CHAPTER TWO

BLACK FLAG FROM BOSTON

John Quelch

I

Captain Plowman, of the brig _Charles_, was looking for men, not just for beef at the end of a rope nor a stevedore’s back; for sailors, certainly, but something more than sailors--sea-fighters. For a fact, this sort of thing was a little outside the usual jobs of both Captain Plowman and his smart little brig. The brig and her master worked in coastwise trading with an occasional venture to the markets of London. But a civic emergency occasioned by the depredations of French and Spanish war vessels and privateers, long vexing the New England provinces, put a commission instead of a charter party into the hands of Captain Plowman and cutlasses, cannon and round shot in place of goods, wares and merchandise into the hold and on the decks of the _Charles_.

For certain worthy merchants of Boston, indignant at the reprehensible Frenchman and his obnoxious ally and impatient with the slow incompetence of the Government, clubbed together and bought the _Charles_ to refit her as a privateer to go against the enemy. It was a recognized method of taking the law into one’s own hands. It must not be thought that this was altogether a sacrifice, motived by the pure principles of patriotism. There was a working chance of shaking something worth while out of a captured Frenchman from which at least current expenses might be paid; but in the main it was a public-spirited thought and should properly have resulted in much happier and more useful action than the peculiar and unforeseeable circumstances which were to allow.

Having the ship, the merchants then procured from Joseph Dudley, her majesty’s captain general, governor and commander-in-chief of the province, a lawful commission for Captain Plowman, under and by virtue of which, as the saying was, he set about the business of recruiting the crew. But Plowman was getting along in years and was at that time a pretty sick man. So the business of beating up the sea birds was for the most part done by the mates, or “lieutenants”, as they were called, taking a sort of man-of-war nomenclature, namely John Quelch and Anthony Holding.

John Quelch was an eager, vigorous, adventurous and able young colonial mariner with not a few of the superb qualities of those who were the proper pride of a maritime province. Like the men of his type and condition, he was quite unafraid of anything that could present itself to one’s five senses. When at a later time he said he was not afraid to die and feared only a great God and the hereafter, he was doubtless telling the truth. What spoiled the life of John Quelch was that he did not take these two factors of admitted fear into reckoning until the evil was past mending.

However that may be, the immediate weakness of Quelch was that his mind was a rudder that any hand might steer. Anthony Holding, quite evil, sly and contemptible, designed to be the helmsman who should drive John Quelch on to the rocks of ruin.

Holding and Quelch in due time gathered as ferocious and villainous-looking a gang of ruffians as ever stood on the docks of old Boston. Their subsequent conduct indicates that they must have been about the toughest, hardest crew that an honest master ever piped together for division into watches. If Plowman, gazing from the quarter-deck upon that rabble, felt a premonition of trouble, the event was to justify him.

But those were not days in which the master of a privateer could be squeamish about such matters and get his ship manned. The _Charles_ would have rotted at her moorings while she waited for good burghers or the sons of good burghers to come and take her to sea. Mostly the driftwood of society, which instinctively dams up along a waterfront, could be loaded on to such ships in such times. Anthony Holding, at any rate, pulled at his long mustache and appraised the crowd with satisfaction.

Sea-fighters were all right if you could keep them fighting the other ship. With a hostile craft in front of them there was no trouble about putting the medley of privateersmen at work, and a ship which could provide a good naval battle every morning before breakfast was more likely to be a contented ship than one which loafed a long while between engagements, thus allowing the free gentlemen time to hatch for themselves a little essential excitement. Mutiny was accepted as a passable substitute for battle.

Perhaps Plowman felt more comfortable when he glanced at the rocky features of Quelch and Holding; for if ever there were two men in the right jobs such were they. With iron hands and iron nerves to drive them they could meet any contingency the crowd of subordinates might present. Perhaps Plowman was of the same sort, but he was a sick and aging man. He was in the hands of his lieutenants.

Englishmen of the first or second generation made up the list of seamen; Cæsar-Pompey, Charlie and Mingo, first or second generation Africans, were in command of the galley. Cæsar-Pompey and Charlie were pressed into the service; they had not volunteered to handle the pots and pans of the brig.

