Surrender did not exist

[akd]

https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0957646127

I will say, it was negotiating at the gun point.

Job being the original owner of the Swallow.

It's actually quite an interesting story in its total.

I honestly cannot follow your reasoning.  The above concerns a British privateer that was seized along with her French prize by another British privateer under the pretext that the former was a smuggler.  It is not particularly surprising that the English owner felt he had recourse to obtain the release of his ship and crew.  Note that the French prize originally taken was eventually condemned and sold, and there was no negotiation with her owner or opportunity for him to get his ship back.

 

Note, however, that prizes were sometimes ransomed in lieu of taking possession.  AFAIK, this pertained only to merchant vessels and was in no way an automatic outcome of one ship striking to another.

 

 

In wartime, the courts are likely to be biased toward home-country plaintiffs

or defendants, but, as Samuel Johnson might have remarked, it is a wonder that the

courts were resorted to at all. In fact, they were surprisingly judicious toward enemy

vessels and their owners. For example, a court declared the first two American prizes

in the War of 1812 to be invalid because their skippers had not yet had the chance to

learn of the state of war (Chidsey 1962, 88).6  The remarkable institutions of ransom

and parole also illustrate how the law and custom of the seas regulated privateering.

 

Not all prizes were as valuable as the Hopewell.A smart captain such as Thomas Boyle

would not risk a prize master and crew to bring into port a vessel full of fish.

Better in that case to transfer the most valuable cargo to the privateer and sink the

prize. But what should the privateer do when the prize was valuable, but its own crew

was short and the prize far from a friendly port?

 

Captain Boyle faced this situation several times, and he did what any good businessman

would do: he called on the captain of the prize and suggested a deal. If the captain would

agree on behalf of the prize owners to pay a ransom, Boyle would release

the prize and its crew. In addition, Boyle would give the captain of the ransomed ships

papers guaranteeing that it would not be taken again by another American privateer.

Such a deal is remarkable because the privateer already had physical control over and

the legal right to the prize, so the ransom was nothing more than a promise to pay.

When the owners of a prize received a bill for ransom due, why would they ever pay?

 

They did so for several reasons, not least because for centuries such contracts had

been enforced in courts of law. Under the British common law, a promise made under

duress was not enforceable. In the case of prizes, however, the duress was not personal,

but against the cargo and ship that the privateer had the legal right to sink (Petrie 1999,

20). Although ransoms were enforceable in common law, legislation in 1782 had over-

ruled the common law and made such promises unenforceable in a British court. Nev-

ertheless, British merchants continued to pay ransom, sometimes against the wishes of

their own government, because such promises were enforceable in the courts of other

nations. If a British merchant refused to pay the ransom of an American privateer, for

example, his assets in much of the rest of the world might be legally seized. Merchants

without assets outside of Great Britain, however, might refuse to pay even if they were

hounded in the courts (Petrie 1999, 30). Barring all such recourse, a privateer might

choose to hold hostage the captain of the prize as a performance bond, although this

option seems not to have been chosen very often (Petrie 1999, 21).

 

https://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_11_04_06_tabarrok.pdf

[Skully]

I honestly cannot follow your reasoning.  The above concerns a British privateer that was seized along with her French prize by another British privateer under the pretext that the former was a smuggler.  It is not particularly surprising that the English owner felt he had recourse to obtain the release of his ship and crew.  Note that the French prize originally taken was eventually condemned and sold, and there was no negotiation with her owner or opportunity for him to get his ship back.

 

Note, however, that prizes were sometimes ransomed in lieu of taking possession.  AFAIK, this pertained only to merchant vessels and was in no way an automatic outcome of one ship striking to another.

I think you nailed it there. It may not have been automatic or anything, but rather a good business transaction.

I have now written up the complete proposal at http://forum.game-labs.net/index.php?/topic/15399-strike-colours-ruse-de-guerre-surrender-while-sinking-patch-proposal/

IMO we shouldn't go for Price Court mechanics. If we take away instant reward, you can imagine the posts.