- Westmorland (ship)
The "Westmorland" or "Westmoreland" [Sometimes referred to as HMS Westmoreland/Westmorland. However, according to "
Ships of the Royal Navy ", like most other privateers she was never actually commissioned into theRoyal Navy .] was a 26-gun Britishprivateer frigate , operating in theMediterranean Sea against French shipping in retaliation for France's opposition to Great Britain in theAmerican Revolutionary War .ervice history
The most notable incident in her life occurred shortly after she sailed for Britain from
Livorno under Captain Michael Wallace in December 1778, carrying a large monetary payment for her inbound cargo of salt cod from Newfoundland (Livorno was a trade hub for this commodity), food goods [These included almost 4000 barrels of anchovies, 129 pounds of silk, 150 crates of manna and oil, thirty-four bales of hemp, thirty-two Parmesan cheeses, twenty-two barrels of Tartar salt and medicines and five crates of artificial flowers.] , and 57 crates of artistic objects collected byGrand Tour ists such as the Duke of Gloucester and Duke of Norfolk [Including Batoni's portrait of Charles Cecil Roberts and a second portrait called An English Gentleman; sculptures byAlbacini andChristopher Hewetson ; a marble chimney originally destined for the Duke of Gloucester; musical scores, violins, violin strings, hats (two barrels!), ornamental fans, expensive books;Piranesi sketches; specimens of lava fromMount Vesuvius sent by William Hamilton; relics; paintings byPompeo Batoni ,Anton Raphael Mengs ,Carlo Maratta ,Guido Reni , andGuercino , among others; modern copies ofRaphael 's paintings; drawings by artists working in Rome, includingJohn Robert Cozens ; 23 crates of ancient Roman marble statues and fragments, plus modern plaster casts; other carved marble mantelpieces, slabs of coloured marble for table-tops, full-sized Piranesi-like "vasi candelabri", 84 rolls of deluxe blank Genoa paper, a crate of flowering onion bulbs and seeds; boxes of pomade, sweetmeats and citrus-blossom water, four barrels of Madeira, and a double-barreled rifle] . She was chased by four French ships, made up of two men-of-war of over 60 guns (the "Carthon" and the "Destin") and two smaller vessels. Wallace attempted to outrun them but, outgunned as he was, soon felt he had little option but to allow the French to board his ship. She was then allowed by Spain (then friendly with France though not yet - in formal terms at least - at war with Britain) to continue toMalaga .At Malaga her artistic contents was passed on from the French government to two trading companies with links to Ireland, despite Wallace's protests that the ship was full of "extremely precious goods" (the French had already seized the "Westmorland" 's cash cargo), and the Spanish king was informed by his prime minister, the
Count of Floridablanca , of the art's arrival. On Spain's declaration of war, king Charles III secretly bought the art from a syndicate of Madrid merchants for 360,000 silver reales (a reduction from their original asking price of 600,000 golddoubloon s, but still a sizeable sum) and had it brought by cart to the capital. (However, the portraits of Basset and Lord Lewisham were acquired by the Spanish Prime Minister.)Though the British consul at
Cadiz had initially informed theBritish Admiralty that the "Westmorland" and her cargo had been seized as legitimate 'prizes', there followed demands by the British ambassador for the repatriation of the art and (in a prisoner exchange for French and Spanish prisoners taken by theRoyal Navy ) the "Westmorland" 's crew and the 10-year correspondence at prime-ministerial level that followed. They all still remain in thePrado Museum , the Real Academia and other Spanish national collections, with only a few exceptions - a package of Catholic relics intended for the Duke of Norfolk, which the Spanish returned unopened to the Vatican; and Sir Watkin Williams Wynn's "Perseus and Andromeda" by Mengs, which has ended up in the collection ofCatherine the Great at theHermitage Museum . Meanwhile, in London in 1784, the £100,000 for which the art had been insured at Livorno was paid out. The "Westmorland" was renamed, re-commissioned into the Spanish fleet but eventually re-captured in theCaribbean by the British.Notes
External links
* [http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0007-6287(200107)143%3A1180%3C420%3ATPOFBB%3E2.0.CO%3B2-S Maria Dolores Sanchez-Jauregui, 'Two Portraits of Francis Basset by Pompeo Batoni in Madrid'] , "
The Burlington Magazine ", Vol. 143, No. 1180 (Jul., 2001), pp. 420-425
*Angus Trumble, 'Pirates of the Mediterranean - mining the cargo of the Westmorland in Madrid', "Trinity Today", December 2007, pages [http://www.trinity.unimelb.edu.au/publications/trinity_today/december2007/TrinityToday66December2007-14.pdf 14] to [http://www.trinity.unimelb.edu.au/publications/trinity_today/december2007/TrinityToday66December2007-15.pdf 15]
* [http://www.museum-security.org/99/032.html Giles Tremlett, 'Spaniards looted British art hoard'] , The Times, 1999
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