CHAPTER FIVEGROAN O’ THE GALLOWSTom GreenIFrom the thickly forested heights of Cape Masoala one can, without being one’s self observed, sweep, with an easy turning of the head, the broad Indian Ocean that pounds perpetually upon the rocky beach at the base of the Cape; the blue placidity of Antongil Bay up to its farthest reaches; the huddle of huts which make the town of Mananara, on the opposite shore, and the tiny island of St. Mary’s snuggling close to the other portal of the bay.That is to suppose that you wish to see and not be seen,—a rather uncommon circumstance in the lives of plain, honest men, but certainly a great advantage to those who conceive that their particular and peculiar interests require secrecy. Cape Masoala has known both sort of folk. The peering botanist has explored it for his specimens; the French surveyor has mapped every inch of it, and the olive-hued Malagassy nativehas for centuries gone about the Cape on his innocent occasions, all quite careless as to who did or did not observe them. Certain other gentry, however, have from time to time made a use of the ancient Cape not entirely commendable. Sad to relate, such persons not infrequently came ashore from ships wickedly sailing beneath the black bunting of piracy. These climbed the steep, wooded slopes not for the purpose of feasting their souls on the beautiful; but for the pernicious design of observing those worthy people who passed in and out of Antongil Bay upon the lawful errands of commerce. In March, 1702, to take a notable instance of this reprehensible use of the Cape, not many less than fifty men lay sprawled in the tropic undergrowth of the headland watching with quick eyes the tardy evolutions of two square-rigged, stumpily built ships working their way alongside the rickety wharf of Mananara.At length the two ships were berthed, and up their riggings men, looking like small boys at that distance, climbed and began to take in the canvas. One of the watchers in the wood yawned, stretched his lean arms high over his head and said, as he rattled the thick gold rings in his ears, “We’ll soon be to sea again, Cap’n.”The man called captain nodded. A great bullock of a fellow he stood, hands on hips, gazing frowningly down at the bay, apparently constructing the strategy of an impending move.He had a flattish, three-cornered hat—somewhat too small for his head—pushed forward over his eyes; the breeches, stockings and buckled shoes of the period had evidently had long and hard wear in contrast with the brilliant sash about his waist from which protruded the handle of a dirk. One great, sinewy hand dangled a belt to which was fastened a thick cutlass. If he were captain, then all these fellows strewn about the grass must be his subordinates. Honest men they no doubt accounted themselves, but their looks belied them; no ordinary man would have cared to picnic with that group in their present beautiful retreat. Their complexions were as colorful as the sashes which almost all of them affected: here was the blond Scandinavian, with his blue, wistful, deep-sea eyes and tawny hair and beard: beside him would be a swart Continental—French predominantly—chattering constantly and continually winding his beard in ringlets about his forefinger, and not a few men of the blackest ebon, the hue of the West Indian negro, not the lighter tint of the native Sakalava. Whatever his color, every man there was capable of committing any violence; that was his qualification for companionship. A hard group, and how hard must the leader of it be! Well, John Bowen, the brawny chieftain, was a hard man.Although maritime history has failed to spell his name with capital letters, John Bowen was one of the most willing little workers in the redtrade of sea robbery. Where he came from and what his finish was we do not certainly know, but while his keel danced its brief hour upon the waters of the Indian Ocean, John Bowen displayed those qualities of resolution, ruthlessness and rapidity which ordinarily earned one a rapid promotion in piracy, and not infrequently a sequential elevation, before an admiring and applauding populace, at the end of the king’s rope.While, as we say, his origins are obscure, there is little doubt that John Bowen came to this Cape Masoala, in the island of Madagascar, directly or indirectly from the West Indies, which for generations was thealma materof all the best pirates. A great school of maritime crime was this West Indian group, having, at one time or another, on its faculty such eminent masters as Blackbeard, lecturer on Violent Deaths at Sea, and whose subsidiary course on Ship Scuttling was deservedly popular. Then, too, many earnest young students from all over the world were drawn thither by Morgan’s notable presentation of the subject of the Assault, Capture and Loot of Municipalities. In fact, the whole scheme of instruction was very thorough. Two prominent practitioners of the art of piracy, captains Kidd and Avery, so esteemed the advantages there offered that both, after distinguishing themselves in the actual practice, resorted there for postgraduate work. There was a finish, a fineness about John Bowen’s workwhich clearly indicated the superiority of his academic training, and stamped him as one of the most promising graduates. Everybody in the Caribbean anticipated a great future for him, and, so far as we can follow his career, these friendly prophecies were amply fulfilled.Evidently when he faced the world with his sheepskin in his hand and the blush of collegiate honors still on his brow, John Bowen had determined to set up business for himself in the East Indies, a fact which indicated the clarity of his judgment and real appreciation of opportunity, for in the East Indies of his day it was so easy for a competent pirate to get rich as to make one feel that his abilities had never been properly tested. But, of course, there were accidents and unavoidable miscalculations, and John must be supposed to have run into one of those inescapable setbacks to which even pure genius is liable, from the fact that he is perched upon a headland of Madagascar with a crew but without a ship. Of course, time and opportunity would correct that state of affairs, for the matter of appropriating a ship was just elementary freshman work in the university of piracy from which he had graduated,summa cum laude. And now, as John gazed down on these two ships below him, he realized with satisfaction that time and opportunity were in happy concurrence.He selected four Englishmen—two, as it chanced, were from New York—and, directingthe rest to meet him at dark in the woods behind Mananara, descended to the beach, where a broken-down native boat was staked. The party crossed the bay and Bowen himself went down to the water front to look at the newly arrived ships. It was now towards evening, and from the cookhouse rose a thin, blue spear of smoke on each ship where the supper was being prepared. Sailors were