Fogbank Perspectives

The Spykman Dictum

2010-12-09T18:15:00.000-08:00

Figure 1: From Mark Polelle, Raising Cartographic Consciousness:he Social and Foreign Policy Vision of Geopolitics in the Twentieth Century. (New York: Lexington Books, 1999), p. 118: cited online at The Cold War: The Geography of Containment.

Some nearly forgotten geopolitical theory – the Spykman Dictum:

Who controls the rimland rules Eurasia;
Who rules Eurasia controls the destinies of the world. ...

In this case, rimland, a word and concept that fails to shed its inter-war linguistic geoclumsiness, refers to the densely populated littoral edges of the Eurasian landmass and Nicholas J. Spykman (1893 – 1943), a Dutch scholar of geopolitics, transfused concepts from Eastern European theory of Realpolitik into American thought and, not coincidentally, Yale thought in particular. Spykman, by the way, modified Sir Halford Mackinder’s very similar dictum to arrive at the essence of the thought cited above. To his credit, Spykman was quite perceptive in drawing a strong distinction between Indian and Chinese cultural horizons as they relate to geopolitics.

The basic premise for American geopolitics is simply this: it does not matter who controls Eurasia in a political sense unless they that control Eurasia also control direct access to the sea. With varying degrees of commitment and modification, the great Anglo-Saxon sea powers have long adhered to this form of Realpolitik as a virtual tradition until a period roughly centered on the collapse of the Soviet Union when the utility of containment, as the U.S. most recently formulated the Spykman Dictum.

Crucial positions in this geostrategy: a) Alaska-Japan-Korea-Taiwan, b) India-Pakistan- peninsular Arabia-Israel-Turkey, c) All of Western Europe.

Currently the United States deploys and maintains some 289 vessels on the active list, down from 789 during the height of the Cold War period of containment. Our present naval posture is, in strictly numerical terms, roughly equivalent to the force at hand in 1917 prior to our involvement in WWI.

I therefore oppose the strategy, although perhaps not the policy, undertaken throughout the War on Terror: prosecuting a war wherein we occupy not one but two countries on the Eurasian landmass, without the certain probability of effecting control, results in the overall degradation of our ability to control Eurasia in a de facto sense through exercise of a modified Spykman Dictum.

Withdraw our land forces, reposition, and equip a capable navy sufficient for the clear and historic task; otherwise, get out of the game altogether and face consequences quite as distasteful as 9/11. As a footnote, Nicholas Spykman is read quite closely by strategists and historians of Anglo-Saxon sea power in Beijing. Chinese policy is adjusting along very solid geopolitical grounds, Marxist thought withstanding.

Recent articles in open source media trace the growing influence of naval strategy within Chinese policy-making circles. The most notable evidence has been the so-called String of Pearls strategic footprint. China, and here the term indicates the Peoples Republic of China, clearly understands the basic elements of energy security and its relation to the Indian Ocean sea lanes. The current language employed by Beijing disclaims any aspiration to the role of hegemon, but is this a realistic expectation?

Figure 2: One historical vantage point from which the People's Republic of China views American expansionism in the Pacific Basin.

China knows its business in Asia. It has experimented with extraterritorial forms of control for a wide range of ethnic and religious groups that abut the Central Asia and its near periphery. The focus of Chinese policy will increasingly turn toward the Indian Ocean and its eastern seas.

From the American standpoint, the current geostrategic is taken for granted, i.e., a militarily dominant United States astride the world's sea lanes as if they were a component of an American lake. However, this reality will shift dramatically during the next half-century if current U.S. policy persists.

Figure 2 represents a historical snapshot of American expansionism in the Pacific which China likely views as an unnatural and, historically speaking, short-term reality for which the PRC has devised a long-term policy designed to reset Chinese economic relationships to some semblance of what they were prior to the First Opium War (1839-42).

Having made this observation, it is nevertheless true that the United States had a peculiar and not unsuccessful foreign policy designed to profit from maritime trade without necessarily assuming the overt status of a hegemonistic naval power up to this period. This was a natural position to assume given the massive presence of the British Royal Navy on the world's oceans. However, a close reading of the United States' history of relations with the Hawaiian Islands shows that even in the first decades of the 19th century the United States harbored less altruistic aims in the Pacific basin when foreign policy was incestuously married with commercial interests.

Figure 3: David Kalakaua (1836 - 1891), King of the Sandwich Islands, later Hawaii, from 1872 until his death. The Sandwich Islands received a U.S. Commercial Agent in 1820, John Coffin Jones, who, while an officer of the U.S. Government, did not receive a salary. He was expected to earn his living through his own business activities. The roots of the close association between American business and American foreign policy in the Pacific began here. (Photo by E Linde/Getty Images)

It is important that we take time to view American civilization and its aims from other perspectives while at the same time staying focused on long-term interests.

Tamil Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers

Saint Georging the Dragon: Wikiresponsibility

2010-12-08T20:02:00.000-08:00

Wikiresponsibility

Wikileaks: a U.S. Army PFC and “one guy who plopped down $35 and bought a Web address," (according to White House spokesman Robert Gibbs) is responsible for the single largest breach of diplomatic security in world history.

In a land where increasingly those with responsibility refuse to shoulder it, one is left to ponder why there have yet to be resignations within the leadership of the State Department, Army Intelligence, and perhaps, within the National Security Counsil.

Wikileaks has done the U.S. Government a huge service in highlighting how ridiculously easy it was to lay bare before the world the day-to-day exchange of military and diplomatic information of the U.S. Deplorable as this is, the only quarter where the call is heard for someone in a responsible position in the U.S. govt. to resign is from the founder of Wikileaks himself.

Rather than take a hard look at all the facts like a mature polity, the national dialogue is simply St. Georging the Dragon: righteous senators and cabinet officials spearing a chimera while their corporate constituents wring their transnational hands. The people, the true constituents, are told to safely graze.

Laid bare are machinations of laws and sinews of power not bending to the Common Good.

“Tell ye the daughter of Sion: Behold thy king cometh to thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a colt the foal of her that is used to the yoke. Matthew 21:5” (Douay-Rheims Bible)

Rachel's Lament

The Varieties of Sharia Experience

2010-05-09T11:13:00.000-07:00

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Above is a Link TV report on reactions to Talibanization of Pakistan. The report is superior in its coverage of a major bone of contention within Islam: the interpretation of Sharia. Islam, as one observer within the video notes, has its own particular history within India and the means of its introduction there relied heavily on Sufism as a bridge to other castes as well as to Hindu practices within India. The historical development of Sharia was therefore much different within the Indian subcontinent and stands in strong contrast with Sharia as it developed in neighboring Iran and Afghanistan.

In The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, a work a professor of mine was kind enough to introduce to me, contained among its many elemental observations the idea that studying the origin or history of something is quite distinct from studying that same thing's value.

As James points out in his work, this i...s particularly true concerning the study of religion.

In 2008, Mumbai-born film director Ashutosh Gowariker released an Indian film epic treating the life of Akbar the Great (1542-1605), the third Mughal Emperor of India (it should be understood that the Mughals were followers of Islam). The movie, which was critically well received, is titled "Jodhaa Akbar" after the Hindu Rajput princess said in some sources to have been one of Akbar's wives (there is ongoing dispute whether she was queen, but this should not distract us from the movie as an art form).

I mention this film because of its very interesting approach to discussing the tension-filled topic of Islam and its relations with Hinduism in India. Akbar, judging from the historical sources, was an unusual monarch in his approach to religious tolerance.

I have, as many in my generation, served in the Middle-East and follow the events surrounding our involvement there with much interest and well as disappointment. We rarely hear or read of a policy-maker in high office discussing Islam other than to present it as a religion of extremist Jihadists. Never, or virtually never, is it observed that Islam is practiced in as many, if not more, forms as Christianity.

When the subcontinent of India came into contact with Islam, it came into contact not with the extremist Wahabi sect we associate today with the War on Terror and 911, but with Sufism. The most popular of the Sufi sects that took root in the subcontinent was the Sufi Chishti order (founded 10th century CE). It is a sect noted for tolerance and political non-involvement.

I am linking a scene from the film Jadhaa Akbar in which members of Sufi Chishti order sing before Akbar at his wedding with his Hindu princess. The resolution could be better, but this version has English subtitles so that the hymn may be understood. In an historical sense, I am not sure Chishti Sufis would appear at a royal wedding; however, their tolerance of other belief systems is well-documented and the scene sends a message about what some Indians and Pakistanis believe is the proper relationship between Islam and politics in their culture (sorry for the long post).

Sunken Military Craft Act , Salvage Law, and Underwater Cultural Heritage

2009-10-02T11:45:00.000-07:00

Shoes belonging to a victim of the sinking of RMS Titanic now resting in situ on the floor of the Atlantic and part of the RMS Titanic assemblage.

First I would like to say that Mr. David J. Bederman, Esq., is without question one of the leading experts on admiralty law in the United States. Additionally, his work, his scholarly contributions, indeed his entire legal and diplomatic career have stood as a credit to his country. However, I would like to take issue with his view on the relationship between Admiralty Law, specifically express abandonment, sovereign authority, and salvage rights, and the developing body of Cultural Property Law (international and domestic). Specifically these comments are directed to remarks Mr. Bederman published in an article Congress Enacts Protections for Sunken Military Craft, in July of 2006. In this article, Mr. Bederman offers comments on the SMCA and takes a strong position in favor of the traditional interpretation of the doctrine of express abandonment as this doctrine affects commercial marine salvage rights; unfortunately, from this readers perspective, the comments are distinctly one-sided: there is little constructive discussion of how Cultural Property Law may be profitably used to clarify many of the criticisms voiced about the SMCA. Unfortunately, Mr. Bederman’s article pursues an argument that leaves the reader (and perhaps treasure hunters) with the impression that cultural property law is at best an unwelcome influence on Admiralty Law and at worst, guilty of trespassing where it does not belong. I politely argue a counter view.

In this article Mr. Bederman performs his customary masterful analysis of effects that the Sunken Military Craft Act (HR 4200) (hereafter SMCA) will have on various aspects of admiralty law as interpreted by domestic and international courts. To be sure, there are numerous areas of concern, summarizing the article in its entirety is beyond the scope of the present post. What is important is that Mr. Bederman’s expertise in delineating the gray areas of admiralty law as it applies to sunken military craft in international waters has been used by American salvage companies operating in international waters to search, locate, and recover underwater cultural resources and artifacts. The manner in which these operations were and are conducted destroys the archaeological context of the underwater resource forever and represents a loss of heritage for which no amount of commercial monetary compensation, in this writer’s opinion, is justified. It is indeed unfortunate that salvage companies utilizing Mr. Bederman’s knowledge and expertise in such specialized legal matters, place his recent contributions in the field law in an unfavorable light. It is regrettable that Mr. Bederman’s good offices form one of the levers of power, perhaps not wholly intentional, that supports destructive marine treasure hunts.

Where I would deign to respectfully disagree with Mr. Bederman, Esq., lies within the realm of his views on the traditional rights of marine salvage. While marine salvage is only a fractional component SMCA article, it is an area of law that Mr. Bederman believes to be strongly impacted by the SMCA legislation. In due course, Mr. Bederman argues strongly on behalf of the traditional interpretation of the doctrine of express abandonment as well as for supporting the traditional rights, as he views them, of marine salvage.

Marine search technologies have advanced to the point where private salvage companies are able to successfully undertake blue water projects in international waters beyond the 24 nm territorial limit of the United States and into the EEZ with increasing success. Mr. Bederman’s writings suggest that this new technology does not substantively impact marine salvage rights and responsibilities under existing admiralty law. He therefore supports a position on express abandonment that effectively works against efforts to classify and protect underwater cultural resources. His position, articulated with respect to the SMCA and published in July 2006 reads:

The position I have taken here on an express abandonment standard of perpetual ownership for sunken military craft is that warships (at least those that sank before the twentieth century) are not subject to a special rule of express abandonment, and that even if the title in such vessels remains in the original sovereign, they are still subject to otherwise proper claims of salvage. I believe that this position properly characterized the relevant international and domestic law on this subject. Nevertheless, today the received wisdom appears to be that international law requires that title in sunken warships be preserved for the original, owning sovereign and that such ships must be absolutely immune from claims of salvage. I believe this “received wisdom” to be part of a larger program of interest in protecting underwater cultural heritage, and its actual sagacity to turn on the wider policy dimensions of the management of underwater cultural heritage. (p. 662)

There are several points worth remarking on. First, while one may argue that vessels that sank before the twentieth century are not subject to a special rule of express abandonment (the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819 presumably excepted), there is no sound legal reason to assert that vessels falling into the category of having sank prior to the twentieth century are not therefore protected, or should be protected, by Cultural Property Law. Second, there exists a growing body of relevant international and domestic law to support the position that warships that sank prior to the twentieth century are in fact cultural resources to be protected from commercial salvage. Third, the so-called received wisdom that international law requires that title in sunken warships be preserved for the original, owning sovereign and that such ships must be absolutely immune from claims of salvage is indeed a position that existing admiralty law does not contradict. Lastly, it may freely be admitted that this “received wisdom” (as expressed in the SMCA) is indeed part of a larger program of interest in protecting underwater cultural heritage, and its actual sagacity does rightfully turn on the wider policy dimensions of the management of underwater cultural heritage.

Touching on the first point, whether warships that sank before the twentieth century are subject to a special rule of express abandonment, Mr. Bederman brings to bear a body of case law exemplified by Steinmetz v. United States, 973 F.2d 212, 222 (3rd Cir. 1992).

Steinmetz correctly points out that the policy of the United States concerning abandonment of its sunken vessels has not always been consistent. In recent times, a Deputy Legal Advisor of the Department of State has recognized the practice of treating warships from the 17th and 18th centuries as abandoned by implication of the long passage of time….

But here Steinmetz fails point out the issue that long passage of time does not necessarily infer abandonment when no contemporary technology exists with which to make a choice to recover or refuse salvage services under existing admiralty law. Some authorities argue that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled negatively on this argument in the past. Deep Sea Research, Inc. v. The Brother Jonathan and California. However, this is not precisely the case, the court’s comments are equivocal and the issue remains to be decided. In Justice O’Conner’s opinion on this case, she wrote in part:

In maritime law, the court explained, abandonment occurs either when title to a vessel has been affirmatively renounced or when circumstances give rise to an inference of abandonment. Here, the Court of Appeals concluded, the District Court’s “failure to infer abandonment from the evidence presented by the State was not clearly erroneous,” given the insurance companies’ claims to the ship’s insured cargo and undisputed evidence presented by DSR that the technology required to salvage the Brother Jonathan has been developed only recently. (poster’s emphasis)

The presumed withdrawal of state authority over sunken warships in international waters as a result of the long passage of time (as Mr. Bederman argues) where no contemporary technology is available to affect salvage or preservation, as the case may be, is in error and harms the public interest with respect to preserving underwater cultural heritage. The passage of time, particularly due to technologically inaccessible ocean depths and conditions should not be the single test used by admiralty courts to preclude the presumed extension of sovereign authority over a sunken warship. The presence and access to recovery technologies must also be weighed in each case.

Mr. Bederman, as any expert in jurisprudence would be inclined to do, relies heavily on the common law mechanics of stare decisis to support criticism, much of it constructive, of the SMCA, particularly with regard to vessels that sunk in the 17th and 18th centuries. Seeking to demonstrate inconsistencies in the U.S. Government position toward express abandonment, Mr. Bederman juxtaposes the SMCA position with the contents of a letter written by Secretary of State Dean Rusk in 1965. Mr. Bederman wites:

The United States previously asserted a rule of express abandonment only for warships that sank during the Civil War period. Indeed, until recently there had been only one instance in which a government agency propounded a rule of express abandonment at all. See Letter of Secretary of State Rusk to American Embassy, Port-of-Prince (Apr. 29, 1965), Salvage, 9 Whiteman, supra, ss15 at 221 (in regard to a U.S. vessel carrying lend-lease cargo prior to [U.S. declaration of war in] World War II, “where ownership to vessels or cargoes resided in US Government at time of sinking, the US retains title thereto subject to explicit transfer or abandonment).

But this is not really on point because congressional enactment of the SMCA in 2005 codifies existing case law, which supports Federal ownership of sunken U.S. military ship and aircraft wrecks. The converse is also true, existing case law that does not support Federal ownership of vessels in this class are not codified (letters emanating from the U.S. Department of State would also fall into this category). Because of these perceived inconsistencies, Mr. Bederman advances the idea that “ with respect to title to warships sunk during the age of sail, that is the more distant past, [the U.S. Government’s position] has not been particularly consistent and ‘would, of course, still be determined by the more conventional interpretation of abandonment of that period’.”

This is an assertion worth very critical analysis, if more conventional interpretations of contemporaneous abandonment are to be used, as Mr. Bederman appears put forward, than so to must more conventional interpretations of maritime salvage rights be used in equal application. Such traditional interpretations of maritime salvage rights would be guided by the essentially commercial nature of the salvor’s operation.

Maritime salvage law developed in order to provide a commercial incentive for the recovery of property. The underlying central idea was (and is) to prevent looting and to place salvaged products and materials back into an economy. The courts in the United States have always stressed the commercial nature maritime salvage law and when a U.S. Admiralty Court makes a salvage award to a salvor, this award does not confer ownership rights to underwater cultural property along with it. (Sherry Hutt Cultural Property Law, 2004. p.124)

There is no legal reason why a salvor’s rights under existing admiralty law should not be limited to a commercial arena confining the recovery of sunken property to a catagory resulting from recent marine peril (Let us for the moment define this class of target as non-warships that sank during the last ninety-nine years, exempting any vessel already under legislative protection). In any case, current salvage awards do not extend to the ownership of cultural resources and artifacts retrieved from a sunken wreck. These cultural resources and artifacts do not belong to the category of commercial property for the purposes of admiralty law.

Maritime salvage law has historically developed as a legal mechanism applied to the recovery of property in peril as a result of recent marine casualty. Only fairly recently, the mid-1980s, has maritime salvage law been used to support claims to the recovery of underwater cultural heritage. This is by way of stating that the historical context within which maritime salvage case law developed, and indeed the measure to be used when interpreting maritime salvage case law, is an inherently commercial one. The SMCA in no manner interferes with existing law applicable to the recovery of sunken property in peril as a result of recent marine casualty. It can be argued that no vessel that sank before the twentieth century falls into this category and must therefore belong to, and be governed by, a body of law applicable to underwater cultural resource management.

Sources:

R.M.S. Titanic, Inc. v. Wrecked and Abandoned Vessel, R.M.S. Titanic and Others. In this case, the Fourth Curcuit Court ruled that R.M.S. Titanic, Inc., was only granted salvage rights to RMS Titanic, and not title to any recovered artifacts. (Sherry Hutt Cultural Property Law, 2004. p.124).

David J. Bederman. Congress Enacts Protections for Sunken Military Craft. The American Journal of International Law, Vol. 100, No. 3. (Jul., 2006), pp. 649-663.

CALIFORNIA and STATE LANDS COMMISSION, PETITIONERS v. DEEP SEA RESEARCH,
INC., et al. ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT [April 22, 1998]

Specie and American Frigates

2009-09-16T09:43:00.000-07:00

James Nicholson served in the colonial Navy with the British in the assault on Havana in 1762, and was commissioned Captain in the Continental Navy 10 October 1776. He commanded Defense, Trumbull, and Virginia, and when blockaded at Baltimore, took his men to join Washington at Trenton to aid in that key victory. He died 2 September 1804 at his home in New York City.

On subject of Mercedes, one must continually confront the allegation that this sovereign frigate of the Spanish Royal Armada was carrying private specie (in part) and thus, must therefore be characterized as a private merchant vessel without a claim to sovereign immunity. One does not dread the subject because the argument made is telling; rather, the dread resides in having to explain, yet again, what every academically trained naval historian of the period clearly understands: sovereign warships flying a national ensign and registered in a national navy frequently, almost habitually carried private specie under certain government regulated conditions. This practice is particularly evident in instances where the sovereign vessel was sailing under orders from Europe to the Pacific or from the Pacific back to Europe. The delicate nodes of colonial commerce, exposed to the vagaries of naval war and sea hazard demanded whenever possible the protection of a sovereign warship to affect secure transport. It should also be baldly stated, that academically trained naval historians of the period are well aware that the captains of sovereign warships were allowed and expected in most cases to personally benefit from the transport of private specie aboard their vessels (space permitted). Such services to transport private specie were made between the captain of the warship and the private party. In the parlance of the late 18th and early 19th century, this specie transport aboard a warship was denoted, in English, by the lexeme freight. When the terms freight, or commission on freight appear in documents related to sovereign warships, these terms should be analyzed within the likely context of private transport of specie on commission (profit) to the commanding officer.

In the late 18th and throughout a major portion of the19th century, United States naval custom permitted the practice of transporting and transferring specie owned by private interests (i.e. a non-sovereign interest). Often these instructions were issued by the Secretary of the Navy within the sea letter instructions drafted for the purpose of outlining the specific duties and mission scope of a captain’s cruise.

The transport of private party or merchant specie fell within the purview of a national navy’s task of protecting and safeguarding the commerce of subjects or citizens (depending upon whether the naval vessel was, Spanish, United States, British, French, Dutch, etc., flagged).