They were the slaves of one Colonel Hobbey; and Quelch, finding them on the street, ran them aboard the brig. You see he did not hesitate about small matters. The ship would need cooks, of course, and here were two black fellows who ought to know how to cook even if they did not, so why not ship them? Why worry about the gallant colonel? Worry would be his job when the _Charles_ was far at sea.

Thus casually Cæsar-Pompey and Charlie found themselves dedicated to a life on the ocean wave. They were to travel far and see much ere they beheld the good Colonel Hobbey again. Quelch was by way of being something of a crimp.

Cooks and seamen being now on hand, in August, 1703, the brig spread her square sails and drew away from the steaming wharves of Boston toward the cool acres of the ocean. No doubt the worthy merchants and a concourse of citizens cheered her departure; probably there were speeches, and mayhap a town band was on the dock. Anthony Holding especially must have enjoyed these marks of civic appreciation.

According to orders they headed off for Newfoundland; but Plowman, who was still sick, must have left the managing of the ship largely to Quelch, his immediate subordinate. Everything went snappily as with leather throats and fisted hands Quelch and Holding hustled the men into quick, effective action.

When they had been a week out from Boston it was easy to see that the captain was in a bad way. Probably at his command they put in at a way port to obtain medical help. The brig was anchored in the stream, and Quelch went ashore in the boat.

Now among the riffraff aboard there was a handful--a small handful--of the more decent sort of seamen, of whom Pimer and Clifford were representatives. These two began to get anxious about the captain as the afternoon dragged on and no boat, Quelch or doctor returned from the shore. The sick man was groaning all the time and in apparent extremes. Nobody seemed to pay any heed to him; but all afternoon the crew roared and shouted and quarreled over their cards and dice, while aft by the cabin only Holding turned about and about on the deck, his hands behind his back, preoccupied with his thoughts.

It began to strike Pimer and Clifford as odd, to say the least; so toward evening, as the August sun was turning red behind the hills, Pimer and Clifford went to the cabin to give a little human help. As they passed Holding, walking up and down the deck, he looked at them queerly but said nothing.

Clearly, things were not just as they ought to be. In the twilight, startlingly, a rough tongue ordered them away from the cabin. A sentinel was there; Peter Roach stood guard at the captain’s door, armed with a drawn cutlass. Had the skipper directed this?

Then they noticed that the cabin door was bolted from the outside with a marlin-spike thrust through the bolt socket, the bolt itself having long been lost. Obviously this was not the captain’s doing.

Pimer and Clifford looked at each other as men do in peril. Something very evil was moving about them. At dark Quelch came back in the boat, and there was a whispering between him and Holding. The ship lights were hung out; and the lantern revealed something of the knobbly, stupid face of Peter Roach, still standing at his sinister watch. No one moved toward the ill-fortuned cabin.

Peter Roach, the sentinel, could not be said to have been a peculiarly sensitive person. Some time later he was to die with as little feeling for himself as he had had for poor Plowman. He was an automaton.

And so this crowd of men lay all about the hot decks, waiting for the captain to die. Those were hard hours for Clifford and Pimer and the one or two other loyal men.

A little before midnight the cries of the sufferer ebbed away, and Peter Roach stolidly left his post and as stolidly grunted a few words at Holding. He and Quelch, taking a lantern, entered the cabin and found that nature had at last done their job for them: Captain Plowman was dead.

Captain Quelch, now, if you please, by the law and usage of the sea.

Anthony Holding bobbed his tarry pigtail low in grimacing courtesy--place was little to him, power everything. And he was the power on this ship. He ordered the captain’s body thrown overboard like so much rubbish. Then he called all hands together in the waist of the brig and openly declared that which undoubtedly he had long secretly prepared for,--piracy. The proposal was acclaimed with a unanimity which indicated premeditation.

It was no time for Pimer or Clifford to talk, though manfully they made an effort at protest with no result but to endanger their own safety. That they were not tossed over the side at once is a marvel. The only question that agitated this bandit conference was where to pirate, one suggesting this field and another that. Somebody, probably Holding, persuaded them that Brazil, then a colony of Portugal, and the South American coast gave the most promise of gain.