hanging over the bulwarks, smoking long pipes, and laughing and joking in the burring tongue of Scotland. They noticed the hulking white stranger loafing about the wharf, but made no comment, for one does not long knock about the waters of Madagascar without dulling the faculty of surprise. Bowen marked the names of the two vessels,ContentandSpeedy Return. This latter name he thought unfortunate in view of all the circumstances.Speedy Return? Not if Jack Bowen knew anything about the matter.To get the full value out of this adventure, we have to know a little something about these two doomed ships and why and how they happened to be in this little port of Mananara at this particular time. If we lift the fly-blown, time-stained pages of history we get a queerish kind of a yarn in this connection. It only needs a momentary glance, and when we have taken it, we shall the more appreciate the significance of the sinister meddling of Jack Bowen, who, of course, knew nothing of what we shall know andif he had known he would not have cared two straws,—in fact, would have enjoyed his game all the more.In June, 1695, some half a dozen years before Jack Bowen comes on the stage, a group of Scotch noblemen, with some other folk of lesser influence, procured a statute from the English parliament and a charter from the English Crown, authorizing them to incorporate an African-Indian trading company. Their chief object was to found a Scotch colony in the Isthmus of Panama, or Darien, as it was then called. Everybody was going to get immensely rich out of the venture. But the noblemen were not stingy about it; they decided to offer the stock of their corporation to the public. They evidently had a wonderful advertising manager, for an old writer tells us that when the stock was put on the market “the nobility, the gentry, the merchants, the people, the royal burghs without the exception of one, and most of the other public bodies subscribed. Young women threw their little fortunes into the stock; widows sold their jointures to get command of money for the same purpose. Almost in an instant four hundred thousand pounds were subscribed in Scotland, although it be now known that there was not at that time above eight hundred thousand pounds of cash in the kingdom.”That is what you may call promoting,—to gethalf the cash of the kingdom. It was the last chance anybody ever had of that sort in Scotland.Everything went so well that the English East India Company became exceedingly jealous and not a little fearful that a powerful rival was rising in the north to challenge its hold in the Far East. In politics, in the financial world, in every way it possibly could, the English company sought to thwart the Scotchmen and upon the whole succeeded very satisfactorily in handicapping the latter. Being Scotchmen, however, they went right ahead, “satisfied of the envy of the English and of their consciousness of the advantages which were to flow to Scotland” from the Darien colony. Six ships were built, each able to carry two hundred emigrants, and on the twenty-sixth of July, 1698, the whole city of Edinburgh streamed down upon Leith to see the Darien voyagers depart, amidst the tears and praises and prayers of relations and friends, and of their countrymen. Many seamen and soldiers, whose services had been refused, because more offered themselves than were needed, were found hid in the ships, and when ordered ashore, clung to the ropes and timbers, imploring to go without reward.The colony, however, was a dismal and tragic failure. When the people arrived at Darien, the Dutch East India Company—instigated it was believed by agents of the English company—forbade the factors of their forts in that region togive help of any sort to the Scotchmen. Expecting to get supplies locally and being thus refused, “the colonists fell into diseases from bad food and want of food” and almost all of them faded and died. Eight months of horror lagged along and then the colony broke up, only a handful surviving to stagger to the ship for home. In the meanwhile, however, another crowd of thirteen hundred colonists had left Scotland for Darien amid the same hurrah, only to meet the same fate as had the first, and to send back as survivors only a pitiful remnant of thirty.Scotland laid all the blame upon England in general and the East India Company in particular and deeply smoldered the already traditional hatred between the northern and southern peoples.Withal, the Scotch African-Indian trading company kept intact, but took on the character of a more private commercial corporation. It entered in the orthodox fashion on the East India trade wherever it could circumvent the English monopoly, and to this end sent forth its young but not unpromising fleet to Indian waters, and of this fleet theContentand theSpeedy Returnwere fair representatives.But see what an unhappy destiny pursues this Scotch company! Here it is, trying to recuperate from the terrible disaster of Darien, just, as they say of an invalid, getting about again, when wretched, wicked and utterly reprehensible JackBowen is here, in far-off Madagascar, lurking about in the woods ready to inflict upon the poor company another terrible adversity!On May 26, 1701, theSpeedy Returnand theContenthad sailed from Glasgow for the East Indies. What great things they were to accomplish! How they were to return soon—speedily, as the name would seem to hope—laden with gold and gain! The name of John Bowen did not mean a thing in Glasgow. Such is life. They lumbered, after the fashion of the blunt ships of that age, first to Guinea, then to the Cape of Good Hope—propitious name—and there, as well as at Guinea, they discovered there was not a little profit to be had by postponing their arrival at Malabar and the Indian trade proper and diverting themselves to the slave business. In this traffic then they came over from the mainland of Africa to the island of St. Mary’s, in Madagascar, where they loaded their holds with the negroid Sakalaves sold to them by the Hovitas and other superior tribes of the island.So cargoed, they went on from St. Mary’s, Madagascar, to Mauritius, where they discharged their load of slaves and in March, 1702, were back again in Madagascar, at a place they called Maritan, but which has probably become Mananara, ready for another batch of blacks, and, though naturally this was beyond their expectation, the thunderbolt of as desperate agang of pirates as ever cast dice with the hangman.Gradually Bowen’s shipless crew gathered in the woods back of the town and impatiently waited for morning. When the tropic sun at length surged up abruptly from beneath the far, thin, eastern line of the Indian Ocean, they girded their belts about them, looked to their weapons, hefting their cutlasses and attending to the priming of their pistols, and waited the cheerful word of onslaught. Bowen called together the four English-speaking men he had first selected the day before, on the