Chasing the enemy under neutral cover: French seizures of Danish ships in Nantes during the Directory period

Introduction

During the eighteenth century, the pursuit and seizure of enemy commerce became a normal feature of war. Hostilities represented a challenge for shipping and trade since belligerents tended to restrict maritime activities by making prize of ships that neutrals considered as engaged in free and innocent commerce. Indeed, much earlier than was the case on land, war on sea highlighted the problems associated with interpreting rights of neutrals. Whereas neutrality on land consisted of preserving a territory from war, shipping and maritime trade were a part of the war and offered good opportunities for the neutrals to take advantage of the circumstances. What could be considered as the first rules of maritime neutrality can be found in a chapter of a collection of Mediterranean shipping customs, the Consulate of the Sea, published in 1494 in Barcelona. ¹ From then on, the issue of maritime neutrality featured prominently in treaties on shipping and trade, books on maritime law and improvements in the legislation of each country. All such texts formed a legal framework that was supposed to make it possible to establish the fair practices of neutral shipping and trade. ² The normative approach of the rights and duties of neutrals is not sufficient, however, for a full understanding of the relations between belligerents and neutral shipping, since the limit between lawful and illegal neutral activities was often difficult to determine.

If neutrality can be considered from a theoretical point of view, things are different from an actor-centred perspective. That is why this article begins with outlines of four cases of Danish ships seized by French privateers in the Atlantic in 1797 and 1798, then judged by the commercial court (tribunal de commerce) of Nantes and finally appealed at the civil court (tribunal civil) of the same city. These cases show in an effective manner what were the moments of confrontation between the practices of neutral commerce and the legal framework. If the treatment of an enemy ship arrested by a man-of-war or a privateer is a rather simple scenario, the cases of neutral ships were obviously more complicated. Their fate depended upon several procedures that were designed to determine a venture’s true nature, as friend or enemy, through the scrutiny of their voyages and enquiries into the nationality of the captains, crews, ships, cargoes and shipowners. Analysis of archival material makes it possible to investigate the moment when the fate of a neutral ship swung between good prize and release, between seizure and freedom. Such a crucial decision relied on an assessment of the degree of fairness of the expedition.

Four cases of neutral ships heard in the courts of Nantes

In 1797 and 1798, four Danish ships coming back from India were boarded in the Atlantic and brought into court in Nantes: the Bernstorff, the Juliana Maria, the Norge and the Bornholm. My aim is not to reconstruct their history in the most detailed way, but rather to understand how the fate of a neutral ship was sealed and to investigate how the limit between release and seizure was established.

The first case concerns the Bernstorff, which was boarded on 23 July 1797 by a Nantes privateer, the Sandwich. The very first inspection of the papers revealed that the ship was built in Calcutta and had been sold as an English ship, the Commerce, to a Danish company in July 1796. This was enough to carry the ship to Saint-Nazaire. The questioning of the crew revealed that the Bernstorff left Calcutta with a cargo of opium which was sold in Batavia, where the ship loaded sugar and coffee before sailing to Copenhagen. It seems consequently very likely that the expedition was English-owned, especially because the new cargo was bought with the sale proceeds of the English opium. Most of the Indian sailors, known as Lascars, ³ came from Bengal, a region considered as subjected to the English and some officers were suspected to be English. For the defender of the Bernstorff, Pierre-Nicolas Berryer, the captain had shown a Danish sea pass in due form for his ship and the cargo which both proved its neutral character. ⁴ According to him, after a simple inspection of these documents, the privateer should have allowed the Danish ship to continue her voyage. However, the commercial court of Nantes believed there were too many contraventions of different French rules concerning neutral shipping. As the captain of the Bernstorff was unable to demonstrate that his ship could ‘be considered as neutral or ally, it is therefore necessarily regarded as enemy’ and consequently condemned as a good prize on 13 November 1797. Four months later, the civil court of Nantes confirmed the first verdict and the Bernstorff was definitively condemned. ⁵

