectators “who testified their satisfaction by repeated huzzas at seeing so much treasure, once the property of the enemy of old England, soon to be in the pockets of her jolly tars and marines,” have been silenced ages agone by that same choking dust, out of which Spaniards, equally with Englishmen, are manufactured. The Don and the Briton are now excellent friends, and one need not be a holder in Spanish securities to heartily hope that the Spaniard’s shadow may never be less. But one cannot help one’s instincts. In this pacific age it must be wrong to feel elated over old triumphs; yet I confess, somehow or other, I cannot listen to the cheers—how infinitely dim and distant soever—of the spectators of that procession of soldiers and sailors, marching with conquering banners, without an unsounding, yet distinct, lifting up of the voice within me in a huzza of my own. “Our echoes roll from soul to soul,” says Tennyson; and I defy a true-born Englishman to watch those waggons of dollars, those rolling seamen, those brave soldiers and valiant marines, those little cocked-hatted middies, passing along over the fairy-like soil of history to the elf-like strains of “Rule, Britannia” and “Britons, strike home!” without joining in the procession and cheering with all his might the thin phantasm of a once brilliantly real pageant.

’Twas a fine haul for Jack. Sixty-three waggons of dollars! How many jorums of grog lay in those piles? How much fiddling, jigging, caper-cutting? But those waggons only represented a part. It was not until the last day of the month that the remaining chests of the Spanish treasure were lodged in the dungeons of the Citadel, and then the record runs: From El Thetis four hundred and twenty-seven boxes of dollars; from Santa Brigida five hundred and eight boxes of dollars, containing nearly three million dollars, besides very valuable cargoes of cocoa, indigo, cochineal, and sugar, “all safely landed and warehoused in Plymouth, under the Excise and Custom House locks.” Booty of this kind makes one think of the old South Seaman, of the big caracks of the spice islands and Western American seaboard, of Dampier, Shelvocke, Clipperton, and Betagh, and of the grand old Commodore Anson. His was possibly as big a bag as ever fell to the mariner’s lot. The galleon he captured had in her one million three hundred and thirteen thousand eight hundred and forty-three pieces of eight, and nearly thirty-six thousand ounces of silver, which, with the treasure already taken by the Centurion, amounted to about £400,000, “independent,” says the writer of the voyage, “of the ships and merchandize which she either burnt or destroyed, and which, by the most reasonable estimation, could not amount to so little as £600,000 more; so that the whole damage done the enemy by our squadron did doubtless exceed a million sterling.”

The Acapulco galleons had long inspired the dreams of the English freebooters. All the wonder and romance of the great South Sea, with its coasts and islands gilded by an imagination of more than Oriental ardency, had entered into those vast floating castellated fabrics, and the magnificence of the New Jerusalem as beheld by the holy seer, was faint in comparison with the substantial splendours which the English sailor with his mind’s vision viewed in the holds of the tall Manila ships. Diamonds of incomparable glory, rubies, sapphires, and other gems of a beauty inexpressible; sacks full of rix dollars, ducatoons, ducats, and Batavian rupees; chests loaded with massy plate, gold and silver, with flagons, goblets, crucifixes, and candles—here, to be sure, were temptations to court Jack from places more distant than Wapping and Gravesend, and to invite him to a contest with seas more ferocious than those which shattered the squadron of Pizarro.

In all naval history I can find nothing more remarkable than the immense courage and wonderful persistency of those old freebooters. Follow Dampier as he traverses the deep and outlives a terrible gale in a small canoe; and Shelvocke as he launches his wretched boat, which he called the Recovery, and sails away in her, loaded with seamen, who had scarce the space to lie down in, and victualled with nothing better than smoked conger eels, a cask of beef, and four live hogs. “We were upwards of forty of us crowded together, and lying upon the bundles of eels, and being in no method of keeping ourselves clean, all our senses were as much offended as possible. There was not a drop of water to be had without sucking it out of the cask with the barrel of a musquet, which was used by everybody promiscuously, and the little unsavoury morsels we daily ate created perpetual quarrels among us, every one contending for the frying pan.” Yet despite their miserable condition, these stout hearts attacked the first Spaniard that came in their way, took her, and used her in their subsequent marauding adventures. The voyage had a dismal issue, yet they managed to pick up a little booty here and there. Some curious old Spanish stratagems are exhibited. In one prize they found a quantity of sweetmeats, which were divided among the messes. One day a seaman complained that he had a box of “malmalade,” which he could not stick his knife into, and asked that it might be changed. Shelvocke opened it, and found inside a cake of virgin silver, moulded on purpose to fit such boxes; and, says he, “being very porous, it was of near the same weight of so much malmalade.” They overhauled the rest, and found five more of the boxes. “We doubtless,” exclaims the old buccaneer in a grieving way, “left a great many of these boxes behind us, so that this deceit served them in a double capacity—to defraud their king’s officers and blind their enemies.”^[72]

