An Actual Privateer
Levinus Hulsius. 1626. “The capture of the Cacafuego by Sir Francis Drake.” Description of the Four Most Wonderful Voyages. Kraus Sir Francis Drake Collection. Image from the: Library of Congress.
When I decided on the title for this blog, I was shooting for alliteration, of course, but also for a representation of my family’s past. Pioneers and preachers we have in abundance, but there really were some privateers as well. Here’s what I have learned about one of them.
William Parker, the brother of my 10 times great-grandfather, was born in 1560 in Shobrooke, near Exeter in the southwest of England. I don’t know anything about his childhood, but he likely went to sea at a relatively early age and seems to have done well as a sailor. In 1587, at the age of 27, he captained one of the ships that sailed to Cadiz, Spain, with Sir Francis Drake; he is believed to have captained the victualler Mary Rose during the attack of the Spanish Armada in 1588; [1] and he captained the galleon Rainbow during the capture of Cadiz in 1596 (Makepeace 2004; Lee 1895). In addition to participating in these major naval actions, he also conducted a successful career as a privateer.
Privateering is a lot like piracy, albeit with a veneer of government approval. During the late 16th century, conflict between England and Spain was always simmering, and the English government was eager to disrupt the Spanish monopoly on trade with the New World. By providing letters of marque and reprisal that permitted ship captains to seize and take ownership of enemy vessels, the government achieved its aims while maintaining some distance from the process (Andrews 1964).
William Parker received such letters and, between 1590 and 1601, undertook a number of privateering expeditions, first on the ship Richard and later on his own ship Prudence. Among his most notable voyages were raids on Puerto de Caballos in Honduras in 1594 and 1595; the sack of Campeche on the Yucatán Peninsula in 1597; and the capture of Portobelo in Panama in 1601, each of these expeditions taking him 5,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean in a wooden ship. Not only did he risk shipwreck during his adventures at sea, Parker was also shot twice by Spanish soldiers, once in the arm and once in the chest, but nevertheless survived and took enough prizes to make himself quite wealthy (Makepeace 2004; Lee 1895).
Excerpt from William Parker’s 1617 will, probated in 1619.
Wills Proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, and now Preserved in the Principal Probate Registry 1605 to 1619. Image from the The National Archives, Kew, England.
Following his expedition to Panama, Parker retired from active seafaring, although his ships continued to go on both privateering and mercantile expeditions without him. He settled in Plymouth in Devon, renovated a large house, and took to investing in expeditions to the Americas, including the Virginia Company of Plymouth, whose 1606 charter lists him as one of the patentees for the northern (Popham’s) colony in Maine, [2] where his brother John, my ancestor, later settled (Makepeace 2004; Lee 1895). Parker also served as mayor of Plymouth in 1601 but doesn’t seem to have taken well to life as a bureaucrat. According to his biographer, “Sir Robert Cecil received bitter complaints that Parker was hampering the work of royal officials, on one occasion sending men to play hurling on Plymouth Hoe to evade impressment” (Makepeace 2004).
Later in life, in November 1617, Parker again took to the sea, this time as vice-admiral for an East India Company voyage to the Maluku Islands in Indonesia. He was 57 years old by that time and according to fleet commander Sir Thomas Dale, “unfit for his work, being old and corpulent” (Lee 1895). Parker doesn’t seem to enjoyed his return to the sea, either, writing home in July 1618 from the Cape of Good Hope and “complaining of bad beer and beef, and the want of fresh provisions and warm clothing” (Makepeace 2004). In any case, he did not survive the voyage, dying at sea as his ship sailed across the Indian Ocean on September 24, 1618.
Interior of Merchants House Museum. Plymouth, England. Photo by author.
There’s an interesting postscript to this story. Parker’s timber-framed house in Plymouth was turned into a local heritage museum. Oddly enough, I went there in 2003, long before I learned that I was related to William Parker.
Visiting the museum was a whim. My mother and I had gone to Plymouth to see where our Pilgrim ancestors set sail for North America and saw the house as we walked from the train station to the harbor. I wasn’t going to turn down the chance to visit an Elizabethan house and so got to see the home of an as yet unknown family member.
[1] This ship is not the famous Mary Rose, which was commissioned by Henry VIII and sank near the Isle of Wight in 1545.
[2] I’m pretty sure my history classes never mentioned Popham’s Colony, but it was established in 1607, the same year as Jamestown in Virginia. It wasn’t very successful, but it’s worth remembering that Europeans were settling in New England that early (Chandler 1998).
Works Cited
Andrews, Kenneth R. 1964. Elizabethan Privateering; English Privateering During the Spanish War, 1585-1603. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chandler, E.J. 1998. Ancient Sagahadoc. New York: Authors Choice Press.
Lee, Sidney. 1895. “William Parker.” Dictionary of National Biography. Sir Leslie Stephen, ed. London, England: Oxford University Press. Vol 43, pp. 283-4.
Makepeace, Margaret. 2004. “William Parker.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Brian Harrison, ed. London, England: Oxford University Press. Vol 42, pp. 751-2.