The second case is much more complicated. On 2 October 1797, the Juliana Maria was intercepted by the privateer the Confiance of Nantes belonging to the merchant and shipowner Felix Cossin, the city’s principal privateering investor. ⁶ After the inspection of her papers, the Juliana Maria was carried to Saint-Nazaire. The questioning of the Danish captain, Christian Madsen, and of the crew reveals the rather unusual story of this ship, which left Denmark for India on 20 April 1796 fitted out by Blacks Enke and Co., one of Copenhagen’s most important companies. After four months at sea, the coal used as ballast caught fire. Two lifeboats were lowered, but unfortunately one of them sank rapidly. Madsen succeeded in saving some members of his crew and a chest with more than 6500 piasters, and finally reached Frederiksnagore, the Danish colony in Bengal close to Calcutta. He bought a new ship and named it, like the previous one, Juliana Maria. Madsen completed his crew, loaded canvas, sugar and indigo before leaving for Copenhagen, but on 19 March 1797 he was intercepted by the French privateer. ⁷ Captain Madsen had to face several grievances. The first concerned the people on board since there were three English passengers and, more importantly, a crew for most part made up of ‘coloured men’ without any letters of naturalization, but suspected to come from the colonies of France’s enemies, Mozambique and Calcutta. The questioning of the Indian sailors disclosed the role played in the expedition of the Juliana Maria by its previous owner, an English merchant of Calcutta. He was suspected of being the real shipowner who let the ship to Madsen by virtue of a fake act of sale. Additionally, the ship’s papers were doubly invalid: firstly, because they were delivered by the Danish authorities while the ship was in an enemy port, the English port of Calcutta; secondly, because the sea pass was just a renewal of the one initially delivered to the ‘first’ Juliana Maria, which left Copenhagen, and consequently could not apply to the ‘new’ Juliana Maria. Due to these two contraventions, the commercial court of Nantes decided that the ship and the cargo were English, and therefore condemned both as good prize on 25 January 1798. ⁸ The owners appealed against the sentence at the civil court of Nantes and appointed Berryer, who was already the lawyer of the Bernstorff, to plead their cause. He tried to prove Captain Madsen’s good faith and emphasized that he was just a victim of the misfortunes of the sea, and that he had done all he could to avoid being suspected of any irregularity. The captain took care not to buy a ship built in an English colony, and chose instead one from the shipyards of Pegu in Burma. The Juliana Maria became Danish property by a notarial act in due course, and obtained papers from the Danish governor of Frederiksnagore. Consequently, there could be no doubt the ship and cargo were Danish property. ⁹ In these specific circumstances, the force majeure argument could justify the breaching of French laws. But all Berryer’s arguments were in vain and the civil court of Nantes confirmed the condemnation of the Juliana Maria. The ship was sold by public auction on 16 April 1798. ¹⁰

Five days after the seizure of the Juliana Maria, on 7 October 1797, the Norge, loaded with a cargo of sugar, rum, coffee from Batavia, was boarded by the privateer Entreprise. As the Danish captain, Hans Nielsen Kraag, was unable to produce all the required papers in good order, his ship was carried to Saint-Nazaire. ¹¹ Kraag was blamed for having a sea pass valid only for navigation within the Indian Ocean, and a crew list without any signature from a Danish officer, as required by the French laws on neutral shipping. The Norge was condemned in first instance on 10 February 1798. ¹² The owner decided to appeal and chose Berryer to represent the defence. The lawyer stressed that there were no doubts concerning the Danish origin of the ship and her cargo, or about her voyage from Batavia to Copenhagen. However, the Norge did not comply exactly with French rules. The ship had been bought from a Danish owner in Tranquebar and provided with a sea pass for tramping in the Indian Ocean. Once in Batavia, her captain decided to sell the ship to another Dane, who wanted to carry sugar to Copenhagen. Kraag, as the new captain, completed his crew with Javanese sailors but was unable to get a signature on his crew list from a Danish royal officer in Batavia. After a four months’ voyage, the Norge arrived at the Cape of Good Hope, where Captain Kraag tried to obtain the signature of the local Danish consul. The latter, unfortunately, had just resigned a few weeks before. The Danish captain could plead his good faith and maintain the unquestionable Danish character of the Norge. According to Berryer, as there were ten documents proving the real neutral character of the ship and no evidence of enemy involvement in the expedition, the Norge ought to be released. ¹³ Furthermore, he added, even if the sea pass was delivered for tramping in the Indian Ocean, it was not legal to condemn a ship on her way home, especially as it was not possible to get another Danish pass in Batavia. Second, the lawyer maintained that according to the Franco-Danish treaty of 1742 an official signature on the crew list was not compulsory. ¹⁴ Despite Berryer’s efforts, however, the Norge was condemned in appeal by the civil court of Nantes. ¹⁵

