CHAPTER SIX

“WHO FIRES FIRST?”

John Gow

I

“As we eat, so shall we work.”

Almost immediately after leaving Amsterdam old Paterson had set up his insistent croak; from his hammock under the poop when the roaring officers called the shifting watches, on the sleety deck and aloft in the wind-taut rigging, and the last thing at night in the great cabin, even at the solemn moment of common prayer, when his captain and master slowly read the form of evening supplication, this ancient and discontented shellback continually muttered his plaint to wind and waves and willing and unwilling ears, “As we work, so shall we eat.”

If looks could kill, the poor cook of the _George_ would long since have perished amid his pots and pans, for it was when, at the appointed times, or as the emergencies of the ship demanded, old Paterson rolled with his pannikin and mess-kid to the galley that his obsessing whine became a shriek and his filmy eye burned upon the humble dispenser of the victuals with a consuming hate. Not that the cook, in himself, offended old Paterson, but because he became a symbol of oppressive shipmasters and exacting shipowners who sought to pare another penny of profit from the stringy stomachs of their ’foremasting slaves.

Justice would indeed be blindfolded, nay, have no eyes at all, if she could not see that old Paterson had some cause for complaint. Little meat and less bread; rum thimbled out as reluctantly as a small boy dividing his lollipops under compulsion; a menu, in fact, made up of tepid water tinctured to the point of tantalizing with suggestions of what might, under proper conditions, have been food, made meager fare for men lashed into crying hunger by the snapping sea gales.

And when still a long way from Santa Cruz, in the Azores, whither the _George_ was bound, the twenty-four men of the crew were put on “short allowance”, old Paterson, with his croak, became a soloist now supported by a chorus. “Short allowance”--certainly, an artful misuse of the comparative degree--had always been short, and in truth could only be called shortest.

At Santa Cruz they sluggishly laded the ship with beeswax, and although the chandlers pressed importunately about the skipper, he gave no orders for any considerable increase in the provisions for the homeward voyage. Were they to make the journey back on that misnamed “short allowance?” It rather looked as though they would. Cargo was stuffed into the hold in plenty, but no fresh sides of beef came to cheer the toiling seamen; no flour, no bread, nothing but a few bottles of wine which, however, went into the great cabin and the custody of the thrifty key. Perhaps provisions would come aboard when the loading was done; at least the younger and less sophisticated men hoped, but old Paterson shook his earrings and clubbed pigtail. He had followed the sea long enough to know the character of his ship.

Among the officers of the ship, the men had but one whom they could look upon as a friend,--John Gow, the second mate, a youngish man from the Orkney Islands. A capable sailor was John Gow, yet never too busy to sympathize a moment with the miseries of his men, nor too much the officer to spend a kindly word on an outcast crew. But what could a second mate do? Was he not simply a block for his superiors to kick with the expectancy that he would pass the compliment on to his subordinates? Exactly.

“As we eat, so shall we work.” John Gow heard the slogan spreading like a kind of vocal slow match to the powder magazine of disaster and only smiled.

When the beeswax and other cargo was in, the unmistakable notice of departure appeared in the formal reception by the captain of his charterers. The gentlemen came aboard in their best clothes and were escorted to the quarter-deck, where an awning had been spread against the sun, and a cluster of wine bottles glowed with their purple prophecy of comfort. From the waist and forward, eyes of envy and dislike turned furtively on the pleasant company aft, merry now in the exchange of compliments.

“We’re starting,” cried a youth, plaintively, “and there’s no victuals aboard.”

Old Paterson was not going home on an empty belly. If he knew anything in this world, he knew that much. Around him clumped a group of seamen, and somehow, probably with little premeditation, they suddenly started aft and shocked their captain by intruding on the sanctity of the quarter-deck. The merchants leaned back from their bottles and looked as though they thought the end of the world had come. Simply unheard of!

Old Paterson bowed and scraped politely. “Cap’n,” he began, with the habitually humble voice before authority, “we’re on short allowance. We hope your honor ain’t agoin’ home without proper victuals aboard.”

His supporters growled their amen. The captain, hardly holding himself in from hurling a chair, a bottle, a tackle block or anything handy at the presumptuous faces before him, rose up and frigidly replied that there was a steward aboard who had the care of the provisions and all complaints would be properly redressed. The tarry gang tumbled back to their proper sphere, leaving the captain in a muddle of embarrassment and suspicion,--embarrassment for his fractured dignity, suspicion because the intrusion indicated a perhaps germinating rebellion.

