Swashbuckling Adventure on the High Seas!

The most recent acquisition to the Bell collection is a 200+ document manuscript archive relating to French corsair activity in the Atlantic and Mediterranean during the 18th and early 19th centuries. The French crown licensed ship captains to capture all ships of France's enemies, whether military, merchant, or private. A rare copy of one of these licenses, called a Letter of Marque" was also acquired with this archive. This important collection of manuscript and printed documents relating to privateering out of St Malo spanning the entire period of the Napoleonic wars, presents a rich source of data on this often romanticized business, its costs, profits, and chief players. The entire collection comes from a lawyer in St. Malo named Bourdet who invested in over fifty different "courses" or ventures between 1793 and 1814. The documents include shares, receipts for transactions relating to particular courses, prospectuses for upcoming ventures, printed accounts listing the costs of outfitting a particular vessel, and records of the “liquidations” of prizes.

New Exhibit Opening on April 14     Learn more

46th Annual James Ford Bell Lecture: Reserve your seat now!   Learn more

A new Bell Library news publication is in production
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