VIIHis name might as well be put as Jemmy, for Jemmy has an honest sound and this Jemmy was an honest lad. What his parish parson actually did christen him is irrecoverably lost in some ancient parish record, but somehow it seems as if he should have been named Jemmy, and we will take the liberty of assuming that for once fact and fiction are coincident.Jemmy, presumably again, was one of the stubborn eight who had refused, at the time of the mutiny, to be traitors to their sailor’s duty; at any rate, he had no stomach for a pirate’s perils and pleasures. Also, he was a clear-minded youth, old enough, however, to see that his company had now brought him within hailing distance of the king’s gallows. Jemmy had no appetite for the ceremonial that that instrument adorned, and so, in the late spring night, when the moon was dark and the moment persuasive, Jemmy slid whitely off the stern of theRevenge, without stopping to procure his honorable discharge as an able seaman, and with no more of a flop than a frog would make turning off a log. With his clothes tightly tarpaulined about him, he clove the circling tides smoothly to the beach. As he pulled on his breeches and stockings, helooked back, but all was quiet. One small yellow light rose and fell out yonder in the watery blackness; to Jemmy the eye of an evil beast of the sea from whose maw he panted in a buoyant freedom. He listened; there was no chump of oars, no hoarse calling afar off, only the wash of white waters among the pebbles at his feet, and, behind him, voices of the shore,—the sweet, sane sounds of a life which he had begun to think had never been.Dressed, he made for the village. In the middle of an unlighted roadway, a strangely accented tongue told him there was no magistrate there; to find His Honor one would have to push on to Kirkwall.And how far was Kirkwall?Kirkwall was a matter of four leagues.“I must get there to-night,” said Jemmy. “Which is the way?”“The nicht!” came back the buzzing bewilderment. “To the magistrate at Kirkwa’ the nicht? Mon, what’s upon ye?”Jemmy wished the fellow would not talk so loud, though reason told him lungs of brass would hardly reach theRevenge. Panic.“Do you know any one would show a man the way to Kirkwall for a bit of money?” asked Jemmy, inspired.The void answered not. Then, ponderously, “It would take a muckle o’ siller for a man wi’ bairns to go out the nicht.”“A half-guinea, supposin’.”Long pause.“Aye—supposin’ as ye say. Cam, lad.”Jemmy’s guide stopped a little while at a cottage to warn the guid wife he would be out making an honest penny, and then they were off on the shadowy leagues. Cicerone tried with rude probe to find out what Jemmy’s business with the magistrate might be, a fact which, perhaps as much as the coveted “siller”, had bought his services, but when daylight and Kirkwall appeared together, he left his queer employer at the house of the magistrate with all of his information unbroached.“This is a funny cock to be crowing in my parlor the morn,” thought the magistrate as, with sleepy peevishness, he was compelled to journey to Santa Cruz, to provision at Porta Santa, to double Cape St. Vincent and what not by this boy with early manhood’s whiskers unshaven, drawn, sallow face, uncurbed hair and clad in a striking symphony of old sea clothes. “But sairtainly there has been an egg laid somewhere.”He sent for Mr. Honeyman, sheriff of the county, who dwelt between Kirkwall and the sea. After due deliberation, consultation and speculation, he issued his precepts to the constable and other peace officers, to call together the people “to assist in bringing those villains to justice.” Raised his posse, in plain Latin.While these matters transpired at Kirkwall,other things significant for Gow were occurring on theRevenge, or, rather, off it, for the defection of Jemmy was followed by a veritable landslide; ten men, no less, seized the longboat and made off for the mainland, where they coasted along till they came to Leith, the port of Edinburgh. Their hard journey was rewarded by imprisonment in the Tolbooth at that place as suspected pirates. A well-founded suspicion, if there ever was one.When John Gow took the next census of his crew only twenty-eight honest fellows answered “here.” Although it was obviously time to move on to uncropped pasturage, Gow first resolved to provision himself at the expense of the home folks by the violent means of robbing the wealthier residents alongshore. With that marked turn of his for a quaint