What do the Prize Papers comprise?
Among 500,000 documents, originally stored in 4,088 boxes and penned in 19 languages are:
• 160,000 undelivered letters
• Logbooks
• Ships papers and bills
• Poems
• Drawings
• Fabric, glass beads, locks of hair, scraps of silk, a quill, sheet music, playing cards – and even a coffee bean!
How did this collection come about?
Through the long 18th century Britain was at war with Europe for approximately half of those years, explains Amanda Bevan, at The National Archives, Kew. Today warfare tends to be viewed as a land-based activity, but in centuries past the sea was where much of the conflict took place. Amanda: “During the French Revolutionary/Napoleonic Wars, and the War of 1812, the British alone captured almost 20,000 ships…