Old Paterson leered at his guard of honor. “As we eat, so shall we work.”

The merchants in polite course quitted the ship, and the captain, without commenting on the incident of the afternoon, ordered the anchor up and the sails shaken out. They were starting, and there was not a square meal for one, let alone twenty-four men aboard. Short--shorter--shortest allowance all the way home.

The crew lagged at their work; particularly old Paterson, who crawled into the shrouds so sluggardly that the captain marked him, and in round sea terms demanded why he did not get to unfurling the sails more seamanlike. Old Paterson turned like an aged rattlesnake.

“As we eat, so shall we work.”

The captain caught the mutter, and so did John Gow, the second mate. The captain prudently did nothing about it; the second mate grinned and gazed innocently out at the greenish sea.

II

Apprehension--almost premonition--dropped heavily upon the skipper as the day marched to a gray and windy evening. The complaining deputation that had assaulted his quarter-deck in the early afternoon, the open grumbling of old Paterson, and above all, no doubt, a something in the demeanor of the men, which an experienced master might read like the signs of the sky, foreboded the brewing of violence.

He and his mate were standing on the quarter-deck, where, in the dusk, two or three men passed and repassed them on the business of the ship. The mate himself felt the coming of a worse storm than that of wind and wave, and when the captain, bracing himself sufficiently to confess his fears and suggest that small arms should be gathered and placed in his cabin “in case anything should happen”, his chief officer, glad to air his secret anxiety, at once set about the business.

And the first thing he did was to call John Gow and order him to attend to the cleaning of the ship’s muskets, pistols and cannon.

“Aye, aye, sir,” responded Gow, and slipped briskly forward.

Almost at the same time two of the men who had been fumbling with the ropes on the quarter-deck sank down the companion ladder and met the second mate in the forward gloom. The three spoke together closely, with much tossing of indicative thumbs over their shoulders.

The arming of the captain’s cabin went but tardily; little delays such as lost keys and so forth kept the thing at pause until eight o’clock, the daily hour of divine worship, not to be foregone for anything but an irresistible typhoon. In the “great cabin,” as it was called to distinguish it from the lesser cabins of the mate, surgeon and supercargo, one half of the crew met while the other half kept on deck and worked the ship, thus taking turn and turn about at prayers. The captain stood under the lantern which jerked and bobbed and anon struck its metal guards sharply against the ceiling with the tumbling of the ship; the pigtailed crowd knelt in a shadowy motley about him, the jumping light threw the blackness off the polished oaken wainscoting, or gleamed an instant on the captain’s graying beard, and again suddenly and sharply picked out a hairy, tattooed arm bracing some worshipper against his lurching chapel.

Against the cabin windows the seas slapped smartly and with a kind of repetition as the movement of the ship turned one side and another into the depths, the cabin door banged explosively with a quick capriciousness of the wind; overhead, faintly, the cries of the navigators could be heard; with it all, the reader pursued doggedly the liturgy of that most sublime achievement of the English religious genius, the book of Common Prayer.

Did he, as his square thumbs turned the pages, light for a moment with chill dread upon the Burial Service?

The arrangement of the watches provided that those who attended the service of prayer should go from there to their hammocks and rest until it was time to relieve the next watch.

“Who fires first?”

A man fully dressed, but without his boots, gently punched one of the bulging hammocks and whispered this strange question to the occupant whose head bobbed up. If the man addressed knew who was to fire first, he did not say so, for his only answer to the query was to roll deftly out of his hammock and drop, with a scarcely audible pad of bare feet, to the deck, tightening his belt about his waist and twisting his dirk scabbard conveniently in front of him.

“Who fires first?”

From one hammock, selected from the swaying lines, to another the queer question proceeded, always receiving the same reply,--tight lips and a quick flop of feet on the deck. Six men had been asked in the gusty darkness who was to fire first and now, cautiously fingering their way along the deck works, and in single file, they crept toward the cabins of the first mate, the doctor and the supercargo.

The passageway connecting these small cabins was heavy with the smell of old tobacco, drugs, wine and wet clothing and lighted by one small lantern above the entrance. Softly, softly--a hand gently thrust against a swinging door--a foot across the threshold--and death was laid quickly at the throats of the sleepers.

The mate, however, was a strong man. Clutching his gaping throat convulsively with his two hands, he ran to the deck, only to meet a conclusive volley of pistol balls.