joke, the first place that he selected for despoiling was that of our Mr. Honeyman, high sheriff.Ten men in charge of the bo’sun were detached for this job, and, slinging upon their persons everything in the way of a weapon they could struggle along with, they started off in the early evening.The high sheriff was flying about the country, compelling his posse, and it was Mrs. Honeyman, candle in hand, who answered the gently deceptive tapping on her front door. When she saw the bristling aggregation on the front steps, she thought for an instant that it was a party ofneighbors stopping in on their way to a fancy-dress ball to show her their diverting make-up. Or she may have mistaken them for a part of her husband’s posse, and may have been about to assure them laughingly that they had made the funniest mistake in the world when one of the great beards cracked like a young earthquake and a gale-conquering noise boomed through the ancestral halls of the Honeymans.“Excuse us, marm, yer leddyship, but we’re the pirates and we’ve come to rob the house. Gi’ us the stuff and there’ll be no trouble.”Nine walking arsenals clanked into the house, while one remained on guard at the door. The good wife screamed and fled, but fled methodically to the place where the family treasure was secreted, and, throwing the money into an apron, she ran back and out past the sentinel. He supposed she was merely running for her life, and he did not blame her a bit, though that was as far as his interest went.But upstairs she left her greatest valuable,—a lovely daughter, just blooming, as the romancers say, into beautiful womanhood. This young person’s sleep was interrupted by an inexplicable clamor below. She got out of bed, threw something about her and crept out on the stair landing. Unfamiliar voices surged up, together with a cracking and splintering that suggested an escaped menagerie. She inherited her mother’s presence of mind. Dashing into father’s bedroom,she grabbed the family papers, and with them in tight grasp, she leaped from her bedroom window, to speed ghostily into the dark.The two female servants and Sandy, the groom, cowered in the kitchen. The marauders found them there; politely they bowed to the ladies, but demanded of Sandy whether he could play the bagpipes. Sandy admitted his skill on that instrument of torture. So they lugged him out by the ear and bade him pipe them down to their ship, while they followed behind with all the Honeyman plate and linen bundled up in bed sheets on their backs, and all the good Honeyman wine, accumulated through the thrifty years, kicking a jig out of their ruffianly heels.Sandy’s wild night is doubtless still a story in Sandy’s generations.With the loot of the sheriff’s house on board, theRevengedropped down the coast a way for another job of “provisioning.” They made a fruitless attempt there, and then drew over to an island known as Calf Sound, where was the home of a Mr. Fea, an old schoolmate of John Gow. The pirate felt he could not leave those parts without saying how-do to one who in the past had shared with him the same dominie’s birch. In getting to the island, however, Gow dropped his anchor too close inshore, so that when it came time to shift he would not be able to avail himself of the wind. Too much wine from the Honeyman cellars probably.So the pirate chief wrote a little friendly note to Mr. Fea, begging the loan of a boat to assist in heaving off the ship by carrying out an anchor, and promising solemnly that the favor would not be rewarded with any violence to Mr. Fea’s boat or servants. This last clause suggests that Gow knew the word of warning against him was spread abroad over the land.The bewhiskered messenger who made the contact with Mr. Fea did not notice Fea’s boat, which happened to have been drawn up on the beach out of sight behind some rocks. Mr. Fea took advantage of the messenger’s oversight and returned to his old chum Jack a very vague answer, the purport of which was that Mr. Fea deplored his inability to oblige. By that time evening was at hand, and Mr. Fea ordered his servants to run the boat into the water, sink her in the shallows whence she could be readily recovered and secrete her gear.Jock and Tam and Donald were hastily pulling out the mast and rolling up the canvas and unshipping the rigging when they heard the grate of a keel on the sharp pebbles, from which, by the passing of a scud of thin cloud from before the moon, they saw five men slide quietly out, not so