01 February 2012

'The Terror of the Seas? Scottish Maritime Warfare, 1513-1713'

Talk by Professor Steve Murdoch (University of St Andrews)

Inverness College (Room G20)

Organised by UHI Centre for History

Description:

In his ground breaking work Warfare at Sea, 1500-1650, the late Jan Glete stated that ‘in Scotland, the state was less successful in gaining control of violence at sea [than other nations] and Scottish privateering often operated in a twilight zone between piracy and legal warfare’ (Glete, 2000). Glete’s assessment has subsequently been picked up and repeated uncritically by a number of other influential maritime historians. Some have gone as far as to claim that Scots played a proportionately larger role in ‘Golden Age’ piracy (1690s-1720s) than one might expect from such a relatively small nation (Graham, 2005, Hewitson, 2005). The seemingly perpetual equating of Scottish maritime warfare with piracy has created a collective degree of confusion over exactly who was conducting Scottish maritime warfare at given periods and what actually constituted piracy, privateering, lawful naval warfare and guerre de course – the legitimate seizure of prizes. However, the majority of maritime conflicts involving Scots andoften described as piratical were actually undertaken by privateers, particularly in the 1620s, 1660s and 1670s.
In the award winning book The Terror of the Seas? Scottish maritime Warfare 1513-1713, the mechanisms for controlling the privateering fleets were established. Details of the masters, ships and operations were revealed and contextualised for the first time and it was established that cases could take years to progress through the High Court of Admiralty. Furthermore, the claim of illegal seizure by owners who lost their ships usually resulted in claims of piracy against the Scottish privateers. At the same time there were several attempts to create Scottish Crown naval squadrons (1530s, 1620s, 1700s) who worked in concert with the larger privateering fleets both to hunt pirates and take on enemy fleets. Their success has previously been overlooked or, indeed, written out of recent histories (Sadler, 2010).
Professor Murdoch chooses selected incidents from The Terror of the Seas?to trace the evolution of Scottish maritime warfare from the time of James IV to the full integration of Scottish maritime assets into the British fleets after the Union of Parliaments in 1707. In the process he contests long-held orthodoxies and offers a fresh perspective on Scottish maritime warfare in a European context.