The captain, hearing the uproar, came up in his slippered feet, calling out for the cause of it all, to which the boatswain answered that he thought a couple of men had fallen overboard. The captain rushed to the side and gazed into the black waters, and immediately was seized by two men, who struggled to hoist him over the bulwark. Desperately, the victim fought in their grasp, but scarcely had he twisted himself once about, ere, in back and front, the dirk sank into his flesh.

“As we eat, so shall we work,” grinned old Paterson, wiping his wet blade on the poor remains.

III

Amid an infernal hilarity, the officers’ cabins were now looted. The little chests of personal belongings were smashed in and the contents tumbled out to be grabbed by whoever could get to them first. Watches, cheap trinkets of jewelry, silk handkerchiefs and what little money could be found were divided with shouts of dispute. But two or three boxes containing considerable coins and the property of the shipowners were withdrawn for more decorous and equitable division.

Everything in the way of liquor was rushed to the quarter-deck and a night-long orgy ensued. The ship somehow wallowed along while its masters reveled. With a bottle of wine in one hand, the greedily gulped liquid streaming down his bushy beard, and a cutlass in the other, one Williams, a proper rascal, smote his weapon ringingly against a cannon and cried, “Captain Gow, you are welcome--welcome to your command.”

In this way, informally but effectively, second mate John Gow accepted his promotion to the office of captain.

Captain Gow politely returned the kindness by saying, “Mr. Williams, you shall be our lieutenant.” Thereupon the nominations were closed, as parliamentarians say, and the elections unanimously carried. The night went along in a roaring good humor till the placid eye of morning, slowly opening in the watery east, was shocked to find the decks red with an unholy stain.

As a matter of fact, the whole affair had been carried by a group of eight men, six of whom had been summoned from their hammocks by the watchword “Who fires first?”, the remaining two being up on deck. From the circumstance we have just seen, John Gow must have been a party to the criminal enterprise, as he indeed was.

Four men were over the side, eight were conspirators; thus there remained twelve men of the crew more or less neutral. These men fled for hiding to the shrouds, into the lazaret, or anywhere that might shield them from the passionate tempest.

A very similar circumstance has often engaged the interest of the story-tellers. If this were a fictitious narration of the conventional sort, this thrilling situation would be artfully resolved by the wonderful recovery of the ship and the ultimate defeat of the mutineers by the faithful and ingenious twelve. If it be permissible to point out the deficiency of such enthralling yarns, as related to practical fact, it would lie in the circumstance that by the time the ship had been recaptured there would not be enough men left alive to work it, and, at least according to the canny calculations of Lloyd’s, it would thereby become an impossible risk.

John Gow had a ship to man, and as no ship probably in all history ever started out with too many hands, generally too few, the _George_ must be supposed to have been no exception to the common rule; hence while Gow might personally have liked to toss all opposition over the bulwarks, he realized that to do so would have been tantamount to wrecking his vessel, so another method of approach to the problem was indicated.

First, however, he had to get his lively eight in hand. As the morning waves slapped foamingly across the slanting deck, the challenge to orderly work was obvious. He therefore, in a regular quarter-deck talk to the men, demanded their obedience and good conduct, concluding with the announcement that alone ever assured harmony to a pirate ship,--an equal division of the spoils to all, with a double share to the ship, that is, the captain.

Next he sent a deputation with drawn cutlasses to hunt out the fugitives and bring them before him under the persuasion of peaceful treatment. Out of their refuges came the frightened and tousled seamen, doubtless full dubious of the efficacy of the promise of him whom they now regarded as a monster. Lining them up, he thus addressed them:

“Men, the inhumanity of the captain, of which you as well as we have complained, produced the consequences of last night. We are now going on a cruise. You may join with us, and if anything good comes to us you shall have your equal share. All I require is obedience and good order. You who have not been in this conspiracy have nothing to fear from us; do your duty as seamen and you will be well paid.”

Four of the twelve grinned and stepped over to the ranks of the mutineers; eight stood dumb, answering never a word. It took a great deal of moral courage to stand amid those eight, deprived of even their dirks and utterly helpless in the hands of a crowd capable of the horrors which the eight had witnessed.

