The Shipwreck Cannibals

by Adam Nightingale

  Deane asked Young what was on the ships.

  Young replied: ‘Anchors, cables, cannon, small arms, shot, shells, tallow and tarr’. Despite the presence of weapons and ammunition this was not an arms stash, but rather a ‘naval store’.

  Deane wanted to know what Young’s commanding officers had thought about him and what he was doing in the vicinity.

  Young replied that they thought Deane’s business was, ‘to settle a correspondence as a merchant’.

  The Russians’ route to Spain was indirect and therefore suspicious. Deane wanted to know why they went ‘north about’.

  Young explained that it was the commander’s orders ‘to go north about’ in order ‘to avoid the channel’.

  The ships had put in on the Irish coast. Was this by ‘design or necessity’?

  Necessity, Young said. There had been ‘very bad weather’. Young’s ship had lost its fore-topmast and had been forced to refit.

  In that case how did the Russian officers ‘behave to those of His Majesties Customs when they came onboard?’

  Compliant, Young replied.

  Did the Russians ‘correspond with, or receive visits from any people of fashion on that coast?’

  ‘Gentlemen of fashion did come aboard,’ Young said but he ‘was never admitted to their company’.

  ‘Were there any arms or ammunitions delivered from your ship while on their coast, or did you observe any such design, had they met with proper persons or opportunities?’

  Young said no, ‘nor could I observe they put in shore with any other design than to refit.’

  ‘When you arrived at Cadiz, did officers immediately go about delivering their goods and receiving others in order to get home before their ports should be frozen up?’

  Young stated that the Russians took their time. They received a cargo of salt to take back to Russia. ‘There was no haste made to leave this port because they designed to winter in Ireland.’

  Deane wanted to know if any British or Spanish ‘persons of rank’ had visited the Russian ships.

  Young answered yes on both counts although he didn’t know who they were.

  The interview continued.

  Deane turned his attention to Young and company’s journey home and the fact that the three ships had put into the Spanish port of St Andero.

  ‘Where did your commander purpose to winter, or was it a design or necessity to put into St Andero?’

  The commander’s plans had been to winter in Ireland if the weather was bad. As it had stood the weather was fine, enabling them to sail on to St Andero without interruption.

  ‘Had you delivered all your goods at Cadiz or did you deliver and receive any at St Andero?’

  ‘We unloaded our ships at Cadiz and took in nothing more than provisions.’

  ‘Did you not touch on the Irish or Scottish coast on your return?’

  ‘We saw no land from St Andero.’

  Mr Young’s inconclusive testimony joined the glut of intelligence that trickled back to Walpole and Townsend from a series of creditable sources in Europe. The consensus was that no invasion was imminent. Townsend was not convinced by the increasingly overwhelming evidence to the contrary and carried on in his paranoia trying to connect dots that did not exist.

  John Deane’s interview with Mr Young was his last contribution to the invisible war that had quietly raged between Great Britain and Russia. With the interview completed, the state of Russia was now no longer his concern. He had a new post and new responsibilities. John Deane was bound for Ostend.

  18

  Water for Wine

  Eighteenth-century Flanders was a country with something of a divided personality. At the beginning of the century Flanders had languished under Spanish control. In 1713, at the conclusion of the War of Spanish Succession, control of Flanders had passed from Spain to Austria.

  Now that a sort of peace had descended on the country, as far as Austria was concerned, Flanders’ numerous ports could be properly utilised for trade. The target was East India. Since the sixteenth-century, England and Holland had exerted dominance on trade in East India. Now Austria was keen to establish an East India Company in the Flanders port of Ostend. Austria established trade deals with the French and the Spanish, and the Ostend East India Company was formed. England and Holland made their disapproval known. They virtually threatened Austria to desist and forced the new company to dismantle itself. Consequently the Ostend East India Company was given a period of seven years to put its house in order and then disappear. So that it did not lose money, the British and the Dutch extended one concession to the company. The company was permitted to conduct a maximum of two trading voyages to India for every year of the company’s remaining existence.

  Naturally the British government did not trust Austria to uphold their end of the enforced agreement, so John Deane’s covert agenda as the commercial consul for the ports of Flanders and Ostend was to report to Lord Townsend anything that might threaten British interests in East India. And although Townsend’s concerns about a Russian-backed Jacobite invasion of Britain had proved something of a fever dream, the Jacobite threat was still a cause for genuine concern. There was a powerful Irish presence in Ostend, many of whom were suspected Jacobites. John Deane was the obvious person to report on and frustrate Jacobite designs.

  Deane’s official duties were essentially to police trade and collect revenue from the British mercantile community. Part of the revenue took the form of ‘consulage’, a tax every British ship had to pay in port; a tax from which John Deane would take his wages. Deane’s other main consideration was to make certain that the merchants’ paperwork was in order. The obstacles facing John Deane were the mercantile community’s resentment of what they perceived to be needless and restrictive bureaucracy and their reluctance to pay consulage. Traditionally, getting merchants to pay consulage was like pulling teeth. Deane’s situation would be not helped by the fact that previous consuls had been principally decorative, wealthy by other means and conflict averse. Consequently they had hardly bothered to collect what was their own and their government’s due. There was another reason for merchants not wanting a consul to look too closely into their affairs. Smuggling was an endemic problem in the ports of Flanders.