It always seems to be the haughty Don who, in the old stories, yields Jack the rich booties. Here, for example, is a passage from the “Annual Register” of 1762: “The Hermione, a Spanish register ship, which left Lima the 6th of January, bound for Cadiz, was taken the 21st of May off Cape St. Vincent, by three English frigates, and carried into Gibraltar. Her cargo is said to consist of near twelve millions of money, registered, and the unregistered to be likewise very considerable, besides two thousand serons of cocoa, and a great deal of other valuable merchandize.” Take these items from her papers: One thousand one hundred and ninety-three quintals of tin—a quintal, I may say, is one hundred pounds—two millions two hundred and seventy-six thousand seven hundred and fifteen dollars in silver and gold, coined; twenty-five arobes of alpaca wool, and five thousand two hundred and forty-three arobes of cocoa. A man did not need more than one capture after this pattern to settle him as a fine old English gentleman, and to qualify him to start a noble family. The mere rumour of such a haul as this would suffice, in those fighting days, to cover the seas with privateers.

Another paragraph, one year later: “Five waggon loads of money, escorted by a party of soldiers, were lately brought to the Bank from Portsmouth, by the Rippon, man-of-war, from the Havannah.” In these piping times of peace one is apt to forget how very well the mariner did in the years when his cutlass was never out of his hand. The value of the prize-goods taken at the Havannah in 1763 amounted to £154,855 10s. 11d., of which the admiral took nearly £90,000, the commodore £17,206, captains £1125 each, and the lieutenants £86 1s. each. And the privateerman fared as well as the naval officer. Not long after the Centurion took the Manila ship, two privateers, the Ranger, of Bristol, and the Amazon, of Liverpool, captured the Sancte Ineas, a Spanish man-of-war, bound from Manila to Cadiz, laden with gold, silver, silk, coffee, china, cochineal, and indigo, and declared to be the richest prize taken since the galleon by Admiral Anson. All through the story, from Elizabeth to the beginning of this century, you hear of the privateers arriving with rich prizes. “Letters from Fowey state the arrival there of the Lord Middleton, richly laden with cocoa, indigo, coffee, quicksilver, valued at £45,000, taken by the Maria privateer, of this port.” “Came in the Earl St. Vincent, fourteen guns, Captain Richards, privateer, of this port, with the New Harmony of Altona, from Smyrna to Amsterdam, with cargo valued at £80,000.” And so on by scores.

There were Customs’ seizures, too, such as we never hear the like of now. You read of an officer of Excise at Falmouth seizing on board a ship twenty-seven thousand five hundred and twenty-nine pounds of tea, and nine thousand gallons of brandy! “The officer by this gets £3000. It is the greatest seizure of tea ever known.” Or, “Arrived, the Providence, smuggling lugger, of Palferro, with nine hundred and seventy ankers of brandy and thirteen tons of tobacco, sent in by l’Oiseau, of thirty-six guns, Captain Linzee.” The old reports teem with examples of this kind.

Yet, spite of rich prizes, smuggling captures, and the like, Jack was always hard up, and by impecuniosity in a chronic state of being “forced from home and all its pleasures.” There was alive in 1790 an old man, one John Holmes, the only survivor of the crew who accompanied Anson round the world. He was in the most distressing poverty. He would tell the story of the fight between the Centurion and the galleon, and of the prize-money that fell to the men’s shares; but when asked what he had done with the substantial sum which had come to him, his answer was, “Alas! sir, I was a sailor.” Sir George Rooke put it more nobly, if less pathetically. When he was making his will, some friends who were present expressed their surprise that he had not more to bequeath. “I do not leave much,” answered the old heart of oak, “but what I do leave was honestly acquired; it never cost a sailor a tear or my country a farthing.”

