The Prize Papers

These impressively illustrated volumes were taken from the Spanish treasure galleon Nuestra Señora de Covadonga, which sailed from Acapulco to Manila during 1743 carrying silver. The vessel was captured en route off Cape Espiritu Santo by a British squadron under Admiral George Anson, and its papers, including these volumes, were confiscated there.

They belonged to the Covadonga’s captain, Jeronimo Montero, and provide many details about the crew’s voyages on Pacific treasure galleons. Montero was probably the illustrator behind the drawings of flowers and birds.

This manuscript sheet music belonged to the Irish merchant John McCarrick, who was a passenger on the ship Franciscus of Hamburg in 1744. It records sections of folk and classical music melodies, written out for violin by McCarrick while he was aboard the ship. Some of these tunes are from The Beggar’s Opera by John Guy.

Few examples of rough music manuscripts like this survive, and they show how individuals heard a melody and repeated it as best they could from memory. We can see this process in McCarrick’s manuscript, as when his notation is compared to surviving printed examples of the same melodies, he has written out several notes with different pitches.

This key was probably taken from a French merchant ship trading to Saint Domingue (Haiti, today) during the mid-1700s. The label attached to the key suggests it opened a chest that perhaps contained Dutch goods or was owned by a Dutch person, but we have few other indications of what it was for.

Stray keys are just one example of materials in the Prize Papers that have become removed from other records or objects taken from the same ship. Wherever possible, record specialists at The National Archives work to return these strays to the collection they were initially archived with, but in some cases, such as with this key, it is not possible.

This intriguing volume in Dutch was taken from the ship Concordia of Bremen, captured in 1757 while sailing from St Eustatius to Amsterdam. It is a copy of the popular navigation ‘textbook’ Konst der Stuerlieden, which contains a series of examples and exercises used to train ships’ navigators.

Sailors would copy out such books for themselves, either during formal lessons or while aboard ship and, in the process, learn the basics of navigation, including trigonometry and the positions of celestial bodies.

Navigation skills varied significantly across time and place, with other records in the Prize Papers detailing how crews that could not navigate became shipwrecked or got themselves captured by enemies.

These pencil drawings come from the personal archive of Henry Balthazar Duprat, who travelled as a passenger on the Concordia of Bremen in 1758. From left to right, the drawings are of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a man who may be the Concordia's first Captain, Jan Biesewig, and a view of La Palma in the Canary Islands, as seen from a ship at sea.

Sailing across a sea or an ocean could take months and with little else to occupy them, seafarers would often get creative, drawing pictures of people or places that they saw, writing poetry and even composing music.

These bundles of letters – around 2,000 in all – were sent from Lima, Peru during 1779. They were on the ship La Perla when it was captured by British privateers off the Azores that year, and were intended for recipients across Spain.

They are mostly written in Spanish, but also French, Italian, Latin, English, Portuguese, Catalan and Basque. Their subjects are highly varied, as writers intended them for family members, business partners, love interests and political rivals.

They are an example of mail-in-transit – what we call ‘post’ today. In the early modern period, letters to be sent overseas were collected in hessian sacks and entrusted to the captain of a ship (usually a merchant vessel) for transport. These ones survive because they were intercepted and brought to London, rather than delivered.

This strip of linen, embroidered with Christian and floral designs, dates from around 1779. The fabric was enclosed in the letter pictured, and both were sent by a priest in Lima to his ailing mother in Spain. The letter explains that he had blessed the piece of embroidered fabric in hopes of protecting her from evil and to speed her recovery.

Many small objects were sent in the letters that survive in the Prize Papers, ranging from textiles to jewellery and even locks of human hair. Many of these were mementos or samples for commercial purposes, but others, such as this piece of fabric, had more unusual purposes.

This red leather wallet was once owned by the Dutchman Jan Bekker Teerlink. He carried it with him while he served as a supercargo (cargo manager) on the Prussian East India Company ship Henriette, during its voyage to China and back between 1800 and 1803. On this voyage, Teerlink visited the Cape of Good Hope, Batavia, Canton and many other places.

Having travelled so widely, Teerlink collected an eclectic range of papers and objects in his wallet including a lock of human hair, peppercorns, samples of silk and chintz fabrics (pictured), as well as a large variety of seeds in small packets.

Three seeds from this wallet were successfully germinated at Kew Gardens in 2014 and a Leucospermum conocarpodendron that grew from these seeds can still be found in their Temperate House.

This Chinese letter was in the wallet of Jan Bekker Teerlink when his ship, the Henriette, was captured in 1803.

It is apparently by Feng An, a 12-year-old boy at Canton to his father, Feng Yasheng, although it was probably written by the boy's uncle. An implores his father to return home, as he has been absent for the child's entire life, working overseas. The family had lived in poverty since Yasheng left, nearing starvation and now in significant debt. This letter is all the more affecting because it was never delivered.

While the majority of the Prize Papers are in major European languages, a significant quantity are not, with letters surviving in Armenian, Persian, Arabic, Chinese, Ottoman Turkish and Hebrew.

This colourful string of glass beads was taken from the British slave trade ship Diamond of London, which trafficked 433 enslaved people from Elmina (in Ghana, today) to Cuba during 1803.

Strings of beads like these were manufactured in Europe as one of many types of goods that European slavers exchanged for captives on the coast of West Africa. This particular example was actually enclosed in a letter at Elmina and sent to Amsterdam, intended as a sample of the colour and style of beads that were popular around Elmina at the time.

The Prize Papers is a significant collection for the history of the transatlantic slave trade and European plantation colonies in the Caribbean. Many of these records are statistical or commercial in nature but some provide unusually detailed information on the lives of enslaved people.