Comments by "" (@VersusARCH) on "The Drydock - Episode 201" video.

  1. 11:37 - Hm... I can think of at least one instance where it was kind of technically the case (with a stretch). In 1793, during the French Revolutionary war, when the town and naval base of Toulon rebelled against the republican government in Paris, and in support of the monarchy - they took control of the Toulon squadron which included the first rate ship of the line named Commerce de Marseille. The royalists sailed out of besieged Toulon with it (and some 3rd rates) to prevent their recapture by the republicans. From the perspective of the revolutionary government which was de facto rulling most of France they could be considered pirates. (and if one were to reject the legitimacy of the republican government and the subsequent 1st Empire then their entire navies could be considered pirates - including the 1st rate Orient and 2nd rate Tonnant at the Battle of the Nile and the 2nd rate Bucentaure at the Battle of Trafalgar :) ). Commerce de Marseille was later seized by the British navy. So yeah, while strictly speaking Drach gave a correct answer (those weren't really pirates, but rather a party in a civil war), when you add legal shenanigans about legitimacy, you could argue that for a short while they technically kind of did. Similar things happened during the English Civil War when the defeated royalists maintained a navy under Prince Rupert of the Rhine and preyed on parliamentary merchant ships. I am not sure about the sizes of ships they used, though, if anyone knows whether they had any ships of the line I'd like to know. It would be an interesting topic for a special - "When the entire Royal Navy was pirate" :)... (since the opposing parliamentary navy which represented the government that effectively controlled England definitely wasn't the ROYAL navy).
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  2. It would have been really funny had the royalists in Toulon actually got to use the Commerce de Marseille to attack the commerce of nearby Marseille...
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