The wonder is that ships went so richly laden in those war times. If it was thought proper to convoy vessels of comparatively small value, it was surely desirable to guard against the cruisers and the privateers the vast accumulations of money and plate which were to be met with in Spanish, French, and Dutch bottoms in the corsair-infested Narrow Seas, in Biscayan parallels, and in the wide Pacific Ocean. Anson’s galleon was, indeed, a powerful ship for those times, yet she proved no match for the slender and crippled company of men who attacked her. Had she been convoyed, had she been in company with other vessels of her nation, the British commodore must have languished in vain for the immense treasure in her. The need of a guard, an auxiliary, of some protection to supplement her own powder and shot seems to us, gazing backwards with clear perception of the issues which followed, essential to the safety of the plate or treasure ship in times when it would appear that the stoutest-hearted of Spanish or French captains were unable to rally their men when the English colours at the masthead acquainted them with the nationality of the foe. For example: On November 6, 1799, there arrived at Dartmouth a Spanish ship, of six hundred tons burden, named the N.S. de Piedat, prize to a privateer called the Dart. She mounted sixteen carriage guns, carried seventy men, and was fitted up for close quarters, that is to say, she was furnished with “barricadoes” as a refuge for her crew in case of being boarded. She struck to the privateer, however, after firing only two guns, though the Englishmen mounted but fourteen four-pounders. Nevertheless, seventy seamen—Spanish sailors—in a ship of six hundred tons seem a feeble company to send along with such wealth as lay in the N.S. de Piedat’s hold. Here is her value: one hundred and forty-two thousand one hundred and seventeen silver dollars, thirty-eight thousand nine hundred and forty-nine dollars in gold doubloons, thirty-one ingots of gold, five ingots of silver, forty-two bales of fine beaver, twenty-one thousand and sixty-one hides in the hair, three bales of fine wool, one bale of fine fur. The rest of the cargo, exclusive of the gold and silver, was valued at £80,000. The Dart carried sixty seamen. What conceivable chance would seventy Spaniards have against such a crew as the Dart could oppose to them—fellows whose living depended upon plunder, and who could almost count upon the enemy’s striking after the first hail or after the first two shots? It was a very cosy haul for the Dart’s people. Small wonder that the privateer should have formed an abounding ocean element, when the character of the prey and the quality of the baggings are considered. “Eight ships long expected from New Spain, and another from Buenos Ayres, arrived at Cadiz the 21st of this month. The cargoes of these ships are valued at eleven millions of dollars, of which the registered gold and silver amount to near nine millions.” Such paragraphs are again and again to be met with in the news sheets of old times.

And depend upon it, if the privateersman’s mouth watered over such items of intelligence, they were also read with a swelling heart by the King’s Navy man. Prize-money is sweet, and it ought to be sweet, for no reward is more gloriously and heroically earned. What is there in cash—be it prompt or otherwise—to compensate a man for a leg or an eye? “Went down into the Sound, La Nymphe, of thirty-six guns, Captain Douglas. She received this afternoon nearly £30,000 prize-money, and sailed directly on a cruise.” How agreeable this is to read, though it is all over, years and years ago! In fancy I behold the jolly red faces of those lively salts, pigtails on back, and quids standing high under their cheekbones, sheeting home the Nymphe’s topsails, their hearts full of the Sukes and Sals who have faded out with the receding shore, and their minds busy with dreams of the dollars this new cruise shall tassel their pocket-handkerchiefs with. “The great sales for prize-goods captured in different vessels of the enemy by our cruisers and sent in here (Plymouth) began this day. The prize-vessels and goods of different kinds fetched great prices, and were bought up with avidity by purchasers from London, Liverpool, Bristol, Falmouth, Exeter, etc., much to the satisfaction of the captors.” Much to the satisfaction of the captors! The fancy leaps to the sound of these century-old words. Hamoaze is full of prizes—the brilliant victor with the proud St. George’s Cross at her peak strains lightly at her hempen cable in the Sound, her yards braced to a hair, the white line of hammock cloths crowning her defences, her tompioned guns grinning like muzzled mastiffs through her ports, the red-coats of marines dotting her almond-white decks, an epaulet or two flashing aft, and the sale proceeding ashore “much to the satisfaction of the captors.” Ay, Jack’s grin, though one, two, or three centuries old, is a living thing yet. The trophies of an amazing naval history are wreathed around his purple smile. What, after all, was Britannia’s true Archimedean lever but the mariner’s pigtail; and what the fulcrum but the mountain of treasure from which the sailor gathered his little pocketful under the name of Prize Money?