chance of being able to make immediate use of them, and left with them for the very outskirts of the town, where they settled themselves in the lush vegetation and watched their prey. Before separating from the main group, Bowen, like a true general, addressed his troops. “If it comes to trouble,” he said succinctly, “and ye find ye against a man bigger than ye, take your tools quickly”—here he tapped his cutlass, “and cut him down to your size.”The plan was for the four men and Bowen to board the shipSpeedy Returnby stratagem, when, if the chance was good, Bowen would sound the bo’sun’s whistle which he carried for that purpose and the reserves were to come up in full force.Early after breakfast the lurkers noticed what was evidently the captain of theSpeedy Return,accompanied by a group of men, come ashore and set off through the woods to the neighboring villages, evidently in the transaction of their traffic in human beings. The day burned to high noon and high noon waned towards evening, and still the cautious Bowen, not risking a fizzle in this his great and long-sought opportunity, held his hounds in the leash. Quite late in the afternoon, when it was reasonably certain the captain had gone for a considerable time, and when the remnant of the crews of the two ships were scattered, some about the town and others dozing on the hot decks, John Bowen and his four aides stepped from the brush, strode past the thatched native huts and out on the dock. They ran up the ladder and were on the deck of theSpeedy Return.“Ho, mate,” called Bowen, grinning genially to what was evidently the ship’s cook, carrying a butcher knife in one hand and a leg of a sheep in the other, “who’s the master of this ship?”“Cap’n Rab Drummond, frae Edinburgh,” burred the cook, “and who be ye, mon?”“Oh, we’re nobody; just come aboard, looking to buy a bit of breadstuff and tobacco, if ye’ve such to spare.”There were not more than a dozen men aboard, according to Bowen’s swift calculation. Over on theContent, a few yards away, there appeared still fewer. The hour had struck. Bowen drew a pistol from the arsenal of his sash and thrustit against the full girth of the cook. “Go on to your cookhouse, my lad,” he commanded. “You’re going to have a few friends for supper.” Thus the chef received notice of the change of management. He took it dully and obediently; anything may happen when one goes so far from Glasgie. Sharp and shrill the signal whistle beat echoingly from the cliffs of the Cape to the heights above the town, and with a terrifying shout, the rest of Bowen’s men hurled themselves over the bulwarks of both theSpeedy Returnand theContent. The gang that boarded the latter had a definitely prescribed job to do and expeditiously they did it. First of all, they ran the gaping sailors off her decks and on to those of theSpeedy Return; then, hastening back, they smeared the decks of theContentwith pitch, set a train to the small powder magazine, and as the thick brown-black clouds of smoke rolled sluggishly over the sides, they fled, whooping as demons may be supposed to whoop at the mouth of the Inferno, for theSpeedy Return. Her sides they clutched even as she moved away in tow of the ship’s boats, out into the bay, where she picked up a helping breeze; where her hastily hoisted sails began to tauten and whence she began quite prettily to glide out into the wide, the welcome ocean. John Bowen was on a quarter-deck again; it mattered to him little who claimed that same quarterdeck; he was on it and the quartermaster at the whipstaff swung thehelm to this side and that, in obedience to his orders. He felt the wind of the free ocean upon his breast and lifted up his great bellowing voice in song. Ha! ha! he! ho! in a jiffy the tables had been turned; John Bowen had had the shore and no ship and now Captain Robert Drummond, of Edinburgh, out of Glasgow, had all the shore he cared to use and no ship.No stenographer was present to record what Captain Drummond said when he came out of the woods and found the black embers of theContentknocking about the piling or bobbing far out on the bay, and of his ship only the stupid, inarticulate remembrance of the gaping Malagassy natives, but without doubt it was something pretty. Captain Stewart was master of theContentand probably had been absent with Drummond of theSpeedy Return—although he might have been on his own ship and been captured with the rest of the crew; nobody has given us the precise information—but if he came out of the woods at the same time that Drummond did, there is no doubt the inhabitants beheld two of the angriest Scotchmen they had ever seen or ever were likely to see. We don’t know what happened to Stewart, but a man who spent fifteen years in captivity among the Madagascans came home with the story that Drummond found his way to Tullea, on the southwest coast of the island, where, in an altercation with a Jamaican negro, who was of course one of those far-faringWest Indian pirates, he received a wallop from the black rogue which deprived the Scotch African-Indian trading company of a faithful servant and the rising British Merchant Marine of a competent shipmaster.Now, Bowen, between the two appropriated vessels, very likely gathered in some thirty men, all well-seasoned sailors. We know the names of only two of these honest tars to whom this vivid change of circumstance occurred; Israel Phippany and Peter Freeland. Some of these captives accepted the fate of the sea and even counted themselves among the pirates; others, naturally, found the situation not to their liking and stood by for an opportunity to escape. It was all one to their swaggering captors, whether a man liked it or not; a sailor he was and sail that ship he should. None of that topmast business for the bold pirate boys; in a jam they might lend a hand at working the vessel, but ordinarily they insisted that fighting was their specialty and avoided the rope and the tar bucket as quite beneath their dignity. But they were fair in their way, for when it came to a fight they did not call on the shellbacks for help; that too would have been essentially undignified for a master pirate. This gang of Bowen stood in a rough relation to the sailors aboard as the marines do to a war vessel. Many ships, of course, were completely manned by confessed pirates, and when that was so they had to dosailor work, but whenever they could they were great little chaps for pressing men aboard especially to do the ship’s chores. So theSpeedy Returnbeing happily in their possession, the pirates lay back under the awnings and drank copiously of arrack, the universal intoxicant of the East Indies, the while their bold chieftain drove his keel along for joyful fights and glorious plunder.Swinging smartly around the northern nose of Madagascar, and shooting westerly, Bowen set the course for the Comoro Islands, some three hundred and fifty miles northwest of Madagascar and two hundred miles east of the coast