In the story of the sea, the bravery of naval battle, the courageous deportment of men on sinking ships, the unselfish giving of one’s life for another, all these have been properly remembered with all the glowing artifice of rhetoric, and the heroes’ names treasured in the marine annals of their country. Unhonored and unsung, for the most part, are those obscure sailors who, without the incitement of martial camaraderie, without the applause of onlookers, without expectation of fame--in the most dejected and hopeless of situations--have manfully stood by their notion of conscientious duty against their mutinous or piratical fellows. Nevertheless, these unknown ones ascended the very height of true heroism.

Conduct of this kind brands as a lie the cynical saying that “every man has his price”, for some men will not accept life itself in payment for principle.

Quelch, the Boston pirate, had his sturdy protestants; so too did Major Bonnet, colleague of the infamous Blackbeard, and so did many other sea rogues. In truth, almost every instance of the sort exhibits the moral hardihood of an incorruptible minority.

John Gow’s eight were delivered over to the rough abuse of Lieutenant Williams, who flogged them at will, and set men to keep them at work at the point of the cutlass. On them fell all the hard labor of the ship and they became the drudges of whatever roistering rascal chose to command them.

At the same time, there is a final leniency about Gow’s treatment of this minority which lifts him from the charge of entirely purposeless ferocity. Purposeless ferocity is a tradition of piracy, but a curious thing is that not one of the pirates, of the major type, whose crimes were afterwards subjected to judicial examination, is particularly marked with a simple lust of cruelty. Tales of brutality abound concerning ruffians like Lafitte, England, Low, Lewis, Rackam and the rest of the roguish gallery, which may or may not be true. The same stories circulated about Kidd, Quelch, Avery and Gow, but when compared with the judicial records, the source alone of this series of pirate tales, of the activities of these last-named men, merely wanton cruelty is notably missing. On the contrary, in not a few cases there is a surprising magnanimity manifested by men of undoubtedly criminal disposition.

Lives were taken in the actual capture of ships, but when the pirates gained possession there is no judicial record of plank-walking or other inhuman treatment. More often than not, the pirate chief recruited new hands from among the captives, though apparently without compulsion, and those that refused to join the black flag were commonly allowed to return to their ship and go their way. Plunder was the chief quest of the pirates, and that obtained their interest in ships or men ceased. If the pirate coveted the ship for his own use, he generally disposed of its crew by signing on those who would and putting ashore those who would not. Not that he was a tender chap--he could be very frightful where he conceived his profit required violence--but merely sportive torture was not a characteristic of those remembered in the only authentic sources of the subject,--the printed trials of the pirates. If this is true of those of whom we have definite information, it follows that the sanguinary accounts of those who never came to trial must be considerably thinned out by doubt.

Gow in his method followed the invariable practice of piracy: he stole his ship. They all began that way. In all the judicial reports of piracy we have examined only Major Stede Bonnet bought and outfitted a vessel for what was then called “the grand account.” In two cases that we know of, the disaffection of the crews made possible their corruption; Henry Avery, mate of the _Charles the Second_, capitalized the discontent of the men at not receiving their pay from the Spanish Government, and as Gow, in his quarter-deck speech declared, short rations and harsh treatment combined to drive the crew of the _George_ into mutiny. Probably the captains of neither the _Charles the Second_ nor the _George_ were individually responsible for the condition; they were themselves creatures of circumstance, but as representatives of the owners or charterers they became the tangible objects of undiscriminating violence.

The men who managed mutinous plots such as these were much more shrewd in their selection of conspirators than were the men who attempted the great political plots of history, for the sea plotters seldom or never had a betrayal. They never approached the entire crew, but picked out a positive core, who would hold fast, seize ship and weapons and dominate the situation. Perhaps this resolute conduct rose from the personal sense of wrong under which the individual plotter suffered; self-interest only could have produced so tight an adhesion to the group. The first part of the game called for few rather than many men, and apparently Gow could have persuaded four more men to come in with him than he actually did.

Properly, the matter was a mutiny but its development into piracy was inevitable, foreseen and provided for. In their position, they might as well hang for a sheep as a lamb.

Another typically piratical trick followed; they painted out _George_ and substituted for it the name _Revenge_, of all ship’s names the best beloved of pirates.

The sailmaker hemmed up a strip of black bunting and under the funereal ensign they turned their prow to the affronted sea.

IV

Living at the unregulated rate they were, the meager provisioning of the ship was soon used up, and so, in search of food and wine rather than diamonds and gold, they set for the coasts of Spain and Portugal, hoping to intercept a local trader freighted with the desired goods.