Aside from the capture of prizes, the shipment and transfer of specie was perhaps the second most lucrative means that a commissioned naval officer in command of an armed warship on the register of a national navy could augment his regular income. The transport of specie by commissioned naval officers was not a practice invented by the United States; rather, it was a practice ubiquitous among the navies of the Western European nation states during the period.

It deserves remarking: the rules for transporting specie were strictly regulated by each country whose commissioned naval officers were so authorized. These regulations varied from navy to navy but where generally similar. The interest rate or commission that a commanding naval officer could charge was capped. In the U.S. Navy practice, for the first $10,000 was usually calculated at .05, and at a rate of .025 on the balance above this amount. Additionally, almost all Western European navies of the period officially limited this transport of specie service to its subjects or citizens as the case may be. The logbooks for the U.S. Navy frigate commanders assigned to the Pacific Station during the first quarter of the 19th century all carry detailed reports of bullion transport transactions on behalf of private parties. These log entries record the amounts as well as the interest or commission charged.(1)

For a quick summary of the wheeling and dealing that went on surrounding this practice at it pertained to American frigates on the Pacific Station, one need look no further than the records of the Court Martial of Captain Stewart in 1825, who commanded the frigate U.S.S Franklin and the Pacific Squadron from 1820 to 1824. The then Captain Stewart, by all accounts, was very active in marketing the specie transfer services of his vessel – perhaps too active. What the records indicate, however, is not that the United States Navy forbade the practice, rather, the Navy was concerned that Captain Stewart was perhaps too indiscriminate in providing the service. In a proceeding that was heavy with political overtones, Captain Stewart was exonerated and returned to frigate-captaining and specie transport duties. The court took testimony from another former United States Navy frigate captain, John Downes, whose pennant flew from the frigate Macedonian (Pacific Squadron from 1818 to 1821). Captain Downes carried specie so long as it did not belong to belligerents (Downes, like Stewart, was not too particular on issues of nationality but had more of a knack for discretion and diplomacy). Captain Downes openly stated that it was part of his duty to carry specie. His testimony is revealing:

Q: Is it customary for our [United States] ships, as well as others [sovereign warships], to take bullion and specie on board, for deposit or transportation, and to receive and to receive a per centage therefrom?

A: Yes. (2)

At no point during the exhaustive proceedings against Captain Stewart was there a suggestion that the transport of private specie affected the sovereign status of the U.S.S. Franklin in any way, or that the practice of specie transport resulted in decommissioning the United States government’s frigate. To argue such a position is to insert a twenty-first century perspective into a nineteenth century practice. It was precisely because the U.S.S. Franklin was a sovereign flagged warship, carried a lot of iron under her skirts, and built for the main purpose of prosecuting war at sea on the offence or defense, that private parties paid a hefty premium to move specie under the protection of her sovereign ensign.

The primary source manuscript material, it is important to note, does not reside solely in the commanding officer’s logbook. Each agreement to transport private party specie was drafted as a separate written contract conforming to the standards of contemporary business norms and laws. These contracts were rendered in duplicate at least depending on the number of parties and the location of agents requiring copies. Thus along with the Captain’s logbook, one should expect to find numerous drafts of private party contracts outlining the amount of specie to be transferred as well as terms and liabilities of parties. The contracts were usually signed under the name of the naval captain commanding and the private party or parties. The first officer, at least, signed as witness. Thus, in addition to the logbook, one finds sheaves of individually drafted specie transport contracts that conform in every respect with private merchant contracts. The presence of such contracts in association with the records of a late 18th or early 19th century sovereign warship is both historically consistent and, moreover, to be expected – particularly in the case of a warship or group of warships moving from the Pacific centers of Latin American commerce to Europe during the Napoleonic Wars.

The point to be communicated clearly by late 18th and early 19th century naval history among the Western European navies is this: the transportation of specie and goods (space permitting)(note) was an acceptable activity by a commissioned naval officer in command of a sovereign flagged vessel during this time period; moreover, this practice was considered one of the so-called perks of attaining such a command. The practice of transporting privately owned specie changed neither the sovereign character of the vessel, nor its status as a warship in the service of its respective nation’s naval armada.

The United States Government prior to Captain Stewart’s enterprising command legally sanctioned specie transport by U.S. Navy warships. In 1818, the Secretary of the Navy officially authorized the carrying specie by issuing written instructions to U.S. Navy Commodore Daniel T. Patterson, whose squadron was home ported in New Orleans, to issue orders for vessels under his command to transport specie belonging to U.S. merchants.

So, we have examined, briefly, one aspect of the problem from the point of view of a U.S. Navy frigate captain in the Pacific during the first quarter of the 19th century. It may be asserted that sovereign warships regularly transported privately owned specie and property, usually at a personal profit to the captain. We have already remarked that attending these agreements were documents that, at face value, give every appearance of being private commercial contracts signed by a ship captain, in these cases, it is important to note, the signing officers are commanders of sovereign vessels of a national navy. However, this is not the whole extent of the problem related to dealing with such primary documents.
Oftentimes, and this is particularly true of specie transactions in the colonial centers of late 18th and early 19th century America (north and south), official government transactions can take on distinctly private commercial appearances, particularly because large quantities of specie were difficult to collect and transport. The governments of the period could and did direct agents with semi-public governmental positions and standing to transact business on behalf of a government. Pursuant to obtaining a successful outcome for these transactions, the government in question would direct their sovereign vessels to transport both goods and specie, as well as allow the necessary transactions to be carried out by any secure commercial means necessary using a bewildering array of public and private factors in varying combinations depending on the local circumstances. The point is this: a government transaction of the period was not guaranteed to be straightforward. Oftentimes, the government transaction resulted in numerous contracts with the outward form and appearance private merchant agreements. Again, by way of easing linguistic issues, one may turn to an United States example from the Revolutionary period, in this case 1781, for illustration.
In July of that year, the United States Congress appointed Mr. Robert Smith U.S. Commercial Agent to Havana, Cuba. In this period, the Commercial Agent held a diplomatic rank below that of consul; however, in areas where no U.S. Consul was present, the U.S. Commercial Agent served as such. It was a non-paid commission and this officer was expected to use the so-called perks of this office to cover expenses and feather his own nest. These Commercial Agents often used their own networks, firm names, and sometimes their own capital, to execute government business. That having been said, the context and redactive intent of the primary source quoted below requires some introduction.

The United States Congress was deeply involved in prosecuting the war against Great Britain. The unquestionable naval superiority of the Royal Navy as well as the effectiveness of the blockade of American ports rendered the shipment of specie extremely risky (as it was for Spain during the Napoleonic period). Here the United States Government is directing its Havana Agent to proceed with a consignment of high-grade flour and sell it in that market at terms stipulated. Note the acceptable rate of commission .05, the same customarily afforded U.S. Navy officers in command of a vessel. The next issue taken up by the source is the question of how to proceed with the ever so delicate and risky task of transporting the specie that the U.S Government hoped to raise by its Havana transaction back to Philadelphia without being lost at sea or seized. The first method of choice appears to have been to distribute the monies to several fast-sailing merchant vessels in order to lower the risk of transport. The second option was the provision made by the U.S. Congress to dispatch the commissioned frigate Trumbull to Havana in order to carry the specie. What is of interest here is that the transactions of the U.S. Commercial Agent in Havana, i.e. the sale of flour and the honoring of the French Bill of Exchange, resulted in subsequent contracts that would appear entirely commercial, and, to the modern reader, non-governmental; non-governmental they decidedly were not. Here are Robert Morris’ instructions to U.S. Commercial Agent in Havana, Mr. Robert Smith:

Begin Primary Source:

Philadelphia, July 17, 1781

By Captain James Nicholson, commanding the frigate Trumbull, I send a bill of lading and invoice for five hundred barrels of flour, which is all fresh and good, and a considerable part of it superfine. This flour I have caused to be shipped to your address on account and risk of the United States of North America. Be pleased to receive it as quickly as may be from the ship, make the most advantageous sale of it which you can, and remit the net proceeds in Mexican dollars, consigned to my order, for account and at the risk of said United States. I expect you will not charge more than five per cent. for transacting this business; that is, two and a half per cent. on the sales and the same on the returns.

I have also enclosed a bill of exchange, drawn by myself on Messrs. Le Couteulx & Co., bankers in Paris, to the amount of five hundred thousand livres tournois; this bill is at sixty days' sight, and you may depend it will be punctually paid, for I have the authority of the court of Versailles to draw it and every assurance I could wish. You will observe by my letter to the governor that he is to have the refusal of this bill. You will therefore offer it to him in the first instance. When I consider the risk which must attend sending money from Havanah to Cadiz, and the remittances, as well private as public, which are to be made from one place to the other, I can not but persuade myself that, unless the government and the people are alike blind to their interests, good bills must sell at a very considerable advance. Should the governor decline taking the bill on Paris, as it is not probable that any one private person could purchase it, you may either remit it to the house of Le Couteulx & Co., banquiérs, Rue de Montorguille, à Paris, or to the house of Messrs. J. L. & L. Le Couteulx & Co., at Cadiz, as may be most convenient for your operations. You will then draw on the house to whom you remit the bill, and sell your bills, to the same amount. [note: it would take very attentive reading on the part of a skilled researcher not to identify this last scenario as a private non-governmental series of transactions, which again, they were not].

Should you remit to the house in Cadiz let me know it, that I may write and apprize them of it; though this I shall do, provisionally, beforehand, so that they may be prepared for you.

I have also, as you will perceive, written to his excellency on the subject of certain other bills of exchange drawn on Mr. Jay. You will endeavor to get the monies for these, if possible; and in case it is required, you will enter into the stipulations there mentioned as to the shipment of flour. In this last case get the flour fixed at as high a rate as possible, and let me have due notice, so that I may punctually cause to be fulfilled whatever contracts you shall, on the part of the public, have entered into.

Should his excellency be inclined to make those advances of money which I have so earnestly pressed upon him you will be able the sooner to despatch the frigate, which I hope will be done without delay; but as there is a risk in placing large sums on board any one vessel, I am to observe that if there should be any fast-sailing vessels about to leave the Havanah at the same time, and if in consideration of convoy they will take the public money freight free, you will then prudently distribute it among them, and direct Captain Nicholson to give them signals and to take them under his convoy; but I must caution you that on no consideration is any private property to be covered as belonging to the public, either to save the duties or for any other purpose. You will, therefore, use all proper vigilance to prevent everything of this sort, should it be attempted.(note) If there are not such vessels as Captain Nicholson and you shall approve of really to sail, then ship the whole money in the frigate, for the risk of being waylaid by the enemy in consequence of any unnecessary delay is greater than that of being otherwise intercepted.

It is unnecessary for me to mention to you that we want money exceedingly. This very measure must convince you of it. Exert yourself therefore to get it, and you will merit much at the hands of your country. Should you not succeed in getting the whole sum I have asked for, get as much as you possibly can, and if the governor should decline advancing any money on the bills drawn by order of Congress on Mr. Jay, perhaps the intendant may accept your contract for flour and take these bills in security, or you may possibly borrow on their credit from individuals, to be repaid when I shall send you shipments of flour, which I will cause to be done so soon as I shall hear from you to this effect.

I have forbidden Captain Nicholson to cruise, but should fortune enable him to bring a good prize into Havanah, the continent has one-half, and you must send to me that half in dollars. Whatever supplies the frigate is absolutely in need of you must let her have; but I entreat that her expenses may be as moderate as possible, and the best way to secure this is to despatch her quick, for the moment they get clear of the saltwater air and feel their land tacks on board every soul on board will try to get his hands into your pockets; but guarda.

I have desired Captain Nicholson to consult with and obey you whilst in Havanah and to push off whenever you say the word. I shall send you flour by private vessels for the sake of getting money back, and write you further as occasion may require.

I am, dear sir, &c.,

Robert Morris.

End Primary Source

What does this discussion portend for the historical documentation relative to the Mercedes? One might observe that the explosion that disintegrated a large section of the vessel, leaving a perfectly explainable archaeological lacuna at the sites of destruction, also destroyed both master’s, deck, and purser’s log (and all other on board contract copies) related to the vessel, the vessel’s specie, as well as the private specie and goods she shipped; however, one expects a massive quantity of duplicate contract copies outlining the terms, liabilities, and parties engaging Mercedes to ship private specie within established regulations aboard the Royal Spanish frigate. Very likely all major private contracts for this specie transport service will bear the signature of a Royal Spanish Navy Officer.
Of course these are only very preliminary comments on what is perhaps a very dry topic to some. More later as the research unfolds.
Note: here the prohibition is not against carrying private specie or property, but against passing private specie or property off as U.S. Government property.

Secondary Sources:

Claude Berube, John A. Rodgaard. A Call to the Sea: Captain Charles Stewart of the USS Constitution. Brassy’s: New York. 2005 (p.184-187)

(1)Francis Diane Robotti and James Vescovi. The U.S.S. Essex and the Birth of the American Navy. Adams Media: Holbrook, MA., 1999. (pp. 74, and 184-186).

(2)American State Papers: House of Representatives, 19th Congress, 1st Session
Naval Affairs: Volume 2 Captain Downes p.507 particularly revealing.

Midshipman Charles Wilkes, Jr.--Testimony before the court-martial for the trial of Commodore Stewart (Page 511-512): Wilkes’ testimony is revealing as it lays out the wide-ranging scope of the practice throughout the U.S. Navy warships assigned to Captain Stewart’s command.

The Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States, Volume 4
Morris to Robert Smith, Agent for the United States in Cuba.†
[Note †: † MSS. Dep. of State; 6 Sparks' Dip. Rev. Corr., 281, with changes and omissions.] Philadelphia, July 17, 1781.

Copyright 2008 Primary Source Research LLC

The Secret Treaty of Ildefonso October 1800

2009-09-07T16:20:00.000-07:00

Figure 1: Napoleon Bonaparte as First Consul
Napoleon Bonaparte, who had been named First Consul after his successful coup d'état against the French Revolutionary Directorate in 1799, restarted negotiations and concluded the secret treaty of San Ildefonso (October 1800).

The Secret Treaty of St. Ildefonso: Fear and Loathing in London

The Secret treaty with Spain, signed at Saint-Ildefonse in 1800.
The Treaty of San Ildefonso (formally titled the Preliminary and Secret Treaty between the French Republic and His Catholic Majesty the King of Spain, Concerning the Aggrandizement of His Royal Highness the Infant Duke of Parma in Italy and the Retrocession of Louisiana) f° 8: signature and seal of the King of Spain
Archives du Ministère des Affaires étrangères, Paris, Traités, Espagne, Ratifications du Traité de Saint-Ildefonse, 1er octobre 1800

The Secret Treaty of St. Idelfonso might perhaps be better known in the United States than in Europe. In the few months after the October 1802 convention that confirmed a number of provisions, including the retrocession of Louisiana back to France, Napoleon sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States. From 1802 onwards, Napoleon was in the process of raising one of the largest financial war chests in the history of military spending up to that time. The Secret Treaty of St. Ildefonso’s latest provisions according to which Spain, under Charles IV, agreed to return the colony Louisiana to France in return for financial advantages granted to the Duchy of Parma, also contained stipulations for the transfer of naval warships, crews, and bullion to the French govt. The secret provisions of this treaty served as simmering justification for British naval operations, i.e., full and partial blockades of Spanish ports between 1800 and 1804.

Thus, while the Treaty of Amiens, Signed March 25th, 1802, is generally viewed as temporarily ending hostilities that attended the conflict between Great Britain, revolutionary France and Imperial Spain, really only affected the situation with respect to land combat. The secret Treaty of Ildefonso of 1800 which was actually a draft document, was confirmed between France and Spain in two subsequent conventions in March of 1801 and October of 1802; moreover, this third Treaty of St. Ildefonso also reaffirmed the terms of the 1796 Treaty of Alliance signed between the French Republic and Imperial Spain. The government of Great Britain, aware of this diplomatic situation kept the Royal Navy on a war footing against both France and Spain throughout 1803 and 1804.

It was Article Five of the Ildefonso treaty caused particular alarm within Britain’s Pitt administration because it contained a provision to provide six third rate 74 gun ships of the line to the French government:

ARTICLE 5

His Catholic Majesty undertakes to deliver to the French Republic in Spanish ports in Europe, one month after the execution of the provision with regard to the Duke of Parma, six ships of war in good condition built for seventy-four guns, armed and equipped and ready to receive French crews and supplies. (Third Treaty of Ildefonso http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/ildefens.htm)

The British government held that several articles of the St. Ildefonso treaty constituted violations of Spanish neutrality. Principle among these provisions was article five concerning the transfer of ships of the line to the French government, or a monetary (bullion) amount that could be used by France toward her war effort. The grounds for the British view, at least the view presented through the debates presented on the floor of the British Parliament, were summarized in the British government’s declaration related to the outbreak of the Second Anglo-Spanish War (1804-1808):

Declaration, Dated Downing-Street, Jan. 1805.

From the moment that hostilities had commenced between Great Britain and France [18 May, 1803], a sufficient ground of war against Spain, on the part of Great Britain, necessarily followed from the treaty of St. Ildephonso, if not disclaimed by Spain. – that treaty, in fact, identified Spain with the republican govt. of France, by a virtual acknowledgement of unqualified vassalage, …By the articles of that treaty Spain covenanted to furnish a stated contingent of naval and military force for the prosecution of any war in which the French republic might think proper to engage. … It does not appear that any express demand of succour had been made by France before the month of July 1803; and on first notification of the war, [which broke out between England and France in May 1803] his maj.’s govt. was lead to believe, … that his Catholic maj. Did not consider himself as necessarily bound by the mere fact of the existence of a war between G. Brit. And France, without subsequent explanation and discussion , to fulfill the stipulations of the treaty of S. Ildephonso,… In the month of October [1803] a convention was signed , by which Spain agreed to pay to France a certain sum monthly, in lieu of the naval and military succours with they had stipulated by the treaty to provide;…(3)

Thus, as a result of the October 1802 confirmation (British sources refer to this as a convention) of the Treaty of St. Ildefonso, the British believed that the Spanish government had agreed to make payments in specie to Napoleon as opposed to providing naval support.

As noted above, the British government immediately undertook the framing of a policy toward Spain based on the October 1802 convention signed between Spain and France. This policy found clear expression in the imposition of a limited blockade of Spanish ports by British Royal Navy assets. This limited blockade was specifically directed at vessels carrying naval stores and supplies and Spanish warships laden with govt. bullion. The British limited blockade did not target merchant shipping, even merchant shipping carrying bullion. Moreover, homeward-bound warships of the Real Armada not engaged in the transport of govt. specie were not to be interfered with.

With the steady disintegration of the Treaty of Amiens, and against the context of the latest provisions of the Treaty of St. Ildefonso, the government of Great Britain tasked the British Admiralty to issue a series of orders to admirals in command of Royal Navy assets charged with blockade duties off the coasts of France and Spain. These Admiralty orders were characterized as precautionary. These precautionary orders were triggered by perceived Spanish navy activity in support of French interest in the port of Ferrol:

No. 22. – Order from the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty to Hon. W. Cornwallis Adm. Of the White, &c. dated the 18th of Sept. 1804. (Most Secret.) By &c. – You are hereby required and directed to give immediate orders to rear-adm. Cochrane, to continue the blockade of the port of Ferrol with the utmost vigilance, not only with the view of preventing the French squadron from escaping from the port, but likewise with a view of preventing any of the Spanish ships of war from sailing from Ferrol, or any additional ships of war from entering that port; and if in consequence of your correspondence with rear-adm. Cochrane you should be of opinion that the force under the rear admiral is not adequate to the purposes above mentioned, you are without delay to reinforce the squadron under his command, and measures will be taken, with all possible expedition, to send out to you a sufficient number of ships to replace the force which you may so detach. – You are to send intimation to the Spanish govt. through rear Adm. Cochrane, of the instructions you have given to the rear Admiral, and of your determination in consequence thereof to resist, under present circumstances, the sailing either of the French or Spanish fleets, if any attempt for that purpose should be made by either of them. – And whereas information has been received that some Frigates are speedily expected to arrive at Cadiz loaded with treasure from South America, you are to lose no time in detaching two of the Frigates under your command, with orders to their captains to proceed with all possible dispatch off Cadiz and the entrance of the Straits, and to use their best endeavors, in conjunction with any of his maj.’s ships they may find there, to intercept, if possible, the vessels in which the above-mentioned treasure may be contained, and to detain them until his maj.’s pleasure shall be further known. Given, &c. 18th Sept. 1804. J. Gambier, J. Colfoys, P. Patton. (4)

No. 27. – Copy on an Order t the Commander in Chief in the Mediterranean, the Leeward Islands, and Jamaica, dated the 25th of September, 1804. By the Commissioners for executing the Office of Lord High Admiral of the United Kingdom of G. Brit. and Ireland, &c.
- In addition to our secretary’s letter to your ldp. Of the 19th inst. Directing you to take such measures of precaution as may be necessary for the opposing of counteracting any hostile attempts of the govt. or subjects of Spain, and to detain, for further orders, ships having treasure on board belonging to the Spanish govt.; your ldg. Is hereby required and directed to give orders to the respective captains and commanders of all his maj.’s ships and vessels under your command to keep a vigilant look out, and on falling in with any ships or vessels laden with naval or military stores, to detain them until his maj.’s pleasure shall be known respecting them. Given under our hands, the 25th of Sept. 1804. J. Gambier. J. Colfoys. P. Patton. Lord visc. Nelson, K. B. vice adm. Of the white, &c. Mediterranean. Similar order to vice adm. Sir J.T. Duckworth, K.B. Jamaica. Commodore Sir S. Hood, K. B. Leeward Islands. (5)

No. 28. – Copy of a letter from W. Marsden, Esq. To the different Commanders in Chief of his Maj.s’ Ships, on the Subject of the Detention of the Spanish Vessels, Dated Admiralty-Office, 25th Nov. 1804. – Sir; It appearing that some misapprehension has been entertained with regard to the nature and extent of the precautionary orders issued by my lords commis. Of the Admiralty, for the detention, under certain circumstances, of Spanish Ships of war; I have it in command from their ldps. To signify to you, that you are not to detain, in the first instance, any ship belonging to his Catholic maj. Sailing from a port of Spain; but you are to require the commander of such ship to return directly to the port from whence he came, and only in the event of his refusing to comply with such requisition, you are to detain and send him to Gibraltar or to England. I am further commanded to signify their direction to you, not to detain any Spanish homeward-bound ship of war, unless she shall have treasure on board, nor merchant ships of that nation, however, laden, on any account whatever.
I am, &c. W. Marsden. (6)

The chief and most significant element of these Admiralty orders rests in the obvious fact that the British expressly excluded Spanish merchant shipping as a legitimate target under these orders. Therefore, it is clear that Mercedes and her squadron were attacked by the British precisely because they were not merchant vessels.

