Mélange Travel & Lifestyle Magazine January 2018 | Page 463

America.
Therefore
support and
trade on their
part had to
be covert. On
St. Eustatius,
the island’s
governor
would sell
Dutch
passports,
ships’ papers,
and Dutch
flags to
pirates as
a means to
help conceal their identity. Merchant houses in
St. Barts, St. Eustatius, and St. Thomas served as
agents for privateers and pirates. A notorious
merchant house in St. Thomas was known as
Cabot & Co, founded in the early 1820’s. They
would provide start-up funds for interested
captains to purchase or lease a ship, supply it with
goods and equipment, and a crew. As the agents,
they were considered the prize-masters, meaning
they decided how the goods from a captured
ship would be divided. They would also help
arrange crews for privateer and pirate ships on St.
Thomas; however, since it was illegal for privateers
to openly seek crew members, merchant houses
would arrange for a small boat filled with
prospective crew members, and after the privateer
ship left St. Thomas, it would follow them out to
sea, and board the privateer ship. This would let
the Governor of St. Thomas claim ignorance of the
affair, as it happened outside of St. Thomas’ waters.
Trade with privateers and pirates, though did not
happen on St. Thomas. Instead, they received
laundered goods and ship s from privateers via St.
Eustatius.
On St. Eustatius, the Governor was more tolerant
of open trade with privateers (and pirates) despite
it being
illegal. Here
pirates and
privateers
could offload
goods from
their captured
ships, and
have them
stored in
mechants’
warehouses
that still lined
Wells Bay
the southern
Photo Credit: Cees Timmers
shoreline,
leftovers
from the
island’s boom period as the “Golden Rock” in
the late 1700’s. These prize goods would then
be laundered on Statia or Saba, for re-shipment
to St. Thomas. A ship would be sent from St.
Thomas to either Saba or St. Eustatius, picking up
these goods as though they were bought from a
legitimate merchant. Each time a cargo of goods
was laundered through Saba, the governor of
the island received a cut of up to 500 pieces of
eight. For privateers that had captured ships
from nations who their sponsor was not at war
with, this posed a problem, as they effectively
owned a smoking gun showing their guilt, and
would then be considered pirates. St. Eustatius
and Saba helped solve this problem for them. An
illegally captured ship would be offloaded of all
its valuables at night, and the ship would then
be filled with rocks, and brought out to sea and
intentionally sunk. By the late 1820’s, this was
happening up to three or four times per week. A
second option was to have the illegally captured
ship sent over to the northwest coast of Saba, to
a section known as Wells Bay, which served as a
chop-shop. Saba was already regionally famous
as an island of captains, sailors, and ship-builders,
but the island had fallen on hard times since major