quietly, however, that the variety of weapons on shoulders and belts did not slightly jingle. The three servants peered breathlessly over the rocks and marked the movements of the invaders as they set off directly for Mr. Fea’shouse. Quickly they threw the boat’s trappings beneath a bowlder, thrust the boat itself nose down into the water, where she quickly filled and settled, then turned and ran for the house, where they arrived shortly before the pirates, who were approaching, stumbling and swearing, through the unfamiliar dark.Mr. Fea ordered all of his servants out of the house, but to remain in the vicinity, and if he should come out, one or two of them were to follow him at a discreet distance. Alone, he prepared to answer the thundering banging upon his front door.Calmly, quite without panic, Mr. Fea invited the delegation into the hall. They came and peered cautiously about. There was no sight or sound of any one but the master of the house; only the candles burned in their long silver sticks, and a fire against the raw spring night smoked on the wide hearth.“There is no one here, my friends,” said Mr. Fea. “May I ask—”“You may,” growled the bo’sun, thumping his musket butt on the polished floor. “We want your boat to pull us off—we’ve got out of the wind, d’ye mind? Cap’n says give us the boat and we’ll leave yer joolry.”“Jack Gow could have anything he wanted from an old schoolmate,” smiled Mr. Fea, like one who, in a pinch, would not object to being a pirate himself, “but Jack is asking a little toomuch, when you come to think of it. Here is Jack—a good boy, too, even if he was a little rough at school—come back to his old home only to be published a pirate; but, says I when I heard this, ‘Little Johnny Gow a pirate?’ ‘Never in this world,’ said I, and many on the Sound can bear me out on this. ‘But he is,’ said they, and a bad, pillaging, plundering sea dog he is, to be sure. ‘Well,’ said I, ‘you are welcome to the notion, but as for me, I stand by little Johnny Gow.’ But, now, hark’ee, suppose I had a boat, and suppose I said to Johnny Gow, ‘Here, heave off with this boat,’ what d’ ye imagine would happen to me? Why, inside of no time at all, I’d be fast in the Tolbooth at Edinburgh as an aider and abettor of pirates. As men of the world, you know you can’t talk to some people when a notion’s stuck in their heads, can ye now?”In this way Mr. Fea turned the edge of the tense minute. With one pretext and another, he wooed the delegation down to the village tavern, where he opened wide his purse and they opened still more widely their mouths, into which that liquid flowed which is authoritatively reputed to steal away the brains. The pirates mellowed, got to slapping Mr. Fea jolting whacks on the shoulder and constantly pledged him with their mugs. Opportunely, their host, so bland, so hospitable and, although they did not realize it, so sober, excused himself a second,and, stepping out, called Tam and Donald quickly and bade them scamper to the beach and destroy the pirate’s boat. This done, they were to come back to the tavern and send in some kind of casual word which would give him excuse to leave his company a second time.As Mr. Fea passed into the public room again, the keeper and his wife met him with upraised hands and faces of silent consternation. He smiled reassuringly, pushed open the door, upon which a roar of strange sea songs came tumultuously from the inside accompanied with the clanging of cutlasses marking time to the voices. Very coolly he resumed his place at the presidency of the revels, where he directed the increasing bubble of strong Scotch whiskey, varied with the husky smuggled French brandy, until, to his obvious annoyance, he was again interrupted by a call to the outside.Tam and Donald had done their task. Pulling them aside from the yellow squares of light which shone from the boisterous inn, Mr. Fea now bade them assemble six men, well armed, place them behind the hedges and carefully remember to do one of two things: if Mr. Fea came from the tavern accompanied only by the boatswain, the ambush was to seize the boatswain; but if he came with the whole crew, he would walk a little forward of the company, upon whom the watchers were then to open fire.After a considerable wait, the tavern door opened and Mr. Fea stepped forth,—and with him was only the boatswain. The boatswain wanted to take his host’s arm in the most friendly manner, but Mr. Fea adroitly disentangled himself; it was no part of his plan to be thus