There are two versions of Privateer. A floppy version, which will have the individual .tre files, including "objects.tre". And there is the CD version, which only contains two, very large .tre files.
When the CD version was created, Origin packed all of the individual .tre files, plus a few other goodies such as extra voice sounds and such, into a single .tre file for both P1 and the add on RF.
The CD version does not copy the .tre files to the game directory. However you can manually copy these over and change the cfg file to point to the hard drive instead of the CD drive. But the tre files on the CD are named "PRSO.TRE" for P1 and "RF.TRE" for Rightious Fire.
If you are indeed running the floppy version, there are sub directories under c:\privater that contain the individual .tre files.