  In addition to the regulation of his own countrymen, a consul’s duties involved dealing with the aggressive trade policies of the host nation. In March 1728 the Flemish authorities in Nieuport had charged the master of an English vessel a brokerage fee of three gilders despite having ‘transacted no business with him’. When he contested the matter he was arrested. In contrast, Dutch ships were completely exempt from such vigorous brokerage despite often having more cargo. Around about the same time an English merchant ship transporting a cargo of grindstones, coal and bottles had sold its entire load to a single Nieuport merchant. The Nieuport merchant made a contract with the English merchant for three more voyages transporting the same cargo. The Nieuport magistrates blocked the voyages and insisted that from that point on all ships had to sell their goods by auction. This was the world that John Deane had inherited.

  None of this would have overly concerned Walpole and Townsend in their appointment of John Deane. In Deane they had a tenacious, flint-headed man with a wildly puritanical streak. They were confident that not only would Deane continue his outstanding run as an intelligence officer, he would reform an endemically corrupt port, long overdue a reckoning.

  Deane would indeed execute his duties with single-mindedness. But in John Deane, single-mindedness was a quality that was characteristically double-edged. He would fulfil his orders, official and covert, scrupulously. But with his genius for conflict Deane would soon count numerous Flemish nationals among the increasingly lengthy roll call of people who hated him. He would antagonise his own countrymen. He would frustrate his peers and his superiors. In time, John Deane would even earn the rebuke of the king of England.

  John Deane arrived in Ostend in April 1728. He began to g
et the lie of the land and it did not take him long to determine whom his future enemies were likely to be. Among the fractious community Deane singled out a Mr Lee, a prominent merchant whom Deane described to Townsend as an ‘Irish papist deeply tainted with Spanish zeal’.

  John Deane’s first task was to introduce and sustain a system of regular consulage payment. Deane had inherited a mess. The British merchants who used Ostend had been in conflict with the previous consul over the matter of consulage. Now that John Deane was among them, the merchants held a general meeting to discuss how consulage was to be regulated for the future. Whatever the merchants’ proposals were, John Deane was not happy with them and was disinclined to consent to their wishes. Deane discussed the matter publically and privately with Mr Lee. Deane made it clear to Lee that it would be his fault if the two men could not ‘live well together’. There was additional tension with Lee over a pass for a ship that Deane was reluctant to grant. Deane suspected that Lee was trying to circumvent his authority and get a pass granted from the admiralty office by alternate means.

  Deane needed allies to do his job properly. He had Townsend’s support in London. He had the advocacy of Robert Daniels, the English minister in Brussels whom Deane praised to Townsend for his assistance. But Deane needed the aid of the governor of Ostend, the Marquis De Campo. De Campo’s support hung in the balance. In Deane’s opinion, Mr Lee had an undue amount of influence over De Campo. But Deane was convinced that he could secure De Campo’s loyalty. The two men met. They had a long conversation. They got on well. De Campo told Deane that he required documentation specifying ‘what consulage each ship ought to pay, and that Mr Lee would see the same executed’. De Campo agreed to speak to the merchants on Deane’s behalf.

  Further tensions between Deane and Lee developed over a ship in port named the Mary Galley. The ship was bound for Cadiz. James Fitzgerald, the master of the ship, had gone to London. Another man arrived in Ostend to command the Mary Galley. The new master was Lee’s brother-in-law. He wanted his pass endorsed by John Deane. There were problems with the pass. The pass had been altered. Another ship’s name had been erased and the name of the Mary Galley had been written on the erased section of the document. Although Deane did not believe the documents were genuinely fraudulent he was still reluctant to endorse the pass to the ship’s new master. Lee contested the decision. From Deane’s point of view it was imperative that he had his way in this matter. Deane wrote: ‘If Lee gains his point in this, I have little reason to expect doing any good here … ’. Deane was further exasperated to learn that Fitzgerald had been told by Lee that he shouldn’t pay the standard consulage from Spain. Fitzgerald was not the only one who believed he was exempt. When John Deane made his first attempts to collect his due he met with flagrant opposition. A Mr Howells refused point blank to pay. Deane had him arrested. John Deane had been in Ostend for less than two months and he was already embroiled in a power struggle he could not afford to lose.

  Almost as soon as Deane had arrived in Ostend he had applied to Townsend for permission to return home. He cited ‘an unsettled condition which my family is divided’. Deane returned to Nottingham in May to resolve his elliptical family problems. In England he met with the attorney general and discussed the problem of consulage. As the situation stood, John Deane could only force defiant merchants to pay consulage by taking them to court. But Deane was not confident the local courts would necessarily back him. He needed letters from Townsend officially empowering him to collect consulage. He wanted the letters to be delivered to the merchants of Ostend and Bruges en masse at a general meeting. He wanted the letters to contain a sentence of rebuke to the merchants for, ‘flying in the face of government and very ill becoming good subjects’. Deane was due to return to Ostend in September. He fully intended to come back armed with everything he needed to bend the merchants to his own and His Majesty’s wishes.