cuddled. Having no use for his rejected arm, the boatswain decided to carry a pistol in each hand, remarking that after all they were his best friends. Mr. Fea thought he was very careless in the way he swung the weapons around, in gestures and for the purpose of punctuating his vigorous conversation.At a dark and hedge-lined part of the road, the boatswain was just indicating, with a very free gesticulation, how to repulse an enemy at one’s bulwarks, when something—probably a heavenly meteor—struck him suddenly from behind, and down he went on the flat of his back, the pistols clattered from his hands, and the meteor, or whatever it was, was poking a handkerchief a lot farther down his throat than he thought necessary for the purpose of preventing speech. Before the fog from his brain could lift, he was bound, hand and foot, until he was as inert as an Egyptian mummy.The attackers left one man to guard their first capture and stole back to the tavern for the big job. There were two doors to the room where Gow’s men were having their little party, at each of which Mr. Fea placed a group of men, who,at a signal, broke in on both sides and covered the pirates with their muskets before the besieged could pull a dirk or raise a cutlass.Law and order now had five out of twenty-eight men, but rather disappointingly for our interest, the record thus concludes:“At length, by an equal exertion of courage and artifice, Mr. Fea captured these dangerous men, twenty-eight in number, without a single man being killed or wounded; and only with the aid of a few countrymen.”And among the captives was old schoolmate John Gow.Happily, for every Gow there is a Fea.TheRevengewas seized by the government, and the pirates sent to Edinburgh under a military guard which came to Calf Sound for that purpose. At Edinburgh they were ironed aboard the frigate,Greyhound, which brought them down to London and the court of admiralty which was waiting there to try them.Five of them were admitted king’s evidence, the rest were put to their plea. Now, in the old law, the prisoner’s plea of guilty or not guilty was necessary before the trial could proceed. Nowadays if the accused refuses to make either plea, but stands mute, as the expression is, the judge directs that a plea of not guilty be entered for him and the proceedings go on. This simple means of meeting the difficulty did not occur to our forefathers, so they decreed that if the prisonerstood mute he was to be put under the press until he either pled or died. In the latter event, he was not considered to have been tried, and not having been tried, any estate which he might leave could not be forfeited. History records some cases where extraordinary persons have endured this dreadful torment to the end, and so saved their property to their heirs, who, one would suppose, could certainly never be sufficiently grateful.John Gow now chose to take the ordeal rather than be convicted as a felon, for he had relatives whom he wished to inherit his ill-earned gains rather than King George. The preparations for his pressing daunted him. The process was that the person sentenced to be pressed was stretched, or spread-eagled, upon his back, and a succession of weights was gradually lowered upon his chest until he either squeaked his plea or perished. The Press Yard of old Newgate jail indicates the place of such pressings.Gow’s nerve gave way and he begged to be allowed to plead, which was clemently allowed him.He and six others—presumably including old Paterson—were convicted and received sentence of death, but the rest, showing that their actions had been under a sort of compulsion, were acquitted.“They suffered,” says the old historian, “at Execution-Dock, August 11, 1729. Gow’sfriends, anxious to put him out of pain, pulled his legs so forcibly that the rope broke, and he fell, on which he was again taken up to the gibbet, and when he was dead, was hung in chains on the banks of the Thames.”As the ordinary, or prison chaplain, rode back to Newgate in the empty cart from Execution Dock, a line from the ninety-second psalm persisted in his mind. “All the workers of wickedness shall be destroyed.”
His name might as well be put as Jemmy, for Jemmy has an honest sound and this Jemmy was an honest lad. What his parish parson actually did christen him is irrecoverably lost in some ancient parish record, but somehow it seems as if he should have been named Jemmy, and we will take the liberty of assuming that for once fact and fiction are coincident.
