Transnational Trade in the Wartime North Atlantic: The Voyage of the Snow Recovery

The voyage of a small ocean-going trading vessel, of a type known as a snow, provides a window into the world of wartime commerce in the late colonial period. In March 1760, the snow Recovery, which was owned by a consortium of North American and Irish businessmen, traveled from New York City to Belfast, Ireland, and from there to the tiny Dutch island of Curaçao. From Curaçao, the snow sailed north to the Bay of Monte Cristi in Spanish Santo Domingo, where it loaded French sugar and coffee, mostly purchased through Spanish intermediaries, for sale at the German port of Hamburg. Upon leaving the bay for a brief stopover in New York, the Recovery was seized by a British warship and carried to Jamaica for condemnation in the court of vice-admiralty. This trading venture tells us much about mid-eighteenth-century Atlantic markets, their fluidity, adaptability, and responsiveness to change, as well as their integration into a single system of production, commerce, and finance.