Greeks Into Privateers

Abstract

In February 1769 the head of Russia's College of Foreign Affairs Nikita I. Panin asked Ivan G. Chernyshev, the Russian special envoy to London, to relay "a true and comprehensive summary of English practices and customs relating to the use of privateers (partikuliarnye armatory) in wartime." 1 Of greatest interest to Panin were details such as whether Admiralty patents -or letters of marque, as they were known in England -were entrusted to native-born subjects only or whether "foreign volunteers" (chuzhestrannye okhotniki) might also secure such letters; whether privateers could sail from the empire's ports only or from any neutral or allied port; how much latitude privateers were given in their action against enemy vessels and in conducting searches of neutral vessels; what rules were to be followed in adjudicating cases involving enemy and neutral ships; and, whether the government collected any guarantees or bonds from the privateer that could be used to hold him accountable in the event that he should commit a crime. 2 Panin dispatched his inquiry just as the State Council debated the question of commissioning privateers in the spring of 1769 during the first Russian-Ottoman war (1768-1774) of Catherine II's reign. 3 Before the eighteenth century was out, the Russian state had sanctioned privateers under the Russian flag; however, due to the ongoing uncertainty over which individuals or social groups actually fit into this category, this sanction boiled down not to a single legislative moment but rather to a process spanning three decades. 4 Panin's inquiry notwithstanding, the Russian government at first sought to fit naval auxiliaries within the existing social structures of its armed forces. These early efforts baldly assumed the "eagerness" of voluntaries to serve the Russian monarch in the wording of the first invitations to foreign subjects sail under a Russian 1 In 1718 Russia appropriated the collegiate model of government administration akin to the one used in Sweden. Each college of ten members was headed by a president. Panin, however, was never formally given the rank of chancellor or made president of the College of Foreign Affairs despite being head of Russia's foreign policy in the 1760s and 1770s.