On Tuesday, 14 December 1708, several men representing the East India Company left its sumptuous headquarters on Leadenhall Street in the City of London. Making their way through traffic, pedestrians, and filth laying in the gutters of the narrow, grimy streets, they headed to the House of Commons, then situated in a modest two-storey, turreted ex-chapel, part of the old Palace of Westminster. Upon arriving, they placed before the members copies of three letters sent post-haste from Cornwall, delivered to Secretary Thomas Woolley as he had been working late on Saturday night. The letters described a ‘melancholly Account’ then occurring: the East India Company's ship Albemarle had run aground during a storm the previous Tuesday night on her return from the East Indies. She was breaking to pieces near Polperro, on the south coast of Cornwall. She and her consort, the Rochester, were, as Woolley described them, rich ships. She carried within her hold indigo, coffee, pepper, and bale goods, including silk and calico. Joseph Bullock, one of the supercargoes, had written in panic that ‘the Savage Inhabitants are ready to plunder what they have gott & cutt their throats too’.

Woolley inaccurately concluded that after the ship went aground, she was attacked ‘by the people of the Country getting on board and plundering what they could and then cutting her Cables for that some of the Country people were overheard on the road threatening they would do so if she was not ashore by the time they got thither’. This was just speculation, but it shows the extent of the fear the East India Company had regarding the dire situation of the wrecked vessel. Indeed, the ship had already parted her anchors by the force of the wind and had been driven onto the rocks; she did not need further assistance to become a total wreck. Despite the dispatch of soldiers to protect the wreck, the ‘country’ did, however, abscond with the silk and other bale goods that had washed ashore. Coffee, too, was harvested from the beach, and sold in Polperro at 12 pence a pound.