The Course to Cape St. Mary

As may be read in Admiralty Order No. 22 (supra), Adm. Cochrane, in fact, wasted no time in dispatching two of the frigates under his command, HMS Indefatigable and HMS Lively, under the command of Capt. Graham Moore, to cruise for the Real Armada frigates laden with bullion and expected to make landfall off Cape St. Vincent. On the night of October 4th, 1804, the frigates HMS Medusa and HMS Amphion rendezvoused with Moore’s squadron approximately five leagues SW of Cape St Mary, Portugal. On the morning of the 5th, the action known as the Battle of Cape St. Mary was fought, the details of which HHI has explored in some detail. The result, of course, was the sinking of the Mercedes and the capture of the three surviving frigates. The battle, it should be noted, was initiated between the Spanish and British frigates at the distance of half a pistol shot. The tactical positioning of the British vessels, their command of the weather gauge, and the effect of their firepower, resulted in all of the surviving Spanish frigates sustaining major damage to both hull system and rigging. Winning the battle with the Spanish by force was only the first part of Capt. Moore’s struggle; there now occurred a major battle between the Spanish and English sailors and the sea itself as an all-out effort was made to repair the battle-damaged Spanish frigates and quickly get them off the Portuguese coast. All of the economic strategy, all of the diplomatic efforts, all of the admiralty orders, all funnel down to action taken at the tactical level of operations. HHI has sought to give some voice to the participants of the battle itself. Here is a small snapshot of the tactical aftermath on board one of the detained Spanish frigates La Fama, as a young British officer attempted to save the stricken vessel off the coast of Portugal on the October 5th and 6th, 1804.

Within this dramatic record are further clues to the nature of the Spanish frigates and their cargo.

The Detained Spanish Frigate La Fama: Lt. Peak, R.N. Commanding

The examination of a portion of the log book entries made by Lieutenant William Peak, RN, dramatically illustrates how the dry, formulaic, admiralty orders (Nos. 22, 27, and 28, supra) were executed in the reality the Royal Navy faced off the coast of Portugal when the Spanish frigate squadron to which Mercedes belonged found itself a target of Royal Navy interdiction. On the afternoon of October 5th, 1804, Lt. Peak was detached from HMS Lively and assigned to command the “detained Spanish Frigate La Fama.”

Lt. Peak was a very resourceful officer and an excellent navigator. His log book, with runs from 6th October, 1804, to 19th October 1804 covers the entire transit of La Fama to England as a prize in company with the three surviving Real Armada frigates seized by the Capt. Graham Moore’s Royal Navy frigate squadron off Cape St. Mary, Portugal, on the 5th of that month.

One would not immediately know it from the laconic and unflappable style of Lt. Peaks log entries; however, as he took command of the detained Spanish frigate, this British officer was literally taking command of a sinking ship. La Fama was badly damaged by fire from both HMS Medusa and HMS Lively. In the first hours of his command, Lt. Peak, relying on parties sent by the two lately named British frigates as well as work parties formed out of the Spanish crew complement, struggled to keep Fama afloat and re-rigged. The log entry excerpted below covers the first twenty-four desperate hours of young Lt. Peak’s command. In the process of examining the log entries, it will be shown that the historical and linguistic evidence strongly suggests that La Fama was viewed as a military vessel belonging to Spain by the His Britannic Majesty’s Royal Navy.

Log of Lt. William Peak, Prize Captain of Detained Spanish Frigate Fama, October 5th, 1804

Primary Source:

October 1804

Saturday 6th Cape St. Mary’s NE 5 or 6 Leagues

Remarks Etc. On Board the detained Spanish Frigate La Fama
Lieut. Wm. Peak Commander

PM. At 1 Light Breezes and clear, took possession of the Spanish Ship La Fama, that has struck to the Lively after an action of 1 hour & 10 minutes, sent the Spanish Commodore, his Captain & First Lieutenant on board the Lively. Found the Fama was Manilla to Cadiz with Money. Found the Rigging, Main Top Mast and Main Mast very much Wounded, the Boats of the Medusa & Lively empld. Shifting the Prisoners, when the Prisoners were ready, all removed. I found from the 2nd Lieut. That the complement at the commencement of the action was 301.. and that about twenty men were either killed or wounded – at 5 a Lieut. And a party of 54 men came from the Medusa & a Lieut. and 10 men from the Lively. Employed during the Night in getting her ready to make sail upon. One half of the [men] kept constantly at the pumps and with difficulty could keep her free – the Spaniards for the most part drunk – at 6 AM moderate. Found out the leak – Carpenter empld. stopping it. All the seamen about the Rigging [B% knotting], splicing, setting up & at 7AM the Sig[nal] to make more sail and pass within hail of the Medusa. When Captain Gore ordered me to use every [B% exertion] to complete the Rigging, as he meant to take the men from me at sunset. Haul’d the main tack on board – and buried a Spaniard who died of his wounds. [B% people] the whole day about the Rigging – Ship making Eighteen inches water. Received this Day an order to Command the La Fama.

Sunday 7th, Wind: NNE

PM. Strong Breezes & Cloudy. empld. about the Rigging repairing sails, the Ship not making quite so much Water as yesterday. Keep the Spaniards at the hand pumps, and a spell at the Chain pumps every four hours. At 4 broke the Starbd. Chain. Set the Carpenter to repair it …(7)

End Primary Source

Before continuing the discussion, a brief summary of the Cape St. Mary battle might be excusable: The Indefatibable’s log records that the Mercedes sustained a catastrophic magazine explosion at 10:07AM. At 10:17, the Medea struck. At 10:22 the Clara Struck. At this moment, the Fama, at the head of the Spanish line-of-battle, hauled up on the NNW breeze and set a course for Cadiz in an effort to escape the Royal Navy squadron. Medusa, the Fama’s opponent at the commencement of the action, followed in pursuit. Capt. Graham signaled the HMS Lively to assist Medusa.

The battle between the fleeing Fama and the pursuing Medusa and Lively lasted another one hour and ten minutes according to Lt. Peak (see above). Lt. Peak was dispatched from presumably Medusa to take command of the Fama.

One finds an unusually top-heavy chain of command on board the Spanish frigate quite distinct from merchantmen command hierarchies. Lt. Peak records that one of his first actions upon assuming command was to send “the Spanish Commodore, his Captain & First Lieutenant on board the Lively.” Thus, the Fama, like Medea, not only a Real Armada Captain and First Lieutenant, but a Real Armada flag officer as well (Commodore). This hierarchy is not characteristic of merchant convoys of the period; moreover, the Spanish Squadron appears to have contained at least three officers of flag rank, as well as four full captains in operational command of each Spanish frigate.

Found the Fama was Manilla to Cadiz with Money

In what has to be one of the more laconic summaries ever written on board a captured vessel full of bullion, Lt. Peak simply states:

“Found the Fama was Manilla to Cadiz with Money.”

Lt. Peak obviously examined La Fama’s papers and knew its cargo; however, his main objective was saving the stricken vessel, not performing functions of supercargo. From this single sentence, one may link the money, at least a portion of it, to the Philippine Islands. The Manila reference may be a reflection of specie on board La Fama consigned by agents of the Royal Philippine Company, a quasi-private venture in which the Spanish Bourbon government, the King of Spain himself, and principle aristocratic and ecclesiastic investors held a substantial stake.

In the English language and maritime tradition, packet-ship, as a noun, connotates a private vessel, or perhaps a government sponsored or operated vessel, engaged in the transport of mail, specie, passengers, etc. However, in the 18th and early 19th century maritime mercantilist empires there existed other specific conceptions for vessels that carried out these types of missions. As discussed in previous posts, in mercantilist economic systems of the 18th and early 19th centuries, bullion transport services were not wholly private in nature. The Real Armada frigate Nuestra Senora de Mercedes was not a civilian packet ship; she was a warship serving as a Spanish Register-ship. The Bourbon monarchy assigned this duty to Mercedes and her sister frigates because the First Anglo-Spanish War had decimated the revenues coming in from the Indies to the Cadiz treasury. The Cadiz treasury accounted for as much as twenty percent of the revenue in hard currency (specie) that was channeled into the General Treasury in Madrid. The specie transfer assigned to the Real Armada frigate squadron to which Mercedes belonged, was a military mission of great importance to the Bourbon state. Upon this mission’s success, the government’s ability to service its public debt, and thereby its military spending, rested. The failure of this specie transfer in October of 1804 may be arguably linked to two outcomes: first, the loss of this Indies bullion under Real Armada protection at the time, helped to undermine the Spanish monarchy’s ability to float loans on the international credit markets of the period. Two, this initial loss of bullion under Spanish naval protection was exacerbated by a second debilitating Anglo-Spanish War that resulted in the bankruptcy of the Spanish government and the fall of the Spanish monarchy.

Further Questions Regarding Mr. Gordon’s Comments to the Tampa Tribune

Quite aside from the obvious strategic nature of the 1804 bullion transfer intercepted by British warships off Cape St. Mary, as well as the apparent lack of relevance that a ship’s manifest would have regarding the classification of a military mission, OME presents no definition of what constitutes public bullion and private bullion or how the 1/3 – 2/3 divisions of the bullion were arrived at. Mr. Gordon’s interview with the Tampa Tribune sheds no light on this important topic. The distinction between bullion belonging to the Bourbon monarchy, its government, and private merchants as defined by contemporaneous admiralty law, is a far more complicated exercise than Mr. Gordon would have the general public believe. It is certainly more involved than running down a list of names associated with the frigate Mercedes’ bullion shipment. Therefore, one has every reason to expect that the exercise will be just as complex in a modern court of law. Some of the obvious and not-so-obvious aspects of the Napoleonic historical and legal context comprise the discussion that follows.

In the mercantilist and royal economy of Spain, agents of crown monopolies remitting money from the sale of a wide variety of products might at first glance appear as private merchants to readers not familiar with either the period or economic structure of Bourbon Spain at the turn of the 19th century. Moreover, there is the complicated question of agents and factors remitting funds from semi-private companies in which the Spanish crown, i.e., the Royal Philippine Company and others, the Spanish church, and the Guild of the Five Companies all held an interest.

If the facts presented to the public in Mr. Gordon’s argument are correct, they are almost certainly taken completely out of the context of nature mercantilist business practices as well as the realities of naval war faced by the Bourbon monarchy during the Napoleonic period. Lastly, the argument fails to account for numerous examples of Royal Spanish frigates assigned military duty as Register-ships in order to protect important colonial cargos transiting from the Americas to Spain, cargos that contained both public and private goods and specie.

In order to gain the appropriate insight to this question and a possible answer one must delve into the practices of bullion transfer in support of state sponsored mercantilist economic policies developed during the Bourbon dynasty in Spain.

Register Ships

Register ship, a ship which once obtained permission by treaty to trade to the Spanish West Indies, and whose capacity, per registry, was attested before sailing.

The Imperial Dictionary, on the basis of Webster’s English Dictionary, 1883

Register-ships were a long-standing, and altogether unique, component of Spanish mercantilist policy dating from the Habsburg period. It was during the Bourbon dynasty, however, that the Register-ship came to displace the Galleon and flota systems within the network of inter-imperial trade. These Spanish register-ships were duly specified by international treaties, and more commonly as the 18th century progressed, operated under licenses procured directly from the Spanish monarchy. It should be noted that Spanish register-ships encompassed a wide class of vessels ranging in size from small cutters to those of frigate class. It is equally true that non-Spanish flagged vessels could and did operate as Spanish Register-ships, particularly in times of peace, or when the threat of war did not loom large on the horizon. These non-Spanish register-ships, so far as preliminary research indicates, were extended to the French House of Bourbon and one finds numerous examples of French vessels so licensed operating out of La Rochelle during the mid-18th century.

The register, so to speak, comprising a Register-ship’s documentation, was equivalent to a private commercial vessel’s manifest and recorded a list of the laden cargo for both the outbound (from Europe) and inbound (from the Americas) voyages. The Royal Spanish government held a direct interest in several aspects of a register-ship. For one, duties (indultos) were collected on the registered cargo. Unregistered cargo was subject to confiscation by the king’s government. Secondly, the Bourbon monarchy frequently tasked register-ships with the specific duty of transporting specie. This bullion could manifest itself as property of the monarchy, property of a semi-private company holding a royal license or monopoly, property of individuals who complied with the requisite laws of Spain necessary to transport bullion in the character of Spanish property (see below: British Court of High Admiralty, The Jeane Isabelle. 1 H. & H., p. 188, 4th of August, 1778). These inherently mercantilist and restrictive laws were a direct hold-over from the Habsburg dynasty Galleon and Flota transport requirements.

Where the Spanish register-ship system, as it developed during the period of the Bourbon reforms, departed from the Habsburg Galleon and Flota transport system was in the relaxing of port restrictions where register ships were permitted to sail. Spanish register-ships were allowed to select from a range of ports depending on operational necessity. The only caveat reserved by the Spanish government was that register-ships had to put into Spanish ports.

By mid-century, and the outbreak of the War of Jenkins Ear (1739-1748, part of Europe’s War of the Austrian Succession), the Register-ship emerged as a favored system of transport for bullion and commodities deemed of strategic economic interest to the Empire of Spain. In the ever-increasing 18th century game of cat-and-mouse on the Spanish Main, the register-ship system was believed by some officials within the Spanish Imperial government to lessen the possibility of a single catastrophic interdiction of a Galleon or Tierra Firme flota. However, it is important to underscore that the multitude of peninsular and colonial interests vested in the various transportation systems ruled out any unified policy within the government itself. To be sure, the register-ship system had its critics, and this question is, unfortunately outside the scope of the present discussion). Anecdotally, for the first six years into the Jenkin’s Ear conflict, a French Foreign Office memoire “calculated that out of 118 Register-ships which sailed from Cadiz between May 20th 1740 and June 27th, 1745, 69 had been lost.”(Note P.114). One wonders if such a calculation is supported by documents within the Spanish archives, nevertheless, it is clear that the enemies of Spain made a consistent strategy of interrupting imperial communications between the Americas and Europe. Moreover, the risk posed to Register-ships sailing in times of open warfare was significant.

If the anecdotal evidence from 18th century French sources detailing losses of Spanish Register-ships is to be believed, one may understand the clear motive for the Bourbon monarchy’s periodic assignment of Real Armada warships to carry out missions as Register-ships in their own right, particularly in heightened periods of international tensions, or when war and the threat of war dictated that the government protect the transport of strategic commodities across the Atlantic. Beginning in the mid-18th century, one finds examples of Spanish warships assigned economic missions of strategic importance to Spain’s mercantilist empire. Moreover, Spain was not alone in the periodic use of warships to transfer bullion and strategic commodities. Great Britain, long an advocate of her own mercantilist economic policies during this same time period, also found recourse to transporting specie with a public, a semi-private, and a private character on ships of war (a brief discussion of two specific illustrative examples below).

Thus, in summarizing this particularly wide-ranging practice of using Register-ships to transport bullion within the dominions of Bourbon Spain’s empire, one may observe the following pattern: in peacetime, one tends not to find warships assigned as register-ships. In wartime, or when war or interdiction is a concern, the Spanish monarchy assigned warships to this task without hesitation.

A Trade so Peculiar to Spanish Subjects

The Case of Princessa 2c.Rob. High Court of Admiralty, August 30th, 1799

Against this backdrop of the long-unexamined 18th century legal category of register-ship, one may assert that the Spanish frigate squadron detained by the Capt. Moore’s Royal Navy squadron on October 5th, 1804, falls squarely into this classification. This being so, what insights do contemporary admiralty cases from the Napoleonic era possess on the question of their legal status as sovereign warships although they were assigned duties transferring bullion for the common and private weal? Luckily, for the few historians interested in such questions, there happen to be numerous examples of Spanish register-ships becoming prizes to be disposed of before England’s courts of admiralty. For the purposes of the present discussion, a case featuring the seizure of a Spanish frigate assigned to transfer bullion will be examined.

Primary Source : Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Court of High Admiralty: The Princessa. 2 C. Rob, August 30th, 1799

A claim of a British merchant for dollars, documented as Spanish property, on board a Spanish ship from Buenos Ayres to Spain, not admitted.

In August of 1796, exactly three years before the Court of High Admiralty ruled on the case, an English merchant managing the risk of transporting bullion between the Viceroyalty of Buenos Aires and peninsular Spain by dividing the bullion amongst three register-ships. Two vessels transited the Atlantic safely to Spain. The third vessel a frigate of the Real Armada in the King’s service was taken as a prize by the Royal Navy. The British merchant (the claimant) shipped the bullion aboard the Spanish frigate Princessa bound for Corunna, Spain, on his account; however, the bullion was entered ostensibly in Spanish names on the ship’s register. The British merchant consigned his bullion in this fashion because of the strict mercantilist policies of Spain’s Bourbon monarchy that prohibited non-Spanish subjects from legally transporting bullion within the Empire unless the specie was consigned in the name and risk of a Spanish subject and a duty was thereby paid to the Spanish Crown. One frequently finds this Spanish mercantilist practice expressed in contemporary 18th century British admiralty rulings with this citation:

“…by the laws of Spain, no merchants can bring over bullion &c., in the Spanish flota, unless in the names and as for account and risk of Spaniards, for which they pay an indulto, or duty to the king of Spain.” (The Jeane Isabelle. 1 H. & H., p. 188, 4th of August, 1778).(8)

Bullion shipped in this manner took on the character of Spanish property. This type of case repeatedly found its way before the British courts of High Admiralty and accordingly some general dicta were laid down delineating how the court would adjudicate such claims. The claimant in this case, obviously distressed at the loss of his money, was placed in the unenviable legal predicament of arguing before the court that the true fact of the British ownership of the bullion laden aboard the Spanish frigate Princessa was at variance with the verified Spanish information he countenanced to be recorded on the captured frigate’s register in accordance with the mercantilist laws of Imperial Spain. Viewed from the bench of High Admiralty, the British merchant’s attorney was attempting to argue a claim whose facts were in opposition to the original ship’s papers.

Generally, in 18th and early 19th century British admiralty law, no claim in opposition to ship’s papers was admissible before the court, although some exceptions do appear to exist.(9) This long-standing precedent placed the British merchant at a severe disadvantage. His barrister chose to attack the standing of the Real Armada frigate in the Service of the King of Spain by asserting that the frigate was “a mere private ship with private papers;…” (p. 10). In doing so, the British merchant hoped to undermine the status of the frigate as a register-ship and as a warship in the service of the king of Spain.

Sir William Scott, turned to this question raised by the claimant and wrote the following (excerpted):

It is said [by the claimant], also, that this is not a register ship, but a mere private ship with private papers; but I think it does appear, that if it is not a register ship, yet it is so nearly of that description, as to be exclusively appropriated to Spanish trade. It is a Spanish frigate employed as a packet of the King of Spain; and I think the presumption is most strong, that none but Spanish subjects are entitled to the privilege of having money brought from that colony to Spain. I have looked carefully through the manifest, and I perceive there is not one shipment but in the name of Spaniards; therefore it appears that this is not an ordinary trade; and I must take this to be property, which must have been considered as Spanish, and which could not have been exported in any other character. It has been decided by the Lords in several cases, (that are so well known, that without naming them it will be sufficient to advert to the general principle,) that the property of British merchants, even shipped before the war, yet if in a Spanish character, and in a trade so exclusively peculiar to Spanish subjects as that no foreign name could appear in it, must take the consequences of that character, and be considered as Spanish property; and I think I may safely go the length of considering this ship, under the description which I have given it, as coming under the operation of that principle.