Jemmy, presumably again, was one of the stubborn eight who had refused, at the time of the mutiny, to be traitors to their sailor’s duty; at any rate, he had no stomach for a pirate’s perils and pleasures. Also, he was a clear-minded youth, old enough, however, to see that his company had now brought him within hailing distance of the king’s gallows. Jemmy had no appetite for the ceremonial that that instrument adorned, and so, in the late spring night, when the moon was dark and the moment persuasive, Jemmy slid whitely off the stern of theRevenge, without stopping to procure his honorable discharge as an able seaman, and with no more of a flop than a frog would make turning off a log. With his clothes tightly tarpaulined about him, he clove the circling tides smoothly to the beach. As he pulled on his breeches and stockings, helooked back, but all was quiet. One small yellow light rose and fell out yonder in the watery blackness; to Jemmy the eye of an evil beast of the sea from whose maw he panted in a buoyant freedom. He listened; there was no chump of oars, no hoarse calling afar off, only the wash of white waters among the pebbles at his feet, and, behind him, voices of the shore,—the sweet, sane sounds of a life which he had begun to think had never been.
Dressed, he made for the village. In the middle of an unlighted roadway, a strangely accented tongue told him there was no magistrate there; to find His Honor one would have to push on to Kirkwall.
And how far was Kirkwall?
Kirkwall was a matter of four leagues.
“I must get there to-night,” said Jemmy. “Which is the way?”
“The nicht!” came back the buzzing bewilderment. “To the magistrate at Kirkwa’ the nicht? Mon, what’s upon ye?”
Jemmy wished the fellow would not talk so loud, though reason told him lungs of brass would hardly reach theRevenge. Panic.
“Do you know any one would show a man the way to Kirkwall for a bit of money?” asked Jemmy, inspired.
The void answered not. Then, ponderously, “It would take a muckle o’ siller for a man wi’ bairns to go out the nicht.”
“A half-guinea, supposin’.”
Long pause.
“Aye—supposin’ as ye say. Cam, lad.”
Jemmy’s guide stopped a little while at a cottage to warn the guid wife he would be out making an honest penny, and then they were off on the shadowy leagues. Cicerone tried with rude probe to find out what Jemmy’s business with the magistrate might be, a fact which, perhaps as much as the coveted “siller”, had bought his services, but when daylight and Kirkwall appeared together, he left his queer employer at the house of the magistrate with all of his information unbroached.
“This is a funny cock to be crowing in my parlor the morn,” thought the magistrate as, with sleepy peevishness, he was compelled to journey to Santa Cruz, to provision at Porta Santa, to double Cape St. Vincent and what not by this boy with early manhood’s whiskers unshaven, drawn, sallow face, uncurbed hair and clad in a striking symphony of old sea clothes. “But sairtainly there has been an egg laid somewhere.”
He sent for Mr. Honeyman, sheriff of the county, who dwelt between Kirkwall and the sea. After due deliberation, consultation and speculation, he issued his precepts to the constable and other peace officers, to call together the people “to assist in bringing those villains to justice.” Raised his posse, in plain Latin.
While these matters transpired at Kirkwall,other things significant for Gow were occurring on theRevenge, or, rather, off it, for the defection of Jemmy was followed by a veritable landslide; ten men, no less, seized the longboat and made off for the mainland, where they coasted along till they came to Leith, the port of Edinburgh. Their hard journey was rewarded by imprisonment in the Tolbooth at that place as suspected pirates. A well-founded suspicion, if there ever was one.
When John Gow took the next census of his crew only twenty-eight honest fellows answered “here.” Although it was obviously time to move on to uncropped pasturage, Gow first resolved to provision himself at the expense of the home folks by the violent means of robbing the wealthier residents alongshore. With that marked turn of his for a quaint joke, the first place that he selected for despoiling was that of our Mr. Honeyman, high sheriff.