The last case is quite different. The Danish ship Bornholm encountered the privateer Le Nantais on 14 January 1798. As the crew list seemed dubious, and as some papers on board were for a ship named Prinsesse Frederica and others for the Bornholm, the French captain decided to carry it to Saint-Nazaire. The questioning of the crew quickly revealed an English involvement in the venture. It seemed that some of the seafarers and the cargo came from Calcutta and Madras, and that the ship was intended for Portsmouth. In Bengal, she had sailed under English colours and during the voyage a box full of papers was thrown into the sea. Furthermore, it appeared that the last sale of the ship, in 1796, was ‘pro forma’, a fact that proved the connections between the captain and some English merchants in Calcutta. Niels Peter Mossin, the captain of the Bornholm, offered a different version of events. He had bought the ship under the name Prinsesse Frederica in 1794 and had already made two voyages between India and Denmark. He maintained that his ship was built in the Dutch colony of Surate, had always been Danish, and had never been to Calcutta. He acknowledged that some letters were thrown into the sea, but said they were unimportant. He also tried to justify his relations with the English. When his ship, under the name Prinsesse Frederica, had arrived in the Bengali Danish colony of Frederiksnagore in October 1795, Mossin learned that Denmark was at war with Great Britain. He decided to simulate the sale of his ship, sail under English colours as the Active. As it turned out, war was just a rumour, so the captain decided to rename his ship Bornholm and to sail back to Europe under a Danish flag. ¹⁶ Mossin failed to convince the commercial court of Nantes in first instance, and therefore the ship and her cargo were condemned on 4 June 1798.

The Bornholm affair was an important event in Nantes. ¹⁷ Savary and Cossin, the owners of Le Nantais, published a brief pamphlet to highlight the connections between Mossin and the English, as well as all the infringements of the rules concerning neutral shipping in France. Beyond this particular case, the privateers questioned how English business was covered by the Danish flag: ‘our objective is particularly to determine an opinion on the neutrality of the Danes’. ¹⁸ Savary and Cossin pointed out that neutral captains were often able to produce fake Danish sea passes. They reproduced the instructions given to Mossin in Calcutta, which advised him to acquire different neutral sea passes (from the Holy Roman German Empire, Tuscany, Genoa, Portugal) and to choose different names for the ship according to each language. ¹⁹ In support of their reasoning, Savary and Cossin also reproduced the Danish regulation concerning shipping and trade in wartime to show that Mossin had not only failed to comply with French regulations, but also violated those of the Danes. ²⁰ This shows how privateers were well informed about foreign laws and how legal factors mattered to them. In his reply, the Danish captain maintained that he had ignored advice to take several passes and that he had been compelled to make a fake sale because of the rumour of a war between Denmark and Great Britain. According to him, the expedition of the Bornholm was truly Danish. ²¹ It seems, however, that the real owner of the ship was Porcher, Redhead & Garnider, a British firm based in Calcutta. As the British government had denied the Active the right to sail under the British flag, Mossin had to rename his ship Bornholm, and he consequently left Calcutta under the Danish flag. ²² Whatever the truth, the purchase of an enemy ship after the beginning of the war and the throwing of papers into the sea were sufficient to condemn the vessel and her cargo. ²³ All in all, the final judgment of good prize by the civil court of Nantes in 1798 seems to have been well founded. ²⁴

Danish shipping suffered much in France during 1798. In the years 1797–1799, between 125 and 150 Danish ships were condemned by French courts, around 80 of them during 1798 alone. ²⁵ The four cases presented here were among them. Even if each of them was particular, their singularity of time, 1797–1798, and of place, Nantes, make it possible to look for structural factors, which offers a ‘from below’ reflection on the fate of neutral ships in wartime.