A small English ship, the _Sarah Snow_, of Bristol, was the first honest craft to vividly discover that a robber was loose on the high seas. What with surprise and the display of a number of guns which Gow had brought up from below and thrust impressively through his ports, the _Sarah Snow_ yielded without a fight, whereupon she was systematically rifled from cargo to the crew’s few shillings, and, leaving one volunteer to join the despoilers, she was permitted to proceed on her voyage.

The _Delight_, of Poole, next fell into their hands, in very similar circumstances, was plundered and allowed to go.

An Englishman, carrying fish from Newfoundland to Cadiz, was informally and unexpectedly relieved of a large portion of his cargo without dockage or stevedoring fees, but unfortunately without any receipt being given him for the information of his owners. Not only that, but somebody thoughtfully decided the owners might at least have the advantage of the insurance, so he kicked a hole in the bottom and the fish boat took a nose dive into the far green deeps. The captain and her crew of four men were brought aboard the _Revenge_ as “prisoners.” They were kept forward under guard, for what eventual disposition nobody--least of all themselves--had the slightest notion. Lieutenant Williams beguiled a boresome day by hanging them up by the thumbs, or seeing which one could longest stand a rope’s end on his bare back. Williams, doubtless, would have delighted in the plank-walking trick, but public opinion was not entirely with him. In fact, he began to sneer at Gow--behind his back--for a chicken-livered pirate, and even secured a sort of following for his point of view. One of the four captives, a man named Jack Belvin, avoided the Welsh lieutenant’s flayings by signing on with the pirates; the others heroically endured rather than become felons. Well, they must have been pretty good men to begin with to take a boat requiring only a crew of five all the way from Newfoundland to Cadiz.

A Scotch ship, carrying pickled herrings to Italy, was the next in line. The _Revenge_ already had a surplus of fish, but, taking off a considerable quantity of the cargo, Gow amused the men and practiced the gunner by bombarding her with his guns and thus amusingly sending the pickled herring back to their original element. The Scotch crew joined Williams’ victims forward.

A pirate always overloaded on the products of the locality he haunted. Kidd, off the Malabar coast procured butter enough to use as a lubricant; Quelch, down Brazil way, acquired control of the coffee and sugar trade; Blackbeard and Bonnet, off the Carolinas, specialized in pineapples and Jamaica rum; Henry Avery, in the Gulf of Guinea, opened his prize package and found it full of negro slaves, and now here is John Gow seriously disturbing the market in salt and pickled fish. Save for the exceptional chance, Kidd, Quelch and Avery would have degenerated into petty peddlers of stolen groceries; their big hauls just happened along.

Everybody on board was now living on salmon, cod and pickled herrings, with never a barrel of bread to go with the fish, and not a spoonful of wine to wash the thirst-provoking diet down. They hesitated to attack any new ships for fear another scaly cargo should mock them, odoriferously from the hold; the thing got beyond a joke and the cook, no doubt, kept his dirk handily under his apron as he passed out the inevitable hunk of pickled horror.

Gow had already seen vividly that the matter of something to eat will upset a dynasty and junk a throne more quickly than any merely political irritation, so, for the appeasement of his subjects and the preservation of his dignities--to say nothing of his life--he resolved to risk no more disappointing ships but to strike for a port and the run of land stores.

The place chosen for their custom was the little Portuguese settlement of Porta Santa, in the Madeiras. With something of the feeling that honester men have on the homeward heave, all hands pulled together heartily, nor allowed any wallowing merchantmen to divert them until the white walls and red roofs of their desired haven rose comfortingly out of the sea. The _Revenge_ foamed smartly into the harbor and rattled her anchor into the mud.

A solemn council in the great cabin--now in all that queer topsy-turveydom which betrays apparent but false authority, and where there was no longer any cramping posture for evening prayers--decided that here was a splendid opportunity to get rid of some of their fish. Appropriately, they would bestow a quantity of it on the governor of Porta Santa, as the embodiment of the State.

Half a dozen ruffians washed their faces, clubbed their briny locks, rubbed up their shoe buckles, pulled together, with long stitches, the gaping holes in their stockings and set out in a boat jammed with dried salmon and pickled herring.

From his airy prison, the Scotch captain gazed pensively upon them. “Mon,” he groaned to a captive Dane, “I cuid bear to ken the rabbers sell ma fush--but to gie it awa’; gie it awa’ to these jabberin’ jumping-jacks for never a bawbee! Mon, mon, these mock sailors air on the road to ruin. And Gow a Scottishman--” John Gow’s departure from the normal was simply inexplicable.