  John Deane described his return journey to Ostend as, ‘disagreeable, tedious and expensive’. He was overcharged at customs despite having with him, ‘nothing new and only necessaries’. In Deane’s absence a merchant had died. Deane was provided with the dead man’s house as his new home. Deane paid the Marquis De Campo a visit. He was warmly received. De Campo asked after Townsend, ‘of whose health,’ Deane observed, ‘he never omits enquiring’. While the two men were talking, a third entered. He was the new burgermaster. His name was Mr Ray. Deane had not met him before but knew of him; he did not approve of him and would accuse him to Townsend of, ‘strenuously opposing everything that tends to the honour or interests of His Majesty or Protestant Britain’.

  Mr Ray and Mr Lee were friends and compatriots. Prior to Deane’s departure for England, Ray had bought a ship for Lee and had begun fitting it out for a voyage to Cadiz. The ship was in a bad condition and the work was shoddy. The practice of fitting ships ‘to be no more than is necessary to preserve them from perishing’ was endemic in Ostend and met with John Deane’s disapproval. Now that he was back in Ostend, Ray applied to Deane for help in acquiring a pass for such a ship. Deane was not impressed and determined to subject the ship to a thorough inspection.

  Despite initial hostility, John Deane was optimistic about the prospect of change for the better. In addition to Townsend, Robert Daniels and the Marquis De Campo, Deane had received a pledge of support from his old friend Sir Charles Wagner. The English admiral promised to do ‘everything in his power to facilitate the impending affairs here’. A meeting of the merchants of Bruges and Ostend had been arranged to address the problem of consulage. Deane believed Bruges was something of a lost cause but was confident he could make the merchants at Ostend see sense.

  All the while, Deane continued to work as an intelligence agent. He acquired access to some of Ray’s correspondence from a company manager at Antwerp. He unearthed intimations that a count had ‘discovered the resolutions of England and Holland to sink or burn all ships of this place that they should meet beyond the cape … ’. Deane also learned that a French cardinal believed that ‘Europe could expect no peace’ while the Vienna alliance survived. John Deane passed the information on to his superiors. Deane assumed that attempts would be made to read his own mail and took measures to assure that this did not happen.

  Deane’s meeting with the merchants took place in Bruges. There was debate. There were the inevitable tensions. As expected, Mr Lee opposed John Deane. The discussion was heated. Deane felt his temper rise but was able to suppress it. He now possessed the letters from Townsend that he needed to validate his demands for consulage and this seemed to begrudgingly settle the matter. Deane assured his superiors that he was now determined to ‘retrieve the government’s honours and interests’.

  Outwardly John Deane could project immense confidence, bull-headedness and strength as he prosecuted his duties. But the old private fears of destitution and financial ruin gnawed away at him. Deane was worried that his fortunes were so inexorably linked to the favour of Lord Townsend that, should the secretary of state die, he would not be supported. Ironically, now that he was properly authorised to collect it, consulage became a real source of anxiety. Consulage was Deane’s only source of income, yet the amassed earnings he was entitled to were meagre in comparison to the financial demands of his rank and position. In Ostend, a man’s status and authority was linked to his ability to reciprocate hospitality. If Deane were invited to a person of influence’s house for dinner he was expected to respond in kind or risk a belittling of status. In Ostend, status and authority were conjoined twins. Deane put it this way: ‘If I ate a bit of meat or drink a glass of wine at another’s house, I must return it, and not water for wine.’ Whether he made up the shortfall in his earnings by borrowing or dipping into personal savings is not known, but by the closing months of 1728 John Deane complained of being £200 ‘out of pocket on this account’. From now on, the formal and deferential tone of much of Deane’s subsequent correspondence with his superiors would often be upended by a tormented sentence or p
aragraph bewailing his purgatorial financial state.

  As Deane continued to do his job as both consul and spy, the winter unfolded in a series of conclusive incidents and dramatic non sequiturs.

  Deane worked with De Campo to introduce the practice of ships displaying their country’s colours when coming in and out of port.

  Deane arrested the Irish master of an English-built ship but let him go.

  Deane passed on information to the admiralty about a man named Robert Smith who had snuck in and out of port without paying the British government what he owed it.

  Deane passed on information received from the director of post that it was known that commissions were being given by the British ‘to destroy’ Ostend Company ships, ‘if found attempting to go to India’.

  Deane passed on his suspicions about a ship called The Seahorse that was ‘cargoed with a host of mysterious secrecy’. Onboard was a Captain Combs who had a price on his head for shooting a customs officer in England.

  There was some consternation about a sixteen-gun frigate that had been spotted at Dunkirk. Deane met three men outside the walls of Ostend who provided him with information about the frigate.

  Mr Ray complained about a pass that he had hoped Deane would grant him that Deane admitted to his superiors Mr Ray had ‘little hope of seeing’.