This policy and its execution were really masterly. They must have been the products of careful pondering based upon information more or less exact. Consider it geographically. From Cape San Augustine, where Brazil thrusts its elbow into the Atlantic Ocean, away down to Rio de Janeiro is one long, continuous coast line, well populated even in the early eighteenth century with numerous ports of small and great importance. Starting then at the cape, a pirate need only drop continually down the latitudes, pausing as occasion suggested to pick up prizes, never staying in a vicinity or returning to it to be captured. At Rio, where the cruise was to be finished, swing out far from the coast and make a bee line for home. It was an able plan and strong because so simple.

Holding, or whoever the proponent of the South American cruise might have been, had without question made a close study of the methods of Captain Kidd, hanged some two years before in London. The parallel between the Kidd and Quelch piracies is so exact as to be more than coincidental. Both perverted the use of a commissioned ship; both journeyed thousands of miles to their fields of operation; both sought to make one quick, strong strike at fortune and return to respectability.

Neither Kidd nor Quelch had a notion of being conventional pirates, that is, of infesting some given locality and preying on passing traffic, spending their gains riotously and expecting not to leave the business except perhaps unluckily by way of the king’s rope. Kidd had made a fortune which was the talk of the colony; and the incident that he was hanged for it only proved his subsequent mismanagement and did not impugn his actual methods of pirating.

Again, pirates of the type of Kidd and Quelch were attracted by a combination of two favoring factors,--a good sea traffic and a weak land government. In Kidd’s case the flourishing Indian commerce was not completely protected by the decaying Mogul Government, while in Quelch’s case the merchants of the east coast of South America were considerably ahead of any authority which could guarantee them a peaceful development.

In the middle of November, or just a little more than three months after leaving Boston, the _Charles_, having reeled off three thousand miles of journeying, arrived in the seventh degree, south latitude, off the bold beak of Cape St. Augustine, and hungrily searched the sea for prey.

Quelch was under English colors, and at the ports hereabouts where he made his first stops he gave out that he was cruising against the French and Spanish. That kind of talk kept things clear on shore.

With Quelch was one John Twist, who was either recruited in the neighborhood of St. Augustine or came originally from Boston. John was the ship’s “linguister”, as the quaint old word was--the interpreter--and he was what army men might call the officer of liaison between the New Englanders and the Portuguese. He was also the pilot in the Brazilian waters, but died before the _Charles_ went home, though apparently not until he had brought her to her extreme southern objective, Rio de Janeiro.

On November fifteenth, after leaving the cape and working slowly southward, a little Portuguese fishing boat was stopped by the pirates as she was slipping into port, and her cargo of fish and salt was quickly tossed over the bulwarks of the _Charles_. Fish and salt do not make any great treasure; in fact, this particular fish and salt were worth about three pounds to Quelch. But it was a little preliminary workout.

Three days later the brig was opposite Pernambuco, where she coolly picked up a small Portuguese vessel of fifteen tons right from under the eyes of the townsfolk. She was stuffed with sugar and molasses to the value of one hundred and fifty pounds. In the modern worth of the pound this would be about six hundred and seventy-five dollars; but it must be noted, of course, that that amount of silver would buy a great deal more in those times than in these.

John Twist persuaded two white men and one negro of the crew of five to sign up with the pirates. Quelch no doubt had the same experience that Kidd had with his original crew; there was a continual attrition by disease or desertion, and the man-power had to be kept up by recruiting so far as possible from captured ships.

Those who did not care to join up with the _Charles_ were returned to their boats in most cases and permitted to pass on their way. It was quite unnecessary for the pirates to kill such as refused to go along with them, for by the time they got back to port and had a chase organized, the _Charles_ would be well ahead of them to the south.

The fifteen-ton brig with the sugar and molasses aboard was kept by Quelch and made a “tender”, as he called it, of the _Charles_, and thus created a sort of fleet, with the Boston brig as flagship and John Quelch as admiral.

