Captured ship: San Francisco Xavier alias La Perla (master Don Josef Perez Muente...

HCA 30/314

1760-1779

Captured ship: San Francisco Xavier alias La Perla (master Don Josef Perez Muente (José Pérez de Muente) former master Don Melchor de Alarcón).

Details: Spanish register ship carrying cargo of silver, gold, copper, wool, cocoa and cascarilla, on voyage from Callao near Lima, Peru, to Cadiz, captured off the Azores by the British privateers Sprightly, James Bett commander, and Shark, William Waring commander, on 29 October 1779.

Documents: nos. 1910, 1912, 1926, 1929 to 1943, and 2001 to 2111: c 100 personal and business letters (mostly in Spanish) from Lima for onward delivery to Cadiz, Madrid and other destinations; bills of lading, cargo manifests and notebooks detailing cargo for previous voyages 1766-68 when Don Melchor de Alarcón was master (no. 1943); financial accounts etc relating to previous voyages of La Perla (no. 2003); collection of c 200 personal and business letters addressed to the ship's former master Don Melchor de Alarcón, dated 1775 - 1778, including some from his mother and letters of introduction for passengers on his ship (nos. 1938-1942); accounts of baize, cloth and pita fibre (balleta, pañete and pita) issued to the crew (nos. 1929-1936); accounts of private commissions (no. 1926).

Note: the letters and papers captured from La Perla are in pieces HCA 30/275 and 276, and 311 to 316, and have been re-ordered, as far as practicable, in one continuous sequence using the original numbers given them by the Prize Court in 1779 (nos. 1 to 1993). The sequence has been extended to no. [2293] for papers which either were never numbered or which have lost their association with an original number through damage or separation.

This re-ordering supersedes the previous bundle numbers used as references in Xabier Lamikiz Trade and Trust in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (2010). References from that work can be traced using the number of the letter, where given, ignoring the piece and bundle numbers. Refer to the catalogue to find in which piece a particular numbered paper is now located.

See the description of piece HCA 30/275 for a list of items which are known to be somewhere among the papers of La Perla but it is not known in which piece.

The letters and papers of La Perla as a whole are written in Spanish, with a few in French, Italian, Latin, English, Portuguese, Catalan and Basque.

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No. [2293] added from HCA 30/265 in November 2023.

See HCA 30/275, HCA 30/276, HCA 30/311, HCA 30/312, HCA 30/313, HCA 30/315 and HCA 30/316 for more letters and papers, and HCA 32/334/9 for the main collection of ship's papers and court process etc

Public Record(s)

Miscellaneous and Spanish

Open Document, Open Description

Topics

International

Litigation

Trade and commerce

Americas

Armed Forces (General Administration)