The High Court of Admiralty Records (TNA HCA)

HCA is the letter code under which The National Archives at Kew arranges the surviving records of the High Court of Admiralty, the English court whose jurisdiction ran over matters arising on the high seas. It is a body of manuscript records divided into classes, and one class carries the criminal side: HCA 1, holding the examinations, informations, indictments, inquests, warrants, commissions and sessions papers of prosecutions for piracy and other offences at sea. The series is distinct from the office: the High Court of Admiralty was a working court; HCA is the court's files as Kew now keeps them.¹

The class is catalogued as "High Court of Admiralty: Oyer and Terminer Records", with covering dates of 1535 to 1834 and languages recorded as English and Latin. Documents are cited by class and piece, HCA 1/51 or HCA 1/99, and ordered by that reference at Kew.²

How the criminal side worked

An Offences at Sea Act of 1536 (28 Henry VIII c. 15) allowed crimes committed at sea to be tried by procedures resembling the common law rather than the civil law that governed the court's other business, under commissions of oyer and terminer. Two kinds of commission appear to have operated, a standing commission of inquiry into piracy and related offences and specific commissions for particular matters, a distinction that is probable rather than settled. Evidence came chiefly through examinations and depositions of suspects and witnesses, and a complainant could submit articles and interrogatories to shape the questioning.³

The overseas reach

The Piracy Act of 1698 to 1699 (11 and 12 William III c. 7) empowered vice-admiralty commissions of oyer and terminer to try pirates in the colonies rather than shipping them home, and the Piracy Act of 1721 (8 George I c. 24) hardened that regime. Records of such proceedings appear to be among the material now in HCA 1.⁴

The arrangement of the class

HCA 1 runs from HCA 1/1 to roughly HCA 1/112, grouped by document type rather than by date. Pieces 1/1 to 1/32 are calendared and indexed by person and ship; 1/33 to 1/59 are examination volumes in chronological order; warrants and commissions sit at 1/65 to 1/77, inquests at 1/78 to 1/84, indictments and inquests at 1/85 to 1/98. The Old Bailey sessions are at 1/110 and 1/111, the Execution Dock papers at 1/112. The criminal remit reached beyond piracy to treason, murder, mutiny, desertion, robbery and insurance fraud at sea.

What it holds for the pirates

For about 1690 to 1725 HCA 1 is probably where the prosecution of English and Anglo-American pirates is documented at first hand. The clearest instance is William Kidd, tried at the Admiralty Sessions held under commission at the Old Bailey on 8 and 9 May 1701 and hanged at Execution Dock on 23 May 1701, with Darby Mullins of his company and possibly two more, the count being open.⁵

It is also reported to hold examinations of pirates and other criminals from the early 1720s, the peak years of the Atlantic wave. It documents the court itself, the commissions of oyer and terminer, the marshals and the ritual of Execution Dock as much as it documents the pirates.

Its limits as evidence

The class is official and contemporaneous, made close to the events. Survival is uneven: depositions come down fuller than the paperwork that began and ended a case, so warrants, indictments and charges are fragmentary, and settlements reached out of court went largely unrecorded, leaving gaps around the surviving mass.⁶

The testimony was produced under legal duress and shaped to the ends of the court. A suspect had reason to minimise his guilt and a Crown witness reason to shift it, so an examination is evidence of what was said in court rather than of the event. Clerks recorded what served the law, leaving the archive silent on much of ordinary maritime life. Proceedings before 1733 are likely to be at least partly in Latin and in secretary hand, much of HCA is uncalendared and most is undigitised, so the class cannot be read at sight and must be consulted in person at Kew or through a copying service.

Underneath the printed trials

The sessions and examinations kept in the court's own papers were probably the raw material worked up into the trial pamphlets of the day and later into the collected state trials, so checking a printed trial against this class is going back towards the source.

What this source cannot yet give is piece-level certainty: no named printed trial has been matched to the sessions and examination pieces behind it, the piece ranges come from a type-level guide rather than from catalogue entries, the reference given for the digitised run of early-1720s examinations has not been checked against the catalogue, and where colonial vice-admiralty proceedings sit within HCA is unsettled.