Latitudes seven and eight degrees south had yielded two victims; November twenty-fourth found them in latitude nine degrees south, and tumbling well around the elbow of Brazil, but still in the vicinity of Cape St. Augustine.

Below the cape they took another Portuguese brig, this time of forty tons. She was on her way from the plantations to Pernambuco, laden with about eight hundred dollars’ worth of sugar and molasses. We are vividly reminded of Kidd’s first catches, which so often consisted of small sloops carrying butter, coffee and opium.

A cool piece of work was the taking of this ship, impudently accomplished well within sight of land. Quelch, with John Twist, the linguister, at his side, led in the capture, which was made without resistance on the part of the Portuguese. It took two or three days to shift her cargo to the _Charles_, after which she was tossed away like a squeezed lemon to get back to port as best she might. Through Twist Quelch informed these Portuguese that the _Charles_ was a French ship and that the Portuguese, as allies of the English, had fallen on the sad mischances of war. Another trick out of Kidd’s bag.

Isaac Johnson, a Dutchman, committed the chief crime on a pirate ship: he talked too much. Somehow or other he told the Portuguese the truth about Quelch. Gunner Moore had met his end at the hands of Captain Kidd because of a fatal flexibility of the lips, and Ike Johnson likewise, though not so severely, was made an example of by the decisive Quelch.

All hands were piped on deck,--not with a boatswain’s whistle, however, but by a trumpet loudly sounded by the kidnapped though apparently not disconsolate Cæsar-Pompey, who to the job of cook added that of ship’s trumpeter. Johnson was brought forward and tied by the wrists to a grating; and Anthony Holding, with malice aforethought and continuous, laid on Ike’s bare back with a rope’s end, and thus counseled him as to the wisdom of silence. It was an approved sea fashion of admonition.

December brought them to latitude thirteen degrees south and early presented them with two jars of rum, a little linen and a trifle of earthenware filched from a shallop. This was the smallest sprat that came to their net during the cruise. She was taken by the tender, and, being despoiled, was sent on her way.

The same day the tender took another small Portuguese boat. Both of these takings were right under the guns of Fort Mora, so close that the flag flying over the fort was clearly discerned. Being a little too close to the fort to run needless risk, Quelch staved in the captured boat and let her gurgle and bubble down into the green Atlantic. Her crew went aboard the _Charles_, perhaps as recruits.

From her they took a quantity of vari-colored silk; and soon the crew of the _Charles_ were gallant and picturesque in silk breeches and shirts,--of homemade cut and tailoring, to be sure, but none the less gratifying to the wearers.

The next capture was in latitude thirteen degrees south and below Mora. The busy little tender here grabbed a twenty-ton brig, from which an inconsiderable amount of rice and a negro slave were taken. The negro’s name was Joachim; but his captors dubbed him Cuffee and turned him over to Cæsar-Pompey as a flunky. In addition to these there was a young man on board with a canvas bag containing two hundred and fifty dollars in gold coin. The young man was allowed to keep the canvas bag.

After the fashion of the trade, the pirate crew were working on the share basis; that is, after deducting for general expenses, a major part went to Quelch--and of course Holding--and minor parts of the plunder were distributed head for head. All cash taken was put in the keeping of the quartermaster to accumulate for future division; merchandise such as sugar and so on was probably marketed at way ports and the proceeds put into the treasury, after the manner again of Kidd in the East Indies.

Cuffee, the flunky, not being divisible, was auctioned off at the mast to the highest bidder, who happened to be one Ben Perkins. The price was thrown into the common pot. Cuffee’s sale brought a hundred dollars to the cash account.

II

An uneventful run of ten degrees brought the _Charles_ and her tender to the twenty-third degree of latitude and the Christmas season of the year. Pretty far south they were by this time. Another of those innumerable little Portuguese brigs here fell into their maw. Although only twenty-five tons burden, her cargo was worth a couple of hundred pounds.

They were off Grande Island at the time, and beating along close to the shore. Rounding the headland, they saw the settlement of Grande Island before them, with a brig or two at anchor in the bay. Upon this Quelch left his flagship and went over to the tender and imprudently struck off for one of these moored brigs.