of Africa. Apparently John was going to lose no time in his business, for the Comoros would be the nearest likely place to pick up a prize; no waiting until he made the distant littoral of India, you notice. His ultimate destination was Rajapore, way up in what is now called the Bombay presidency, but he did not care to go as the crow flies, but rather as the vulture does; pausing for anything that might be carrion.The Comoros was a pretty good guess. At Mayotta, one of those islands, they found a ship commanded by George Weoley, which was loading with sugar, rum, cocoa oil and taking in fresh beef. The fact that Weoley’s vessel was in harbor did not mean anything to John Bowen; if the island itself had been navigable he would have put a crew on it and sailed it away. TheSpeedy Returnshoved alongside their victim, and casually, as men doing an easy job away below their real abilities, a handful of fighters dropped to her decks. Nobody interfered with them but the unimaginative first mate, and his protest was met with a crack on the head which created an immediate promotion for the second mate. A little more than a year after this misfortune Captain Weoley wrote a plaintive letter to Mr. Pennyng, “Chief of the English East India Company’s Factory at Calicut,” giving a full and detailed account of the naughtiness of John Bowen, wherein he states that at Mayotta he fell into Bowen’s hands and was “detained by him after they had slain my chief mate and plundered what they pleased.”Poor Mr. Weoley and the rest of his people were taken into the forecastle of theSpeedy Returnand thus recruited that ship’s list of able seamen. Whether Bowen burnt, scuttled or simply abandoned Weoley’s craft the good captain does not inform us, but we may be sure that when he headed off for India, he left that unfortunate vessel no better for his visit.During the long and uneventful voyage—uneventful, that is, so far as the piracy game went—Captain Bowen, alas! did not observe those little amenities between brother captains which so pleasantly mitigate the sternness of the sea. Doubtless Mr. Weoley had to do many things aboard which drove a bitter iron into hissoul. One day he might be lending a hand with the art of navigation if the load of rum captured at Mayotta should happen temporarily to incapacitate Captain Bowen; next day he might pitiably have to fetch and carry water at the behest of the sprawling villains, or again bend his elderly and stiffening back at the eternal task of pumping, and pumping ship in the Indian Ocean must have been—well, hot. He says himself that he received “many hazards of life and abuses from those villains.” Not the least of his grievances was that of listening through the long hours of a torrid night to the liquored Bowen boasting of his wickedness. That remark of Weoley’s places Bowen as the true, deliberate, almost romantic pirate and approximates him to the traditional pirate of fiction.Off the coast of Malabar, Bowen nearly had to sober up, for he was come to his proper fishing grounds. Up and down this roadstead passed much of the commerce of the East Indies. Quite a medley it was, to be sure. There were craft from the ten-ton sloop belonging to a petty local merchant, up through increasing tonnage chartered by Moors, Persians, Armenians, Hindoos, to the two-and three-decker so-called East Indiaman, the ship of the august and imperial East India Company itself. In disturbing this traffic captain William Kidd had found a fortune in less than six months, and numerous pirates of many nations had here easily enriched themselves.Captain Bowen, who must have been something of a joker as were so many of his outlaw colleagues, doubtless enjoyed immensely taking a ship with the name ofProsperous, which he did shortly after his entry into Indian waters proper. With a chuckle he realized that he had made the owners of theContentdiscontented; he intended theSpeedy Returnshould go home neither slowly nor speedily, and it is very likely that he put the charterers of theProsperousinto bankruptcy. It might have been of a better omen in those days to name your ship the very opposite to your hopes; say call theContenttheDissatisfied; theSpeedy ReturntheNever Come Backand theProsperous,Hard Times,—in which case a marauding pirate would at least lose the dramatic pleasure of surprise.Having bagged theProsperous, Bowen put a crew on board and used her for an auxiliary, and with this augmented command in a few months, according to Weoley, he took “six sail of ship” and “hundreds ruined.” The last of these six ships was one from Surat, evidently of considerable size, for Bowen transferred all hands to her and then, being as drunk as a fool, entertained the amazed city of Rajapore with a grand nautical bonfire made up both of theProsperousand theSpeedy Return. How uneasily the stockholders of the Scotch Indian-African trading company would have turned in their beds hadthat lurid light gleamed against their far-off window panes!This man Bowen was an incorrigible ship burner, which proves that he had not the heart of a true sailorman or the first instincts of a real conqueror of the sea.On this captured Surat ship, when Bowen got over his pyrotechnic spree, he counted up his men and found, so Weoley records, “70 Lascars (native of India) and 146 fighting men (the Lascars being used as sailors) of which part are 43 English, the better part of the company French, the rest Negroes (our Jamaica friends), Dutch and other nations that cries ‘yaw’.” Quaint foible! Amid all his sufferings poor Captain Weoley could still find a feeling of irritation for men that “cries ‘yaw’” instead of “yes.”Bowen steered from Rajapore down along the Malabar coast until he came to Cochin, a Portuguese settlement and where a miscalled Portuguese war fleet made its anchorage. Those old sieves were the local maritime joke, and a brisk pirate would think little of using them for mooring buoys. This aggregation had once gone out after the formidable Captain Kidd and much to its surprise and pain had found him. It had never been known to attempt anything notable since. Certainly, they did not trouble John Bowen. As Bowen dawdled along in these parts, touching at this and that small port for frolic orland robbery or both, “about three leagues to the northward of Cochin” Weoley states that “I got clear of the pirates.” Thus ended the worst seven months in the life of that worthy mariner.What became of Bowen after Weoley escaped from him we do not know, at least so far as the authentic record we are consulting is concerned. Probably he met the violent end of his ilk; one thing is sure, however; he was never hanged for the piracy of theSpeedy Return, but—and this makes the dread, dark sequel of the crime—another man who knew not Bowen, Robert Drummond or the ill-fated shipSpeedy Returnsuffered by one of the most notable miscarriages of justice known to the law as the murderer of Captain Drummond and the pirate of theSpeedy Return.