Ten men in charge of the bo’sun were detached for this job, and, slinging upon their persons everything in the way of a weapon they could struggle along with, they started off in the early evening.
The high sheriff was flying about the country, compelling his posse, and it was Mrs. Honeyman, candle in hand, who answered the gently deceptive tapping on her front door. When she saw the bristling aggregation on the front steps, she thought for an instant that it was a party ofneighbors stopping in on their way to a fancy-dress ball to show her their diverting make-up. Or she may have mistaken them for a part of her husband’s posse, and may have been about to assure them laughingly that they had made the funniest mistake in the world when one of the great beards cracked like a young earthquake and a gale-conquering noise boomed through the ancestral halls of the Honeymans.
“Excuse us, marm, yer leddyship, but we’re the pirates and we’ve come to rob the house. Gi’ us the stuff and there’ll be no trouble.”
Nine walking arsenals clanked into the house, while one remained on guard at the door. The good wife screamed and fled, but fled methodically to the place where the family treasure was secreted, and, throwing the money into an apron, she ran back and out past the sentinel. He supposed she was merely running for her life, and he did not blame her a bit, though that was as far as his interest went.
But upstairs she left her greatest valuable,—a lovely daughter, just blooming, as the romancers say, into beautiful womanhood. This young person’s sleep was interrupted by an inexplicable clamor below. She got out of bed, threw something about her and crept out on the stair landing. Unfamiliar voices surged up, together with a cracking and splintering that suggested an escaped menagerie. She inherited her mother’s presence of mind. Dashing into father’s bedroom,she grabbed the family papers, and with them in tight grasp, she leaped from her bedroom window, to speed ghostily into the dark.
The two female servants and Sandy, the groom, cowered in the kitchen. The marauders found them there; politely they bowed to the ladies, but demanded of Sandy whether he could play the bagpipes. Sandy admitted his skill on that instrument of torture. So they lugged him out by the ear and bade him pipe them down to their ship, while they followed behind with all the Honeyman plate and linen bundled up in bed sheets on their backs, and all the good Honeyman wine, accumulated through the thrifty years, kicking a jig out of their ruffianly heels.
Sandy’s wild night is doubtless still a story in Sandy’s generations.
With the loot of the sheriff’s house on board, theRevengedropped down the coast a way for another job of “provisioning.” They made a fruitless attempt there, and then drew over to an island known as Calf Sound, where was the home of a Mr. Fea, an old schoolmate of John Gow. The pirate felt he could not leave those parts without saying how-do to one who in the past had shared with him the same dominie’s birch. In getting to the island, however, Gow dropped his anchor too close inshore, so that when it came time to shift he would not be able to avail himself of the wind. Too much wine from the Honeyman cellars probably.
So the pirate chief wrote a little friendly note to Mr. Fea, begging the loan of a boat to assist in heaving off the ship by carrying out an anchor, and promising solemnly that the favor would not be rewarded with any violence to Mr. Fea’s boat or servants. This last clause suggests that Gow knew the word of warning against him was spread abroad over the land.
The bewhiskered messenger who made the contact with Mr. Fea did not notice Fea’s boat, which happened to have been drawn up on the beach out of sight behind some rocks. Mr. Fea took advantage of the messenger’s oversight and returned to his old chum Jack a very vague answer, the purport of which was that Mr. Fea deplored his inability to oblige. By that time evening was at hand, and Mr. Fea ordered his servants to run the boat into the water, sink her in the shallows whence she could be readily recovered and secrete her gear.