As the tender got closer, those aboard saw a boat put hurriedly off from the Portuguese brig and make for the town. Apparently the natives had suspected the oncoming tender as promising them no good fortune. Quelch and his men must have grinned at this easy capture, and doubtless wondered why the deserting crew did not scuttle their ship rather than leave her to fall into the hands of this unknown enemy.

Quelch was drawing nigh to his prey when to his surprise a large, red, stolid face rose, like an early sun, above the bulwarks. One man had evidently remained as a reception committee, and he certainly not a Portuguese.

He claimed to be a Dutchman when the pirates had flocked over the side of his ship and clustered about him, brilliant with their new silk breeches and formidable with an assortment of cutlasses and pistols.

This unconcerned Dutchman seems to have been far from temperamental, and entirely unacquainted with nervousness. He casually spat over the side and asked who they were that thus jumped a fellow’s ship. He had no trouble finding folk among the pirates who could palaver enough Dutch to get along with. He added that there was a pretty good gain in the ship,--sugar to the value of one hundred and fifty pounds and gold and silver and Portuguese coins worth about fifty more. It was not his property.

He lolled against the mast, watching with dull eye the transfer of the sugar from the Portuguese to the _Charles_, drawn in closer for that purpose. He noted without a flicker of expression the fine silk breeches of these sailors, and gazed ponderingly down at his own garments of canvas. Silk breeches, eh? He strolled slowly up and down the deck in the hard labor of reflection.

Silk breeches did it. With the last boatload of cargo went the Dutchman. He was made to feel right at home, Quelch seeing his value as a pilot, an interpreter and an extraordinarily cool hand.

The _Charles_ and her tender put out to sea, leaving the little town of Grande Island provender for ten years’ wonder. The Dutch recruit had many talks with the men. And all the time he was thinking the new situation through.

He desired to come right down to a definite business basis. He appraised carefully the accumulated plunder and learned of the money holdings of the quartermaster. It would do very well; he too would have a pair of silk breeches. He put in his claim for a full share of everything, past, present and to come.

This demand became the talk of the ships. It grew and grew until it split the harmony of the floating community. At last in a deserted inlet, where the woods ran darkly down to a silver beach, the whole affair was threshed out.

All hands were trumpeted up by him of the ponderous antique titles. The Dutchman stolidly and unmistakably stated his terms. Some spoke in favor of them, others against; and at last a vote for and against was taken. The majority determined that the Dutchman was not entitled to a full share.

He turned a quid of tobacco about in his hairy cheek and gazed up at the sky. He had a trump card to play, and a very firm nerve to cast it. He said his conditions would be met or he would inform against them all. Just whom he would inform is not apparent; nor is it clear what damage an informer could do to people who robbed right under the guns of forts, and took ships from their anchor within a stone’s throw of town.

This Dutchman was either excessively stupid or a man of extraordinary courage. As a sailor he must have seen that the kind of folk he was dealing with were neither timid nor tender; never in all his sea-going years had he looked right in the eyes of just so hard an aggregation as he did then. Yet he stands there quite alone and backs up his claim not by prayer but by threat. It is one of the most curious incidents of the sea.

Of course, a chap like this must be put out of the way. Methods and means were discussed at this same meeting, and once again a vote was taken--this time as to what they should do with the Dutchman. The majority decreed that he should be marooned then and here.

Mr. Dutchman was ordered over the side and into the boat. He was rowed ashore and left with a gun, some powder and shot. He gazed stolidly at the departing boat, his hands deep in his canvas pockets, the twist of tobacco turning around in his cheek. Fair enough; if they couldn’t accept a business proposition, why, he couldn’t do business with them, and that was all there was to it.

Perhaps a lucky man at that. He didn’t get a pair of silk breeches, but neither did he get a hemp necktie.

III

Two miles offshore, a short time out of Spirito Sanctu, and making good way for Rio de Janeiro, her destination, a Portuguese brigantine of fair size and speed was destined to be the choicest prize a gang of New England pirates were to pick up within a thousand-mile cruise. She was to Quelch what the _Quedagh Merchant_ had been to Captain Kidd, the crown and climax of his piratical career.

