In March 1757, following the outbreak of hostilities between France and Great Britain, the Two Sisters, John Dennis master, a two-masted, square-rigged Irish merchantman or snow, was captured by a Bristol privateer, the Caesar, Ezekiel Nash master, en route from Bordeaux to Dublin. Her cargo was seized and her crew was pressed into British naval service. Dennis had good reason to believe that the seizure was illegal and eventually, after numerous vicissitudes, his case and that of his crew ended up in the High Court of Admiralty in London where he and his backers were successful. His ship and his cargo, or most of it, were returned to him. However, it was not until September 1757, almost a year after embarking on her voyage from Ireland, that the Two Sisters finally made her way back to Dublin. In and of itself, the capture of the Irish snow would not warrant further examination. It was merely one of hundreds of such incidents during the Seven Years War (1756–63). What renders the seizure of the Two Sisters worthy of scholarly attention was her cargo and a parcel of letters that she had on board. First, her cargo: this consisted mostly of various kinds of wine and cork, as well as, inter alia, ‘white paper for printers’ use’, ‘artificial flowers for women’s hair’, ‘women’s white leather gloves bound with ribbon’, ‘lavender water’ and a selection of edibles such as ‘sweetmeats’, ‘preserv’d fruit’ and ‘kegs [of] olives about two quarts each’. We have details of all these items, and more, because of the ‘true and perfect inventory of the goods wares and merchandise’ on board ship drawn up for the scrutiny of the members of the High Court of Admiralty (and here published, pp 289–94). Second, and more significantly and quite exceptionally, the Two Sisters also carried a bundle of letters from Irish residents in Bordeaux and its region that were destined for various friends, business associates and relatives in Ireland. Curiously – there was a war on, and letters from France to Ireland formed a staple of Irish Protestant paranoia about Jacobite conspiracy – these letters received only a cursory examination at the time, most were unopened, and all were eventually deposited in the archives of the High Court of Admiralty along with the other legal documents generated by the lawsuit pursued by John Dennis and his associates. There the letters remained, apparently untouched, until Thomas M. Truxes, searching for a different set of documents, uncovered them in 2011. These letters, 125 in total, are now published in full in this fine edition, and fully vindicate the editors’ claim that they provide ‘an extraordinary entrée into a long-vanished world’.
Inevitably, given that this postbag constituted a true mixum gatherum, the letters defy easy categorisation. A large number of the letter-writers were in the wholesale trade and shipping business, but some correspondents were Irish prisoners of war, or Irish priests/seminarians, or Huguenots, and very many letters were written between spouses, among siblings, between parents and children, or among cousins. As a whole they make for absorbing reading. Here is Denis Kelly, fed-up with school (and penury) in France, and threatening to ‘engage me self with the French Otherwise to make me self a soldier’ unless some money was forthcoming. His threat was dismissed by his uncle ‘as the usual menace … all the good for nothing boys here do to their friends, to extort money’ (pp 108, 151). Then there is the advice of Walter Codd, a prisoner of the French, to Catty, his wife about the upbringing of their daughters: he hoped [they] ‘will avoid the too Common Custom of Dublin girls, Such as Gadding Abroad etc’ and he urged Catty to make them pay attention to ‘theyr needle’ because ‘its as great a Scandall for girls to be ignorant of theyr needle as it is for men not to understand The use of the pen’ (p. 63). Another prisoner of war, Richard Exham, had other concerns, railing at ‘the Dacait and Roguery, fleecing us in every shape and making us pay mostly on every article we have three hundred per Ct’ that he had encountered from his captors (p. 83). The voice of women is particularly impressive in this collection, even though only ten of the 125 letters were written by females. Perhaps the most interesting and poignant are the three written by young Irish women in service. Here is Mary Flynn, a domestic servant in the home of Bordeaux wine merchant, James Beab, writing to Mrs Catrin Norris, her sister [in-law], ‘living feaceing the blackelying in [facing the Blacklion inn] Temple Bare, Dubllin’ and asking her to ‘be Sure to Rite to me by the furst had you Chan get’, and to ‘sind me all nws’ (p. 198). Indeed, it is this aspect of the letters as a whole that the editors find most striking: ‘The centrality of family in the letters bears out studies which have shown that the family was the core institution in organising and sustaining commerce in the early modern English-speaking world’ (p. 62). And the letters written by various members of the Black family of Bordeaux bear this out.
The editorial work is of the highest order, with full transcriptions and, where necessary, translations of all the letters. Additionally, in an important series of chapters, the essential context for the letters is revealed. Thus L. M. Cullen distils the researches of a lifetime into a vivid portrait of the Irish community in Bordeaux, John Shovlin ably surveys the Atlantic world at war in 1757, while Thomas Truxes details the fortunes of the Two Sisters. ‘I dare not say any more’, noted William Cunningham to a Cork correspondent, ‘as I believe this letter will be opened before it reaches you.’ Cunningham was wrong; but the letters have now all been opened and confirm the editors’ view that they are undoubtedly of ‘exceptional social historical value’ (p. xiii).
