Page 85 - Kennemerland VOC ship, 1664 - Published Reports

NAUTICAL ARCHAEOLOGY, 6.3
recovered has been found in the Scottish Records Office; a summary of some of this information can be found in Muckelroy (1976, table 1). It is also apparent that there was a good deal of bad feeling between those involved in these salvage operations, and in particular towards the Earl of Morton’s Chamberlain, Robert Hunter, the man who broke open the chests of gold from the Kennemerland in Scalloway Castle on 18January 1665; for exam- ple, there is a strongly worded rebuke dated 18 April 1665 to him from the Earl of Morton himself in the papers in Gardie House on Bressay in Shetland.
operational. The next stage in the story does, however, demonstrate a connection between the goods from the Kennemerland and the royal annexation of the Orkney and Shetland estates, since CharlesI1then offered the Earl of Morton a financial settlement in return for his written acceptance of the alienation of these estates, the deal being 210,000 sterling, and relief from the obligation to surrender the Kennemerland gold (Morton Papers, 1673). Evidently the pressing ‘want in the Exchequer’ had receded by then! Since this proposal was made five years after the original court’s verdict, the Earl of Morton had obviously been in no hurry to surrender this treasure; in fact, there is evidence that his affairs were in considerable disarray by the 167Os, and reference is made in the docu- ment conferring these gifts on him to ‘the present reduced state of the Earl of Morton’. Although William, the 10th Earl, never appears to have signed a statement renouncing the estates in question before his death in1681, and, as a consequence, only H,OOO of the L10,OOO settlement was ever paid to him, the matter of the Kennemerland treasure is never referred to again, so it must be presumed that this element in the deal was regarded as settled.
More information has also emerged regarding
the legal dispute between CharlesI1 and William,
10th Earl of Morton, over the ownership of
the salvaged treasure, although the precise
motives and intentions of those principally
involved remain confused. It appears that the
King’s reasons for initiating proceedings were a
mixture of a desire to assert the Royal author-
ity, and penury; in a revealing phrase in the
letter to his Lords of Exchequer in Scotland
ordering them to commence the action, he
writes: ‘We are very sensible of this want in Our
Exchequer, and therefore we hope you will
no longer delay a matter of this great import-
ance, of which we will expect an exact account’
(Morton Papers, undated). There are no good
reasons for believing that the motive was a
desire for a pretext to justify the removal of
the Earl of Morton from the Earldom of Ork-
ney and Lordship of Shetland by requiring him
t o surrender salvaged goods which there was no
evidence he had ever possessed; a careful read-
ing of the Court’s verdict of 9 April 1668 shows
that he was only obliged to surrender that
which his own agents had witnessed to have
been salvaged (Warrants of the Exchequer
Register, ’ 1667-8). When, on 27 December
1659,the Earl was deprived of his Orkney and
Shetland estates by Act of Parliament, it was
only after a decreet had been obtained the pre-
vious February declaring that his continued although there are several hints that activity,
holding of these rights was ‘contrary to the laws and Acts of Parliament of this Kingdom’ (1669, cap. 19). A source of added confusion in this situation is the fact that the Earldom and Lord- ship had earlier been gifted by Charles I1 to George, Viscount Grandison (1662, cap. 46), a grant which for some reason had never become
both on site and in the courts continued for many years; witness, for example, the decree issued on 21 September 1675 against the late Gilbert Murray of Lax0 for the return of 404 score ells of linen cloth, and other items (Bruce, 1907: 128). It is hoped that further information may in time emerge from continued search in
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Confirmation has also been found of a Dutch attempt at salvage in 1665, in a letter from Patrick Blair, the Earl’s Sherriff, to his master on 19 June 1665. He writes: ‘That Hollander when in the Skerries did not much raise for he got but five iron guns, three anchors and five ropes, that is all he got’ (Morton Papers, 1665); whether he was in fact deceiving the Earl or himself over these quantities is, of course, another matter. He seems to suggest that the boat sent had inadequate lifting capacity, since they were there a month, but failed in an attempt to raise a chest of quicksilver. He goes on to report that ‘there is yet many ropes, a chest of quicksilver, and much iron and lead
lying there’. Little new material regarding sal- vage operations after 1668 has emerged,