Patriot Pirates (10 page)

Still, the young man enjoyed operational advantages in Martinique that soon gained him a formidable reputation among its merchants and foreign visitors, “treated with as much respect,” marveled a London newspaper, “as the British ambassador at Paris.”

The island’s remote location encouraged the flouting of traditional protocol. Its governor and military commander gleefully snubbed British protests over the firing on HMS
Shark
and went so far as to offer a naval escort to
Reprisal
on its return trip to America, a gesture the foreign ministry rejected as too incendiary. “They were afraid of commencing hostilities,” Bingham lamented, “as the French navy is very weak in the West Indies.”

He too pushed limits with his superiors. Within days of arriving he sent letters to Philadelphia and Paris laying out strategies of wartime commerce like a veteran magnate. He told Silas Deane to ship goods through him rather than straight to America. It was costlier due to reloading onto smaller, more elusive vessels and paying the middlemen (including Bingham), but it was safer “as by this means the risk may be divided.”

To Robert Morris he stressed the need for efficient communication. Rather than ask random captains to carry mail, he proposed a regular schedule of “fast sailing, well appointed” vessels to ply between Martinique and the American mainland. Six months later, the Committee of Secret Correspondence likewise sought to buy two packet boats in France to facilitate contact with its diplomats there, a belated acknowledgment of the mail delays that had so bedeviled Deane.

Martinique’s inhabitants were well informed of international events. European ships neutral in the ongoing war brought in mail and newspapers free from Royal Navy harassment. And American ships on powder voyages to Saint-Pierre were numerous and persistent. Many were intercepted, but enough got through with the latest news from their ports of origin to give Bingham a broader sense of current affairs in Europe and America than was available to Congress or the Paris commissioners. His network of procurement agents on other foreign-held islands enhanced his knowledge of world developments and market trends. Before long he was making unilateral purchasing decisions that those awaiting his shipments in America had no choice but to accept.

Morris, with whom he had extensive side deals in addition to their government work, conceded that “none but persons on the spot can have a just idea of the perpetual changes that take place in every branch of business.” Congress grumbled, however, forgetting that military supplies were in erratic abundance even on Martinique. If arms were temporarily unavailable, Bingham might substitute molasses or tea that Congress at least could exchange, at values much higher than their original cost, for tobacco, flour, indigo, and other colonial commodities prized by foreign merchants. Such profit-based purchases generated “a ministerial fortune” for him and Morris and should have benefited the government as well, increasing its buying power abroad. But Congress consistently failed to fulfill its end of the commodities-for-weapons arrangement.

Most of the problem in getting shipments to its agents was due to capture by Royal Navy patrols, but much was caused by bureaucratic inattention, shortsightedness, and incompetence. “If Congress means to succeed in this contest,” Morris scolded his colleagues, “they must pay good executive men to do their business as it ought to be done, and not lavish millions away with their own mismanagement.” But as Deane had quizzically observed in countless letters from Europe, mail and cargoes carried by private vessels enjoyed a higher rate of arrival than those sent by government vessels despite facing similar threats of capture. That the same officials (namely Morris and his business associates) managed both private and public commerce suggests they were more vigilant when out for themselves.

Certainly they were more aggressive in hiring ships and crews and dispatching them nonstop from multiple ports; more daring in sailing in winter weather (when the Royal Navy held closer to port); and more prepared to endure losses on the bet of future success. Still, in the knowledge that “when cargoes arrive either one way or other the profits are ever so great,” they clearly took unethical advantage at times.

In October 1776, Morris had Bingham log a government cargo into Willing & Morris’s account “as we want to throw funds into your hands.” The bookkeeping maneuver may have been part of the common flux of debt that ran between Congress and the era’s powerful money men. “It should be said,” notes the economic historian E. James Ferguson, “that an officer in Morris’s position would, in the normal course of events, sometimes owe the government money and thus have use of public funds to conduct his private trade; and at other times the government might be in debt to him.” After the war, however, Morris admitted diverting more than $80,000 to his accounts without returning it. Those funds had undoubtedly supported his business ventures while Congress’s in the meantime had floundered.

