MADISON, James (1751-1836). Letter signed ("James Madison") as Secretary of State to Spanish Minister to the United States Carlos Martínez de Yrujo, Department of State [Washington], 20 June 1805.

One page, bifolium, 245 x 198mm. (lightly toned with some slight creases). Docketed in Spanish on the verso.

Madison sends an irate message after the capture of an American naval ship by a Spanish privateer. Referencing an earlier letter sent on June 11th, the Secretary of State encloses a copy of a certificate from a "Captain Kennedy of Philadelphia" and "a copy of a letter from a respectable citizen of Alexandria" which details the events of the capture. "The evidence resulting from these two documents," he writes, "affords more than a sufficient presumption that the capture, however contrary to the friendly views of His Catholic Majesty towards the United States, has been committed within Spanish responsibility, and consequently strengthens the expectation that the interposition which have have promised, will be addressed to the proper authority at Porto Rico..." This letter references the capture of the Huntress, a naval ship which had been chartered by the Navy Department on 18 May 1805 to carry supplies to the U.S. squadron in the Mediterranean. After the ship departed the port of Alexandria, it was captured on 1 June 1805 by the Spanish privateer La Maria under Capt. Antonio Lobo of Puerto Rico, who robbed the ship of "ten barrels of bread, one barrel of tar, and sundry other items" and ordered the Huntress to Puerto Rico. In his earlier letter on June 11th (as referenced in this piece), an irritated Madison writes: "Persuaded, sir that your promptness in taking the measures most likely to reach and redress the insult, will be proportioned, to the aggravations which distinguish it, and to the importance of an immediate and entire liberation of the Ship in order that she may proceed with her supplies to the Mediterranean...You will yourself, Sir, be able to select the several places, at which your interpositions will have the chance of finding the prize. From the proximity of East Florida, that is the first that suggests itself; and next to that, Cuba..." Unknown to Madison, the ship was captured two days earlier from Puerto Rico itself on 9th June by two British slave ships and was sent to Liverpool, where it arrived on 16 June 1805. (James Madison to Carlos Martínez de Yrujo, 11 June 1805,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/02-09-02-0511. [Original source: The Papers of James Madison, Secretary of State Series, vol. 9, 1 February 1805–30 June 1805, ed. Mary A. Hackett, J. C. A. Stagg, Mary Parke Johnson, Anne Mandeville Colony, Angela Kreider, and Katherine E. Harbury. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011, pp. 452–453.])