Vente de prise a Etaples. Chanvre & Lin de Russie, Fer en Barres.

A COMPREHENSIVE BOULOGNE BROADSIDE ANNOUNCING AN AUCTION IN ÉTAPLES (PAS-DE-CALAIS REGION) OF THE CARGO OF A BRITISH BRIG TAKEN BY BOULOGNE CORSAIRE JEAN AUGUSTIN "PAQUETTE" HURET

[AUCTION, BRITISH BRIG CARGO]. [HURET, Jean Augustin, corsaire]. Vente de prise Anglaise a Étaples. Chanvre & Lin de Russie, Fer en Barres, &c. Le onze Frimaire an huit. agissant pour les Citoyens DELPORTE FRERES, Armateurs du Corsaire L'ESPIEGLE, Capitaine J. HURET, à la Vente de la Cargaison d'un Navire-Brick Anglias, Prise faite par ledit Corsaire. Savoir:... Folio broadside, 18 1/2 x 14", untrimmed. Boulogne, de l'Imprimerie de [François] Dolet, An VIII [1799].

Apparently unrecorded. Announces the December 2, 1799 auction at the French port of Étaples, Pas-de-Calais, of the cargo and other contents of a 193-ton British brig taken by the corsaire Jean Augustin Huret (1767-1814), captain of the ship L'Espiegle (Mischievous)sailing for shipowners Citizens Delporte frères. Huret, a native of Boulogne, was active as a privateer from 1793 to his death in that city in 1814, during which time he comanded more than a dozen privateers. He died after a duel with an English officer at his mansion in Boulogne at 7;00 A. M., December 4, 1814. According to Henri Malo in his work Les Corsaires (1913), Huret was a non-stop privateer, "one of the great corsairs bolonnais of the Empire." In this instance we have found, with a deep dive on a translation on Geneanet: Tree Plug Matches, that on October 23rd or 24th Huret, with his brother Guillaume as second, and 34 crew, at the point of Les Perrées, met with a convoy of 200 British sail, sailing to the South East. Approaching, he took the brig Joseph Garland, but is chased and finds it impossible to gain Boulogne and is forced to go to Étalpes, coasting under the fort of Lornay, in front of Carniers. His capture was sold at this auction for 92,242.57 francs. From 1803 to 1805 Marshal Ney's Sixth Army Corps was starioned in or near Étalpes so as to threaten an invasion of England. Hemp, copper and iron were required to build fully rigged ships, and the British had long relied on such items being supplied by Russia, a fact not lost on Napoleon. Historically, at the start of any hostilities Britain's enemies would move to block the supply from the Baltic. "The desire to make Britain independent of Russia in the matter of raw materials was central to the Board of Trade's effort in the last two decades of the eighteenth century...Charles] Middleton [comptroller of the Navy Board] emphasized the dangerous reliance on Russia for stores. As he argued 'it is for hemp only we are dependant on Russia...but it is impractical to carry on a naval war without hemp'...but by January 1807...No ground had been made: the British were still unwilling dependants on Russia."-James Davey, The Transformation of British Naval Strategy: Seapower and Supply in Northern Europe, 1800-1812 (2012), p. 23. In that context here are the captured materials from the English brig to be auctioned in Étalpes: 4524 iron bars; 235 linen balls; 611 linen boots; 30,000 to 40,000 hemp, 209 red fir planks two to three inches thick, 14 beams for shipbuilding; and 23 other cuttings; 12 barrels of tallow, tar, fish paste, etc. Articles of the ship to be sold included anchors, cables, sails, rope, 60 pulleys, brasses, rudders; and much more, right down to a large folding table, a copper fireplace; an iron kitchen from the bridge, and two wooden chairs, 37 catagories in all. For biographical information about Captain Huret see, Nos Corsaires Boulonnais:Jean Augustin Huret dit Paquette et son frère Guillaum in, Les dossiers de l'histoire boulonnaise, No. 21, May-June, 1980, pp. 20-22. The broadside ends with the conditions of sale. Apparently unrecorded. Fine copy, with small, undecipherable oval stamp at top left corner. 84438 ABAA-VBF