The burly Dane grunted “Yah”, practically the extent of his linguistic resources in Danish or any other tongue. He never did know what all these doings meant, anyway.

His Excellency was deeply touched when the load of preserved marine fauna was dumped on the gubernatorial verandah.

“It’s not so much the gift,” he reflected, turning over a stark salmon with the toe of his shoe, “as the spirit of the giver.”

He looked approvingly on the six honest visages before him and marveled at the depths of their unselfishness.

“Where are you bound?” he asked, in Portuguese.

“Tell him Bristol, Bill,” prompted one of the emissaries to the slow-footed chum who could parley the lingo sufficiently to interpret the question to his fellows. So Bristol it was.

With racial courtesy, the governor proposed to return to the ship with them, to formally thank their captain. A group of local dignitaries was quickly collected and all went down to the wharf.

“The governor’s coming aboard,” shouted Gow, as the company appeared at the water side. “Now, men, keep ’em on the quarter-deck and away from the prisoners, and you yourselves try to look less like jailbirds and more like sailormen!”

The reception on the quarter-deck left nothing out; even the awning was drawn across so that for a little while it seemed to some of the men that the past few weeks were all a dream, good or bad as the individual viewpoint dictated.

The boat had had orders, after bringing out the governor’s party, to go back to town and fetch provisions. Now, whether the idea was to pay for the goods or to just take them with a thank-ye-marm is not a matter of recorded history; historical it is, however, that the boat came back empty, which Gow, out of the corner of his eye, noticed, and, excusing his absence, stepped down the companion ladder in anxious questioning. Somehow there was always drumming through his head old Paterson’s ancient chant, “As we eat, so shall we work.”

“They won’t give us the grub,” bellowed the boatswain, balancing himself in the stern of the bobbing boat.

Gow went back and lodged a courteous complaint with His Excellency. Excellency called an attendant and battered him about the ears with swift Portuguese. Attendant went back with the boat.

Back came the boat in a little while, with the boatswain holding aloft a sadly small meal bag in signals that needed no aid from the boatswain’s disgusted expression. More complaints to the governor--and complaints rather acrid; more rapid fire at the attendant; another departure for shore--the boat’s crew were beginning to grumble at their oars--another return. Nothing at all with them, this time. The boatswain wigwagged Gow to do something violent with the governor.

Which Gow proceeded to do. He unbuttoned his coat and revealed himself attired to play “Arsenal” in a charade, with a belt full of sudden death in several varieties. As calmly as if he were taking out a toothpick, he drew a long, convincing pistol and laid it cozily--nose on--into the deepest crease of the governor’s brocaded waistcoat.

In this manner the _Revenge_ was amply provisioned at Porta Santa.

V

The larder stuffed, the next question before the House was whither now. “Before the House” is a calculated phrase, for, by approved piratical procedure, equal franchise prevailed on the _Revenge_; a majority decided all general propositions; only in the particular ones of fighting, chasing or being chased was the captain’s power absolute. With their odd turn for the comic, the jolly sea robbers would often describe their conferences as sessions of the “House of Lords” or the “House of Commons”, just as they enjoyed, when carousing ashore, under the mangrove trees of the West Indies, holding mock courts for the mimic trial of one of the number for piracy, when the “Judge” would throw a tarpaulin around his shoulders for the judicial robes, and a turban on his head for the ponderous judicial wig, and the whole affair would be carried off in a quite striking parody of that judicial process which many of their fellows had already suffered under, and for most of whom the actual fact was but a question of time. Such jollities revealed an intimate knowledge of forms and manner and curiously reflected the contemporaneous severity of prosecutors and judges.

The lawless business still had its laws; for instance, sea courtesy between passing pirates required salutes with loaded guns, as against the usual blanks, and in their burial rites the maritime rovers often followed their own peculiar but very particular ritual.

After the usual tumultuous debate, Cape St. Vincent, Spain, was the place chosen for their happy efforts, there to intercept the lawful merchants in those fairly crowded sea lanes. The selection looked justified by an early capture. But, alas for the disappointments of life, when the cargo was eagerly examined, it was found to be merely a mass of negro slaves being rushed from the Gulf of Guinea to the American plantations, by way of Lisbon, into which the slaver had had to detour through the pressure of adverse circumstances. Little did John Gow realize, as he looked down into that fetid hold, that he was gazing upon one of the major elements of future history and the strife of armed hosts. Probably would not have cared, at that.

