Merchant Depositions and Insurance Claims

This is the commercial paperwork of piracy's victims, in which merchants, shipmasters and seamen set out on oath or under contract what had been taken from them, principally between about 1690 and 1725. Four families sit inside it: depositions sworn before colonial governors and vice-admiralty officers; examinations taken by the High Court of Admiralty; notarial protests; and marine insurance policies. They travelled home as enclosures to gubernatorial despatches and survive at Kew in the Colonial Office correspondence classes: CO 5, CO 23 for the Bahamas, CO 137 for Jamaica, CO 152 for the Leeward Islands.¹

What unites them is voice, across several separate repositories. Here the plundered party speaks in the first person, and generally with something to gain by speaking.

How the papers were made

Colonial governance ran on paper sent to Whitehall. A master who had lost a ship swore a narrative before the governor, and the governor forwarded the copy to the Council of Trade and Plantations, generally alongside a request for convoy, a station ship, arms or a pardon. Admiralty examinations came from another engine, written interrogatories put to witnesses by the court's own examiner.

On 31 October 1718 Woodes Rogers wrote from "Nassau on Providence" to the Council, and his letter, calendared as entry 737 under the reference "C.O. 23, 1. Nos. 10, 10 i. to viii.", carried eight enclosures. Three are depositions sworn at Nassau that August and September, by Thomas Bowlin and four others, by William Dewick of Kingston, and by Richard Tayler, master of the sloop Elizabeth and Mary. Two more are certificates under Rogers's own hand authenticating them. His covering letter asked for stores, arms and fortification.²

What the series hold

At Kew the Admiralty record splits in two. The civil side is HCA 13, "examinations and answers", 272 bundles and volumes covering 1536 to 1826, the examinations proper running to 1750; the volumes for this archive are HCA 13/80 to 13/87, spanning 1690 to 1728. The criminal side is four volumes, HCA 1/52 to 1/55, covering 1683 to 1725 and catalogued simply as "Examinations of pirates and other criminals", with the indictment files at HCA 1/13 to 1/17 and loose affidavits, bills of lading and inventories in HCA 15.³

Calendared depositions are short and voyage-specific, and could also be gathered in bulk: Francis Nicholson's despatch of 10 June 1700 encloses at item 523.xii the depositions of twenty-seven named men "and other sailors and prisoners, as to piratical acts of the ship La Paix".

Insurance, and how little survives

What the insurance record establishes best is what merchants were buying. The perils clause of English policies, in wording A. B. Leonard describes as almost unchanged between 1580 and 1980, insured against "the seas, men of war, fire, enemies, pirates, rovers, thieves, jettizons, letters of mart and counter-mart, suprisals and takings at sea". Piracy was a named peril in the standard wording throughout the period.⁴

Survival depends on how the private underwriting market was organised. Before 1720 English marine insurance was written by individual underwriters, so no institutional archive of it exists; a policy survives because a merchant kept his file. The best-catalogued English run here is Ralph Radcliffe's, at Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies as DE/R/B293, forty-seven policies from 1709 onwards, and Levant and North Sea risks rather than Caribbean ones. The London Assurance Corporation held a marine charter from June 1720, but in its archive at The London Archives, GB 0074 CLC/B/192-26, the catalogued policy records begin only in 1721.⁵

Its limits as evidence

The category "pirate" in this material is elastic. All three of the Nassau depositions of 1718 describe seizures by Spanish guarda costas and periaugas, not by the Anglo-American pirate companies of the Bahamas, yet they reached London inside a piracy-driven despatch and are calendared among piracy material. Counted as pirate attacks, they inflate the phenomenon.⁶

A deposition is also a pleading in embryo. Every deponent wanted something, and a stated loss is his own valuation of goods nobody could inspect. The texts come down at a remove as well: the calendar prints an abstract, its editor's summary interleaved with quotation, and spellings shift within one entry.

How the Archive uses it

The cluster documents institutions as clearly as pirates: the governor as evidence-gatherer, and the vice-admiralty courts exporting the same procedure, HCA 1/99 holding their proceedings from North America, the West Indies and Africa from 1722 to 1739.

What this cluster cannot yet give is insurance in quantity: with no institutional archive of English underwriting before 1720, the cost of piracy risk cannot be counted from these papers. A London Assurance loss on a Jamaica risk in October 1720 could not be confirmed in any catalogued source, the citation for the Henry Bostock deposition about Blackbeard, CO 152/12/2 no 67iii, has not been checked at Kew, and no comprehensive surviving series of London notarial protests for the period has been located.