(10)

End Primary Source

High Court of Admiralty

Sir William Scott encountered several of the problems that confront historians now seeking to understand the precise role and function of the Real Armada frigate Mercedes. Importantly, Sir Scott had before him the register of the Princessa and this register appears to conform externally and internally with documents usually associated with Spanish Register-ships. It is striking that the argument advanced by the unfortunate Mr. Dubois (the British merchant), e.g., that the Spanish frigate Princessa was a “mere private ship with private papers” was rejected by a contemporary 18th century High Court of Admiralty.

Thus, a pattern emerges that is particularly relevant to portraying an accurate picture of world trade carried on between the Latin American Viceregal governments of the Spanish empire and Europe prior to the collapse of the so-called Old China Trade at the end of the first quarter of the 20th century. All warships of the major naval powers whose governments and citizens held interests in the Viceroyalties of Spanish America transferred specie on behalf of their respective governments, on behalf of private citizens, and sometimes on behalf of both those interests. These warships did not lose their sovereign immunity by operation of these activities. Moreover, it was the fact that these vessels were sovereign warships that governments and private citizens (merchants) chose to transport specie under the added protection that a ship-of-war could in fact offer. In short, transporting and protecting specie would fall well within the scope of a military mission regardless of who owned the specie if the specie was in the character of Spanish property. Moreover, contemporary admiralty law did find that Spanish-register ships were not the equivalent of regular merchant ships.

Returning to the Battle of Cape St. Mary: Diplomatic Fallout, October 21st, 1804

Drawing back the focus of our historical lens a bit and moving back into the comfortably appointed offices of Downing Street, one finds that Lt. Peak’s desperate struggle to keep La Fama afloat met with success and the bullion-laden frigate made the roadstead at Portsmouth, England:

N. 17. – Copy of a Dispatch from Ld. Harroby to B Frere, Esq. Dated Downing-Street, 21st Oct. 1804. – Sir; the Lively, capt. Hammond, arrived at Portsmouth on Wednesday morning with the Fama, a Spanish frigate, laden with dollars, from the Rio de la Plata, and brought information of the action with took place on the 5th inst. between 4 of his majesty’s frigates, and the same number of Spanish frigates, in which three of the latter were captured, and 1 unfortunately, blew up. – Although, from the situation of the ships when this action happened, it is probable that the event is known at the court of Madrid, I have thought it necessary t give you this information without loss of time, in order that you may be able to explain to the Spanish govt. the principles upon which this the orders given to his maj.’s naval commanders are rested, and the effect which this event is here considered to have upon the relative situation between the two countries. – As the subject was fully discussed in a conference which took place yesterday, between the Spanish minister and myself, I can not point out more distinctly the language which his maj. Thinks proper to be held upon this occasion, than by stating to you the substance of this conversation. – In answer to the first question of the Spanish minister, in what light was this to be considered; I informed him, that it was an act done in consequence of express orders from his maj. to detain all ships laden with treasure for Spain. That such orders had been issued as soon as intelligence was received of the equipment of naval armaments in the port of Spain, and particularly at Ferrol, without any previous explanation. That the court of Madrid could have no reason to be surprised that such a step was taken, as it had been repeatedly stated to the Spanish govt. and particularly in a note delivered by Mr. Frere on the 18th of Feb. last, that as long as they continued in a situation of merely nominal neutrality, any naval armament in their ports must be considered as putting an immediate end to the forbearance of England, and as necessarily producing consequences that were distinctly pointed out. I added, that upon the first intelligence of the armament, adm. Cochrane had been directed to communicate to the govt. of Ferrol the orders he had received to oppose the sailing of any Spanish ships of war to or from the port of Ferrol; and Mr. B. Frere had also been directed to inform the court of Madrid of the orders given by his maj. That all necessary measures of precaution should be taken, and particularly those notified by adm. Cochrane. The Spanish minister then observed, that his court was not apprised of the orders given to detain the ships laden with treasure, which being ships of war, [emphasis added] their resistance to any attempt to detain them must have been foreseen. I observed in reply, that this was the first and most obvious of those measures of precaution which had been announced. …(12)

Within the British minister’s dispatch one is able to discern the essential elements of the British view of the events that led to the detaining of the three surviving Real Armada frigates engaged in transporting bullion to Spain in the fall of 1804. As the weak inter-bellum provided by the Treaty of Amiens began to collapse, Spain was diplomatically refining the provisions of the Secret Treaty of St. Ildefonso; the naval men and material, as well as the specie payments to be rendered to the French government, which were given visceral effect by the near arrival of Spanish warships laden with bullion and reported naval activity in the Spanish port of Ferrol, triggered orders from the British government to the admiralty to immediately impose a limited blockade on Spanish ports. One essential fact related to the Spanish view of the events is also very clear: the Spanish minister, according to this official diplomatic record, identifies all the frigates as ships of war, i.e., sovereign warships. In this diplomatic exchange, one finds historical confirmation supporting the documentation already presented to the public by the Kingdom of Spain that demonstrating that Mercedes was sailing on a purely military mission whose scope was defined by, and emanating from, a clear military chain of command directly in the service of the head of state, the Bourbon king of Spain.

Copywrite: David Pelfrey Primary Source Research LLC (2008)

Sources:

3. Cobbett's Parliamentary Debates from the Year 1803 to the Present Time, During the ... Session of the ... Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of the Kingdom of Great Britain ...
By Great Britain Parliament, William Cobbett
Published by R. Bagshaw, 1812
Item notes: v.3 (1805)

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. ADM 51/2530

8. Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Court of High Admiralty: The Jeane Isabelle. 1 H. & H., p. 188, 4th of August, 1778

9. Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Court of High Admiralty: The Princessa. 2 C. Rob, August 30th, 1799

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

12. Cobbett's Parliamentary Debates, supra note 3.

The Economic Aspect of British Naval Warfare - Pitt and the Spanish Colonies

2009-09-07T16:03:00.000-07:00

Figure 1: The battle of Cape St. Vincent (14 February, 1797) was fought by warships of Bourbon Spain seeking rendezvous at Cadiz in order to escort a large convoy of quicksilver to the Viceroyalties in the Americas so that silver mining for bullion production might continue. The Royal Navy sought to interdict the Spanish fleet. No form of warfare is more wedded to economics than naval. The transport of bullion from South America to European Spain within the holds of four Real Armada warships in 1804 falls squarely within boundaries of a naval mission (entirely military) tasked by the Boubon Spanish state during the Napoleonic Wars (as the documented naval orders provided the Kingdom of Spain clearly demonstrate).

One continues to read the assertion made in some quarters that attempt to characterize the Real Armada frigate Nuestra Senora de Mercedes as a vessel chiefly engaged upon a commercial mission when she met her fate under the guns of British Royal Navy frigate squadron off the coast of Cape St. Mary’s, Portugal, October 5th, 1804. In the latest instance, the president of Odyssey Marine Exploration, Mr. Mark Gordon, gave an interview on August 26th to the Tampa Tribune wherein he advanced this viewpoint by virtue of reference to historical documents related to the Spanish frigate in question. The president of OME did so, so far as can be determined, without providing either copies or translations to the press of these documents upon which these views are based so that an accurate assessment of the historical validity of these claims might be made. Below are a few excerpts from this interview. It is hoped that the reader will consult the full text of the article in the link provided:

In a wide-ranging interview with the Tribune about the treasure -- 17 tons of colonial-era coins worth an estimated $500 million -- Gordon said he thinks most of it belonged to private merchants. The company expects the descendants of those merchants to file legitimate claims at some point for the cargo in U.S. District Court in Tampa.

"There's lots of research available publicly that says more than two-thirds of the cargo was private merchant cargo," Gordon said. "We can tell you who put it on, and we can tell you who was expecting it."

"If two-thirds of the cargo or more were private goods, it couldn't have been on an exclusively noncommercial mission," Gordon said.

http://www.tradingmarkets.com/.site/news/Stock%20News/1844486/

Mr. Gordon’s argument appears to rest on the assumption that there is a clear separation between military and commercial missions with respect to the Mercedes last voyage based on what that naval vessel carried in her hold. Mr. Gordon supports his argument with the premise that the mission type of the frigate Mercedes may be ascertained by the percentage of cargo allocated between government and merchant consignments of specie with which she was then laden. The Tribune article, if we are to believe the statements it contains to be reflective of Mr. Gordon’s views, advances the claim that 2/3 of the cargo laden on Mercedes is allegedly traceable to private merchants; therefore, the Mercedes’ mission must be characterized as 2/3 commercial and 1/3 military. Such an argument puts forward a red-herring: first, military missions for military vessels are not defined by what, and for whom, they carry within the protection of their hulls. Naval missions, e.g., military missions, are defined by orders emanating from a sovereign state, through its regular or auxiliary naval headquarters, and down through a clear military chain of command. Therefore, defining a military naval mission has nothing to do with cargo or manifests. Military missions, particularly naval missions, are determined by orders issued by the a state’s naval command to her naval assets. Such documents, in the case of Mercedes, have been made public by the Kingdom of Spain.

This being said, it is well worth noting that naval missions are frequently concerned with protection of commerce and the transport of strategic commodities; conversely, it is equally true that naval missions include the capture and interdiction of an enemies commerce and strategic commodities.

The European Colonies in America as a Strategic Target of 18th century Naval Warfare

The purpose of this series of posts is to explore how Napoleonic era writers conceived of naval warfare, what these writers believed the aims of such warfare to be, and what methods should be utilized to accomplish them. During the course of the presentations that follow, the attempt will be made to work from general concepts to specific instances and events. First, the views of prominent writers with legal experience of prize law and maritime matters related to mercanitlist vessels taken by force will be quickly sampled. Chief among these writers are 1st Viscount Mellville, Henry Dundas, Secretary of War for the administration of William Pitt and Mr. James Stephen, a prominent lawyer and writer on maters related to British naval policy and parliamentary law. Second, against the context set by James Stephen and Henry Dundas’ remarks, naval orders issued by the British Admiralty to the forces under its command during the Fall of 1804 will be examined. Third, and working down to the specific event at the core of our discussion on this thread, one of the surviving log books made by a British officer who took command of one of the Spanish frigates detained after the Battle of Cape St. Mary, October 5th, 1804, pursuant to admiralty orders, will be briefly reviewed. Lastly, at least for this part one of this series, a relevant case decided by Lord Stowell, then Sir William Scott. During the years he sat on the bench of Great Britain’s Court of High Admiralty, he decided several cases that laid the foundation for much of modern Anglo-Saxon maritime law as it finds expression today. His judgment in the case: The Princessa. 2c. Rob. August 30th, 1799. will be used to illuminate some unusual aspects of Spanish naval operations as they pertained to the use of warships, particularly frigates, to transfer bullion.

Naval warfare throughout the 18th century and the Napoleonic periods, was unquestionably expressed both strategically and tactically as warfare waged against the economy of one’s enemy. The military and the economic aspects of naval warfare during this period were inextricably intertwined, so much so, in fact, that it is a sound historical assertion to state that warships of the period engaged in the protection or transport of commercial property, public or private, or engaged in the act of convoying merchant vessels carrying property of such character, under orders from their respective naval commands, were conducting military operations of great importance to their respective states.

James Stephen expressed a widely held 18th and early 19th century viewpoint among the commercial planter interests in Britain regarding war in general, and naval war in particular, when he wrote:

To impoverish our enemies used, in our former contests with France and Spain, to be a sure effect of our hostilities; and its extent was always proportionate to that of its grand instrument, our superiority at sea. We distressed their trade, we intercepted the produce of their colonies, and thus exhausted their treasuries, by cutting off their chief sources of revenue, as the philosopher proposed to dry up the sea, by draining the rivers that fed it.

By the same means, their expenditure was immensely increased, and wasted in defensive purposes. They were obliged to maintain fleets in distant parts of the world, and to furnish strong convoys or the protection of their intercourse with their colonies, both on the outward and homeward voyages. Again, the frequent capture of these convoys, while it enriched our seamen, and by the increase in important duties aided our revenue, obliged our enemies, at fresh expense, to repair their loss of ships; and when a convoy outward bound, was the subject of capture, compelled them either to dispatch duplicate supplies in the same season, at the risk of new disasters, or to leave their colonies in distress, and forfeit the benefit of their crops for the year.
In short, their transmarine possessions became expensive encumbrances, rather than sources of revenue; and through the iteration of such losses, more than by our naval victories, or colonial conquests, the house of Bourbon was vanquished by the masters of the sea.

(James Stephen, War in Disguise of the frauds of neutral flags (London, 1805) (1)

Secretary of War in William Pitt’s first administration Henry Dundas ( from 1794 to 1801 he was War Secretary under Pitt, his great friend.) expressed the following view regarding the chief objective toward which British war aims should be directed:

…be the causes of the war what they may, the primary object ought to be, by what means we can most effectually in crease those resources on which depend our naval superiority, and at the same time diminish or appropriate to ourselves those which might otherwise enable the enemy to contend with us in this respect… I consider offensive operations against the colonial possessions of our enemies as the first object to be attended to in almost every war in which Great Britain can be engaged. (2)

Copywrite David Pelfrey, Primary Source Research LLC (2008)

Source and Notes:

1. Henry J. Bourguignon. Sir William Scott, Lord Stowell: Judge of the High Court of Admiralty, 1798-1828, (London: Cambridge University Press, 2004) p. 118

2. Ibid. p. 117

Odyssey Marine and the Commercial Concept of the Mercedes

2009-09-07T14:40:00.000-07:00

Figure 1: The Capture and Destruction of Four Spanish Frigates October 5th, 1804 by Nicolas Pocock.

For several years now, I have been engaged off and on, researching the history of what to Americans was a minor engagement between British and Spanish frigate squadrons off the coast of Portugal, October 5th, 1804. The action, known as the Battle of Cape St. Mary's, actually destroyed the uneasy peace that ensued in Europe between Revolutionary France and Great Britian after the Treaty of Amiens (25 March, 1802).

In practical terms, the British interception of the four Real Armada frigates represented the end of an era for Bourbon Spain and regular specie shipments from the Empires New World mines and mints. The squadron to which Neustra Senora de Mercedes belonged was the last of its kind that the world would see: a Spanish treasure fleet moving bullion from the New World Viceroyalties to the Iberian kingdoms: after 1804, the Spanish moto Plus Ultra
no longer held.

During the intercept and subsequent action between the British squadron under Captain Graham Moore and the Spanish frigates, the Real Armada frigate Mercedes sustained a massive magazine explosion and sank. Some 23 survivors managed to cling to a floating remnant of the forecastle which drifted for some time after the explosion. For two centuries the bullion aboard the doomed vessel lay on the sea floor.

In March of 2007, an American Treasure Hunting Company, Odyssey Marine Exploration, recovered some 17 tons of bullion from a site code named Black Swan. The coinage numismatically fell within a period datable to 1795-1804; no coins were recovered with post-1804 characteristics or dates. It was immediately surmised by archaeologists and historians that the Black Swan site was in fact part of the Mercedes assemblage.

I have posted a great deal on this topic on the original History Hunters International website until that website collapsed due to an unfortunate administrative circumstance. During the years since 2007, I also contributed research on the Mercedes and the Battle of Cape St. Mary's in support of JWM Productions series, Treasure Quest, featuring Odyssey Marine Exploration.

Most of the research found its way into the JWM episode, but was subsequently cut from the final version, perhaps because of on going litigation between OME and the Kingdom of Spain.

I intend to post some of the research here in Fogbank Perspectives in order to continue to give light to some of the historical material. The debate concerning the legal fate of Mercedes continues. There are grave issues at stake concerning sovereign immunity, preservation of underwater cultural heritage (UCH), and aspects of international relations between the Kingdom of Spain and the United States.

OME has contended in its legal briefs that Mercedes did not fall under the protection of sovereign immunity because she was on a so-called non-military commercial mission. Such interpretations are disingenuous to admiralty law as well as to history. In advancing such assertions before a U.S. court, OME fails to place the Mercedes and her cargo within it proper context. That 1804 context was a Spanish Bourbon mercantilist one.

Mercedes was a Real Armada frigate serving the Kingdom of Spain also serving in the capacity of a register ship (more on this peculiar category in a later post).

In any event, one continues to read the assertion, from various quarters, that the Real Armada frigate squadron transferring specie from South America to Spain under orders from the Royal Government of the Spanish Empire was somehow civilianized, somehow rendered non-military, by operation of moving money, mail, and passengers across potentially hostile ocean space.

It is always a good practice to maintain a healthy degree of skepticism and detachment while one attempts to weigh historical and archaeological claims. The claim that the Spanish frigate squadron that sustained attack and capture by British naval forces under Capt. Graham Moore’s command on October 5th, 1804, was not on a mission that falls properly under the purview of a sovereign nation’s naval arm has attracted HHI scrutiny in preceding posts.

Of specific interest is Odyssey Marine Exploration’s (OME) claim that the Real Armada frigate, Neustra Senora de Mercedes (Mercedes), which was destroyed some seven minutes into the October 5th, 1804 action as a result of a magazine explosion, was on a so-called civilian mission. Since HHI began examining and presenting primary source evidence touching on this claim made by OME, an argument supporting OME’s position based on primary source documentation has yet to be presented to the public in a detailed systematic format. The question of Mercedes would-be civilianized mission is, from an historical viewpoint, very interesting. Of course, research into this aspect of OME’s proposed redaction of Mercedes’ history continues on a variety of fronts.

The present post focuses on the OME claim that Mercedes was somehow on a civilian mission by examining a portion of the log book entries made by Lieutenant William Peak, RN. On the afternoon of October 5th, 1804, Lt. Peak was detached from HMS Lively and assigned to command the “detained Spanish Frigate La Fama.”

Lt. Peak was a very resourceful officer and an excellent navigator. His log book, with runs from 6th October, 1804, to 19th October 1804 covers the entire transit of La Fama to England as a prize in company with the three surviving Real Armada frigates seized by the Capt. Graham Moore’s Royal Navy frigate squadron off Cape St. Mary, Portugal, on the 5th of that month.

One would not immediately know it from the laconic and unflappable style of Lt. Peaks log entries; however, as he took command of the detained Spanish frigate, this British officer was literally taking command of a sinking ship. La Fama was badly damaged by fire from both HMS Medusa and HMS Lively. In the first hours of his command, Lt. Peak, relying on parties sent by the two lately named British frigates as well as work parties formed out of the Spanish crew complement, struggled to keep Fama afloat and re-rigged. The log entry excerpted below covers the first twenty-four desperate hours of young Lt. Peak’s command. In the process of examining the log entries, it will be shown that the historical and linguistic evidence strongly suggests that La Fama was viewed as a military vessel belonging to Spain by the His Britannic Majesty’s Royal Navy.

Log of Lt. William Peak, Prize Captain of Detained Spanish Frigate Fama, October 5th, 1804

Primary Source:

October 1804

Saturday 6th Cape St. Mary’s NE 5 or 6 Leagues

Remarks Etc. On Board the detained Spanish Frigate La Fama
Lieut. Wm. Peak Commander

PM. At 1 Light Breezes and clear, took possession of the Spanish Ship La Fama, that has struck to the Lively after an action of 1 hour & 10 minutes, sent the Spanish Commodore, his Captain & First Lieutenant on board the Lively. Found the Fama was Manilla to Cadiz with Money. Found the Rigging, Main Top Mast and Main Mast very much Wounded, the Boats of the Medusa & Lively empld. Shifting the Prisoners, when the Prisoners were ready, all removed. I found from the 2nd Lieut. That the complement at the commencement of the action was 301.. and that about twenty men were either killed or wounded – at 5 a Lieut. And a party of 54 men came from the Medusa & a Lieut. and 10 men from the Lively. Employed during the Night in getting her ready to make sail upon. One half of the [men] kept constantly at the pumps and with difficulty could keep her free – the Spaniards for the most part drunk – at 6 AM moderate. Found out the leak – Carpenter empld. stopping it. All the seamen about the Rigging [B% knotting], splicing, setting up & at 7AM the Sig[nal] to make more sail and pass within hail of the Medusa. When Captain Gore ordered me to use every [B% exertion] to complete the Rigging, as he meant to take the men from me at sunset. Haul’d the main tack on board – and buried a Spaniard who died of his wounds. [B% people] the whole day about the Rigging – Ship making Eighteen inches water. Received this Day an order to Command the La Fama.

Sunday 7th, Wind: NNE

PM. Strong Breezes & Cloudy. empld. about the Rigging repairing sails, the Ship not making quite so much Water as yesterday. Keep the Spaniards at the hand pumps, and a spell at the Chain pumps every four hours. At 4 broke the Starbd. Chain. Set the Carpenter to repair it …

End Primary Source

Comments: The Indefatibable’s log records that the Mercedes sustained a catastrophic magazine explosion at 10:07AM. At 10:17, the Medea struck. At 10:22 the Clara Struck. At this moment, the Fama, at the head of the Spanish line-of-battle, hauled up on the NNW breeze and set a course for Cadiz in an effort to escape the Royal Navy squadron. Medusa, the Fama’s opponent at the commencement of the action, followed in pursuit. Capt. Graham signaled the HMS Lively to assist Medusa.

The battle between the fleeing Fama and the pursuing Medusa and Lively lasted another one hour and ten minutes according to Lt. Peak (see above). Lt. Peak was dispatched from presumably Medusa to take command of the Fama.