Everything aboard that brigantine was as merry as a wedding bell, as the old saying goes. Besides the crew she had two beautiful and charming passengers, ladies of local importance journeying to Rio on any one of the many errands which attract ladies to the neighboring centers of fashion, whether in France, the East Indies or upon the coast of Brazil. One may imagine how pleasantly the balmy evenings sped away with song and music and the inevitable dance.

And down those watery ways were drawing nigh a brig and tender manned by foreigners, who, could they have visioned the contents of the Portuguese treasure-chest, would have been beside themselves with anticipation.

It was all so easy. The boat of the _Charles_ with ten men pulled over to the Portuguese when they had brought him to a stop. Probably the Portuguese had no idea he was being pirated; he may even have tossed a rope ladder over the bulwarks to assist his enemies aboard.

Over the sides of the pirate ships lounged the New Englanders, casually watching the progress of the robbery. They speculated that here was probably another load of sugar and molasses and coffee. Another dreary job of stevedoring was promised. After all, this pirate business was pretty slow work; meanly paid drudgery it had been for the most part, certainly not worth risking a fellow’s neck.

Somebody wigwagged vehemently from the Portuguese. Quelch dropped into the tender’s boat to investigate. There were no sounds of fighting; no clamor of struggle; but something material was going on.

He climbed the side of the Portuguese without meeting resistance, was seen to walk about her deck in a deliberate way, then came back over the side and got into his boat, carrying, however, two sacks heavy enough to bring out the cords of his forearms.

In each of those sacks were fifty pounds’ weight of gold dust!

Frenzy flamed from the _Charles_ to the tender. Men leaped and danced and shouted; and the round, thick rum jar passed merrily from hand to hand. Their fortunes were made!

Yo-ho-ho, for a pirate’s life!

So good-natured were the sea bandits that they treated the two Portuguese ladies with urbane consideration and the despoiled crew with tolerance. They kept them all on the _Charles_ that night, and with the coming of morning restored them to their ship and bade them be off.

Three days later the quartermaster, the carpenter and the captain, composing a committee on division of profits, ordered a pair of scales set up on the quarter-deck, from which each man had weighed out to him his share of the fascinating dust. Added to that was a neat little bonus of good, hard-ringing Portuguese gold coins, forty-five hundred dollars’ worth of which were gathered in from this very profitable find.

Rich with the plucking of the gold bird, the _Charles_ and her tender ran rapidly from the stage and stopped nowhere until they were abreast the south end of the Brazilian coast and in the vicinity of Rio de Janeiro.

Quelch was about ready to call it a day. The big scoop had been made, and by this time the coast must have been getting a little warm for him. The alarm was certainly raised; for in the last ship he attacked--a Portuguese two-hundred-tonner carrying hides and other merchandise--he met with his first real fight. This ship did not stop at Quelch’s summoning round shot but crowded on sail and made haste to get away, thus showing that Captain Bastian, her master, had had warning of the character of the New England brig and her tender.

After chasing her for two days the pirates pulled up with her, and the Portuguese, after a sharp trading of shot, gave in. When the pirates gained her deck there was some altercation with Captain Bastian, who was shot down and his body heaved overboard. In the reminiscence of this incident there were several of the rascals who claimed the honor of shooting Bastian, but after a quarrel which nearly came to fighting, Cooper Scudamore--a minor ringleader, it seems--was conceded to be the hero of that black job.

The captors took off hides, tallow and beef and then left the Portuguese. They were ready for home now, and the little tender which had journeyed a thousand miles with them was dismantled and set adrift to float upon some Brazilian beach. The _Charles_ swung round and drove northward for Boston, home and--not mother. The end of February, 1704, was when they struck off from the Rio Region, concluding just about three months of active piracy, perhaps three and a half.

It surely looked reckless for Quelch to come back to Boston with the good merchants’ brig and with no trophies in his hold of England’s enemies but shamefully of England’s ally, Portugal. It was as reckless as it looked; but mere recklessness never bothered John Quelch.

