The Saint Nicholas's Day, a curious vessel…

The Saint Nicholas's Day, a curious vessel ordered by Nicolas van Hoorn, had made its appearance in the Caribbean at the very end of 1682.

This vessel, in the armament of which the commander of the Dover Castle had taken part, had left England the previous year, intending to trade with the Spaniards in Cadiz then in America.

Nicolas Porcio, who was one of the holders of Asiento—a royal license granting the monopoly of the draft of the slaves in the Spanish colonies—had apparently promised to obtain for van Hoorn the permission to sell him Africans in Spanish America.

Now transformed into a true pirate, van Hoorn had started a voyage of plundering along the coasts of Western Africa expecting to be supplied with slaves, as the depositions of four of his men reveal. (These depositions, taken in front of Reginald Wilson, the naval officer of Port Royal, will be transmitted by the governor of Jamaica, Sir Thomas Lynch, to the secretary of the committee for the Trade and the Plantations, William Blathwayt, with his letter of March 4, 1683.)

Indeed, before the arrival of van Hoorn in America, the English colonial authorities had been informed of his piracies in Africa, and—more serious—the fact that the Saint Nicholas's Day had openly broken with its British ship-owners to act on van Hoorn's own account.

Thus, cruising against the forbans of the Antilles on order of the Governor Lynch, Jamaican captain George Johnson falls on van Hoorn, in December 1682, but can demand no account nor explanation.

The president of the royal Audiencia of Santo Domingo had indeed prohibited Johnson from any contact with van Hoorn.

The reason is simple: the president retains the Saint Nicholas's Day for a flight made from Cadiz by his captain, for whom what remains in African slaves is confiscated.

All this makes van Hoorn determined to gain the French part of Hispaniola, to take a commission from its governor, the Sieur de Pouançay, and to assemble the famous pirate assault on Vera Cruz.