Some points of interest:

1. Lt. Peak makes it clear his log describes events “[o]n board the detained Spanish Frigate La Fama. Detained describes a specific legal classification under admiralty law distinct from a captured prize taken under wartime conditions. However, it should be noted that the seizure of the Spanish frigate squadron by the British was a legal casus belli that resulted in a declaration of war. Secondly, the Royal Navy officer does not describe La Fama as a merchantman; rather La Fama, in the British log, is referred to as a Spanish Frigate, i.e., a warship of the Kingdom of Spain. In the log books of the period, Royal Navy officers are very careful to specify whether or not a merchant vessel has been seized or detained. Capture of a ship of war was a singular mark of distinction.

The example from the log book of HMS Grasshopper has been cited already; however, it bears comparison with Lt. Peak’s description of Fama. Both officers were lieutenants. Both officers participated in the capture of vessels in the proximity of Cape St. Mary’s within two years of each other:

Here is the primary source as transcribed from the Grasshopper’s Master’s Log entry “Remarks for 24th April, 1808”:

Primary Source

Wind North

Light winds. The Cutter obs.d the Enemy’s convoy coming Along shore and gave the [alarm B%] cut the cable and made all possible sail in chase of them. At Daylight cut them off from passing Cape Saint Mary. They short.d sail and anchored within the shoals of the town of Faro. At 5.20 the Rapid (gb) began firing on the enemy. At 5.45 opened our fire on them consisting of Gunboats having 2 large vessels under Convoy we kept up a constant fire which was returned from the Gunboats Batteries and flying artillery on shore.

Wind NNE

Grasshopper to close them. At 9.30 anchored with the sheet anchor with a Spring on the cable and kept up the fire till 10 then sent out the boats manned and armed to board them & after a Gallant Resistance on the part of the enemy succeeded in carrying 2 of their Gun Boats and 2 [apparent B%] South Americans and drove the remaining 2 Gun Boats on shore. Several of the Crew [swam B%] ashore. At 11.10 weighed and made sail with the Prizes in Company & Grasshopper working offshore Rapid (gb) in Company now. Fine Weather.(note)

End Primary Source

In the above example, the Grasshopper’s log refers to the “2 large vessels under convoy” as [B%apparent] South Americans. Had these vessels been of a military class, the Grasshopper’s log would have likely identified them accordingly. As one may read, this is in fact the case with those vessels identified as “Gunboats.”

Lt. Peak, after making the determination with respect to La Fama’s cargo (from Manilla to Cadiz with Money), identifies La Fama neither as South American (although the vessel was inbound from that region) nor as a merchantman. Again, to repeat, La Fama is described as Spanish and as a frigate, a specific class of warship.

An additional note worth investigation: Grasshopper’s log makes mention of the “Gunboats having 2 large vessels under Convoy…” This is of interest because the naval act of convoy implies that military vessels are present protecting and civilian vessels from hostile intentions of an enemy. None of the primary source material related to Mercedes and the Spanish Frigates under Admiral Bustamante’s command indicate that the vessels are in convoy. To the contrary, the four Real Armada frigates are referred to as operating as part of a squadron or division, i.e., a naval unit.

2. Supporting this reading one finds an unusually top-heavy chain of command on board the Spanish frigate quite distinct from merchantmen command hierarchies. Lt. Peak records that one of his first actions upon assuming command was to send “the Spanish Commodore, his Captain & First Lieutenant on board the Lively.” Thus, the Fama, like Medea, not only a Real Armada Captain and First Lieutenant, but a Real Armada flag officer as well (Commodore). This hierarchy is not characteristic of merchant convoys of the period; moreover, the Spanish Squadron appears to have contained at least three officers of flag rank, as well as four full captains in operational command of each Spanish frigate.

3. In what has to be one of the more laconic summaries ever written on board a captured vessel full of bullion, Lt. Peak simply states:

“Found the Fama was Manilla to Cadiz with Money.”

In this first part of the log, this is the principle remark that Lt. Peak makes regarding the lading of the Spanish Frigate. This is not a typical merchantman cargo; it is typical of a monarchy transferring public, semi-private, and private monies in support of state interests and policy.

As the first quarter of the 19th century progressed, and Spanish control over the Viceroyalties of the New Spain and Peru disintegrated, British, French, and American vessels, particularly sovereign warships of these nations, began the practice of transporting private specie on behalf of merchants. Silver, it need not be stressed, was a principle commodity of the Viceroyalty of Peru.

To the discussion of the practice of freight money and the United States case of the USS Franklin, one may also add the equally well-documented case of the British HMS Doris, also working the South American station at the same time period the USS Franklin was patrolling those same waters. In the case of HMS Doris and USS Franklin private specie in very large amounts was transported by these sovereign United States and British warships without prejudice to sovereign immunity. USS Franklin and HMS Doris were not rendered civilian mail carrying vessels by performing this role.

Thus, a pattern emerges that is particularly relevant to portraying an accurate picture of world trade carried on between the Latin American Viceregal governments of the Spanish empire and Europe prior to the collapse of the so-called Old China Trade at the end of the first quarter of the 20th century. All warships of the major naval powers whose governments and citizens held interests in the Viceroyalties of Spanish America transferred specie on behalf of their respective governments, on behalf of private citizens, and sometimes on behalf of both those interests. These warships did not lose their sovereign immunity by operation of these activities. Moreover, it was the fact that these vessels were sovereign warships that governments and private citizens (merchants) chose to transport specie under the added protection that a ship-of-war could in fact offer.

4. Lt. Peak reports that the rigging of Fama was severely damaged during the course
of combat with Medusa and Lively. Thus, one notices that the British, keenly aware of the value of the cargo, directed their fire against the rigging, masts, and upperworks of the frigate in order to disable her likely by concentrated use of chain and bar shot. Ultimately, of the 301 seamen aboard Fama, the number of casualties reported killed and wounded was 21.

5. As noted above, Lt. Peak reports that “I found from the 2nd Lieut. That the [crew] complement [of Fama] at the commencement of the action was 301.” Nowhere does Lt. Peak make a distinction between the crew complement and civilian passengers. Moreover, and this is worth further research, 301 is about the number of seamen one would expect to fully man a late 18th and early 19th century frigate. The Fama carried some 34 cannon. No historical or linguistic evidence has yet come to light that allows an assertion that La Fama carried less than her full armament of guns. If one allows for a full gun crew of six men per cannon, one may calculate that in order to efficiently man and fire all port and starboard guns, the Fama would likely need some 204 sailors. (his presuming that Fama was armed with all 34 guns. Some significant portion of the remaining 97 seamen would be manning other battle stations throughout the vessel. If there were a significant number of civilian passengers aboard Fama, Lt. Peak makes no note at all regarding either their presence or treatment. Thus from this primary source, one may argue that Fama was manned with a full complement of able-bodied seamen and Real Armada officers for a crew of 301 (less KIA and WIA).

6. With such large numbers of enemy crew to control, the British began to divide the prisoners into smaller groups and distribute these groups throughout the now seven vessel frigate flotilla.

7. Lt. Peak also records that the lower works of Fama were in desperate condition when he took command. He organized Spanish work parties to man both the hand pumps and port & starboard chain pumps. Even working around the clock, Lt. Peak was hard pressed to keep Fama afloat. Eventually the leak was found and repaired.

8. Because of the damage to the masts and rigging, other British vessels sent rigging parties to assist in quickly repairing Fama and bringing her into sailing condition.

Sources:

National Archives, United Kingdom: ADM 51/1765 Master’s Logs HMS Grasshopper April – June 1808

Prelude to Comments on Historical Theology

2009-02-17T15:00:00.001-08:00

No. 4 Scenes from the Life of Joachim- 4. Joachim's Sacrificial Offering 1304-06

A Tale of Two Clerics

2009-02-14T13:42:00.000-08:00

At Auschwitz-Birkenau, humanity walked through a "valley of darkness." And so, here in this place, I would like to end with a prayer of trust -- with one of the psalms of Israel which is also a prayer of Christians: "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul. He leads me in right paths for his name's sake. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil; for you are with me; your rod and your staff -- they comfort me ... I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long" (Psalm 23:1-4,6). [Comments of Pope Benedict XVI at Auschwitz-Birkenau]

[Portion of the SSPX NOTE on the expulsion of Shoah minimizer Fr. Abrahamowicz, according to several Italian news agencies:] "The action is in effect from Friday, February 6, and was taken for grave reasons of discipline. Father Floriano Abrahamowicz had expressed for some time positions distinct from the official ones of the Fraternity of Saint Pius X. The decision of the expulsion, though painful, was made necessary to avoid that the image of the Fraternity of Saint Pius X be distorted and, with it, that its work in the service of the Church be damaged."

Over four years, the Rev. Patrick Desbois and his group have identified more than 600 common graves of Jews in Ukraine.

Fr. Desbois’ personal odyssey, recorded in “The Holocaust by Bullets” that took him across generations and nations and led to his calling in the Ukraine and other parts of Eastern Europe to document the lost sites and witnesses of the Shoah is deeply wrenching reading.

The release of the French Catholic priest’s book coincides with the controversy unleashed by Pope Benedict XVI’s (former Cardinal Ratzinger) lifting of the excommunication of the SSPX Bishops, a small set that includes the controversial Williamson, whose writings have long-been imbued with a solid coloring of anti-Judaisim that carries over into anti-Semitism.

While superficially known for their devotion to the pre-1962 Roman Catholic liturgy, at the heart of the SSPX movement is its lack of recognition of Vatican II council changes in the liturgy that have arguably affected the validity of the Catholic Sarcarments.

After reviewing the introductory liturature of SSPX, it must be stated that on points of traditional liturgy and pistics, the Society executes arguments that are both valid and precise and honed to a fine-point utilizing the experience of four hundred years of Tridentine practice. On points of doctrine related to the liturgy and the validity of the Sacraments, the Catholic Church, in lifting the excommunication of the four SSPX Bishops, is attempting to recognize a valuable contribution made by the SSPX in preserving what it views as The Faith. However, as noted in earlier posts, while preserving the pre-1962 doctrines of the Catholic Church's Tridentine liturgy, in which SSPX is expert, members of the Society from Bishops to priests, have asserted positions based on language along the edges of its liturgical formulae that lead directly to the errors of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism.

It should be stated that while SSPX Seminaries have done an exemplary service in preserving the Catholic Tridentine Faith throgh continuing the pre-1962 Latin Liturgy, insufficient attention has been paid to intellectually grounding SSPX seminarians, at least some of them, in understanding the relationship between the Tridentine Liturgy, historiography, and historical events.

The interplay between human events, in an historical sense, with the Tridentine liturgy is very important for a sacred priesthood communicating the Sacraments in a sacred, secularly termed dead-language. These Sacred languages, Classical Arabic, Hebrew, Sanskrit, and Latin, derive their power and advantage because they are resistant to semantic changes and are therefore resistant, in a practical sense, to heresy, an argument that Biship Lefebvre made in his work "An Open Letter to Confused Catholics." However, the situation is not quite so straight forward, the Tridentine Liturgy contains, besides expressions of essential dogma necessary to the Sacraments, many fossilized expressions conveying attitudes about non-Christian groups that need not be, properly speaking, part of the form and matter of the 21st Century Tridentine liturgy.

The controversy involving Bishop Williamson and Fr. Abrahamowicz illustrate this point clearly.

1870 to 1945 - Historical Context of Communism and Its Effect on Catholic Perceptions of Judaism

Some writers and scholars following John Cornwell’s thesis developed in “Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII” argue that deeply embedded anti-Judaic bias within pre-1962 Catholic doctrine translated itself into direct anti-Semitism within the Church hierarchy and led, at the very least, to indifference to the Nazi regime’s program of exterminating European Jewry. The wartime Vatican hierarchy, in short, accepting the doctrinal view that the Jews were a people of deicide, and more recently in the early part of the twentieth-century, subsumed this anti-Judaism into holding Jewish intellectuals to blame as the architects of a godless communism, assumed the tacit viewpoint that Jews had brought about persecution on themselves.

In some later post there will be time to explore the historical context of Communism’s influence on the Catholic church’s approach to using Tridentine doctrine as a historiographic foundation to write about the problems of both Modernity and its relationship with Judaism; however, the hypothesis that many clergy and theologians in Western Europe roughly bounded by the century between 1870 and 1989 saw in communism an ideology constructed by Jewish intellectuals, and that this construct represented a danger to the survival of the Catholic church deserves further study. It is but a small step from this position to John Cornwall’s thesis.

Previous posts on this blog have, in a hodge-podge fashion, taken primary source material and shown how Irish foreign policy during a major portion of the twentieth century aligned itself with Vatican views on Jerusalem and Palestine without giving sufficient weight to important Israeli and Judaic realities and proposals. In the post-Vatican II period, however, the Catholic church has sought to adjust the perscription of its Tridentine lenses in order to place its relationship to the root of Abraham in a clear and proper perspective.

In this regard Vatican II sought to move forward toward a new ecumenism with Judaism and took steps to adjust the nuances of the interpretation temper of its doctrine in a way that recognized that Catholicism and Christians are at root the sons and daughters of Abraham and are therefore spiritual Semites.

The recent controversy involving the SSPX Bishop Williamson and the SSPX priest Fr. Abrahamowicz, underscore certain interpretations of concepts on the edge of Catholic doctine that may become manifest when viewed through the Tridentine lens refracting traditional dogma as it collides with historical contexts.

The Vatican’s response to these two examples of SSPX holocaust denial (taking the form of minimizing the Shoah) demonstrated a certain reluctance that many observers have attributed as tantamount to agreement with the two SSPX clerics’ statements on the Shoah.

However, in the weeks following the statements made by Bishop Williamson and Fr. Abrahamowicz (both SSPX), the Vatican has taken concrete steps to repudiate Bishop Williamson’s and Fr. Abrahamowicz’s particular statements, condemn anti-Semitism, and reaffirm Nostra Aetate.

Recently, to his Holiness' credit, he voiced the following remarks concerning Nostra Aetate [as quoted by Asia News]:

"Recalling the "milestone" of the conciliar decree "Nostra Aetate," he said that the Church "is profoundly and irrevocably committed to reject all anti-Semitism and to continue to build good and lasting relations between our two communities. If there is one particular image which encapsulates this commitment, it is the moment when my beloved predecessor Pope John Paul II stood at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, pleading for God’s forgiveness after all the injustice that the Jewish people have had to suffer. I now make his prayer my own." [Asia News 02.13.09]

SSPX for its part has silenced Bishop Williamson and, according to some reports, removed him as rector of the Argintine seminary where he presides. SSPX has expelled Fr. Abrahamowicz from the society for his public statements. Such steps are doctrinally justifiable, and more importantly, morally justifiable.

Vatican demands Lefevbrite bishop recant: History Comes Home to Roost

2009-02-04T11:24:00.000-08:00

Members of the Jewish organization B'nai B'rith outside the Vatican's diplomatic building in Paris.

Vatican demands Lefevbrite bishop recant

National Catholic Reporter
By John L. Allen Jr.
Published:
February 4, 2009

The Vatican Secretariat of State issued a statement today that in effect demands that the Lefevbrite Bishop Richard Williamson recant statements questioning the Holocaust.

The statement says that in order to function as a bishop, Bishop Williamson must distance himself from his previous statements in "absolutely unequivocal and public fashion."

The statement also re-emphasizes that the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X, to which Williamson belongs, would have to recognize the teachings of Vatican II and of post-conciliar popes to be in full communion with the church.

NCR’s translation of the statement follows the analysis by John Allen.

Analysis: Vatican statement on Williamson not an about-face, but comes far too late

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.

In many quarters, the tendency will be to see today’s Vatican statement demanding that traditionalist Bishop Richard Williamson recant his views on the Holocaust “in absolutely unequivocal and public fashion” as an about-face, a hasty reversal in the wake of overwhelmingly negative public reaction to news that the pope had lifted the excommunication of a Holocaust denier.

In one sense, of course, that’s absolutely correct: Without the backlash, it’s unlikely the Secretariat of State would have felt the need to issue a public statement.

Yet the tragedy is that, in effect, today’s statement simply spells out what the Vatican had in mind all along – raising the perfectly legitimate question of why it wasn’t issued before this whole mess erupted.

Among Vatican-watchers, there has long been speculation that a pope might someday lift the excommunications of the four bishops of the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X, which resulted from their 1988 ordination by rebel Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. It has always been understood that when and if that happened, it would mark the beginning of a process of reconciliation – the endgame of which would involve, among other things, full acceptance of official church teaching by the Lefebvrites, including the teaching of the Second Vatican Council on respect for Judaism.

One can of course debate the pastoral wisdom of rescinding the excommunications, or what it betokens about the broader direction of Catholicism, but insiders always understood that it would clearly not signal a “seal of approval” for absolutely everything various Lefebvrites currently think or say.

Naturally, it’s unreasonable to expect the outside world to instinctively grasp all of that, which is why the logic and the subsequent steps in this process of reconciliation have to be carefully laid out in advance. The real story, therefore, is the Vatican’s failure to do so – a point that’s being made these days far and wide, and not just by the usual in-house critics.

Consider, for example, the reaction of Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna, Austria: “Obviously a mistake has been made here. Someone who denies the Holocaust, Shoah deniers, cannot be restored to an office in the church. Here there must be also a certain criticism of the Vatican's staff practice, which obviously did not examine the matter carefully or did not examine sufficiently the case in the information that they had.”

Schönborn was essentially Benedict XVI’s “campaign manager” during the conclave of 2005, telling his fellow cardinals it was God’s will that Joseph Ratzinger be elected to the papacy. Schönborn is a longtime papal protégé, having done post-doctoral work under Ratzinger at the University of Regensburg in the 1970s. You can take to the bank, therefore, that his criticism is not motivated by office politics or anti-papal animus.
Today’s note from the Secretariat of State once again asserts that the pope did not know Williamson’s views on the Holocaust prior to Jan. 21, when the decree lifting his excommunication was dated. That, however, doesn’t do the trick; his track record was abundantly clear to anyone who wished to look, and in any event, the Vatican certainly knew that members of the Society of St. Pius X hold views on other matters that are also difficult to reconcile with official doctrine.

Had the note from the Secretariat of State been issued along with the decree on Jan. 21, much of the present crisis could have been averted. The bottom line is that we’re not dealing with an about-face, but an honest clarification – however, one that comes far too late in the game.

****

NOTE OF THE SECRETARIAT OF STATE, February 4, 2009

Following the reactions generated by the recent Decree of the Congregation for Bishops, with which the excommunications of four prelates of the Society of St. Pius X were rescinded, and in relation to the declarations denying or minimizing the Shoah on the part of Bishop Williamson of this same society, it is regarded as opportune to clarify certain aspects of this affair.

1. Remission of the Excommunication

As has already been published, the Decree of the Congregation for Bishops, dated January 21, 2009, was an act with which the Holy Father kindly responded to repeated requests on the part of the Superior General of the Society of St. Pius X.

His Holiness wished to remove an impediment that prevented the opening of a door to dialogue. Now he is waiting for equal openness to be expressed by the four bishops, in total adhesion to the doctrine and discipline of the church.

The extremely grave penalty of excommunication latae sententiae, which these bishops incurred on June 30, 1988, which was then formally declared on July 1 of the same year, was a consequence of their ordination by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.

The lifting of the excommunication has freed the four bishops from a most grave canonical penalty, but in no way has it changed the juridical situation of the Society of St. Pius X, which, in this moment, does not enjoy any canonical recognition in the Catholic church. Also the four bishops, despite removal of the excommunication, do not have any canonical function in the church and do not licitly exercise any ministry in it.

2. Tradition, doctrine and the Second Vatican Council

For any future recognition of the Society of St. Pius X, a full recognition of the Second Vatican Council and the magisterium of Popes John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II and Benedict XVI himself is an indispensable condition.

As was already affirmed in the Decree of January 21, 2009, the Holy See will not fail, in ways judged opportune, to purse the questions which are still open with the interested parties, thus to be able to reach a full and satisfying solution to the problems that gave rise to this painful fracture.

3. Declarations on the Shoah

The positions of Bishop Williamson on the Shoah are absolutely unacceptable and firmly rejected by the Holy Father, as he himself remarked this past January 28, when, referring to that brutal genocide, he reconfirmed his full and indisputable solidarity with our brothers who received the First Covenant, and affirmed that the memory of that terrible genocide must lead “humanity to reflect on the unpredictable power of evil when it conquers the human heart,” adding that the Shoah remains “a warning for all against hate, against denial or reductionism, because violence against even a single human being is violence against all.”

Bishop Williamson, in order to claim admission to episcopal functions in the church, must distance himself in absolutely unequivocal and public fashion from his positions regarding the Shoah, which were not known by the Holy Father when the excommunication was lifted.

The Holy Father asks accompaniment in prayer from all the faithful, that the Lord may illuminate the path of the church. May the commitment of the pastors and all the faithful grow to sustain the delicate and weighty mission of the Successor of the Apostle Peter, who is the “custodian of the unity” of the church.

From the Vatican, February 4, 2009

Catholic and French Does Not Necessarily an Anti-Semite Make

2009-01-31T16:27:00.000-08:00

17 months ago: A member of French priest Patrick Desbois' team shows a bullet casing which he found in Bogdanokva, the site of the biggest mass extermination of Jews in Soviet Ukraine, in Bogdanovka, Ukraine, July 16, 2007. Over a period of three weeks in late December 1941 and early January 1942 _ with a break for Christmas _ 48,000 Jews were executed in Bogdanovka.

