cups, stone and glass bottles, and casks of Dutch knives, but these were claimed by the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. On April 27th, 1827, a Company of Shareholders began digging at the wreck, A to recover part of the cargo, but the result was a failure. A few relics from the Amsterdam are preserved in the Hastings Museum. For many years the wreck was discernible at low water.
Piracy and Privateering.
Cooper, in his History of Winchelsea, says : "The habit of smuggling, wrecking, and privateering led to the perpetration of many crimes ; amongst others, to a revival of those acts of piracy which disgraced the Cinque Ports in the thirteenth century."
Hastings figured largely in these lawless and dangerous pursuits as the following will show :
"On August 11th 1758, Nicholas Wingfield and Adams Hyde of Hastings, masters of two privateer cutters, piratically boarded the Danish ship, 'Der Reisende Jacob,' on board of which was the Marquis Pignatelli, Ambassador Extrordinary from his Catholic Majesty to the Court of Denmark ; assaulting Jurgan Muller, the master of the Vessel, and stealing twenty casks of butter. The Lords of the Admiralty offered a reward of £500. Nicholas Wingfield and Adams Hyde, with four others, having been betrayed by some of their accomplices, were arrested ; and on January 15th, 1759, were brought under a strong guard of soldiers, and lodged in the Marshalsea. They were tried at the Admiralty sessions, March 9th, 1759, and found guilty ; and on the 28th of the same month were hung at Execution Dock. The four others were aquitted. The punishment did not operate as a sufficient warning to the Hastings men. For seven years a gang known as the Ruxley Crew, most of whom lived at Hastings, boarded and robbed several of the ships coming up the channel ; and in particular in 1768, they boarded a Dutch homeward bound hoy, called the " Three Sisters," Peter Bootes, Commander, off Beachy Head, and chopped the master down the back with an axe. The Government sent a detachment of two hundred of the Enniskilling Dragoons to Hastings, to arrest the men, who had been betrayed by their bragging to one another, how the Dutchman wriggled when they had cut him on the back bone ; and a man-of-war and cutter lay off Hastings to receive the men. Several arrests were made of the parties, who were conveyed to the Marshalsea. At the Admiralty Sessions holden of October 30th, 1769, Thomas Phillips, elder and younger, William and George Phillips, Mark Chatfield, Robert Webb, Thomas and Samuel Ailsbury, William Geary, William Wenham, and Richard Hyde, were hung at Execution Dock, Nov. 27th. So great was the panic occasioned by these arrests that a shop-keeper reported worth £10,000, absconded on information of having bought goods of the smugglers." Smith's Sussex Smugglers.