Perhaps the yarn that Anthony Holding and he had spun together gave him a confidence that he would not otherwise have had. It was a plausible thing. All hands were to say that Captain Plowman had died naturally, true only in part; that thereafter while cruising for Frenchmen according to Plowman’s commission, now executed by Quelch, they beat down as far as Brazil way.

Here they met with coast Indians who told them that a rich Portuguese brig had been recently wrecked in those parts, from which the Indians had obtained great treasure, of which the gold dust and doubloons on the _Charles_ were a part, having been given to Quelch and his men by the pleasant natives, who had little notion of the worth of those things.

There was more than a good chance that the gang could have got away with this story. Nobody could have checked them up, and the incident in itself was not so utterly improbable; a circumstance like that _might_ happen in those far-off seas.

The trouble for Quelch was that he carried informers with him all the time and brought them back with him to Boston. Pimer and Clifford and the one or two other loyal men were only waiting their time. And Quelch knew it.

Off the Bermudas, coming home, Quelch called for a journal Pimer was known to be keeping and tore from it five or six leaves containing a record of the various piracies from St. Augustine to Rio. Quelch probably calculated that fear for their own safety would keep all hands quiet when they reached Boston.

He was wrong. The _Charles_ was not long docked after her far-flung cruise when Quelch and a number of the seamen were arrested and the ship appropriated. There can be little question that Pimer and Clifford or one of them hurried to the governor and informed.

The jig was up. Anthony Holding, the evil genius of the adventure, shrewdly packed up his portion of the plunder and fled without waiting for what he no doubt foresaw as inevitable and imminent, the approach of the officers of the law.

Not so with Quelch. No back-alley dodging for him. With all the circumstances of a business man in lawful enterprise he went to the shop of one of the leading jewelers of Boston and there melted down a quantity of Portuguese gold and silver coins. May have been fooling with the jeweler’s crucibles when the rough hand of the officer thumped his shoulder.

Captain Kidd was the last of the colonial pirates to be sent home to England for trial. After that the Government authorized such proceedings to be had in the colonies themselves, for the expense of dragging the accused and the witnesses across the Atlantic was too much. On June 13, 1704, Quelch and a group of his pirates were tried for murder and piracy at a “Court of Admiralty held at Boston, in her Majesty’s Province of the Massachusetts-Bay in New England, in America.”

Mr. Attorney General of the province, assisted by eminent queen’s counselors, carried the prosecution; the defense was borne by the accused themselves with the help of a Mr. Menzies, a lawyer appointed by the court to assist them “in any matters of law.” It will be remembered that in those times a defendant in a criminal action was not allowed a lawyer for the purpose of ascertaining the facts of the case but merely to advise on matters of legal practice, whose only job in most cases was to assure the accused that what was being done to them was all according to law.

The indictment was on nine articles or counts, beginning with the death of Captain Plowman and ending with the taking of the Bastian ship off Rio. The death of Plowman was made the fact of the murder charge.

Pimer, Clifford and a fellow named Parrot turned queen’s evidence. The feeling of contempt which one seems to have for an informer can not be extended to these men; for their action here was quite consistent with their attitude from the beginning, which, as we have seen, had not been hidden even from the pirates. They never approved the deeds done or pretended they did. These are not your ordinary informers.

We have to take off our hats to lawyer Menzies. He put up a fine fight. He showed himself unafraid of court or council and stuck to his clients when more politic lawyers would have eased off. Really he beat the prosecution.

It was this way. The commission to this court of admiralty was issued under an act of parliament which provided that its proceedings should be according to what was called the civil law, which was a different procedure from that of ordinary criminal courts, being originally from the old Roman law. Now, by the civil law, in a trial for piracy an accomplice could not be a witness against the accused; and Pimer, Clifford and Parrot were technically accomplices. Menzies had chapter and book for it, too.

Mr. Attorney General floundered back on an act of Henry the Eighth, but if Menzies had had a modern court his point would have stuck. Not that this is a modern principle of law; but a modern court under the same rules as this old court would have held with Menzies. The president of the council, the provincial council constituting this court of admiralty, hemmed and hawed and fudged by.