GROAN O’ THE GALLOWS
Tom Green
From the thickly forested heights of Cape Masoala one can, without being one’s self observed, sweep, with an easy turning of the head, the broad Indian Ocean that pounds perpetually upon the rocky beach at the base of the Cape; the blue placidity of Antongil Bay up to its farthest reaches; the huddle of huts which make the town of Mananara, on the opposite shore, and the tiny island of St. Mary’s snuggling close to the other portal of the bay.
That is to suppose that you wish to see and not be seen,—a rather uncommon circumstance in the lives of plain, honest men, but certainly a great advantage to those who conceive that their particular and peculiar interests require secrecy. Cape Masoala has known both sort of folk. The peering botanist has explored it for his specimens; the French surveyor has mapped every inch of it, and the olive-hued Malagassy nativehas for centuries gone about the Cape on his innocent occasions, all quite careless as to who did or did not observe them. Certain other gentry, however, have from time to time made a use of the ancient Cape not entirely commendable. Sad to relate, such persons not infrequently came ashore from ships wickedly sailing beneath the black bunting of piracy. These climbed the steep, wooded slopes not for the purpose of feasting their souls on the beautiful; but for the pernicious design of observing those worthy people who passed in and out of Antongil Bay upon the lawful errands of commerce. In March, 1702, to take a notable instance of this reprehensible use of the Cape, not many less than fifty men lay sprawled in the tropic undergrowth of the headland watching with quick eyes the tardy evolutions of two square-rigged, stumpily built ships working their way alongside the rickety wharf of Mananara.
At length the two ships were berthed, and up their riggings men, looking like small boys at that distance, climbed and began to take in the canvas. One of the watchers in the wood yawned, stretched his lean arms high over his head and said, as he rattled the thick gold rings in his ears, “We’ll soon be to sea again, Cap’n.”
The man called captain nodded. A great bullock of a fellow he stood, hands on hips, gazing frowningly down at the bay, apparently constructing the strategy of an impending move.He had a flattish, three-cornered hat—somewhat too small for his head—pushed forward over his eyes; the breeches, stockings and buckled shoes of the period had evidently had long and hard wear in contrast with the brilliant sash about his waist from which protruded the handle of a dirk. One great, sinewy hand dangled a belt to which was fastened a thick cutlass. If he were captain, then all these fellows strewn about the grass must be his subordinates. Honest men they no doubt accounted themselves, but their looks belied them; no ordinary man would have cared to picnic with that group in their present beautiful retreat. Their complexions were as colorful as the sashes which almost all of them affected: here was the blond Scandinavian, with his blue, wistful, deep-sea eyes and tawny hair and beard: beside him would be a swart Continental—French predominantly—chattering constantly and continually winding his beard in ringlets about his forefinger, and not a few men of the blackest ebon, the hue of the West Indian negro, not the lighter tint of the native Sakalava. Whatever his color, every man there was capable of committing any violence; that was his qualification for companionship. A hard group, and how hard must the leader of it be! Well, John Bowen, the brawny chieftain, was a hard man.
Although maritime history has failed to spell his name with capital letters, John Bowen was one of the most willing little workers in the redtrade of sea robbery. Where he came from and what his finish was we do not certainly know, but while his keel danced its brief hour upon the waters of the Indian Ocean, John Bowen displayed those qualities of resolution, ruthlessness and rapidity which ordinarily earned one a rapid promotion in piracy, and not infrequently a sequential elevation, before an admiring and applauding populace, at the end of the king’s rope.
While, as we say, his origins are obscure, there is little doubt that John Bowen came to this Cape Masoala, in the island of Madagascar, directly or indirectly from the West Indies, which for generations was thealma materof all the best pirates. A great school of maritime crime was this West Indian group, having, at one time or another, on its faculty such eminent masters as Blackbeard, lecturer on Violent Deaths at Sea, and whose subsidiary course on Ship Scuttling was deservedly popular. Then, too, many earnest young students from all over the world were drawn thither by Morgan’s notable presentation of the subject of the Assault, Capture and Loot of Municipalities. In fact, the whole scheme of instruction was very thorough. Two prominent practitioners of the art of piracy, captains Kidd and Avery, so esteemed the advantages there offered that both, after distinguishing themselves in the actual practice, resorted there for postgraduate work. There was a finish, a fineness about John Bowen’s workwhich clearly indicated the superiority of his academic training, and stamped him as one of the most promising graduates. Everybody in the Caribbean anticipated a great future for him, and, so far as we can follow his career, these friendly prophecies were amply fulfilled.
Evidently when he faced the world with his sheepskin in his hand and the blush of collegiate honors still on his brow, John Bowen had determined to set up business for himself in the East Indies, a fact which indicated the clarity of his judgment and real appreciation of opportunity, for in the East Indies of his day it was so easy for a competent pirate to get rich as to make one feel that his abilities had never been properly tested. But, of course, there were accidents and unavoidable miscalculations, and John must be supposed to have run into one of those inescapable setbacks to which even pure genius is liable, from the fact that he is perched upon a headland of Madagascar with a crew but without a ship. Of course, time and opportunity would correct that state of affairs, for the matter of appropriating a ship was just elementary freshman work in the university of piracy from which he had graduated,summa cum laude. And now, as John gazed down on these two ships below him, he realized with satisfaction that time and opportunity were in happy concurrence.
He selected four Englishmen—two, as it chanced, were from New York—and, directingthe rest to meet him at dark in the woods behind Mananara, descended to the beach, where a broken-down native boat was staked. The party crossed the bay and Bowen himself went down to the water front to look at the newly arrived ships. It was now towards evening, and from the cookhouse rose a thin, blue spear of smoke on each ship where the supper was being prepared. Sailors were hanging over the bulwarks, smoking long pipes, and laughing and joking in the burring tongue of Scotland. They noticed the hulking white stranger loafing about the wharf, but made no comment, for one does not long knock about the waters of Madagascar without dulling the faculty of surprise. Bowen marked the names of the two vessels,ContentandSpeedy Return. This latter name he thought unfortunate in view of all the circumstances.Speedy Return? Not if Jack Bowen knew anything about the matter.