Slaves were less desirable even than salt fish; Gow wanted no more mouths to feed. However, he could replenish his sail lockers from the brig’s canvas, as well as obtain a bagful of watches, small coins and personal knickknacks from the crew. Then, too, the gang decided that here was a good chance to be rid of a number of their unprofitable prisoners by a means not too violent. The disposition of prisoners of a pirate was a constant problem throughout the history of the business, because, contrary to the common idea, very few pirates could bring themselves to an utter ferocity in the destruction of their victims after the guns had ceased throbbing and the smoke had curled away from the desecrated waters. The worst of them, Teach, England, Davis, Low, Lewis, all had their hours of compunction, and marooning was not hit upon as a method of wicked torture, but as a compromise to get men out of the way whom they could not feed and who would not work with them, yet without making the ship a shambles. This appears to be true, at least, of English-speaking pirates; when you come to the swart Ladrone villains, many of the Spanish, and the Chinese, there you will find the uttermost of barbarity.

So a group of the forlorn mariners was transferred from the _Revenge_ to the slaver--not at the slaver’s request--and that vessel was then allowed to proceed on its humane occasions.

Lieutenant Williams could not get the point of all this solicitude for mere prisoners. He rather favored the Chinese way.

A French ship next splashed around the Cape and into captivity. A neat find, being freighted with goodly store of oil and wine, even to the solid value of five hundred golden English pounds. Captured, too, like the rest of them, without a blow. As a matter of fact, a fight was exceptional rather than usual, not because merchant masters were cowardly, but because the pirate, often by a trick of false colors, gained a confiding approach until within close range, when he would suddenly bristle his line of muzzle-framing open ports with the snarling demand of money or life. As the old West would have put it, the pirate “got the drop” on his prey.

The dour old Scotch captain, still lamenting the waste of his “fush”, now met the wheel of fortune on one of its most whimsical turns. The _Revenge_ was a little bored with the Scotch friend, and a quarter-deck parliament hit on the artful idea of simply making an entire change of prisoners by bodily shifting the present ones over to the Frenchman and bringing all the Frenchmen to the _Revenge_. The pirates felt so relieved with the newness of it all that they even gave the puzzled Scot additional sails and some small articles of ship furniture,--only Mr. Williams reserved the right to kick his departing victims down the gangway. A really nasty person, was Williams.

It would be mightily entertaining, no doubt, to know what the feelings of the Scotch skipper were as he found himself thus on another man’s quarter-deck, in another man’s cabin, going through another man’s shipping papers and deeply mystified as to how he was going to explain the extraordinary situation to another man’s owners.

We wonder, too, what the French owners said when their ship finally reported in the person of a master with an outlandish tongue and a truly incredible yarn.

The Scot bobbed away to the horizon, cogitating his own particular problems, when another ship--but of the wrong sort--came smoothly down upon the _Revenge_.

A French warrior! Gow took her in with a long, slow glass.

“Thirty-two guns,” he growled to his boatswain, “and by the looks of her decks the whole French navy’s aboard!”

Down fluttered the black flag; a young panic brewed in those honest hearts, while in the prisoners’ quarters the Frenchmen could scarcely breathe for hope and fear.

Gow knocked his pipe pensively out on the capstan. His was the right of decision to stay and fight or flee to fight another day. He ordered flight.

“You white-livered coward!” bellowed Williams, rather grogged up, “Run away from a frog-eater!”

[Illustration: “You white-livered coward!” bellowed Williams, “Run away from a frog-eater!”]

That meant only one thing--who would fire first? Out of his belt Williams whipped his pistol and snapped it squarely at his captain. The thing flared and fizzed and flashed feebly in the pan. Guns were tragically unreliable in those days. Ere he could recover for another shot, he went down with two balls piercing his body,--and one of them was from the weapon of old Paterson.

Gow simply commanded with a slight, contemptuous inclination of the head; old Paterson and another grabbed the lieutenant for rough and ready interment in the convenient deep, but when they had pantingly hoisted the body to the height of the bulwark, it came back to vigorous life, hit about with startling force and then bolted, pistol drawn and still loaded, to the powder magazine, shouting that all hands should go down--or rather up--together. Within but a second of the most dreadful destruction, a couple of stalwarts fell heavily on the desperate wretch and lugged him away to be chained in irons and cast among the prisoners, there to be nursed, lovingly and tenderly, by those who, like all previous captives, had endured his vile whims; nursed, that is, by being used as a bench for tired Frenchmen to sit upon, and as a football for those whose cramped limbs made wholesome exercise imperative.