Unable to tap into government coffers, Bingham used privateering to generate cash and bolster his credit through prolonged periods of nonpayment from Congress. En route to Martinique aboard
Reprisal
, he’d seen Captain Wickes snatch three British cargo ships and send them home for settlement. With an eye for efficiency, Bingham, at his first meeting with the island commander, General Comte d’Argout, inquired whether American privateers could carry prizes to Saint-Pierre, a destination nearer the hunting ground of Britain’s West Indian trade routes. D’Argout’s immediate reply, given six months before Deane frantically championed the case of Captain Lee in Spain, could only have come on remote Martinique. “If the American cruisers should bring any prizes into our ports, we will not prevent their selling or disposing of them as they think proper.”

Bingham leaped into action with none of Deane’s misgivings about licensing privateers on his own authority. He required only a nominal American identity before approving applications. A single crewmember was sufficient; everyone else involved—the captain, the owners—could be foreign. If caught by the Royal Navy in the act of pursuing a British prize, the ship could produce its commission signed by Bingham to assert its status as a legitimate privateer. If detained for routine inspection, it could show French papers and be spared further harassment by virtue of its neutral flag.

When spy reports about “one Bingham, an agent from the rebels” reached Lord Stormont in Paris, he erupted. “What they have hitherto only attempted in Europe they have executed in the West Indies, and in such a manner as calls loudly for redress.” That redress came when France, under British pressure, replaced D’Argout with the “more reliable” Marquis de Bouillé. Stormont remained skeptical. “They will continue to play the same game, but it will be played with more decency and address.”

Sure enough, he soon was back at the French foreign ministry with a list of Bingham-sponsored privateers still working out of Martinique. With appropriate shock Vergennes exclaimed, “Why, this is a fleet!” Stormont followed with a threat. “If a fire is lighted at the extremities it will soon arrive at the center.”

Assuring the ambassador that the matter “should be inquired into,” Vergennes instructed the island commander to rein in the American agent, that “distance from the seat of empire” did not excuse the disregard of international treaties. But by then Bingham had preemptively met with Bouille to promote “the harmony and exchange of good offices which have hitherto subsisted uninterruptedly between the government of Martinique and the United States of America.”

Stormont knew about the meetings and doubted that matters would improve. Sure enough, at the same time Vergennes was tossing him superficial concessions the foreign minister was privately telling his aides that Britain, despite its attempt at intimidation, had no greater sway over French policy than anyone else. “Whoever can pay the most can be assured of the preference.” France had rebuilt its military from the shambles of defeat in the Seven Years’ War and increased its naval presence in the West Indies. “Fire at the center” was nothing to fear any longer.

Only minimally constrained by Martinique’s new regime, Bingham’s privateering activities vaulted him into the financial stratosphere. His involvement was “early and active,” he wrote. During his first six months on the island, 250 British ships carrying cargoes worth more than $10 million were waylaid in the West Indies. Saint-Pierre was the privateer destination of choice to settle prizes and refit for the next cruise. Fourteen arrived there in one week alone, with Bingham’s take on a single shipload of coffee and sugar exceeding a quarter-million dollars in today’s terms.

One afternoon a year after the agent’s arrival, British spies counted “eighty-two English ships, some of which were of considerable value,” anchored at Saint-Pierre awaiting sale. “Every prize vessel proper to be converted to a privateer is fitted out as one. They all have commissions from Mr. Bingham.”

The port was awash in captured goods ranging from Irish linens to African slaves. There was no pretense of legitimacy. “Guinea ships are sold immediately and publicly without condemnation.” And since the merchandise was illicit, it could be bought cheaply, with slaves that elsewhere fetched £40 each going for less than £30.