To get the full value out of this adventure, we have to know a little something about these two doomed ships and why and how they happened to be in this little port of Mananara at this particular time. If we lift the fly-blown, time-stained pages of history we get a queerish kind of a yarn in this connection. It only needs a momentary glance, and when we have taken it, we shall the more appreciate the significance of the sinister meddling of Jack Bowen, who, of course, knew nothing of what we shall know andif he had known he would not have cared two straws,—in fact, would have enjoyed his game all the more.
In June, 1695, some half a dozen years before Jack Bowen comes on the stage, a group of Scotch noblemen, with some other folk of lesser influence, procured a statute from the English parliament and a charter from the English Crown, authorizing them to incorporate an African-Indian trading company. Their chief object was to found a Scotch colony in the Isthmus of Panama, or Darien, as it was then called. Everybody was going to get immensely rich out of the venture. But the noblemen were not stingy about it; they decided to offer the stock of their corporation to the public. They evidently had a wonderful advertising manager, for an old writer tells us that when the stock was put on the market “the nobility, the gentry, the merchants, the people, the royal burghs without the exception of one, and most of the other public bodies subscribed. Young women threw their little fortunes into the stock; widows sold their jointures to get command of money for the same purpose. Almost in an instant four hundred thousand pounds were subscribed in Scotland, although it be now known that there was not at that time above eight hundred thousand pounds of cash in the kingdom.”
That is what you may call promoting,—to gethalf the cash of the kingdom. It was the last chance anybody ever had of that sort in Scotland.
Everything went so well that the English East India Company became exceedingly jealous and not a little fearful that a powerful rival was rising in the north to challenge its hold in the Far East. In politics, in the financial world, in every way it possibly could, the English company sought to thwart the Scotchmen and upon the whole succeeded very satisfactorily in handicapping the latter. Being Scotchmen, however, they went right ahead, “satisfied of the envy of the English and of their consciousness of the advantages which were to flow to Scotland” from the Darien colony. Six ships were built, each able to carry two hundred emigrants, and on the twenty-sixth of July, 1698, the whole city of Edinburgh streamed down upon Leith to see the Darien voyagers depart, amidst the tears and praises and prayers of relations and friends, and of their countrymen. Many seamen and soldiers, whose services had been refused, because more offered themselves than were needed, were found hid in the ships, and when ordered ashore, clung to the ropes and timbers, imploring to go without reward.
The colony, however, was a dismal and tragic failure. When the people arrived at Darien, the Dutch East India Company—instigated it was believed by agents of the English company—forbade the factors of their forts in that region togive help of any sort to the Scotchmen. Expecting to get supplies locally and being thus refused, “the colonists fell into diseases from bad food and want of food” and almost all of them faded and died. Eight months of horror lagged along and then the colony broke up, only a handful surviving to stagger to the ship for home. In the meanwhile, however, another crowd of thirteen hundred colonists had left Scotland for Darien amid the same hurrah, only to meet the same fate as had the first, and to send back as survivors only a pitiful remnant of thirty.
Scotland laid all the blame upon England in general and the East India Company in particular and deeply smoldered the already traditional hatred between the northern and southern peoples.
Withal, the Scotch African-Indian trading company kept intact, but took on the character of a more private commercial corporation. It entered in the orthodox fashion on the East India trade wherever it could circumvent the English monopoly, and to this end sent forth its young but not unpromising fleet to Indian waters, and of this fleet theContentand theSpeedy Returnwere fair representatives.
But see what an unhappy destiny pursues this Scotch company! Here it is, trying to recuperate from the terrible disaster of Darien, just, as they say of an invalid, getting about again, when wretched, wicked and utterly reprehensible JackBowen is here, in far-off Madagascar, lurking about in the woods ready to inflict upon the poor company another terrible adversity!
On May 26, 1701, theSpeedy Returnand theContenthad sailed from Glasgow for the East Indies. What great things they were to accomplish! How they were to return soon—speedily, as the name would seem to hope—laden with gold and gain! The name of John Bowen did not mean a thing in Glasgow. Such is life. They lumbered, after the fashion of the blunt ships of that age, first to Guinea, then to the Cape of Good Hope—propitious name—and there, as well as at Guinea, they discovered there was not a little profit to be had by postponing their arrival at Malabar and the Indian trade proper and diverting themselves to the slave business. In this traffic then they came over from the mainland of Africa to the island of St. Mary’s, in Madagascar, where they loaded their holds with the negroid Sakalaves sold to them by the Hovitas and other superior tribes of the island.
So cargoed, they went on from St. Mary’s, Madagascar, to Mauritius, where they discharged their load of slaves and in March, 1702, were back again in Madagascar, at a place they called Maritan, but which has probably become Mananara, ready for another batch of blacks, and, though naturally this was beyond their expectation, the thunderbolt of as desperate agang of pirates as ever cast dice with the hangman.
Gradually Bowen’s shipless crew gathered in the woods back of the town and impatiently waited for morning. When the tropic sun at length surged up abruptly from beneath the far, thin, eastern line of the Indian Ocean, they girded their belts about them, looked to their weapons, hefting their cutlasses and attending to the priming of their pistols, and waited the cheerful word of onslaught. Bowen called together the four English-speaking men he had first selected the day before, on the chance of being able to make immediate use of them, and left with them for the very outskirts of the town, where they settled themselves in the lush vegetation and watched their prey. Before separating from the main group, Bowen, like a true general, addressed his troops. “If it comes to trouble,” he said succinctly, “and ye find ye against a man bigger than ye, take your tools quickly”—here he tapped his cutlass, “and cut him down to your size.”