The turning point between good prize and release

From 1793 onwards, the commercial courts were responsible for first instance judgements and the civil courts for appeal. ²⁶ Theoretically, the commissioner in the civil courts should have warned and consulted the government on cases that could have consequences for relations with allies and neutrals. ²⁷ But in reality this seldom occurred and the judgement of prizes remained in the hands of local courts. This is why, along with his activity in Nantes, Berryer tried to persuade the Directory of the innocence of his clients. He was helped in his actions by the Danish ambassador in Paris who regularly wrote to the French government to complain about the harshness of the regulations on neutral shipping. ²⁸ Nevertheless, jurisdiction of prizes at a local level had the advantage of speeding up judgements. In the cases considered here, it took six to ten months between the moment when the neutral ship was boarded at sea and the final decision of good prize. This seems to be representative, as it took a similar period, seven months, to judge and condemn as good prize another Danish ship in Nantes, the Vendskap, boarded on 6 August 1797 and sentenced on 4 March 1798. ²⁹ This was shorter than during the ancien régime, when the first instance judgement generally required six months and the final verdict could take a year or more. ³⁰

This advantage, however, was balanced by an important disadvantage. In Nantes, as elsewhere, privateering was often financed through a joint-stock company. ³¹ The profits of the investors, the shipowners, the officers and the seafarers depended on the ability of the privateer to seize enemy ships or dubious allies and neutrals, which would ultimately be judged as good prize and sold. The final decision of the courts determined the success or the failure of a privateering enterprise. In other words, the income of many people in Nantes relied on good prize sentences. Therefore the judges of the commercial court could be subject to the pressures of their environment, or inclined to follow their own interest, since they were elected among the merchants of the city and were themselves investing in privateering. ³²

The privateers of Nantes experience particular difficulties in 1797 and 1798 because of English seizures and the subsequent collapse of some privateering enterprises. ³³ In this context, the prosecution of the four Danish ships was an important issue. During his career as a lawyer, Berryer wrote, he had to defend neutral seized ships valued between 50,000 and 9 million francs. The ships coming back from the East Indies were large vessels with extremely rich cargoes: the Bernstorff was valued at 2.5 million francs, the Juliana Maria 2.8 million, the Bornholm 3.3 million, and the Norge 1.3 million. For the privateer La Confiance, the Juliana Maria alone represented 68 percent of the total of its ten seizures, whereas the Bernstorff represented 86 per cent of the value of the three prizes made by the privateer Sandwich. ³⁴ Such amounts can be compared with the price of a privateer: in November 1798, the Sandwich was sold for only 26,400 francs. ³⁵ When Berryer pleaded for the second instance judgement of the Bernstorff and of the Norge, he noticed that his introductory speeches had led people in Nantes to believe that the ships would be released and consequently the shares of the privateers suffered a sharp decline at the Exchange in Nantes. ³⁶ A sentence condemning a high-value vessel was really good business for the investors. For example, in the case of the Bornholm, each share of the privateer Le Nantais yielded a profit ten times higher than its nominal value as a result of the good prize verdict. ³⁷ As we can see, the fate of a neutral ship was an important financial issue for local society. This can explain why Berryer noticed that the cases concerning seizures worth several million francs were the hardest to plead, and he acknowledged that he often failed to get them released. ³⁸

