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Updated: June 21, 2025
Merchant-ships are but extension bridges; armed ones but floating forts; even pirates and privateers, though following the sea as highwaymen the road, they but plunder other ships, other fragments of the land like themselves, without seeking to draw their living from the bottomless sea itself.
"The public weal justifies all things," said Lord Worcester, who, with Lord Rivers, viewed with jealous scorn the power of the Earl of Warwick. "And what is to become of my merchant-ships," said the king, "if Burgundy take umbrage and close its ports?" Hastings had no cause to take up the quarrel on Warwick's behalf. The proud earl had stepped in to prevent his marriage with his sister.
This is the sum of the story, and you will all be seized as pirates, I can assure you, and executed with very little ceremony; for you know merchant-ships shew but little law to pirates, if they get them in their power."
The engraving shows the state and situation of the two ships at the time the Réunion surrendered. During the night, the wind had been so far to the westward as to enable the Crescent to fetch Cape Barfleur, while the Réunion, which left Cherbourg in the evening, stood to the northward, in hopes of meeting with merchant-ships coming up Channel.
"Seeing the wide berth kept by this fine ship, which was going proudly before the wind," says the sprightly and sagacious biographer of Beaumarchais, M. de Lomdnie, "Admiral d'Estaing signalled to her to bear down; learning that she belonged to his majesty Caron de Beaumarchais, he felt that it would be a pity not to take advantage of it, and, seeing the exigency of the case, he appointed her her place of battle without asking her proprietor's permission, leaving to the mercy of the waves and of the English the unhappy merchant-ships which the man-of-war was convoying.
In the old system, the disadvantage of making a longer passage is compensated by the certainty of catching the trade-winds in a shorter space of time, and keeping them the greater part of the passage. At the time of my abode in the Spanish colonies, I witnessed the arrival of several merchant-ships, which from the fear of privateers had chosen the oblique course, and had had a very short passage.
"The pirates knew these waters. The average merchant skipper didn't. They'd build signal flares on the keys to lure ships onto the rocks, and then loot them. The more adventurous used to overhaul vessels skirting the coast to and from Cuba and Central America. They'd sally out from their hiding-places among the keys and lie in wait for the merchant-ships. They'd turn tail and run.
Spanish galleons, Spanish merchant-ships, were brought month after month to English harbours. The daring of the English seamen faced any odds. Ten English trading vessels beat off twelve Spanish war-galleys in the Straits of Gibraltar. Sir Richard Grenville in a single bark, the Revenge, found himself girt in by fifty men-of-war, each twice as large as his own.
In the well-known instance, in which Captain Richard Budd Vincent sacrificed his ship, in a contest where he was from the first sure to be overpowered, he gained sufficient time for most of his flock of merchant-ships to escape.
The former, therefore, were unable to interpose in time; and the alternative remedy, of the convoy running down to leeward of their escort, could not be applied by all the merchant-ships in so large a body. "In the spring of 1780 the British admiralty had assembled in the Channel ports forty-five ships-of-the-line.
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