Yahad-In Unum: Priest uncovering beginnings of Final Solution

2009-01-31T16:00:00.000-08:00

This file photo provided by Paris' Holocaust Memorial shows a German soldier shooting an Ukrainian Jew during a mass execution in Vinnitsa, Ukraine, between 1941 and 1943. For decades, the Holocaust was epitomized by barbed wire fences, gas chambers and death camps, a tragedy amply documented in history textbooks and reflected in solemn memorial sites around the world. The extermination of over 2 million Eastern European Jews by guns in the middle of quiet villages and towns across Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, has been underresearched and the victims have largely been forgotten. Many of their remains still lie unidentified and unmarked. (AP Photo/USHMM/Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

In contrast with the ultra-traditionalists comprising the SSPX, whose members as recently as January, 2009, have referred to the Jewish people as a people of deicide, and whose first order adherents have made public statements trivializing the Holocaust, we may juxtapose the example of Fr. Patrick Desbois whose work documenting the scope of the Holocaust in the Ukraine during WWII, presents evidence too graphic and solid to impeach.

Within the context of recent remarks made by SSPX clergy, one can not help but look with profound regret on Pope Benedict XVI's lifting of the excommunication of this sect. While there is something to be said for the Latin mass, the public statements and political associations of SSPX first order clerics displays a strain of anti-Semitism and xenophobia that is truly medieval in its colorings. That SSPX's exculpatory letters and statements regarding Bishop Williamson's statements fall short of retraction and disavowal betrays a disingenuousness to pronouncements that anti-Semitism is incompatible with the type of Catholicism SSPX espouses and practices.

Priest uncovering beginnings of Final Solution

KIEV, Ukraine — The Holocaust has a landscape engraved in the mind's eye: barbed-wire fences, gas chambers, furnaces.

Less known is the "Holocaust by Bullets," in which over 2 million Jews were gunned down in towns and villages across Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. Their part in the Nazis' Final Solution has been under-researched, their bodies left unidentified in unmarked mass graves.

"Shoah," French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann's documentary, stands as the 20th century's epic visual record of the Holocaust. Now another Frenchman, a Catholic priest named Patrick Desbois, is filling in a different part of the picture.

Desbois says he has interviewed more than 800 eyewitnesses and pinpointed hundreds of mass graves strewn around dusty fields in the former Soviet Union. The result is a book, "The Holocaust by Bullets," and an exhibition through March 15 at New York's Museum of Jewish Heritage.

Brought to Ukraine by a twist of fate, Desbois has spent seven years trying to document the truth, honor the dead, relieve witnesses of their pain and guilt and prevent future acts of genocide.

Some 1.4 million of Soviet Ukraine's 2.4 million Jews were executed, starved to death or died of disease during the war. Another 550,000-650,000 Soviet Jews were killed in Belarus and up to 140,000 in Russia, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Most of the victims were women, children and the elderly.

Begun after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the slaughter by bullets was the opening phase of what became the Nazis' Final Solution with its factories of death operating in Auschwitz and other camps, all in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Desbois devotes his 233-page book, published by Palgrave Macmillan in August, to his work in Ukraine, where he says he has uncovered over 800 mass extermination sites, more than two-thirds of them previously unknown.

Since the book was written, he has expanded his search for mass graves into Belarus and plans to look early this year in areas of Russia that were occupied by the Germans.

Sometimes bursting into tears, old men and women from poor Ukrainian villages recount to Desbois how women, children and elders were marched or carted in from neighboring towns to be shot, burned to death or buried alive by German troops, Romanian forces, squads of local Ukrainian collaborators and local ethnic German volunteers.

Even then, it was methodical, Desbois' research shows. First, Germans would arrive in a town or village and gather intelligence on how best to transport the victims to extermination sites, where to execute them and how to dispose of their bodies.

"It was done as systematically as it was done elsewhere," said John Paul Himka, an expert on the Holocaust and Ukraine at the University of Alberta in Canada, who is not connected to Desbois' work. "You can read as they're figuring out best way to do this, the best way to shoot ... it's absolutely systematic, no accident here."

Desbois' interviews and grave-hunting tie in to millions of pages of Soviet archives, heightening their credibility, says Paul Shapiro, of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum who wrote the foreword to Desbois' book.

Father Desbois' work is also having an impact on efforts to preserve Holocaust sites. In December, the 26-nation International Task Force on the Holocaust called on European governments to ensure the protection of locations such as the mass graves Desbois is uncovering, according to Shapiro, who helped draft the resolution.

Among Desbois' key findings is the widespread use of local children to help bury the dead, wait on the German soldiers during meals and remove gold teeth and other valuables from the bodies. His work has also yielded evidence that the killings were most frequently carried out in the open, in daylight and in a variety of ways — shooting victims, throwing them alive into bonfires, walling up a group of Jews in a cellar that wasn't opened until 12 years later.

Desbois' witnesses are mostly Orthodox Christian, and he comes to them as a priest, dressed in black and wearing a clerical collar, taking in their pain and trying to ease their suffering. Many have never before talked about their experiences.

In the village of Ternivka, some 200 miles south of Kiev where 2,300 Jews were killed, a frail, elderly woman, who identified herself only as Petrivna, revealed the unbearable task the Nazis imposed on her.

The young schoolgirl saw her Jewish neighbors thrown into a large pit, many still alive and convulsing in agony. Her task was to trample on them barefoot to make space for more. One of those she had to tread on was a classmate.

"You know, we were very poor, we didn't have shoes," Petrivna told Desbois in a single breath, her body twitching in pain, Desbois writes in his book. "You see, it is not easy to walk on bodies."

Desbois, 53, a short, soft-spoken man with dark, thinning hair, says the stories give him nightmares. The most difficult is "to bear the horrors that the witnesses tell me, because often the people are simple, very kind and want to tell me everything," Desbois said in a phone interview while on a trip to western Ukraine.

"You have to be able to listen, to accept, to bear this horror," said Desbois. "I am not here to judge the people's guilt, we are here to know what happened."

Desbois' small team includes a translator, a researcher, a mapping expert, a ballistics specialist and a video and photo crew. He often joins his witnesses in their homes, leaving his shoes outside. He tends to a peasant's cow while the man tells his story.

Desbois has deep personal roots in his project, dating to 2002, when he first visited Ukraine to see the place where his grandfather was interned as a French prisoner in World War II.

When he arrived, the locals told him of a stream of blood that had run from the site where the Jews were executed and of a dismembered woman hanging from a tree after the Nazis threw a grenade in a pit full of people. When he was offered a visit to more villages, he did not hesitate.

"I am in a hurry to find all the bones, to establish the truth and justice so that the world can know what happened and that the Germans never left a tiny village in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia without killing Jews there."

The Holocaust is a divisive topic here because some Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazis. Jewish groups are grateful for Desbois' efforts and lament the lack of government support for his and other Holocaust research and education programs.

"As a Ukrainian citizen and a Ukrainian historian it pains me ... that there is no policy of national remembrance," said Anatoly Podolsky, head of the Ukrainian Center for Holocaust Studies. "We are not responsible for the past but we are responsible for remembering."

Desbois leads a French association, Yahad-In Unum (the Hebrew and Latin words for "together"), which was founded by Catholics and Jews to heal the wounds between the two faiths. He believes that as a Catholic priest talking to Orthodox believers about the killing of their Jewish neighbors his work advances that healing mission.

"The book is meant so that people know ... that a genocide is simply people killing people," Desbois said. "My book is also an act of prevention of future acts of genocide."

___

Randy Herschaft reported from New York.

___

On the Net:

The Holocaust by Bullets book site: http://us.macmillan.com/theholocaustbybullets

Yahad-In Unum: http://www.yahadinunum.org/index.en.html

Museum of Jewish Heritage: http: http://www.mjhnyc.org

More Anti-Semitism among the SSPX - Fr. Floriano Abrahamowicz

2009-01-30T13:37:00.000-08:00

Fr. Floriano Abrahamowicz [second from left], a pastor and spokesperson for the Society of St. Pius X in northeastern Italy, [has] referred to Jews as “a people of deicide,” referring to the death of Christ, and suggested that the Jewish Holocaust has been “exalted” over what he called “other genocides,” such as the Allied bombing of German cities and the Israeli occupation of the Gaza strip.

"In the wake of a global furor triggered by Pope Benedict XVI’s decision to lift the excommunication of four traditionalist Catholic bishops, including one who cast doubt on the Holocaust, another leader in the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X has questioned whether the Nazis used gas chambers for anything other than “disinfection,” and said that people who hold revisionist views on the Holocaust are not anti-Semites." Source National Catholic Reporter :JOHN L. ALLEN JR., NCR Staff
Published: Jan. 29, 2009

It is astounding to find that the anit-Semitic views of Bishop Williamson SSPX are not a unique abberation (as one would like to hope), or the views of a lone far-right fanatic. Apparently there is a least one more outspoken ordained priest among SSPX who feel compelled to hold forth on historical and political matters.

While Fr. Floriano is quite right that one innocent killed unjustly is one too many, it is very disturbing to again read within the comments of an SSPX priest the term Deicide and have it associated with the Jewish people.

Some readers have written that the John Crossan post on "Who Killed Jesus" (see below) is a past issue and hardly worth returning to. However, one can not help but be both surprised and concerned about the number of times the issue of Jewish Deicide crops up in Christian doctrine amongst the traditionalists as well as the number of times the word Deicide occurs in their open-source pastoral correspondence.

The science of history and archaeology has moved forward in many respects that demonstrate just how factional and faulty the canonical Gospels' presentation of first century Judaism was (is).

While one my sign an anti-modernist pledge and hove close to pre-1962 liturgy and doctrine, this does not give the spiritual intellect the right to repeat and legitimize historical errors within scripture without seeking to make clear those aspects of the past that were inaccurately known in centuries prior to 1962.

Here is Fr. Floriano Abrahamowicz's interview - source: National Catholic Reporter.

La Tribuna di Treviso
Interview with Fr. Floriano Abrahamowicz, Jan. 29, 2009
By Laura Canzian

Fr. Floriano, is the Lefebvrite community anti-Semitic?

It’s truly impossible for a Catholic Christian to be anti-Semitic. I myself, on my father’s side, have Jewish roots. My last name even suggests this. This entire polemic regarding the statements of Bishop Williamson concerns the existence of gas chambers, and has been strongly instrumentalized for anti-Vatican purposes. Williamson simply expressed his doubts, and his ‘denial’ is not of the Holocaust – as newspapers have falsely said – but of the technical aspect of the gas chambers.

In your view, what’s the ‘technical aspect’ of the gas chambers?

Certainly, it was imprudent of Williamson to get into technical questions. In the famous interview, you can see that the journalist was obviously leading up to this specific aspect. But you have to understand that the theme of the Holocaust is situated on a much higher level than the question of knowing whether the victims died from gas or from other causes.

What do you think? About the gas chambers, I mean.

Truly, I don’t know. I know that gas chambers existed at least for disinfection, but I don’t know if they were used to kill people or not, because I haven’t studied the question. I know that, alongside the official version [of events], there’s another version based on the observations of the first Allied technicians who entered the camps.

Do you cast doubt on the number of victims of the Holocaust?

No, I don’t cast doubt on the numbers. There could have been more than six million victims. Even in the Jewish world, the number has a symbolic value. Pope Ratzinger says that even one person killed unjustly is too many, which is a way of saying that it’s equal to six million. To speak about numbers doesn’t change anything with respect to the essence of genocide, which is always an exaggeration.

An exaggeration? In what sense?

The number [of six million] is derived from what the head of the German Jewish community said to the Anglo-Americans shortly after the liberation. In the heat of the moment, he fired off a number. But how could he know? For him, the important point was that these victims were unjustly killed for religious motives. If there’s a criticism to be made of the way in which the tragedy of the Holocaust has been handled, it’s in giving it a supremacy with respect to other genocides.

To which other exterminations are you referring?

If Bishop Williamson had gone on television to deny the genocide of 1.2 million Armenians by the Turks, I don’t think that all the newspapers would have talked about his statements in the same terms they’re using now. Who has ever talked about the Anglo-American genocide in the bombing of German cities? Who has ever talked about Churchill, who ordered the phosphorous bombing of Dresden, where there were not only many civilians, but also many Allied soldiers? Who has spoken about the English air force, which, in the bombing of the cities, killed hundreds of thousands of civilians? And the Israelis certainly can’t tell me that the genocide they suffered from the Nazis is less serious than that of Gaza, simply because they’ve taken out a few thousand persons, while the Nazis took out six million. This is where I fault Judaism, which exasperates rather than honoring the victims of genocide decently. It’s as if there were only one genocide in history, that of the Jews during the Second World War. It seems like you can say anything you want about all the other exterminated peoples, but no one at the global level has spoken in the terms in which people are speaking today after the declarations of Bishop Williamson.

Why do so many people still cast doubt on the Shoah? Why is it a subject that still divides people so viscerally?

Because the whole history of humanity is marked by the people of Israel, who initially were the people of God, who then became the people of deicide, and who at the end of time will reconvert to Jesus Christ. Behind it all is a mysterious theological aspect, which is that of the people of God which rejected its Messiah and which still combats him. It’s a mystery of doctrine. Anti-Semitism is born from the illuminated liberal and Gnostic world. The church throughout history has always protected the Jews from pogroms, as one reads, for example, in Domenico Savino’s book on ritual homicide.

What do you think of [Holocaust] denial?

Denial is a false problem, because it focuses on methods and numbers and doesn’t address the substance of the problem. Those who have studied the technical data, and who have cast certain doubts on the versions that we find in history books, aren’t anti-Semites. It’s enough to recall that the first ones to find this data were also those who saved the Jews, meaning the Allies.

Do you want to offer a message to the Jewish community?

One message: As a Catholic Christian, adding that little Jewish blood that runs in my veins, I express the hope that the Jews will embrace Our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Comment: Fr. Abrahamwicz continues to demonstrate exactly what is so absurdly dangerous with SSPX preaching its message and discussing historical and political issues in public. Briefly, the Shoah is a well-documented prototypical episode of genocide that was trans-national, encompassed an entire continent, and demonstrated the moral leadership failure of an entire Christian culture. The Christian culture at this time was infused with anti-Semitic attitudes of which Bishop Williamson and Fr. Abrahaowicz (both SSPX), by virtue of their recent comments, represent a archatypical throwback. The views expressed by these men of the cloth are medieval, sectarian, and promote, at best, indifference to religious and cultural intolerance, and at worst, justifications for actual violence.

Abrahamowicz, by trivializing the Holocaust in effect trivializes all genocides, particularly those whose geographic scope were both smaller and less well-documented. His own logic actually undermines his argument rather than supports it. The study of the Shoah presents the world with a methodology with which the study of other genocides may proceed in a way that recovers something of the memory of the victims as well as highlights the vigilance needed to prevent such acts of barbarism from recurring.

Abrahamowicz, and religious how hold views similar to his, fail to recognize that the Holocaust is of paramount importance, not just because it was a genocide of unparalleled organization, prethought, and malice, but because within this particular genocide we find at its heart a failure of both Christianity and Christian doctrine to protect the innocent from injustice.

Why is there perhaps less discussion of the Armenian genocide and the Hutu-Tutsi genocide? The answer does not lie with the assertion that the Jewish people trumpet and parade their genocide before the world to the point it drowns out so-called lesser genocides; rather, there is perhaps a tendency to dismiss the non-Western genocides as partially a product of non-Christian forces acting out a barbarism we in the West want to imbue Islam (in the case of Ottoman Turkey) and the cultural mores of Hutu-Tutsi society in Africa. But this points directly back to the moral failure of Christianity in the West to arrest Europe's slide toward the Final Solution.

SSPX - Lefebvre movement: long, troubled history with Judaism

2009-01-28T13:16:00.000-08:00

Lefebvre: Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre distributes First Communion in church in St. Marys, Kansas (August, 1979) (NCR file shot)

The National Catholic Reporter yesterday published a focused summary of the movement founded by Bishop Marcel Lefebvre and its attitudes toward Judaism:

Lefebvre movement: long, troubled history with Judaism

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR., NCR Staff
Published:
Jan. 26, 2009

When the Vatican lifted the excommunication of four traditionalist Catholic bishops Jan. 21, it’s entirely possible Rome was unaware that one of those bishops, an Englishman named Richard Williamson, had just given an interview to Swedish television in which he denied that the Nazis had used gas chambers and asserted that no more than 200,000 to 300,000 Jews had died during the Second World War.

In retrospect, however, it would be disingenuous for anyone to feign surprise.

A troubled history with Judaism has long been part of the Catholic traditionalist movement associated with the late French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre — beginning with Lefebvre himself, who spoke approvingly of both the World War II-era Vichy Regime in France and the far-right National Front, and who identified the contemporary enemies of the faith as “Jews, Communists and Freemasons” in an Aug. 31, 1985, letter to Pope John Paul II.

Reacting to the furor over Williamson, the Vatican has stressed that lifting the excommunication is not an endorsement of his views on the Holocaust, and has repeated its firm commitment to Catholic-Jewish dialogue and to combating anti-Semitism. The pope’s outreach to traditionalists should instead be seen, spokespersons said, as an “act of peace” intended to end the only formal schism in the wake of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65).

Canonical experts also point out that, technically speaking, Holocaust denial is not heresy. It’s a denial of historical truth, not a truth of the faith, and hence repudiating it is not inconsistent — at least from a strictly logical point of view — with the Jan. 21 decree from the Congregation for Bishops ending the excommunication of the four Lefebvrite prelates.

That’s a fine distinction, however, likely to be lost on much of the world, especially given that Williamson’s comments hardly came out of the blue.

A long history

The historical association between some strains of traditionalist Catholicism and anti-Semitism run deep, intertwined with royalist reaction to the French Revolution in the 18th century and, later, the Boulanger and Dreyfus Affairs in France (1886-1889 and 1894-1899). In populist European conservatism, the defense of Christian tradition has often been linked to a suspicion of “contamination” — originally by Jews, and more recently, by Europe’s rising Muslim presence.

Observers of the traditionalist landscape caution people not to paint with too broad a brush, as if every Catholic attracted to the older Latin Mass or to traditional views on doctrinal matters is somehow tainted by anti-Semitism. Similarly, experts also warn that critics of Catholic traditionalism can sometimes be quick to label as “anti-Semitic” attitudes that may be controversial theologically or politically, but that don’t in themselves reflect real prejudice.

For example, traditionalists often uphold a robust missionary theology, insisting that the church cannot renounce its duty to evangelize any group, including Jews. Similarly, traditionalists often challenge Vatican II’s teaching on religious freedom, church-state separation, and interreligious dialogue. Neither position, observers say, necessarily conceals latent anti-Semitism.

For its part, the Priestly Fraternity of St. Pius X, the body founded by Lefebvre, issued a 2007 statement asserting that “a Catholic cannot be anti-Semitic without destroying the origin and essence of his own faith.” Nonetheless, there’s also a track record in some traditionalist and Lefebvrite circles of open hostility toward Jews and Judaism that is anything but latent.

As noted above, Lefebvre himself wrote to John Paul II in 1985, three years before his decision to ordain four bishops in defiance of the pope’s authority, to argue that Vatican II’s “Declaration on Religious Liberty” had produced a series of poisonous consequences, including “all the reforms carried out over 20 years within the church to please heretics, schismatics, false religions and declared enemies of the church, such as the Jews, the Communists and the Freemasons.”

This sense of antagonism was lifelong. In 1990, one year before his death, Lefebvre gave an interview to the journal of the National Front in France, suggesting that Catholic opposition to a residence of Carmelite nuns at the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp was being instigated by Jews.

Lefebvre’s followers often share this outlook. In 1997, one of the four bishops ordained by Lefebvre in 1988, Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, said, “The church for its part has at all times forbidden and condemned the killing of Jews, even when ‘their grave defects rendered them odious to the nations among which they were established.’ ... All this makes us think that the Jews are the most active artisans for the coming of Antichrist.”

Nor has their record been confined simply to making statements. In 1989, Paul Touvier, a fugitive charged with ordering the execution of seven Jews in 1944, was arrested in a priory of the Fraternity of St. Pius X in Nice, France. The fraternity stated at the time that Touvier had been granted asylum as “an act of charity to a homeless man.” When Touvier died in 1996, a parish church operated by the fraternity offered a requiem Mass in his honor.

In just the past year, controversy arose in Germany when a priest of the fraternity asserted that Jews were “co-responsible” for the death of Christ. Also in 2008, an Italian priest of the fraternity celebrated a Latin Mass in honor of the 63rd anniversary of the death of fascist leader Benito Mussolini.

Reaching a crescendo

By all accounts, this strain reaches a crescendo in Williamson, whose views were a matter of public record well before his most recent comments to Swedish television.

In 1989, for example, police in Canada briefly considered filing charges against Williamson under that country’s hate speech laws after he gave an address in Quebec charging that Jews were responsible for “changes and corruption” in the Catholic church, that “not one Jew” perished in Nazi gas chambers, and that the Holocaust was a myth created so that the West would “approve the state of Israel.”

Williamson also praised the writings of Ernst Zundel, a German-born Canadian immigrant whose works include Did Six Million Really Die? and The Hitler We Loved and Why, both considered mainstays of Holocaust denial literature.