The words of Berryer are all the more precious in that he was an important actor in the cases examined here as the defender of three vessels (Bernstorff, Juliana Maria, Norge). As the judgement of prizes was a legal procedure, shipowners and captains had always to be defended by legal experts. It is not unusual to find in the archives the names of the lawyers involved in the trials, but very little is known about their background and their abilities. Pierre-Nicolas Berryer (1757–1841) is an exception, as he published his Souvenirs in 1839, in which he told his story and showed how he became an expert in neutral prizes cases. He stated that, in the seven years between 1793 and 1799, he defended 360 cases of Danish, Swedish, American, Venetian, Genoese, Tuscan, Ragusean and Hanseatic ships. He assisted captains of neutral ships arrested or already judged in first instance in different places of France, especially in Nantes, but also in Marseille, Aix-en-Provence, Bayonne, Bordeaux, Brest and Dunkirk. Berryer’s reputation came from his very first case, when he published a brief pamphlet in which he defended the right of free neutral shipping and of the inviolability of neutral flags. His views derived from the reading studies of the law of nation by Grotius, Pufendorf, Barbeyrac and Vattel, as well as more specialized books, such as Valin’s Commentaire sur l’ordonnance de la marine de 1681, and those of the Spanish and Danish jurists Abreu and Hübner. ³⁹ To his great surprise, his text was translated into many languages and he earned an excellent reputation as an expert of the law of neutral shipping and trade. ⁴⁰ During the Directory period, he sent several dissertations to the government to advocate greater freedom for neutral shipping. ⁴¹ Berryer thought that the last regulation of the French monarchy in 1778, which established the principle ‘free ship, free goods’, ⁴² was the wisest, whereas the harsh treatment of neutrals by revolutionary France was ‘a scandal to the universe’, ⁴³ which he had to fight almost alone.

When Berryer came to Nantes in late 1797, he was an experienced and well known lawyer. He acted in the name of Duntzfelt Meyer & Co., an important business firm in Copenhagen. Native from India, Christian Vilhelm Duntzfelt was the chief merchant in the colony of Frederiksnagore during the Revolutionary Wars, and a relative of the most important businessmen of Copenhagen. ⁴⁴ Frederiksnagore had been established on the west bank of the Hooghly River upstream of the English colony of Calcutta, and had been a Danish factory since the mid-eighteenth century. ⁴⁵ Due to the geographical position of the factory, every ship sailing to the Danish colony had to pass through Calcutta, and this paved the way for every kind of subterfuge. This geographic proximity could serve as an excuse, as in the Bernstorff case, when the English supercargo Rutherford Smith admitted that the ship was fitted out in Calcutta and not in Frederiksnagore because of the low level of water in the Ganges basin. ⁴⁶ When the war began in 1793, the Danish Indian colonies were renowned as places where belligerent ships were covered by neutral colours. ⁴⁷ Trading companies like Duntzfelt Meyer & Co., and Blacks Enke & Co., were active in these kinds of traffic, and it is therefore not surprising that they became involved in the cases of the Danish ships seized in Nantes.

The critical moment when a neutral ship met a privateer was the inspection of the papers on the high seas. For the Bernstorff, the Juliana Maria and the Bornholm, a dubious crew list fuelled the captors’ suspicions, whereas the captain of the Norge was unable to produce an entire set of ships’ papers. Once in France, the captains entered into a legal procedure that started with the complete inspection of the ship’s papers. The most important item was the crew list, which had to prove that no more than one-third of the seafarers were subjects of the enemy; ⁴⁸ the property certificates that proved the ship truly belonged to a neutral owner; and, finally, the charterparty, which was a contract signed between the owner of the cargo and the freighter. Theoretically, according to the second article of the Règlement concernant la navigation des bâtimens neutres en temps de guerre (26 July 1778), just one valid piece among the ship’s papers was enough to prove her neutrality. But in reality, the due form of all these documents was essential since every fault, even the slightest one, heightened the risk of a seizure. Berryer denounced privateers for investigating ‘each syllable’ of the papers as if they all had to be false and as if real neutral shipping did not exist. ⁴⁹ He stressed the tendency ‘to mix up all kinds of neutral’s irregularities, even when derisory, with real acts of disloyalty, leading to condemn to seizure for un-important formal flaws as for the most horrible crimes’. ⁵⁰ In fact, the ship’s papers could match with the reality at the beginning of the venture, but during the long journeys between India and Europe much could happen to invalidate the documents.

