Cargoes and Commodity Values

Sugar, tobacco, gold dust, logwood and enslaved people were what the ships carried, each priced in its own moneys. What a captured ship held is at prizes, cargoes and fencing; how a take was divided at plunder, shares and compensation.

What the ships carried

Three trades fill the record. The plantation trades moved sugar in hogsheads and tierces, rum and molasses, tobacco in hogsheads and rolls, cocoa, indigo and cotton, with the Jamaica minor lines given by the naval surgeon John Atkins as "Ginger, Piemento, Cocoa, Indigo, Cotton, Tortoise-shell, Dyers Wood, Cedar, Mohogany, and Manchineel-woods". The Guinea trades moved gold weighed as dust, ivory, gum, camwood and enslaved people. Logwood, cut on ground Spain claimed, carried a legal defect at its origin. The statutes that channelled these trades are at the Caribbean plantation economies.¹

Moneys, and the conversion problem

The coin English usage called a moidore is reported to have been the double moidore, at about 27 shillings. Where the General History glosses thirteen lakhs of rupees as "1300000 half Crowns", the half crown is that author's own.

Four points where a value was struck

The same goods cost one sum at the outfitting port, exchanged for another on a foreign coast, sold for a third at a destination market, and realised a fourth for a taker who could neither warehouse nor advertise nor sue. Atkins recorded the first: an outward Guinea cargo invoiced at 950 pounds, with 150 trading guns at eight shillings and threepence and a last line of "10 Cwt. of Cowrys at 5l." He recorded the second for the same goods: at Whydah, "Cowrys sell per Cwt. 12l. 10s."²

People priced as cargo

Enslaved Africans were bought, shipped, priced, taxed and plundered as cargo. Johnson's General History lists Captain Jones's loss in 1719, thirty-six enslaved men, gold dust, clothes, guns, rum and stores, as a single valuation, "computed in all to 1500 l. Sterling", and gives clandestine landing prices at Brazil of "from 20 to 30 Moidors a Boy, and from 30 to 40 a Man Slave". The trade itself is at the slave trade nexus.

At Sierra Leone, in Atkins's tables, goods totalling 50 gold bars, among them seven kettles and three pieces of chintz, bought a woman. He gave sterling equivalents too, about 15 pounds a head there "allowing the Buyer 40 or 50 per Ct. Advance on his Goods", and four ounces of gold a head at Cape Apollonia, "allowing 100 per Cent. on Goods, they cost at a medium 8l. Sterling". At Sierra Leone the trade goods came in kettles, chintz and iron bars; at Cape Apollonia the price was weighed in gold.³

Ransom, the one negotiated price

Ransom is the only transaction in which a taker and a merchant agreed a price for a hull and its cargo. At Whydah in January 1721/2 ten of the eleven ships in the road ransomed with Roberts's company at eight pounds of gold dust apiece, the receipt of 13 January 1721-2 made out in the name of "GENTLEMEN OF FORTUNE". At Atkins's rate of about four pounds the troy ounce, that ransom is between about 384 and about 467 pounds sterling, according to which weight is meant.⁴

Scale without modern money

A known wage gives the scale. A Royal Navy able seaman was paid 22 shillings and sixpence a month after deductions, on a rate set in 1653 and not raised until April 1797, reckoned by the 28-day lunar month. Against that wage the thousand pounds a man written into Roberts's ninth article is about sixty-eight years of pay, and the boy Philip Middleton's share of above a hundred pounds from the Every dividend about six and three quarter years. What Henry Every's company took in 1695 was put at anything between 325,000 and 600,000 pounds, a dispute between claimants rather than a measurement.

The gaps are specific. No documented price series for sugar, tobacco or logwood between 1690 and 1725 has been found, so a sentence of the form "a hogshead of sugar was worth so much in 1718" cannot be written; Atkins's prices are one trader's recollection of one season. No account book made by pirates has been found, so every figure for what a company held comes from a victim, a prosecutor or a printed narrative.