Jock and Tam and Donald were hastily pulling out the mast and rolling up the canvas and unshipping the rigging when they heard the grate of a keel on the sharp pebbles, from which, by the passing of a scud of thin cloud from before the moon, they saw five men slide quietly out, not so quietly, however, that the variety of weapons on shoulders and belts did not slightly jingle. The three servants peered breathlessly over the rocks and marked the movements of the invaders as they set off directly for Mr. Fea’shouse. Quickly they threw the boat’s trappings beneath a bowlder, thrust the boat itself nose down into the water, where she quickly filled and settled, then turned and ran for the house, where they arrived shortly before the pirates, who were approaching, stumbling and swearing, through the unfamiliar dark.
Mr. Fea ordered all of his servants out of the house, but to remain in the vicinity, and if he should come out, one or two of them were to follow him at a discreet distance. Alone, he prepared to answer the thundering banging upon his front door.
Calmly, quite without panic, Mr. Fea invited the delegation into the hall. They came and peered cautiously about. There was no sight or sound of any one but the master of the house; only the candles burned in their long silver sticks, and a fire against the raw spring night smoked on the wide hearth.
“There is no one here, my friends,” said Mr. Fea. “May I ask—”
“You may,” growled the bo’sun, thumping his musket butt on the polished floor. “We want your boat to pull us off—we’ve got out of the wind, d’ye mind? Cap’n says give us the boat and we’ll leave yer joolry.”
“Jack Gow could have anything he wanted from an old schoolmate,” smiled Mr. Fea, like one who, in a pinch, would not object to being a pirate himself, “but Jack is asking a little toomuch, when you come to think of it. Here is Jack—a good boy, too, even if he was a little rough at school—come back to his old home only to be published a pirate; but, says I when I heard this, ‘Little Johnny Gow a pirate?’ ‘Never in this world,’ said I, and many on the Sound can bear me out on this. ‘But he is,’ said they, and a bad, pillaging, plundering sea dog he is, to be sure. ‘Well,’ said I, ‘you are welcome to the notion, but as for me, I stand by little Johnny Gow.’ But, now, hark’ee, suppose I had a boat, and suppose I said to Johnny Gow, ‘Here, heave off with this boat,’ what d’ ye imagine would happen to me? Why, inside of no time at all, I’d be fast in the Tolbooth at Edinburgh as an aider and abettor of pirates. As men of the world, you know you can’t talk to some people when a notion’s stuck in their heads, can ye now?”
In this way Mr. Fea turned the edge of the tense minute. With one pretext and another, he wooed the delegation down to the village tavern, where he opened wide his purse and they opened still more widely their mouths, into which that liquid flowed which is authoritatively reputed to steal away the brains. The pirates mellowed, got to slapping Mr. Fea jolting whacks on the shoulder and constantly pledged him with their mugs. Opportunely, their host, so bland, so hospitable and, although they did not realize it, so sober, excused himself a second,and, stepping out, called Tam and Donald quickly and bade them scamper to the beach and destroy the pirate’s boat. This done, they were to come back to the tavern and send in some kind of casual word which would give him excuse to leave his company a second time.
As Mr. Fea passed into the public room again, the keeper and his wife met him with upraised hands and faces of silent consternation. He smiled reassuringly, pushed open the door, upon which a roar of strange sea songs came tumultuously from the inside accompanied with the clanging of cutlasses marking time to the voices. Very coolly he resumed his place at the presidency of the revels, where he directed the increasing bubble of strong Scotch whiskey, varied with the husky smuggled French brandy, until, to his obvious annoyance, he was again interrupted by a call to the outside.
Tam and Donald had done their task. Pulling them aside from the yellow squares of light which shone from the boisterous inn, Mr. Fea now bade them assemble six men, well armed, place them behind the hedges and carefully remember to do one of two things: if Mr. Fea came from the tavern accompanied only by the boatswain, the ambush was to seize the boatswain; but if he came with the whole crew, he would walk a little forward of the company, upon whom the watchers were then to open fire.