Merchants on the British islands of Bermuda, Grenada, and Antigua came to regard Martinique’s privateers as a routine business hazard, regularly journeying to Saint-Pierre to buy back their stolen goods. One spy report noted that a British captain whose slave ship had been hijacked “actually contracted with Mr. Bingham for the schooner and Negroes for a considerable sum of money, though not the full value of them.”

Insurance rates on Britain’s West Indian trade tripled from prewar levels and import prices in London rose almost 20 percent. Some trading firms dispensed with national pride and committed “the unusual and unholy spectacle” of booking cargoes on French ships to discourage American theft. Though ostensibly authorized by Congress, it was common knowledge that most of the West Indian privateers were foreign-manned surrogates, a further affront that incited British outrage against “the agent Bingham, who commissions all the French pirates.”

In December 1776 the Committee of Secret Correspondence, uneasy with the power accruing to Bingham in his faraway post, told the Paris commissioners to quit sharing with him “the business passing between you and us” because “we think him rather too young.” Morris ignored the policy, informing committee members, “I have this day written to Mr. Bingham a full state of intelligence to this time.”

Bingham’s specialty was commerce, not diplomacy, yet Morris understood that the agent’s international contacts made him indispensable to the war effort regardless of his low security clearance. He also was indispensable to Morris, who’d sent him to Martinique on orders, Morris confided to Silas Deane, “to procure some arms for the government and with another view that I need not mention.” Beyond their private trade collaborations, Bingham had become, through letters exchanged that fall, the older man’s sounding board in resolving his personal qualms about privateering.

Those qualms had centered on loyalty. The Royal Navy’s seizure of Morris’s cargoes had seemed, in the early months of the war, insufficient cause to justify the turnabout of seizing cargoes belonging to his former friends in Britain. He had his limits, however, and by December, “having had several vessels taken from me and otherwise lost a great deal of my property by this war, I conceive myself perfectly justifiable in the eyes of God or man to seek what I have lost from those that have plundered me.”

Bingham, an expert in the field by that time, recommended a number of capable captains with whom they could jointly venture. One of the first was an Acadian-born skipper named Coctiny de Prejent. Demanding confidentiality, Morris proposed that the three of them buy “a stout privateer” to cruise “amongst the outward bound West India men.” He’d use Willing & Morris’s funds to furnish his stake in the project even though his partner, Thomas Willing, “objects positively” to privateering, and he vowed to repay the debt out of the vessel’s earnings should the cruise be successful. “If not, I will repay them the amount here.”

To expedite prize payouts, Morris advised Bingham to sell, “without formal condemnation,” slaves, commodities, and dry goods on Martinique, but to send “cargoes as are suited to the Continent [that is, arms and gunpowder]” directly to America for sale. He closed with a reminder to make sure the ship’s crew obeyed the rules of humane conduct mandated by its commission. The nervous tone of his letter bespoke a traditional gentleman’s uneasy view of privateering. Lest anyone say he’d come to it out of mere greed, he offered
Retaliation
as the warship’s new name to symbolize that his motives were righteous.

Morris’s misgivings soon evaporated. By the spring of 1777 he was pestering Bingham “to increase the number of my engagements in that way.” Moreover, “it matters not who knows my concern.” Yet their blossoming partnership had the unexpected consequence of tilting the power between them toward Bingham. He was where the action was; he hired the boats and managed the prizes. Eventually Morris, in his rush to participate in the Martinique boom, ran up more than half a million dollars in personal debt to the young man, an obligation that “sits heavy with me.” His early bossiness toward Bingham (“If you cannot attend closely you had better get some other to do the business or hire an excellent clerk to assist you”) turned petulant and plaintive. “It is not necessary to be so pressing with me about remittances…”

Upon first appointing him, Morris had feared Bingham was “fanciful” and wondered if “experience could cure him of this.” But as “your affectionate friend” congealed to “dear Sir” in his letters, it was clear the financier found it hard to accept that his protégé had become his master.