In 1991, Williamson issued a letter from Winona, Minn., where he served as rector of a Lefebvrite seminary, stating, “Until [Jews] rediscover their true Messianic vocation, they may be expected to continue fanatically agitating, in accordance with their false messianic vocation of Jewish world dominion, to prepare the Antichrist’s throne in Jerusalem.”

In 2000, Williamson went on record suggesting that the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” supposedly a plot for Jewish global domination regarded by historians as an anti-Semitic hoax created in Tsarist Russia, is authentic. “God put into men’s hands the Protocols of the Sages of Sion … if men want to know the truth, but few do,” Williamson said.

Nor have Williamson’s comments flown under the Catholic radar. A 2008 piece in England’s Catholic Herald documented his anti-Semitic record and included a judgment from Shimon Samuels, director of international relations at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, to the effect that Williamson is “the Borat of the schismatic Catholic far-right.”

Samuels said at the time that Williamson is “a clown, but a dangerous clown.”

In that 2008 Catholic Herald piece, Williamson denied being an anti-Semite, but said that he opposes “adversaries of Our Lord Jesus Christ.”

“If Jews are adversaries of Our Lord Jesus Christ — obviously not all of them, but those that are — then I don’t like them,” he said. “My definition of anti-Semitism is to be against every single Jew purely because he’s a Jew. That’s not at all my case. I once had a Jewish rabbi come and speak to seminarians. Does that sound to you like anti-Semitism?”

To be sure, Williamson’s controversial views are not confined to Jews. He has also suggested that the 9/11 bombings were not the result of airplanes hijacked by terrorists but rather “demolition charges,” has criticized the film “The Sound of Music” for a lack of respect for authority, and has expressed sympathy for what he described as the “remotely Catholic sense” of the Unabomber for the dangers of technology.

Spokespersons for the Fraternity of St. Pius X and other traditionalist Catholic groups have generally said that Williamson’s views do not represent the corporate position of the traditionalist movement. Reacting to the most recent comments, Bishop Bernard Fellay, superior of the fraternity, said that Williamson had expressed a “personal opinion.”

Vatican watchers have likewise stressed that Benedict XVI’s motives in reaching out to traditionalists, including Williamson, are certainly not to canonize his positions on Judaism or any other subject, but rather to promote unity in the church. Over the centuries, popes have always abhorred schism because of the article of Catholic theology that any legitimately ordained bishop can ordain other bishops — and thus, if it is not arrested, a schism can become self-replicating and produce a parallel church.

Early returns, however, suggest that in the court of broader public opinion, disentangling the pope’s logic from the taint of association with anti-Semitism will be a tough sell. The chief rabbi of Rome, Riccardo Di Segni, sounded despondent on Monday about where things will go from here.

“I don’t know what kind of resolution there can be at this point,” Di Segni said.

[John L. Allen Jr. is NCR senior correspondent.]

For the record, here is a link to the PDF of SSPX Superior General Bishop Fellay's official response to Bishop Williamson's Swedish interview denying the scope and severity of the Holocaust:

http://www.sspx.org/superior_generals_ltrs/bishop_fellay_statement_re_bishop_williamson.pdf

There is no specific disavowal of Bishop Williamson's statements regarding the Holocaust. One reads only that Bishop Williamson's position is not that of the SSPX; however, one does not find any clarification on what the SSPX position is toward the Holocaust.

Regrettable.

SSPX appears much more concerned regarding the public nature of Bishop Williamson's utterances and the public hew and cry that resulted.

January 28th is the Saint's Day for St. Thomas Aquinas; maybe he got it right: here is an excerpt from St. Thomas Aquinas' Conference on the Creed -

"Humility? Look at Christ crucified, whom God willed to be condemned by Pontius Pilate and die."

This Doctor of the Church seems to know that it was the Roman government that executed Jesus of Nazareth. In fact, none of his readings from the Proper of Saints for his memorial contain an anti-Judaic remark.

Anti-Judaic Imagery of the Pharisee vs. Jesus in SSPX Letter

2009-01-26T12:31:00.000-08:00

Frans Francken the Younger, The Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus
Fr. John D. Fullerton SSPX

I have always been attracted to the revival of the Latin mass and much of the pre-1962 Catholic liturgy. In many ways I intellectually support the efforts of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX)and their stance relative to the Papal authority of Rome.

The Catholic church, particularly the post Vatican I church, has suffered tremendously from the centralization of authority and the concentration of power in Rome. This centralization, as many scholars have argued, left the regional Catholic churches of various nations unable to react to local injustices. Such has been the case in Germany with the rise of Nazism and the resulting Holocausts of the infirm, mentally ill, the Gypsies, peaceful opponents to the regime, and above all, European Jewry.

Catholic's who espouse tradition must be careful to cull the wheat from the chaff amongst the ancient dogma, and the inherent anti-Judaic aspect of pre-Vatican II beliefs and language must be rooted out.

Here are excerpts from the SSPX District Superior Letter to Friends and Benefactors dated July 8th, 2008, signed by Fr. John D. Fullerton.

[Concluding sentence in paragraph on Pagan Religion]"...Life [ordered on Pagan spirituality] is lived according to the promptings of inclinations, which urge one on to pursue what is immediately advantageous.

Unfortunately the taint of this touches the practice of religion on the part of those who hold the true faith. Pharisaism brought about conflict between the Pharisees and our divine Savior despite the same faith. Exteriorly there seemed to be a harmony of belief, but this was only apparent. In the soul there was a profound difference. The reason was that their philosophies of life differed. For the Pharisees there was a divorce between their faith and their theory of human values. They valued the material greatness of their nation rather than the spiritual transformation of the individuals that composed it. Christ’s philosophy of life was deduced from and implicitly contained in the religion he practiced.

It is fashionable today to say that history does not repeat itself. But history itself shows us that this is false, especially where the same causes exist. What happened once can happen again. The same tragic fate that came upon the Pharisees can also befall Christian communities in all ages of history. We know that the faith will never fail but history proves that the faithful can. Failure is inevitable unless the philosophy of life is in harmony with religion. If not there is a conflict with reality, within oneself - part of reality, and with God - the source of reality."

At first glance the letter appears innocuous; however, the pharisee metaphor may be taken a number of ways. It should be noted that the use of Pharisee imagery juxtaposed with Jesus, the inside-outsider, (Fr. Fullerton does stress Jesus' Jewish faith), may be read as lingering anti-Semitism. While it is clear that Fr. Fullerton's target is the Roman Catholic hierarchy, which he means to imbue with the qualities of being both hypocritical and condemnatory. However, the metaphor hinges on transferring a negative Christian historiographic stereotype depicting Pharisaic Judaism found in the canonical Gospels and using this anti-Judaic imagery to tar Rome with the same brush. In the canonical Gospels one finds that the term pharisee is a short-hand, particularly in Luke, for a religious hierarchy that is self-absorbed and out-of-touch with the struggles of ordinary believers (see for example: Luke 18:9-14). Here is what one scholar write concerning this passage:

“In Luke 18:9-14 Jesus tells of a Pharisee who went to the temple to pray, and gave thanks to God that his profession, lifestyle, or “reserved occupation” enabled him to study the law, to avoid ceremonial defilement, to elude the company of thieves and rogues, to practice fasting, and to tithe his income to the most minute detail. The thanksgiving is understandable and genuine. Only after centuries of Western Christian traditions could a reader suggest that it is duplicitous or hypocritical.” Anthony C. Thiselton. The Hermenutics of Doctrine (2007) p. 353.

Thiselton's view is a far cry from what Fr. Fullerton wishes to impart to his readers; moreover, against the broad context of the statements made by Bishop Williamson (SSPX), whose views on the scope of the Holocaust are outlandish and unsupportable, one must question if older anti-Semitic viewpoints are embedded and intended. Are there not other ways to mine the Gospels for imagery that makes the same point? For instance:

Luke 16:19-31 "Now there was a certain rich man, and he was clothed in purple and fine linen, living in luxury every day. A certain beggar, named Lazarus, was laid at his gate, full of sores, and desiring to be fed with the crumbs that fell from the rich man’s table. Yes, even the dogs came and licked his sores. It happened that the beggar died, and that he was carried away by the angels to Abraham’s bosom. The rich man also died, and was buried. In Hades, he lifted up his eyes, being in torment, and saw Abraham far off, and Lazarus at his bosom.

He cried and said, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue! For I am in anguish in this flame.’

"But Abraham said, ‘Son, remember that you, in your lifetime, received your good things, and Lazarus, in like manner, bad things. But now here he is comforted and you are in anguish. Besides all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed, that those who want to pass from here to you are not able, and that none may cross over from there to us.’

He said, ‘I ask you therefore, father, that you would send him to my father’s house; for I have five brothers, that he may testify to them, so they won’t also come into this place of torment.’

"But Abraham said to him,
‘They have Moses and the prophets. Let them listen to them.’

"He said, ‘No, father Abraham, but if one goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’

"He said to him, ‘If they don’t listen to Moses and the prophets,
neither will they be persuaded if one rises from the dead.’"

Of course the Fr. Fullerton excerpt is from a larger letter, it is important to weigh the entire letter and its context; however, weigh we as readers must if we are to avoid the mistaken path that leads to indifference in the face of the persecution of innocents.

Link to letter:

http://www.sspx.org/District_Superiors_Ltrs/2008_ds_ltrs/july_2008_ds_ltr.htm

Society of St. Pius X - Holocaust Denier Rehabilitated by the Pope

2009-01-25T14:57:00.000-08:00

Saint Pius X consecrating a Bishop [future Benedict XV = the Pope of Peace]

VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict's rehabilitation of four traditionalist bishops may heal one festering Catholic wound at the expense of opening a wider one with Jews because one of the prelates is a Holocaust denier.

The four bishops re-admitted to the Church over the weekend lead the far-right Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), which has about 600,000 members and rejects modernizations of Roman Catholic worship and doctrine.

One of the four, the British-born Richard Williamson, has made statements denying the full extent of the Nazi Holocaust of European Jews, as accepted by mainstream historians.

In comments to Swedish television broadcast on Wednesday and widely available on the Internet, Williamson said "I believe there were no gas chambers" and only up to 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps, instead of 6 million.

"I believe that the historical evidence is hugely against 6 million having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler," he said.

While lifting excommunications that had barred them from the Roman Catholic Church left many internal questions open, there was no doubt it has provoked what some are calling the biggest setback in Catholic-Jewish relations in half a century.

Israel-based Rabbi David Rosen, head of inter-religious affairs for the American Jewish Committee and a leading figure in decades of dialogue with the Vatican, said:

"The late Pope John Paul II called anti-Semitism a sin against God and man. The denial of the overwhelmingly detailed documentation of the Shoah (Holocaust) is anti-Semitism at its most blatant.

"In welcoming an open Holocaust denier into the Catholic Church without any recantation on his part, the Vatican has made a mockery of John Paul II's moving and impressive repudiation and condemnation of anti-Semitism," he said.

Elan Steinberg, vice president of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants, spoke of "an act of moral debasement unworthy of a moral institution."

Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League said: "What was the imperative to bring these people back into the Church at such a high cost to the Jewish people?"

Diplomatic sources said the row could put the pope's planned trip to the Holy Land in May in doubt.

A Vatican spokesman said that while Williamson's comments are "open to criticism" they were "totally extraneous" to the lifting of the excommunications.

But Jewish leaders did not accept the explanation. They questioned why the Vatican had not issued a clear statement condemning Williamson and one said privately the decree represented "a nail in the coffin of 50 years of dialogue."

Catholic-Jewish relations were already severely strained over the figure of wartime Pope Pius XII, who Jews have accused of turning a blind eye to the Holocaust. Jews have asked the Vatican, which denies the charges, to freeze the procedure that can lead to his sainthood pending more study of wartime records.

ENDING A SCHISM?

The rehabilitations of the four bishops followed years of negotiations with the Vatican to return to the fold.

They have won some battles, such as a wider use of the Latin Mass, as Benedict has sought to end a schism that pierced the Church's unity 20 years ago when French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre ordained the four without a papal nod.

Their leader, Bishop Bernard Fellay, said, "Catholics attached to tradition throughout the world will no longer be unjustly stigmatized." He said the group was ready to help the pope "remedy the unprecedented crisis that currently shakes the Catholic world."

But Fellay made it clear they still had "some reservations" about the teachings of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), which modernized the Church and is accepted by most of its 1.1 billion members, as opposed to the 600,000 traditionalists.

Paris Cardinal Andre Vingt-Trois called the pope's decision "a measure of clemency and mercy" that would allow the Church to repair a damaging split but said it was a first step toward total re-integration and indicated the SSPX would have to bend to Church discipline.

(Additional reporting by Tom Heneghan in Paris; editing by Michael Roddy)

A Look at a Primary Source: Letter by Bishop Williamson, The Gulf War, Feb. 1st, 1991

The Reuters article quoted above covers some obscure ground in a long-running debate, some observers categorize Rome's break with SSPX as a schism, within modern Catholicism. It is important to note that much of the SSPX theological platform is a throwback to a pre-Vatican II church. The SSPX Bishop, Richard Williamson, appears to have a view of historiography similar to that of a medieval Catholic chronicler marking the signs of the End of Days. Here is an excerpt from Bishop Williamson's letter released on occasion of the First Gulf War (letter dated 1991:

"...However, behind the Gulf War and even behind Russia, may one not, thirdly, fear the looming figure of the Anti-Christ? Before hostilities are over in the Gulf, expect Israel to be looking to "solve" the Palestinian problem by removing King Hussein of Jordan, by turning Jordan into a client Palestinian state and by forcibly moving there all Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank, to "make room" for the Jewish immigrants from Russia (cf. Washington Post, August 26, 1990). Imagine how such an idea appeals to the Arabs! In which case one understands why so many friends of Israel in the U.S.A. were and are whooping for the United States to break the Arab strong-man.

Supernaturally seen, such a scenario, capable of many adaptations, represents one more in many steps of the Jewish people towards their appointment with God at the end of the world, when, maybe converted by the heroism and endurance of the Catholics undergoing persecution by their Anti-Christ, they will at last convert (Romans XI) and discover their own true Messiah, Jesus Christ, who has never ceased to love them as his own people. However, until they re-discover their true Messianic vocation, they may be expected to continue fanatically agitating, in accordance with their false messianic vocation of Jewish world-dominion, to prepare the Anti-Christ's throne in Jerusalem. So we may fear their continuing to play their major part in the agitation of the East and in the corruption of the West. Here the wise Catholic will remember that, again, the ex-Christian nations have only their own Liberalism to blame for allowing free circulation within Christendom to the enemies of Christ. As these make society more and more oppressively anti-Christian, he will profit to raise his sights above this world and look to the things of heaven –“When these things begin to come to pass, look up, and lift up your heads, for your redemption is at hand” (Lk XXI,28). Remembering also that Annas and Caiphas induced but never obligated Judas to betray Jesus, and that the Apostle's betrayal was a crime far worse than the Jews' deicide, He will look at the state of the Catholic Church today, and see why the enemies of Christendom are being given so much power.... [Richard Williamson, The Gulf War, Feb. 1st, 1991]

Irish Scholar-Archaeologist John Dominic Crossan and the Question of Who Killed Jesus

2009-01-22T13:57:00.000-08:00

Excerpted from John Dominic Crossan's website:

The death of Jesus is one of the most hotly debated questions in Christianity today. In his massive and highly publicized The Death of the Messiah, Raymond Brown - while clearly rejecting anti-Semitism - never questions the essential historicity of the passion stories. Yet it is these stories, in which the Jews decide Jesus' execution, that have fueled centuries of Christian anti-Semitism.

Now, in his most controversial book, John Dominic Crossan shows that this traditional understanding of the Gospels as historical fact is not only wrong but dangerous. Drawing on the best of biblical, anthropological, sociological and historical research, he demonstrates definitively that it was the Roman government that tried and executed Jesus as a social agitator. Crossan also candidly addresses such key theological questions as "Did Jesus die for our sins?" and "Is our faith in vain if there was no bodily resurrection?"

Ultimately, however, Crossan's radical reexamination shows that the belief that the Jews killed Jesus is an early Christian myth (directed against rival Jewish groups) that must be eradicated from authentic Christian faith. [Blurb from John Crossan’s website]

Link to PDF of first chapter:

http://www.johndcrossan.com/WhoKilledJesus.html

Catholicism and Anti-Semitism in Mid-20th Century Ireland's Immigration Policy

2009-01-19T23:31:00.000-08:00

Éamon de Valera, Taoiseach from 29 December 1937 to 18 February 1948. De Valera was the architect of Ireland's neutrality policy during World War II. De Valera's policies aligned Ireland closely with Vatican views in some important areas that were to affect international relations in the post-WWII period. Did embedded anti-Semitism within Catholicism influence Irish immigration policy for Jewish immigrants at this time?

One frequently reads the argument, more of a statement really, that the Zionist Jews should have gone back to Europe where they came from, particularly Eastern Europe. However, yet another troubling aspect of apparent institutionalized anti-Semitism in Irish government policy during WWII can be found articulated by the Department of justice and immigration policy:

“It is the policy of the [Irish Republic] Department of Justice to restrict the immigration of Jews. The wealth and influence of the Jewish community in this country, and the murmurs against Jewish wealth and influence are frequently heard. As Jews do not become assimilated with the native population, like other immigrants, there is a danger that any big increase in their numbers might create a social problem.” [National Archives Ireland, DT, 69/8027, 24 September 1945, as sited in: Bryan Fanning. Racism and Social Change in the Republic of Ireland (Manchester University Press, 2002) pp. 80-81]

This is but one example of government documents on record articulating policy for Ireland in the immediate post-war period regarding Jewish people. This particular language was hardly modified until approximately 1953 in response to pressures to qualify for Marshall Plan aid and EU membership. I am, of course not intending to single out Ireland, I grew up in a country that has had a history of institutionalizing the ownership of other human beings; however, there is something to be said for a healthy examination of one’s national history and coming to terms with it.

In the case of Ireland in the post-war period; if official policy was averse to Jewish immigration into the country, in light of the Holocaust what kind of program for an independent Jewish homeland would Ireland have supported? Secondly, if post-war Ireland, of all places, would not allow significant immigration Jews, a position that numerous other countries also espoused, it seems justified that the Jewish people look to their own resources and achieve the kind of protection that only a homeland might offer.

Link to preview of source: http://books.google.com/books?id=Q8us1So7oaQC&pg=PA83&lpg=PA83&dq=pre+1951+Irish+immigration+policy&source=web&ots=RB-WbVJ1yr&sig=3fzWflIT69vRr3Bfar3C6bkvwyM&hl=en&sa=X&oi

Oliver J. Flanagan of Laois-Offaly and the Dáil Éireann 1943

2009-01-18T15:56:00.000-08:00

The only photograph I am able to locate at present showing Oliver J. Flanagan. He is the dark-haired gentleman back and left-center.

“There has been a tendency within Irish historiography to depict anti-Semitic outbursts within national politics or within Catholic discourse as atypical. Figures like Fr. Creach, Eoin O’Duffy, Charles Bewley, Oliver J. Flanigan, Fr Fahy or Stephen Coughlan can be portrayed as unrepresentative, yet they articulated anti-Semitisms shared by some key decision-makers and, arguabley, with Irish society more generally.” [Bryan Fanning. Racism and Social Change in the Republic of Ireland (Manchester University Press, 2002) p. 82

In my uncle's blog, a lively discussion has ensued regarding anti-Semitism in Irish officialdom and whether such a legacy impacts Ireland's current stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One of the Irish participants in this discussion made detailed comments and remarks, some of which are excerpted below (the third excerpt might require some additional context).

‘The wedding of Devotionalism and Nationalism which occured following the revolutionary period was motivated by a desire to heal old Civil War wounds and a genuine zeal by most participants to replace all remnants of 'Anglican' culture with a purile Gaelic, Catholic culture. The Catholicism of Fenianism was not a new idea but only now was it so blatant.”

And:

“When De Valera came to power in 1932 he represented a full swing in Irish politics. For De Valera had a decade earlier defied the popular will and joined the irregulars in the Civil War. He more than anyone else deeply embedded Catholicism in Irish public life.”

Lastly:

”You may be right that there is a strong subconscious element of Jew hatred in Ireland. I simply don't believe this. There is no evidence for this.”

What about the hypothesis that deeply embedded political Catholicism, an expression of the wedding of Devotionalism and Nationalism, as you framed it, imbued many aspects of Irish public and private life with “a strong subconscious element of Jew hatred?”