The plan was for the four men and Bowen to board the shipSpeedy Returnby stratagem, when, if the chance was good, Bowen would sound the bo’sun’s whistle which he carried for that purpose and the reserves were to come up in full force.
Early after breakfast the lurkers noticed what was evidently the captain of theSpeedy Return,accompanied by a group of men, come ashore and set off through the woods to the neighboring villages, evidently in the transaction of their traffic in human beings. The day burned to high noon and high noon waned towards evening, and still the cautious Bowen, not risking a fizzle in this his great and long-sought opportunity, held his hounds in the leash. Quite late in the afternoon, when it was reasonably certain the captain had gone for a considerable time, and when the remnant of the crews of the two ships were scattered, some about the town and others dozing on the hot decks, John Bowen and his four aides stepped from the brush, strode past the thatched native huts and out on the dock. They ran up the ladder and were on the deck of theSpeedy Return.
“Ho, mate,” called Bowen, grinning genially to what was evidently the ship’s cook, carrying a butcher knife in one hand and a leg of a sheep in the other, “who’s the master of this ship?”
“Cap’n Rab Drummond, frae Edinburgh,” burred the cook, “and who be ye, mon?”
“Oh, we’re nobody; just come aboard, looking to buy a bit of breadstuff and tobacco, if ye’ve such to spare.”
There were not more than a dozen men aboard, according to Bowen’s swift calculation. Over on theContent, a few yards away, there appeared still fewer. The hour had struck. Bowen drew a pistol from the arsenal of his sash and thrustit against the full girth of the cook. “Go on to your cookhouse, my lad,” he commanded. “You’re going to have a few friends for supper.” Thus the chef received notice of the change of management. He took it dully and obediently; anything may happen when one goes so far from Glasgie. Sharp and shrill the signal whistle beat echoingly from the cliffs of the Cape to the heights above the town, and with a terrifying shout, the rest of Bowen’s men hurled themselves over the bulwarks of both theSpeedy Returnand theContent. The gang that boarded the latter had a definitely prescribed job to do and expeditiously they did it. First of all, they ran the gaping sailors off her decks and on to those of theSpeedy Return; then, hastening back, they smeared the decks of theContentwith pitch, set a train to the small powder magazine, and as the thick brown-black clouds of smoke rolled sluggishly over the sides, they fled, whooping as demons may be supposed to whoop at the mouth of the Inferno, for theSpeedy Return. Her sides they clutched even as she moved away in tow of the ship’s boats, out into the bay, where she picked up a helping breeze; where her hastily hoisted sails began to tauten and whence she began quite prettily to glide out into the wide, the welcome ocean. John Bowen was on a quarter-deck again; it mattered to him little who claimed that same quarterdeck; he was on it and the quartermaster at the whipstaff swung thehelm to this side and that, in obedience to his orders. He felt the wind of the free ocean upon his breast and lifted up his great bellowing voice in song. Ha! ha! he! ho! in a jiffy the tables had been turned; John Bowen had had the shore and no ship and now Captain Robert Drummond, of Edinburgh, out of Glasgow, had all the shore he cared to use and no ship.
No stenographer was present to record what Captain Drummond said when he came out of the woods and found the black embers of theContentknocking about the piling or bobbing far out on the bay, and of his ship only the stupid, inarticulate remembrance of the gaping Malagassy natives, but without doubt it was something pretty. Captain Stewart was master of theContentand probably had been absent with Drummond of theSpeedy Return—although he might have been on his own ship and been captured with the rest of the crew; nobody has given us the precise information—but if he came out of the woods at the same time that Drummond did, there is no doubt the inhabitants beheld two of the angriest Scotchmen they had ever seen or ever were likely to see. We don’t know what happened to Stewart, but a man who spent fifteen years in captivity among the Madagascans came home with the story that Drummond found his way to Tullea, on the southwest coast of the island, where, in an altercation with a Jamaican negro, who was of course one of those far-faringWest Indian pirates, he received a wallop from the black rogue which deprived the Scotch African-Indian trading company of a faithful servant and the rising British Merchant Marine of a competent shipmaster.
Now, Bowen, between the two appropriated vessels, very likely gathered in some thirty men, all well-seasoned sailors. We know the names of only two of these honest tars to whom this vivid change of circumstance occurred; Israel Phippany and Peter Freeland. Some of these captives accepted the fate of the sea and even counted themselves among the pirates; others, naturally, found the situation not to their liking and stood by for an opportunity to escape. It was all one to their swaggering captors, whether a man liked it or not; a sailor he was and sail that ship he should. None of that topmast business for the bold pirate boys; in a jam they might lend a hand at working the vessel, but ordinarily they insisted that fighting was their specialty and avoided the rope and the tar bucket as quite beneath their dignity. But they were fair in their way, for when it came to a fight they did not call on the shellbacks for help; that too would have been essentially undignified for a master pirate. This gang of Bowen stood in a rough relation to the sailors aboard as the marines do to a war vessel. Many ships, of course, were completely manned by confessed pirates, and when that was so they had to dosailor work, but whenever they could they were great little chaps for pressing men aboard especially to do the ship’s chores. So theSpeedy Returnbeing happily in their possession, the pirates lay back under the awnings and drank copiously of arrack, the universal intoxicant of the East Indies, the while their bold chieftain drove his keel along for joyful fights and glorious plunder.
Swinging smartly around the northern nose of Madagascar, and shooting westerly, Bowen set the course for the Comoro Islands, some three hundred and fifty miles northwest of Madagascar and two hundred miles east of the coast of Africa. Apparently John was going to lose no time in his business, for the Comoros would be the nearest likely place to pick up a prize; no waiting until he made the distant littoral of India, you notice. His ultimate destination was Rajapore, way up in what is now called the Bombay presidency, but he did not care to go as the crow flies, but rather as the vulture does; pausing for anything that might be carrion.
