Paris,
3 January. Letters from Madrid and inland letters dealing with the shipwrecked
Columbian vessel off Gibraltar with a crew numbering 70 men and who surrendered
to the Spanish confirmed that it was the ‘famous’ Columbian privateer el
General Sobletto. She had been a real danger for the merchant trade causing a
lot of damage. It was already for a long time known that most of her
crewmembers were British of Anglo Americans without any inhabitant of Columbia
and that there was an interpreter on board to communicate with the Spanish
prisoners. The faith of the crew wasn’t known, although the king ordered some
years earlier that every stranger who participated in the war with the
Independents got the death penalty. This order was made after a long diplomatic
correspondence and an official answer of the British and North American
governments, who claimed that their subjects were not allowed to take up the
arms against Spain and that won’t help their subjects who were taken prisoner
by Spain.