I am struck, for example, by the early career of Mr. Oliver J. Flanagan. Here is a brief synopsis of his bio drawn from Wikipedia:

Mr. Oliver J. Flanagan (22 May 1920 –26 April 1987) was an Irish Fine Gael politician who served in the Dail Eireann for forty-three years and was Minister of Defense for six months. He was elected to the Dáil fourteen times between 1943 and 1982, topping the poll on almost every occasion. He was Father of Dáil from 1981 until his retirement in 1987, and he remains one of the longest serving members in the history of the Dáil. (Wiki)

During Mr. Flanagan’s debut speech before the Dáil in 1943, in which an Emergency Measures Bill was being debated, he made the following remarks which are excerpted below:

“Mr. Flanagan: I should like to co-operate with the Government or with any Party that I believed was going to introduce legislation in the best interests of the Irish nation. I should like very much to be in a position to support any measure brought forward in this House with that object, but I am very sorry that I cannot associate myself with this Bill or with anything relating to the public safety measures introduced by the Cumann na nGaedheal Government or by the present Fianna Fáil Government because I have seen that most of these Emergency Acts were always directed against Republicanism. How is it that we do not see any of these Acts directed against the Jews, who crucified Our Saviour nineteen hundred years ago, and who are crucifying us every day in the week? How is it that we do not see them directed against the Masonic Order? How is it that the I.R.A. is considered an illegal organisation while the Masonic Order is not considered an illegal organisation? You do not hear one word in these Acts against the banks who are robbing the people, right, left and centre. I told the electors in Leix-Offaly that the banks were robbers. The police were listening to me. Does the Minister for Justice think that, if the banks were not robbers, the police would have allowed me to make that statement in public without attempting to make me prove it? This Government is introducing an Emergency Powers Bill now to prevent the suffering masses of the Irish people from ridding themselves or the poverty, emigration, debt, seizures and a thousand and one other national ills which I could continue to enumerate in this House until this day-week, but I do not propose to waste your precious time doing so.”

And further on during the same address (outburst?):

"I want to ask that the Emergency Powers Order which prevents the division of land from taking place, be immediately lifted. The Minister for Lands wrote me some time ago to say that there was not sufficient staff in the Land Commission to deal with the division of land. How is it that there are thousands of well educated young men being forced to take the emigrant ship, not from Galway Bay or Cobh this time to take them to the greater Ireland beyond the Atlantic, but to take them from Dun Laoghaire and Rosslare to the land beyond the Irish Sea, the land of our traditional enemy, to help England in her war effort against Germany? There is one thing that Germany did, and that was to rout the Jews out of their country. Until we rout the Jews out of this country it does not matter a hair's breadth what orders you make. Where the bees are there is the honey, and where the Jews are there is the money. I do not propose to detain the House further. I propose to vote against such Orders and actions, and I am doing so on Christian principles. The Minister for Justice could not give me a straight answer a few moments ago. I am sorry that I interrupted him in the heat of the discussion. Of course, one needs great patience to listen to what is going on. I know very well that even the clergy in the Minister's constituency are up against him.”

Source: Dáil Éireann - Volume 91 - 09 July, 1943
Emergency Powers (Continuance) Bill, 1943—Second Stage (Resumed).

Link: http://historical-debates.oireachtas.ie/D/0091/D.0091.194307090010.html

Mr. Flanagan stood for election in 1943 running on a Monetary Reform ticket associated in a broader sense with the Social Credit party. Mr. Flanagan’s version of this party, small and said to be confined to his own constituency of Laois-Offaly, adhered to a an ideology that working-class Ireland was dominated by a Jew-Masonic system.

As your survey of Irish history demonstrates, Mr. Flanagan’s remarks made in 1943 are rather singular, even for Ireland at that time. Nevertheless, are historians to simply dismiss such episodes out of hand? One can not help but observe that during the course of this debate in 1943 no other Irish politician rose to rebuke Mr. Flanagan. Was this episode an example of “subconscious [cultural] Jew hatred?” Was such public discourse made acceptable within the context of a Catholic educational system that, for all its merits, bore the strong imprint of centuries of anti-Jewish dogma? Is one justified in viewing Mr. Flanagan’s remarks as a public expression of a significant segment of Irish society privately believed at that time?

If one admits this possibility, one must confront the fact that Mr. Flanagan continued to hold political office for forty-three years. Thus, the Flanagan speech, taken with the Hitler Condolence episode, in conjunction with Mr. Walshe’s tenure in the Office of External Affairs, juxtaposed against Ireland’s diplomatic policy toward Israel, indicate that there is evidence of a subconscious expression of Jew hatred within the institutions of Irish public life, particularly within the generation in which Ireland’s independent national public institutions were born and formed.

One may further note that these traces of anti-Jewish bias, perhaps the result of deeply embedded Catholicism in Irish public and private life, only begins to fade as the principal actors in this aspect of Ireland’s history begin to exist from the stage.

Only with the passing of that generation, let us say, since the early 1990s, has it been possible for Ireland to move beyond this cultural legacy toward a distancing from political Catholicism and its embedded biases. Nevertheless, this is a slow and uneven process and the question remains – how much of these deeply ingrained attitudes remain?

Kind Regards.

Joseph P. Walshe Expresses Ireland's Condolances, May 1945

2009-01-16T23:12:00.000-08:00

The above image purports to be a primary source document in the form of a letter written by the United States Ambassador to Ireland, Mr. David Gray, expressing his concern regarding a breach of diplomatic protocol.

Ambassador Gray served in this capacity from 15 April 1940 to 24 June 1947. He was an Uncle through marriage to Elanore Roosevelt and may have been more sensitive to this slight than others in his position.

This document image, as well as several others from different sources that corroborate this event, are availible through the Nation Archives, Ireland (www.nationalarchives.ie). It should be noted that much of Mr. Walshe's personal correspondence has yet to be released to the public and it is difficult to build a ballanced picture from only a few sources; however, given Conor Cruise O'Brian's observations, one can not help but wonder.

In recent biographies of Mr. Joseph P. Walshe, Irish authors report Ambassador Gray's strong bias against Mr. Walshe. Ambassador Gray asserted in official correspondence that Mr. Walshe favored the Axis powers over the Allies during WWII. Against this portrait, Irish historians present the argument that Mr. Walshe presented a nuetral face for Ireland's policy during the war but was secretly pro-Allies in his beliefs.

More research of course needs to be conducted on this subject.

It is difficult, however, to not give weight to the behavior of Ireland's senior diplomat and other state representatives in this symbolic visit to Nazi Germany's ambassador in Dublin.

While it is noted that this visit occurred in May of 1945, and that Ireland has more than a half-century of diplomatic evolution since these events, one wonders what kinds of seeds were sown and what kind of harvest was reaped by politicians and diplomats evidencing this kind of approach.

Was this a simple breach of protocol, or was it a sign of other ideas then current in Irish politics and culture?

Conor Cruise O'Brien and Ireland's Department of External Affairs, 1944

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Conor Cruise O’Brien 3 November 1917 – 18 December 2008

At this far remove from the presidential campaign of 1960, it is difficult to understand the fears held be a sector of the American electorate that electing John Kennedy, an Irish-American Roman Catholic, to the highest office in the land would open U.S. foreign policy up to influence from the Vatican.

It seems a laughable fear in retrospect; however, as I mentioned in yesterday’s post, an on-going discussion involving Irish commentators and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – triggered by the recent Gaza War – has resulted in further examinations of Irish history and historiography regarding this particular question.

I continue to be surprised.

In several of the secondary sources regarding recent Irish history, one comes across a phrase attributed to Mr. Conor Curise O’Brian stating that the long, slow, process of establishing diplomatic relations with the state of Israel was the result of “the Vatican factor.” Mr. O’Brien suggests that Ireland’s government did not want to adjust its position on Israel without Vatican approval.

O’Brien is of interest to historians of this issue because his parents chose to school him in non-denominational, or at least non-Catholic and non-Nationalist, settings. O’Brien is recorded to have attended the Sandford Park School, and Trinity College. This educational context, at least to those of us outside Ireland, suggests that a level of cultural objectivity exists in Mr. O’Brien’s writings when those writing touch upon Irish cultural blind-spots, i.e., influence of Catholicism,Protestantism, and nationalism. Of course,all societies are prone to such cultural blind-spots (the U.S. is no exception).

Nevertheless, when one begins the process of sorting out Mr. O’Brien’s viewpoint, there is a good deal of biographical material to turn toward. In 1944, as WWII was reaching its Western European climax, Mr. O’Brian was transferred at his request to the Irish Department of External Affairs, here is the picture he presents and this is a primary source observation:

Anyone who knew the department as it was in those days, and who knew me, would have thought it highly improbable that the department would accept me. Joseph P. Walshe, the secretary--that is, permanent head--of the department, was an exceptionally devout Catholic, even by the exacting standards of the Ireland of the first half of the twentieth century. He had served thirteen years of the novitiate for the Jesuit order before being rejected on grounds of ill health. Rome, for Walshe, was still the center of the civilized world. And not only papal Rome but also political Rome in the thirties and early forties. Mussolini had been his hero, both as anti-communist champion and as restorer of the glories of Rome. A memo of his, in June of 1940, reveals him as exhilarated by the victories of the Axis (as he saw it; they were of course really German) and implies that Irish neutrality should be revised in a pro-Axis sense. He hoped to see Ireland aligned, after the war, with Franco's Spain, Salazar's Portugal, and Mussolini's Italy, forming a stabilizing Catholic element within the New Order, which he expected would follow the victory of the Axis. By 1944, of course, this blissful vision was fading fast. But Walshe's outlook did not change. He was always an extreme-right-wing Catholic in his personal views. His official position was significantly different. I shall come to that.

To a person holding those views, my CV was necessarily repulsive. My secondary school, Sandford Park, in Dublin, was a nondenominational school for boys. The boys were the children of Protestants, liberal Jews, and dissident Catholics--roughly a third of each description. From Joe Walshe's point of view, this was the most disreputable and morally contagious collection and environment that one could find in Catholic Ireland, with one exception: Trinity College, Dublin, an Anglican foundation, then under ban by the Catholic Church. No Catholic could attend it without a dispensation without committing a mortal sin. From Sandford Park, I went to Trinity College, without asking for a dispensation: a second large black mark in Walshe's book.” (Conor Cruise O’Brian, “The Roots of my Preoccupation” July, 1994).

This is a sobering picture and it is worth discussing. What was the role, for example, of Mr. Joseph P. Walshe with respect to framing Ireland’s Israel policy? He was secretary of the Department of External Affairs in 1944 and remained in that position until he became Ireland's ambassador to the Holy See, in 1946.
The point is determining the bias inherent in each historian or writer treating a subject and weighing the work accordingly. Going back to Mr. O’Brien and the Ireland-Vatican post, what Mr. O’Brien asserts appears at first glance to be in evidence in the diplomatic record.

That is to say, Ireland’s policy toward Israel appears to be more than influenced by the Vatican; it may be argued that Ireland allows the Holy See to take the lead on this issue and lends its direct support.

Mr. O’Brien, in fact, demonstrates a very strong command of the primary source material he cites in his works. He also shows and unusually strong interest in areas of historiography outside of a direct Irish perspective.

In contrast to this position, much modern Irish historiography tends to downplay the role of the Vatican in Irish policy toward Israel and instead shape narratives that attribute hostility toward Israel to an ingrained Irish hatred of partitions in general. However, one should again note that one finds both positions articulated in Mr. O’Brien’s works.

I am informed by several Irish commentators that Mr. O’Brien is not held in the highest regard as an historian in Ireland today. However, he appears to be an accurate and objective source.

Lastly, if Mr. O’Brien and what can be gleaned from the diplomatic record is correct, Ireland has for many years directly followed Vatican political policy with respect to Israel. While it may be argued that Ireland did not formulate this policy, it may equally be said that it has given direct support to policies formulated by Pope Pius XII that were infused with anti-Semitism, anti-Judaism, and anti-Zionism. If Ireland’s diplomacy is not considered by the Irish themselves as any one of these three things; at the very least one can assert that Ireland is indifferent to all three and their influences, direct and indirect, on this area of Irish foreign policy in the immediate post-World War II period.

Kind Regards

Emerald Isle and Emerald City: Ireland and Israeli Diplomacy

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Image: President of Ireland, Sean Thomas O’Kelly, received by Pope Pius XII. Mr. O'Ceallaigh was President of the Republic of Ireland from 1945-1959 and set the tone for diplomatic relations between Ireland and Israel.

"If one were to throw a sack of flour over the Irish parliament, it is unlikely that anybody pro-Israeli would get white. Among the 120 members of the Dáil-the Irish parliament's lower house-and the hundred members of the Senate, not one name springs to mind as a regular defender of Israel. There are either those who do not care or pro-Palestinians."

Dr. Rory Miller interview comments (cited from Manfred Gerstenfeld, interview with Rory Miller, "Irish Attitudes toward Israel," European-Israeli Relations, 181-94).

Some Context

My uncle has a long-running blog wherein he regularly writes on current events issues. The recent conflict in Gaza is no exception. During the course of the commentary and debate on his blog (The Scenic Route), several Irish citizens took strong issue with the pro-Israel positions of my uncle and his circle (of which I count myself). I found the positions these Irish writers held of interest because such opinions ran counter to what I otherwise expected based on my views of Irish history, in retrospect, rather naïve views perhaps.

Much, if not all of the historiography related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is fraught with polemic and political bias; however, the question was raised whether or not countries with predominantly Catholic populations and cultural history, by virtue of their deep enculturation with church attitudes towards Judaism and Islam, carry over subliminal cultural bias against either Israelis or Palestinians.

As this question applies to Ireland, the Irish commentators appeared to stress that their objections to the Israeli position in the ongoing conflict was rooted in secular and humanitarian premises, not religious ones. Thus these commentators objected to Zionism and not Judaism, while at the same time expressing understanding of Hamas while condemning terrorism. It is difficult to reconcile these points of view and one is struck by the similarity of these individuals’ respective view with those of presented by the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign: (link:http://www.ipsc.ie/index.php)Much of The Scenic Route’s critique of the politics of the Left and its stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict appears directed at organizations and umbrella groups of this ilk. This site contains links to a wide range of human rights organizations as well as to thinkers and writers on the Israeli Left and Palestinian center. The IPSC, while relatively small, is among the most vocal groups of its type. The page devoted to Irish voices lists a total of three politicians, leaving one with the impression that those politicos willing to back the Hamas position in Irish politics are relatively few in number.

Anti-Jewish, or Anti-Zionist, or Anti-Israeli?

Under the category: The Importance of Ireland’s Role [as an arbitrator?] one may read the following paragraph:“Irish diplomats and politicians speak with the moral authority derived from our history of peaceful co-existence, cooperation and mutual respect for other peoples and nations of the world since the foundation of our state. Owing to our centuries long struggle for independence and recent experience of conflict resolution, others who long for justice and peace are inspired by the Irish peace process.”

However inspired the world may or may not be with the Irish peace process, the casual observer has every right to examine the record of Irish diplomats and politicians to speak with moral authority on the question of the Israeli-Palestinian problem.It is worth remarking that Ireland, in pursuing its diplomatic role as an international self-styled moral authority, has been in the vanguard of United Nations efforts to speak out on issues of religious intolerance. In an interview conducted by Manfred Gerstenfield with American Law professor Anne Bayefsky, Bayefsky “points out that Ireland has been the EU's leading state on the subject of religious intolerance at the United Nations. Yet it was determined to exclude any mention of anti-Semitism from the 2003 UN resolution on religious intolerance. Ultimately, to avoid a separate motion by Israel, Ireland agreed to include such mention if Israel withdrew its motion, which it did. Yet, the Irish delegation reneged on its promise.” (Manfred Gerstenfeld, interview with Anne Bayefsky, "The United Nations: Leading Global Purveyor of Anti-Semitism," Post-Holocaust and Anti-Semitism, 31, 1 April 2005).

While several scholars are quick to observe that this diplomatic behavior smacks of a form of anti-Semitism, one must weigh the possible provenance of such a policy. After all, it is a diplomatic axiom that nations have no permanent friends, only permanent interests. On the level of economic exchanges, for example, the record between Ireland and Israel are distinctly more positive. A quick survey of Irish diplomatic behavior toward Israel since 1948 suggests that there exists a set of biases that require careful and critical examination.First, in the most recent major example of Ireland's diplomatic attitude toward Israel and Arab terrorism it may be stated that Ireland was one of only three countries, the others being France and Spain, that sought to prevent the EU from declaring Hezbollah a terrorist organization. (Rory Miller, Ireland and the Palestine Question, 1948-2004, by, Irish Academic Press, 2005).

Nineteenth-Century Extraterritorial Protection of Christians in the Ottoman Empire: A Legacy Continued by Current Vatican Diplomacy?

By way of aside, the monarchies of Bourbon France and Bourbon Spain each carried titles conferred by the Pope designating the Christian role of these monarchies as temporal powers under a duty to protect Christians. The French monarchs were designated Christianissimus (Most Christian) and the Spanish monarchs were designated Catholicus. The politics of the Spanish reconquest of the Iberian peninsula and the expulsion of the Muslim and Jewish populations therein during the XV and XVI centuries did much to shape the demographics of early modern Palestine. Moreover on the subject of extra-territorial rights concerning the protection of Christians in Muslim lands, particularly in with respect to Ottoman-era Palestine and the city of Jerusalem, France and Spain have served as a Vatican sanctioned Christian state-powers charged with the protection of Christians at the holy places. Here is a summary of the historical legal position of Jerusalem related to the nineteenth-century Ottoman Capitulations as summarize by the Irael Ministry of Foreign Affairs:

The Holy Places in the city have often been a matter for dispute. In the 19th century there was bitter controversy when certain European countries extended their protection over the various Christian churches in Palestine, and over their Holy Places. Some of the Powers also established consulates in Jerusalem (France, Britain, Russia, Prussia, Austria, Sardinia, Spain and the United States). For the purpose of regulating the status of the various churches at the Holy Places, the Ottoman government published a number of firmans, the most important being that of 1852. This firman dealt with certain Holy Places and determined the powers and rights of the various Churches in those places. This arrangement was generally known as the 'status quo', and has been applied to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and its dependencies, the Convent of Deir al-Sultan, the Sanctuary of the Ascension (on the Mount of Olives), the Tomb of the Virgin Mary (near Gethsemane) in Jerusalem as well as the Church of the Nativity, the Milk Grotto and the Shepherds' Field near Bethlehem.It is worth hypothesizing the extent to which historical Vatican policy toward the status of Jerusalem has affected the diplomatic relations of these three modern majority Catholic European states, Ireland, France, and Spain with the modern state of Israel.

For the record, the Vatican itself has never backed away from what was essentially a nineteenth-century position supporting the extraterritorial (one would now use the term international) nature of Jerusalem. The Vatican did not offer official recognition to the state of Israel until December 30th, 1993.The Vatican felt compelled to articulate its position on the extraterritoriality of Jerusalem with the successful formation of the state of Israel in 1948 in two Encyclicals issued by Pope Pius XII (In Multiplicibus, 10/24/1948 and Redemptoris Nostri Cruciatus, 04/15/1949). Below are the relevant excerpts from the 1949 Encyclical:

9. We have never ceased to pray repeatedly for this enduring and genuine peace. And to the end that it might be brought to fruition and permanence at the earliest possible moment, We have already insisted in Our Encyclical letter In Multiplicibus, that the time has come when Jerusalem and its vicinity, where the previous memorials of the Life and Death of the Divine Redeemer are preserved, should be accorded and legally guaranteed an "international" status, which in the present circumstances seems to offer the best and most satisfactory protection for these sacred monuments.

10. We cannot help repeating here the same declaration, encouraged by the thought that it may also serve as an inspiration to Our children. Let them, wherever they are living, use every legitimate means to persuade the rulers of nations, and those whose duty it is to settle this important question, to accord to Jerusalem and its surroundings a juridical status whose stability under the present circumstances can only be adequately assured by a united effort of nations that love peace and respect the right of others.

11. Besides, it is of the utmost importance that due immunity and protection be guaranteed to all the Holy Places of Palestine not only in Jerusalem but also in the other cities and villages as well.12. Not a few of these places have suffered serious loss and damage owing to the upheaval and devastation of the war. Since they are religious memorials of such moment—objects of veneration to the whole world and an incentive and support to Christian piety—these places should also be suitably protected by definite statute guaranteed by an "international" agreement.

Link to full text: http://www.catholic-forum.com/saints/pope0260cc.htm

It is worth consulting the full text of this document. The redaction fails to mention the state of Israel and its overall points and concerns mirror diplomatic discourse found in official statements made by the governments of France, Spain, and most particularly, Ireland. Such parallelism between the Vatican positions taken toward Israel and the official and unofficial discourse on the Israel-Palestinian conflict one reads in Irish political tracts suggests that historians would be justified in taking up the important question of Ireland’s role in support of Vatican policy in East Jerulsalem and the extent to which the policy of Ireland toward Jerusalem specifically and toward the state of Israel generally, is informed by Vatican positions regarding Holy Sites.

Ireland for example, did not extend immediate recognition to the state of Israel in 1948. Irish policy in this matter appears not to follow and independent source. Rather, Irish policy solidly adheres to Vatican developments. This is illustrated by that government extending to Israel the barest minimum of recognition and only upgraded diplomatic relations when questions arose surrounding Ireland’s application to join the European Union. Thus one finds the very odd diplomatic announcement by Ireland on 25 January 1964 that it had granted de jure recognition to Israel “some time ago.”(note: Stefan Talmon: Recognition of Governments in International Law (1998), p. 73)

But like the Vatican, Ireland withheld full recognition and establishment of full diplomatic relations was slow, very slow (the agreement to establish diplomatic relations was not finalized until 12 December 1974). Lastly, it very curious to note that the Irish government did not approve the opening of the Israeli embassy in Dublin until 14 December 1993, some two weeks prior to the official recognition of the state of Israel by the Vatican. (note: Talmon (1998) p. 73). Again, such diplomatic parallelism is too stark to ignore.

Farrallones Islands

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