As the privateers lived off greed, even an insignificant detail could feed the suspicion that the neutral ship was concealing its true destination or covering enemy trade. They considered that every infringement to the legislation on neutral shipping and trade could point to fraudulent activity, because of the habits of concealment of enemy business under neutral flags. Jean Savary and Félix Cossin, owners of the privateer Le Nantais, which seized the Bornholm, denounced the ‘hideous and insolent’ Danish use of their neutrality and their ‘hidden manoeuvres’ in favour of the enemies. ⁵¹ Berryer, on the contrary, considered that the ship ought to be freed because of the lack of evidence of any enemy involvement in what was a neutral expedition. In other words, he maintained that a non-enemy ship was a neutral ship, and should, as such, sail undisturbed if she was not explicitly breaking existing laws. In that respect, the Norge case is emblematic. As Berryer noticed, no suspicious papers were found on board, and none of the interrogations revealed that the venture had enemy-owned cargoes stowed away. The Norge, in fact, was never charged with being an enemy, but was nevertheless condemned because her captain had a flawed sea pass and a crew list without the signature of a Danish official. In other words, all the parties acknowledged she was not an enemy ship, but because of the errors in her papers, the voyage was not considered legitimate. According to Berryer, ‘impartiality’ should allow some little faults in the papers, all the more as the good faith of the captain was evident. ⁵² But the judges condemned the ship because Captain Kraag was unable to prove the neutrality of his venture by complying with the French laws. They considered that a release was possible only if all the rules concerning neutral shipping were observed, hence the importance attached to the formal faults of the ship’s papers. This led to application of the principle, as in the Bernstorff case, that a ship which ‘cannot be determined to be neutral or ally is therefore inevitably considered as an enemy’. ⁵³

Another crucial point was the interrogation of the captain and crew by the means of a regulated procedure. ⁵⁴ As with the inspection of the ship’s papers, the judges needed translators in Latin, English and Danish, and they even found a person ‘able in Indian language’ to question the sailors of the Juliana Maria. ⁵⁵ Since the crew lists often seemed to be dubious, it was important to know where the sailors and officers really came from. On the Bernstorff, several officers pretended to be American, but were justifiably ‘suspected to be English’. ⁵⁶ Actually, the first enquiry revealed that one of them was, in fact, the English supercargo, and that the Danish captain was a straw man. ⁵⁷ On the Juliana Maria, the presence of Indian sailors from Bengal was incriminating evidence. Bengal was indeed considered as a ‘subjected country or at least tributary of England’ and its seafarers as enemy subjects. ⁵⁸ Their testimonies disclosed the leading role of an English merchant of Calcutta, who was probably the real owner of the Juliana Maria. Berryer tried to discredit the testimonies of the Indian crew members by contending that the sailors were just ‘workmen, taken at random in India, and lacking of any instruction’. ⁵⁹ The time and the attention devoted to the inspection of the ship’s papers and to the questioning of the crew show how important it was for the judges to get testimonial evidence to prove, or disprove, the authenticity of the expedition; that is, its true Danish character and its conformity with the French laws on neutral shipping.

The French laws on neutral shipping and trade relied on the domestic regulations and on the provisions of international treaties. Berryer observed that he was most busy with the defence of neutral prizes in the years V and VI. ⁶⁰ At this time, the French government decided to act towards neutrals in the same way its enemies acted against France, a decision which led to the boarding and seizure of any neutral ship loaded with enemy cargo (laws of 2 December 1796 and 2 March 1797). ⁶¹ The commissioners of the Directory encouraged the courts to proceed with the greatest rigour against the subterfuges of neutrals in favour of the enemy. ⁶² The peak of this harshness was reached with the law of 18 January 1798, which stated, among other things, that the fate of a non-belligerent ship depended on the nationality of its cargo. ⁶³ Beyond the specifics of each of the cases he defended, Berryer tried to prove that the Franco-Danish treaty of 1742 was still valid. ⁶⁴ According to article 21, an inspection on the high sea was to be limited to the sole sea pass, and not go any further, as the French privateers did in the four cases at stake. Moreover, according to article 28, the neutral flag covered the cargo, contraband excepted, of whoever was its owner. ⁶⁵ For these reasons, Berryer considered the seizures illegal. He evoked the case of a recent judgement of the court of Saint Brieuc, which released a Danish ship according to the treaty of 1742. ⁶⁶ The position of the French government on that point was very clear, however, as stressed by Delacroix, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, to his colleague Merlin de Douai, the Minister of Justice. According to him, the Franco-Danish treaty had expired in 1764, and as the neutrals accepted the English seizures of French goods under their flag, French courts should follow the most recent laws and condemn any shipment of cargo belonging to the enemy. ⁶⁷

