“They found in its stomach a package…”

I couldn’t help being intrigued by this anecdote from Aderivaldo Ramos de Santana’s recent article on the Black Perspectives history blog, as translated by Ana Catharina Santos Silva:

[In 1799] in the West Indies, in the context of conflicts involving France, Spain, Holland and England, Lieutenant Hugh Whylie [of the Royal Navy] stopped Nancy, an American ship.

Nancy’s journey, a 125-ton brig, began in the port of Baltimore on July 3, 1799, and was bound for the ports of Curaçao and Santo Domingo (now Haiti) to buy goods that would supply American trade. After the first stage, the ship followed its destination towards Port-au-Prince, but bad weather and a broken mast forced it to stop at the small Île à Vache (Cow Island), in southern Haiti.

Soon after, Nancy was chased and approached by Sparrow, one of the English cruisers commanded by Lieutenant Whylie, who watched the Haitian coast. Since the ship was suspected of being a “good prey” for the illegal trafficking of goods with the enemy nations, it was then escorted to Port Royal, Jamaica, where a lawsuit was filed. Nancy’s captain, Thomas Briggs, fervently claimed the vessel was neutral, with no connection to the Dutch or Spanish.

As investigations progressed, another English cruiser, H.M.S. Aberdavenny, commanded by Lieutenant Michael Fitton, found the main evidence to convict Briggs and his crew of the crimes of perjury and smuggling. On August 30, Fitton spotted, near Jacmel, a dead bull [whale] fought by hungry sharks, 119 kilometers from Cow Island, a description that might take one back to Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick. In the interest of catching at least one of the predators, the lieutenant threw a bait and managed to lure the biggest of them. As the sailors opened and cleaned the animal, they found in its stomach a package with documents carefully tied. The leaves were separated on deck and set to dry in the sun, revealing who the real trading partners of the American brig were.

Except for the envelope, the letters were in perfect shape. One of them, dated on the island of Curaçao, was addressed to Christopher Schultz, a Jewish merchant from Baltimore, and dealt with merchant affairs. Based on this documentation, Nancy and her charge were condemned as “proper war preys” on November 25, 1799.

Ramos de Santana’s article discusses other ways that sharks intersected with the transatlantic slave trade, both biologically and symbolically. Indeed, this wasn’t the only example of a ship’s records being thrown overboard and retrieved from the intestinal tract of a shark.

(The picture above is, of course, John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark, showing the British merchant Brook Watson’s close encounter with a predator in Havana harbor in 1749. This version hangs at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.)