YEMEN. RED SEA. ARABIA. MOORISH PIRACY. - Lot 169

YEMEN. RED SEA. ARABIA. MOORISH PIRACY. [Account of the capture of the vessel the Neptune by the Moors]. S.l.n.d. [Red Sea, Indian Ocean], (ca. 1743-1748). Anonymous manuscript, 11 pp. numbered in ink, on 4 sheets of watermarked laid paper in small folded folio format (i.e. 3 bifeuillets). (The first leaf is torn at the fold, general oxidation of the paper, slight browning and soiling at the head and edges of the document). Very interesting account by one of the Neptune's crew members. 25-28 lines per page, in large, legible brown ink. The author of the account seems to be addressing the putative reader a second time in his "report" or letter, but the absence of any mention of affiliation, signature or recipient prevents us from going any further on certain questions. If we lack information on his status on the ship, we can deduce from the account that he was not a subaltern or seaman, as he mentions his "house" (his personal cabin), the silver buckle on his belt which protected him, and the "buttons on his habit" which were stolen from him by the cipayes, suggesting that he had a bourgeois or managerial rank, or even a lesser military nobility. The factual, and at times violent and dramatic, account of the attack and the crew's fate seems devoid of the classic tropes of the falsely memorialized adventurous tale, which encourages us to consider it a genuine historical testimony. [Le Neptune, 3rd of the name, a 700-ton vessel, commissioned in February 1739, left for China in January 1740; condemned on its 3rd voyage to Pondicherry, perhaps around 1745. This ship was captured by Moorish pirates off Mahé (India), a French East India Company trading post established in 1721]. Our witness explains: "I embarked on the vessel Neptune for the voyage to Moka in Arrabia (here the town of Mokha or Mokka, a port town in Yemen), for which I left Pondicherry on February 9th 1743. (...) We arrived at Mahé, which is a trading post of our nation located on the Malabar coast (...) we remained at this trading post to take on goods from this coast until March 11, when we sailed for the Arabian coast...". After a long account of the terrible and bloody capture of the Neptune by the pirates, the violent deaths and the fear, our wounded witness, after having had to keep a low profile - "I would have had a 3rd which I would not have missed if one of the chiefs (...) prevented them and ordered me to make him Salam..." - regains hope. - takes up hope again "on the morning of the twenty-second, they were not suspicious of three Portuguese vessels in the Mangalore roadstead (...).) They thought it was one of their ships returning from China, for the confidence of the bouselots was well founded, since they were in a peace treaty with the Portuguese, and even these pirates believed that the Portuguese were on their way back to Goa"; "For this reason, these pirates returned to join our vessel, but they did not expect the Portuguese ships to wait until nightfall to run at us (....] The Portuguese, who did us such a generous deed, did not do the same afterwards, for not only did they treat us as prisoners, but they acted with us like pirates. I can't tell you any more, it would take too long"...