Ultimately, between the determination of local interests to generate profit from prizes, and a repressive law as defined by the government, Danish ships had very little chance to escape their final condemnation. Berryer asserted that he was involved in ‘a multitude of appeals’ for neutral ships judged in France, ‘but, unfortunately, most of them were without success’. He confessed that the appeals were intended to obtain money from insurers rather than a release verdict. ⁶⁸

Conclusion

The capture of enemy trade under neutral flags was shaped by a complicated combination of different factors: mercantile local interests, legal aspects and diplomatic priorities. The fate of intercepted neutral ships called on, directly or indirectly, different sets of people who all were, at several levels, actors in the neutrality drama: the merchants, who sought, either in good or bad faith, to secure their expeditions were the most obvious ones, just as the privateers, who wanted to make profit by maritime predation and sought to prove a fraud. But others played a role as well: the diplomats of neutral countries, who tried to intercede in favour of their fellow countrymen; crew members who were at the same time victims and witnesses for the prosecution and the defence; lawyers, like Berryer, who tried to defend the captured, even if they had little hope of succeeding; and, finally, the judges who sealed the fate of the ship–judges who might, or might not, be linked to the privateers, depending on the court in which they served. The multiplicity of actors and their diverging positions explains why neutrality ought to be studied from several points of view and at different scales in order to take into account the plurality of people involved in the process, from boarding on the high seas to the final decision of the appeal court. The outcome depended, of course, on the application of the law, but also on many other factors, like the value of the captured ship and of her cargo, or diplomatic pressures. The study of the legal framework is necessary, but it only provides a partial point of view on the complex reality of neutral shipping and trade. Individual cases show how legal rules came into force to distinguish the lawful from the unlawful neutral activity. Each time, the issue at stake was the determination of what a neutral venture was, and how its nature could be proved or not. Neutral commerce could have many different faces and many different levels and kinds of subterfuges, which made it difficult to differentiate between acceptable and unacceptable practices. Even if a legal framework did exist to identify real neutrals and the simple coverage of enemy trade, each case, each situation appears unique when studied from the actors’ point of view, and not simply from a mechanical legal perspective.

The chase of unfair neutral shipping and trade was a difficult undertaking because of the complexity of the flows of goods and people that were involved in commercial transnational networks. The fluidity of commerce, the extent of merchant networks, the belligerents’ subterfuges and their various complicities were incompatible with wartime rules based on strict criteria of the nationality of men, ships and goods. One of the fundamental questions raised by the analysis of neutral shipping is the extent to which it was possible, and with which level of fairness and certainty, to ascertain the nationality of maritime trade. This was why ships’ papers were so important: they were the only means to establish officially the nationality of ship, cargo and crew.

One of the central points was to know whether the neutrality of an expedition was defined by the most accurate compliance with the belligerents’ regulations on neutral shipping, or by the sheer absence of any evidence of enemy involvement in the shipping venture. In other words, is neutrality a specific state or just the absence of anything connected with belligerents’ interests? The answers evolved over time. The place of neutral commerce was somewhere between legal definitions based on the books of theoreticians, the provisions of international treaties, national legislation and a miscellany of practices, customs, concessions and interests. All this created a nebulous whole that allowed each party to defend its own interpretation of neutral shipping and trade.