Love letters, cries of despair and shoe orders, centuries late

In a love letter from 1745 decorated with a doodle of a heart shot through with arrows, María Clara de Aialde wrote to her husband, Sebastian, a Spanish sailor working in the colonial trade with Venezuela, that she could “no longer wait” to be with him.

Later that same year, an amorous French seaman who signed his name M. Lefevre wrote from a French warship to a certain Marie-Anne Hoteé back in Brest: “Like a gunner sets fire to his cannon, I want to set fire to your powder.”

Fifty years later, a missionary in Suriname named Lene Wied, in a lonely letter back to Germany, complained that war on the high seas had choked off any news from home: “Two ships which have been taken by the French probably carried letters addressed to me.”

None of those lines ever reached their intended recipients. British warships instead snatched those letters, and scores more, from aboard merchant ships during wars from the 1650s to the early 19th century.

While the ships’ cargoes — sugar from the Caribbean, tobacco from Virginia, ivory from Guinea, enslaved people bound for the Americas — became war plunder, the papers were bundled off to so-called “prize courts” in London as potential legal proof that the seizures were legitimate spoils of war.

For centuries since, the bulging boxes of those undelivered letters, seized from around 35,000 ships, sat neglected in British government storage, a kind of half-forgotten dead letter office for intercepted mail.

Poorly sorted and only vaguely catalogued, the Prize Papers, as they became known, have now begun revealing lost treasures. Archivists at Britain’s National Archives and a research team at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg in Germany are working on a joint project to sort, catalogue and digitise the collection, which gives a nuanced portrait of private lives, international commerce and state power in an age of rising empires.

The project, expected to last two decades, aims to make the collection of more than 160,000 letters and hundreds of thousands of other documents, written in at least 19 languages, freely available and easily searchable online.

Many of the papers haven’t been read in centuries, and many letters remain sealed and unopened.

“You find so many individual voices by men, women — children, even — who speak, not as a colonial administrator, but as a person abroad,” said Dagmar Freist, a historian at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg who directs the Prize Papers Project. “They would describe their social interactions with other religious groups, with enslaved people, with rituals and traditions,” she added. “It allows you insights into everyday life.”

The paperwork of colonial commerce makes up much of collection: invoices for goods, contracts, bills of lading. Reports from the managers of colonial slave plantations, dispatched to owners and investors in Europe, also turn up frequently.

But some are poignant and personal. A German sailor on a merchant ship captured in the 18th century copied out a poem for his daughter’s baptism. One letter mailed back to Europe requesting a new pair of shoes includes the traced outline of the writer’s foot to match the size.

An intercepted cache of letters to Spanish prisoners of war from their wives and children on Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands, includes complaints about the hardship of scratching out a living alone during wartime, and details the outbreak of an epidemic on the island: “Distemper begun with Pains in the head, Stitches, lowness of Spirits and a loathing of the Stomach.”

Archivists and a team of volunteers have begun sorting the documents — some still coated in soot and grease, and smelling of the filthy 1800s London air — in some cases matching paper creases or other marks to bring together scattered pages.

Conservators at the National Archives clean and preserve the collection, while two photographers, hired by the project through the German Historical Institute London, meticulously document the intricate work.