After a considerable wait, the tavern door opened and Mr. Fea stepped forth,—and with him was only the boatswain. The boatswain wanted to take his host’s arm in the most friendly manner, but Mr. Fea adroitly disentangled himself; it was no part of his plan to be thus cuddled. Having no use for his rejected arm, the boatswain decided to carry a pistol in each hand, remarking that after all they were his best friends. Mr. Fea thought he was very careless in the way he swung the weapons around, in gestures and for the purpose of punctuating his vigorous conversation.
At a dark and hedge-lined part of the road, the boatswain was just indicating, with a very free gesticulation, how to repulse an enemy at one’s bulwarks, when something—probably a heavenly meteor—struck him suddenly from behind, and down he went on the flat of his back, the pistols clattered from his hands, and the meteor, or whatever it was, was poking a handkerchief a lot farther down his throat than he thought necessary for the purpose of preventing speech. Before the fog from his brain could lift, he was bound, hand and foot, until he was as inert as an Egyptian mummy.
The attackers left one man to guard their first capture and stole back to the tavern for the big job. There were two doors to the room where Gow’s men were having their little party, at each of which Mr. Fea placed a group of men, who,at a signal, broke in on both sides and covered the pirates with their muskets before the besieged could pull a dirk or raise a cutlass.
Law and order now had five out of twenty-eight men, but rather disappointingly for our interest, the record thus concludes:
“At length, by an equal exertion of courage and artifice, Mr. Fea captured these dangerous men, twenty-eight in number, without a single man being killed or wounded; and only with the aid of a few countrymen.”
And among the captives was old schoolmate John Gow.
Happily, for every Gow there is a Fea.
TheRevengewas seized by the government, and the pirates sent to Edinburgh under a military guard which came to Calf Sound for that purpose. At Edinburgh they were ironed aboard the frigate,Greyhound, which brought them down to London and the court of admiralty which was waiting there to try them.
Five of them were admitted king’s evidence, the rest were put to their plea. Now, in the old law, the prisoner’s plea of guilty or not guilty was necessary before the trial could proceed. Nowadays if the accused refuses to make either plea, but stands mute, as the expression is, the judge directs that a plea of not guilty be entered for him and the proceedings go on. This simple means of meeting the difficulty did not occur to our forefathers, so they decreed that if the prisonerstood mute he was to be put under the press until he either pled or died. In the latter event, he was not considered to have been tried, and not having been tried, any estate which he might leave could not be forfeited. History records some cases where extraordinary persons have endured this dreadful torment to the end, and so saved their property to their heirs, who, one would suppose, could certainly never be sufficiently grateful.
John Gow now chose to take the ordeal rather than be convicted as a felon, for he had relatives whom he wished to inherit his ill-earned gains rather than King George. The preparations for his pressing daunted him. The process was that the person sentenced to be pressed was stretched, or spread-eagled, upon his back, and a succession of weights was gradually lowered upon his chest until he either squeaked his plea or perished. The Press Yard of old Newgate jail indicates the place of such pressings.
Gow’s nerve gave way and he begged to be allowed to plead, which was clemently allowed him.
He and six others—presumably including old Paterson—were convicted and received sentence of death, but the rest, showing that their actions had been under a sort of compulsion, were acquitted.
“They suffered,” says the old historian, “at Execution-Dock, August 11, 1729. Gow’sfriends, anxious to put him out of pain, pulled his legs so forcibly that the rope broke, and he fell, on which he was again taken up to the gibbet, and when he was dead, was hung in chains on the banks of the Thames.”
As the ordinary, or prison chaplain, rode back to Newgate in the empty cart from Execution Dock, a line from the ninety-second psalm persisted in his mind. “All the workers of wickedness shall be destroyed.”
Transcriber’s NotesPerceived typographical errors have been silently corrected.Colloquial spelling in dialog has been retained as in the original.Inconsistencies in hyphenation and compound words have been retained as printed.
Transcriber’s Notes
Perceived typographical errors have been silently corrected.
Colloquial spelling in dialog has been retained as in the original.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation and compound words have been retained as printed.