Ships

Perhaps not surprisingly, ships have always been property of fairly high value. Therefore they were often co-owned, and in the early modern period the shares could be held by tens if not hundreds of people, as a way to spread risks.⁶ Also cities and states owned or chartered ships if it served their purpose, prominent examples being the galleys of Venice used for trade or the Friedeschiffe of Hanseatic cities which were to keep privateers at bay.⁷ The high value of ships came on the one hand from the pragmatic side of ship ownership, enabling owners to conduct trade, transport people, explore new coastlines or wage war.

On the other hand, ships as property were also status markers. This is apparent from the Anglo-Saxon and Viking ship burials: chieftains ventured on their last voyage in a fashion which was to demonstrate the scale of their activities and power.⁹ Both the imprint of the seventh-century Sutton Hoo ship and the well-preserved ninth-century Gokstad ship show that a ship in the context of royal death can be seen as the equivalent of a throne in the context of royal life.¹⁰ Medieval and renaissance ships were depicted as images of power.¹¹ Also, the growing size of ships and fleets of late medieval and early modern rulers, often lavishly adorned, was a clear demonstration of status and might. The shipbuilding activity could turn into a missile race of sorts. The examples of the Spanish Armada and the English fleet at the time of Elizabeth I are well known.¹² Another good example is the competition between two cousins, the Danish Fredrick II and the Swedish Erick IV, in the dominance of the Baltic in the 1560s.

Ships were thus valuable for a number of reasons, and could be very much sought after by merchants, cities and rulers. Approaching ships as property means that we can focus on what kind of property right transfers were possible: sale and purchase of (parts of) the ship, stealing (including privateering), swapping, loans, inheritances or even income from insurance if the ship perished in storms or battles. All such transfers, obviously, had a legal side. There exists a large body of literature on each of these aspects, which in turn creates a context for the case studies.¹⁴ Of course, the property approach also applies to the cargo they carried, but this topic can only be broached very briefly here as the prime focus is on the vessels. Instead, it is important to point out that the value of ships, and the fact that they could be subject to property transfer in various ways, was also intrinsically connected to the fact that they were tokens of connections. They were means of transport and of putting people into contact with each other, like they still are today. Their very purpose was to move from A to B and so on, meaning that they moved from one political, juridical and social context to another. The core of their activity was thus embedded in having to function in different contexts, and the shipowners, skippers and crew must have been aware of it. Calling in each port reminded them of it, time and again.¹⁵ If needed, they referred to these differences in courts to defend their actions. For instance in a recently investigated 1565 case, Dutch seamen pointed out in the court in Danzig that it was not the custom in Amsterdam to certify in writing where they were intending to go, so the lack of such a document should not be held against them. The municipal court apparently accepted this argument.

This means that – following the research of Edda Frankot – matters of ships and shipping were approached in the legal (and diplomatic) practice of plurality and diversity.¹⁷ The lack of one uniform system of maritime law in northern Europe entailed a need for adaptability, and allowed explanation of the legal, social and even political context of a case. Furthermore, even within one city, there was no guarantee that similar cases would be tried in the same way as the context could still differ. When property rights of ships became very complex from an international point of view, diplomacy was called in at an urban or state level. In the aforementioned â€?fleet growth’ contest between the Danish and Swedish kings in the 1560s, rulers like the Polish king or the regent of the Netherlands were repeatedly called on to intervene and regain ships which had been confiscated or, in the words of the Danish Fredrick, â€?borrowed’.¹⁸

We will now examine three cases in more depth. The first case study, to illustrate how challenging but also flexible the approach to ships as property was, concerns the story of a caravel which caused several political crises. Beata Możejko reconstructed a social history of this ship, and her original and meticulous analysis is the point of departure for the discussion here.¹⁹ The caravel was a new type of ship which appeared in the Baltic in the second half of the fifteenth century: a three-masted ship with flush (edge to edge) planking and about 800 tons of carrying capacity used for trade and warfare. The vessel in question went on her first voyage in the 1460s, under the name Pierre de La Rochelle, as property of a French salt merchant. On arrival in Danzig in 1462, it suffered a serious accident in the harbour, and had to undergo extensive repair.

What is most striking about this case from the point of view of the present chapter is how intertwined the legal and diplomatic means were and how intricate the question of the ownership of the vessel (and later also of the captured cargo) proved to be.

The second case under examination here involves sixteenth-century Scotland, as documented in the archive in Gdańsk.²⁵ At some point in the 1510s a Portuguese ship had been captured by a Danzig citizen, Hinrick Berner. He later came with it to Scotland, which proved to be a poor choice for a safe haven. The Scottish king seized the ship and had Hinrick Berner imprisoned. Hinrick managed to escape twice, and apparently also saw an opportunity to spread news of the events to his hometown. Subsequently, the Scottish king declared the ship and its cargo (salt) his own property, and put the ship under the command of a Peter Jerner. This skipper then sailed with it to Danzig in the 1520s, which was again an unfortunate destination. The ship was arrested in the harbour by city officials, and what followed was a case before the bench of aldermen, one of the juridical bodies in Danzig.²⁶ The bone of contention was who was to be considered the owner of the ship: the Danzig skipper (Hinrick Berner) or the Scottish king. A wealthy Danzig burgher, Jakob Kempe, who had connections in the Portuguese trade, became guarantor for Hinrick Berner and apparently wanted to help him to retrieve the ship.

The final case involving a ship also has a link to Scotland.²⁸ In 1544, while the Low Countries were at war with Scotland,²⁹ a Deventer-owned ship sailing from Danzig was captured by Scottish privateers.³⁰ At that time, Scottish sailors were building up their reputation as a danger at sea.³¹ The incident happened close to the Norwegian coast. The descriptions which were recorded in the later legal proceedings contain salacious elements such as the story that a money treasure was hidden in the ship while the Scots were boarding, or the fact that the Dutch were left in Norway in their underwear and with hardly any money to make their way home (â€?geheel naect ghepilieert’). The real issue, once again, was the question of the ownership of the vessel. It was resold twice, and after the second sale it got into the hands of an Antwerp merchant. Apparently, the Deventer owners caught wind of this when the new ship owner approached the coast of Holland, heading towards Amsterdam. The Deventer merchants, some of whom were members of the city council, decided to put up a juridical fight. They had the ship arrested and the goods confiscated, apparently including several pairs of shoes which had allegedly been stolen – a creative sartorial revenge, one might say. But the arrest was temporary, and had to be resolved properly. The merchants from Deventer contested the property rights before a sequence of courts: the municipal court in Amsterdam, the regional Court of Holland and eventually the appellate court called the Great Council of Malines. It is in this court that the proceedings investigated here have been found (a serendipitous discovery since the documentation of the lower courts has only survived in a very fragmented way). The point made by the Deventer traders was that they had been unaware of the ongoing war between the Low Countries and Scotland, which had influenced their decision regarding the ship. They had thought it was safe to sail and trade. Therefore, they argued the case should not be seen in the context of privateering and prize law. Instead, they sought to frame it as a matter of piracy and unlawful appropriation. In other words, both sides considered the ship to be their own property and were willing to contest their claim in three consecutive court cases. Once again, the eventual outcome is unknown, but this case shows that property rights were subject to an ongoing interpretation of the law (by various courts) and political influence.