The Comoros was a pretty good guess. At Mayotta, one of those islands, they found a ship commanded by George Weoley, which was loading with sugar, rum, cocoa oil and taking in fresh beef. The fact that Weoley’s vessel was in harbor did not mean anything to John Bowen; if the island itself had been navigable he would have put a crew on it and sailed it away. TheSpeedy Returnshoved alongside their victim, and casually, as men doing an easy job away below their real abilities, a handful of fighters dropped to her decks. Nobody interfered with them but the unimaginative first mate, and his protest was met with a crack on the head which created an immediate promotion for the second mate. A little more than a year after this misfortune Captain Weoley wrote a plaintive letter to Mr. Pennyng, “Chief of the English East India Company’s Factory at Calicut,” giving a full and detailed account of the naughtiness of John Bowen, wherein he states that at Mayotta he fell into Bowen’s hands and was “detained by him after they had slain my chief mate and plundered what they pleased.”
Poor Mr. Weoley and the rest of his people were taken into the forecastle of theSpeedy Returnand thus recruited that ship’s list of able seamen. Whether Bowen burnt, scuttled or simply abandoned Weoley’s craft the good captain does not inform us, but we may be sure that when he headed off for India, he left that unfortunate vessel no better for his visit.
During the long and uneventful voyage—uneventful, that is, so far as the piracy game went—Captain Bowen, alas! did not observe those little amenities between brother captains which so pleasantly mitigate the sternness of the sea. Doubtless Mr. Weoley had to do many things aboard which drove a bitter iron into hissoul. One day he might be lending a hand with the art of navigation if the load of rum captured at Mayotta should happen temporarily to incapacitate Captain Bowen; next day he might pitiably have to fetch and carry water at the behest of the sprawling villains, or again bend his elderly and stiffening back at the eternal task of pumping, and pumping ship in the Indian Ocean must have been—well, hot. He says himself that he received “many hazards of life and abuses from those villains.” Not the least of his grievances was that of listening through the long hours of a torrid night to the liquored Bowen boasting of his wickedness. That remark of Weoley’s places Bowen as the true, deliberate, almost romantic pirate and approximates him to the traditional pirate of fiction.
Off the coast of Malabar, Bowen nearly had to sober up, for he was come to his proper fishing grounds. Up and down this roadstead passed much of the commerce of the East Indies. Quite a medley it was, to be sure. There were craft from the ten-ton sloop belonging to a petty local merchant, up through increasing tonnage chartered by Moors, Persians, Armenians, Hindoos, to the two-and three-decker so-called East Indiaman, the ship of the august and imperial East India Company itself. In disturbing this traffic captain William Kidd had found a fortune in less than six months, and numerous pirates of many nations had here easily enriched themselves.
Captain Bowen, who must have been something of a joker as were so many of his outlaw colleagues, doubtless enjoyed immensely taking a ship with the name ofProsperous, which he did shortly after his entry into Indian waters proper. With a chuckle he realized that he had made the owners of theContentdiscontented; he intended theSpeedy Returnshould go home neither slowly nor speedily, and it is very likely that he put the charterers of theProsperousinto bankruptcy. It might have been of a better omen in those days to name your ship the very opposite to your hopes; say call theContenttheDissatisfied; theSpeedy ReturntheNever Come Backand theProsperous,Hard Times,—in which case a marauding pirate would at least lose the dramatic pleasure of surprise.
Having bagged theProsperous, Bowen put a crew on board and used her for an auxiliary, and with this augmented command in a few months, according to Weoley, he took “six sail of ship” and “hundreds ruined.” The last of these six ships was one from Surat, evidently of considerable size, for Bowen transferred all hands to her and then, being as drunk as a fool, entertained the amazed city of Rajapore with a grand nautical bonfire made up both of theProsperousand theSpeedy Return. How uneasily the stockholders of the Scotch Indian-African trading company would have turned in their beds hadthat lurid light gleamed against their far-off window panes!
This man Bowen was an incorrigible ship burner, which proves that he had not the heart of a true sailorman or the first instincts of a real conqueror of the sea.
On this captured Surat ship, when Bowen got over his pyrotechnic spree, he counted up his men and found, so Weoley records, “70 Lascars (native of India) and 146 fighting men (the Lascars being used as sailors) of which part are 43 English, the better part of the company French, the rest Negroes (our Jamaica friends), Dutch and other nations that cries ‘yaw’.” Quaint foible! Amid all his sufferings poor Captain Weoley could still find a feeling of irritation for men that “cries ‘yaw’” instead of “yes.”
Bowen steered from Rajapore down along the Malabar coast until he came to Cochin, a Portuguese settlement and where a miscalled Portuguese war fleet made its anchorage. Those old sieves were the local maritime joke, and a brisk pirate would think little of using them for mooring buoys. This aggregation had once gone out after the formidable Captain Kidd and much to its surprise and pain had found him. It had never been known to attempt anything notable since. Certainly, they did not trouble John Bowen. As Bowen dawdled along in these parts, touching at this and that small port for frolic orland robbery or both, “about three leagues to the northward of Cochin” Weoley states that “I got clear of the pirates.” Thus ended the worst seven months in the life of that worthy mariner.
What became of Bowen after Weoley escaped from him we do not know, at least so far as the authentic record we are consulting is concerned. Probably he met the violent end of his ilk; one thing is sure, however; he was never hanged for the piracy of theSpeedy Return, but—and this makes the dread, dark sequel of the crime—another man who knew not Bowen, Robert Drummond or the ill-fated shipSpeedy Returnsuffered by one of the most notable miscarriages of justice known to the law as the murderer of Captain Drummond and the pirate of theSpeedy Return.