Menzies was both a lawyer and a man, but he really had no court to try his case in. All the council could see was a case of piracy, and away with technicalities. That would be all right, of course, if technicalities did not exist for the protection of the innocent. Quelch was guilty, no doubt, according to the gossip blowing about Boston, but innocent so far as the court in its particular province was concerned.

Quelch didn’t say much. If he had he would not have done himself much good. It is fair to say on behalf of the court that though it erred in admitting Pimer, Clifford and Parrot as witnesses, there was a fair showing of other proof which went to help the State’s case, though that does not exonerate the court from the use of improper procedure in the particular which has been shown.

“Guilty,” said the council. Cæsar-Pompey and the other negroes were discharged along with the handful of men who showed they had sailed under a sort of compulsion.

Twenty men, including Quelch, were sentenced to die; and of these, six were hanged on “Charles River, Boston side, June 30, 1704.” They were John Quelch, John Lambert, Christopher Scudamore (the cooper who boasted of shooting Captain Bastian), John Miller, Erasmus Peterson and Peter Roach (the automaton). The record is silent as to the fate of the remaining fourteen; possibly their sentences were commuted.

The end of the matter is best told by one who saw it.

“On Friday, the 30th of June, 1704, pursuant to orders in the death warrant, the aforesaid pirates were guarded from the prison in Boston, by forty musketeers, constables of the town, the provost-marshal and his officers, with two ministers, who took great pains to prepare them for the last article of their lives. Being allowed to walk on foot through the town, to Scarlet’s wharf, where the silver oar being carried before them, they went by water to the place of execution, being crowded and thronged on all sides with multitudes of spectators.

“At the place of execution, they then severally spoke as follows, _viz._:

“1. CAPTAIN JOHN QUELCH. The last words he spoke to one of the ministers at his going up the stage, were, ‘I am not afraid of death; I am not afraid of the gallows; but I am afraid of what follows; I am afraid of a great God and a judgment to come.’

“But he afterwards seemed to brave it out too much against that fear; also when on the stage, first he pulled off his hat, and bowed to the spectators, and not concerned, nor behaving himself so much like a dying man as some would have done. The ministers had, in the way to his execution, much desired him to glorify God at his death, by bearing a due testimony against the sins that had ruined him, and for the ways of religion which he had much neglected. Yet now being called upon to speak what he had to say, it was but thus much, ‘Gentlemen, it is but little I have to speak; what I have to say is this, I desire to be informed for what I am here; I am condemned only upon circumstances; I forgive all the world, so the Lord be merciful to my soul.’

“When Lambert was warning the spectators to beware of bad company Quelch joining said, ‘They should also take care how they brought money into New England, to be hanged for it.’

“2. JOHN LAMBERT. He appeared much hardened, and pleaded much on his innocency; he desired all men to beware of bad company; he seemed in great agony near his execution; he called much and frequently on Christ for pardon of sin, that God Almighty would save his innocent soul; he desired to forgive all the world; his last words were: ‘Lord forgive my soul. Oh, receive me into eternity. Blessed name of Christ, receive my soul!’

“3. CHRISTOPHER SCUDAMORE. He appeared very penitent since his condemnation; was very diligent to improve his time going to and at the place of execution.

“4. JOHN MILLER. He seemed much concerned, and complained of a great burden of sins to answer for; expressing often, ‘Lord, what shall I do to be saved?’

“5. ERASMUS PETERSON. He cried of injustice done him, and said, ‘It is very hard for so many men’s lives to be taken away for a little gold.’ He often said, ‘His peace was made with God, and his soul would be with God,’ yet extreme hard to forgive those he said had wronged him; he told the executioner he was a strong man and prayed to be put out of misery as soon as possible.

“6. PETER ROACH (the automaton). He seemed little concerned, and said but little or nothing at all.

“FRANCIS KING was also brought to the place of execution, but reprieved.”

Many men have many minds. A little circumstance will bring a sense of moral responsibility to one man; another would seem to awaken to the fact of morality only by some such final catastrophe as the grim gallows.