Somehow the rogue lived,--lived until another ship was captured, or, more probably, simply detained, for, after appropriating a few portable valuables, Gow, with the consent of the crew of the _Revenge_, put Lieutenant Williams aboard the stranger with sharp admonition to the surprised skipper to keep him in close ward until the first English man-of-war was met, to which he was to be delivered as a wicked pirate for yard-arm bunting.

Simply speechless with astonished rage, Mr. Williams was slung aboard.

But he was only one of many who had to learn that, above all things, pirates loved their little jokes, especially some delicate impertinence like this to constituted authority.

VI

The ship seemed awfully quiet after the roaring Williams had gone. Something was missing, but what it was they did not just know. Unsuspectingly, the grim jest of sending Williams home to the gallows had removed the heart of the piratical enterprise. If the _Revenge_ expected to keep on the grand account, fellows like Williams, who could do the rough work, were essential, and without him the great affair threatened to simmer back to the status of a mere mutiny.

Then, too, the presence of the warship, with its promise of hundreds of pounds of hot lead and forest of cutlasses, awakened unhappy perturbation, and stirred even sluggish imaginations with pictures of uncomfortable events. The lads pensively stared at their finger nails and realized only one insistent fact,--that they must depart the region forthwith.

Some kind of retreat began to be openly proposed, but just whither; that was the vexing thing. At this point John Gow forfeits a place in the first rank of pirates for he shows that he did not know the fine points of the game. He is now not far from the place where Henry Avery, some years before, had stolen the _Charles the Second_, a ship on which he was mate, and, with his exploiting of a discontented crew, was in circumstances very similar to those now surrounding Gow. Avery, it may be remembered, came first of all to the Madeiras, but the point of separation between him and Gow is that Avery knew that the local coast was not the most advantageous place for piracy, knew that the jeweled Indies was, and set his unswerving prow resolutely thither.

A moment’s thought concerning the conditions of piracy suggests Gow’s difficulty. A pirate’s main resource was in merchant cargoes; only luck threw him the fabled treasure ships. For all he could tell about, a pirate might have to plug along in a quiet way of trade, hoping for the time when a _Quedagh Merchant_ or a _Gunsway_ would reward his patient application. But the successful raiding of merchant ships put the pirate in the same situation that the honest shore trader was in,--to make any profit at all he had to keep his stock turned over. Now, in the Indies, while a pirate was waiting his big haul, a system of coast “fences”, or buyers of stolen freight, made possible his continuance in business. Kidd and Avery and all the rest of them used these folk for the disposal of their plunder, for, as we have seen, one of these gentlemen, Cogi Commodo, boasted to the steward of poor Captain Green’s ill-fortuned ship that he had been “merchant” on the Malabar coast, to the eminent Kidd. These illicit traffickers supplied the interlopers and other competitors of the British East India Company, as well as catering to the native markets. The arrangement suited everybody except John Company.

But in European waters the only possible opening for a pirate’s wares--that is of the usual merchant sort--was in methods akin to smuggling. That, however, was already a complicated and preëmpted business, and in taking any ship it would always be questionable whether her freight were dutiable and therefore worth-while contraband. Smuggling could never flourish so haphazardly.

Last of all, but sufficiently troublesome, was the stricter policing of the European coasts. Without these guardians, of course, the customs would have entirely collapsed and piracy rather than smuggling would have prospered by maintaining a sort of cheap local bazaar, such as Blackbeard did in the Carolinas. The lack of effective policing made possible the brisk trip of John Quelch, the Boston boy, down the Brazil coast, for a cargo taken in one latitude was auctioned off in another and no “fence” was needed to aid in dodging a vigilant authority.

The _Revenge_ thus was driven off the coasts of Spain and Portugal by lack of a market and incidentally by the police patrol.

Gow and his crew turned the matter over and over in a long debate, which resulted in a determination to sail away to Gow’s native Orkney Islands, a decision which can only be laid to the peculiar fatality which seems to work the self-destruction of wickedness. The meeting must have discussed the possibilities of the East and West Indies, Madagascar, Africa and the Red Sea, not to mention a flyer in slaving on the Guinea Coast; in other words, all the available opportunities for a rising young pirate, but why, against these, were chosen the lean and foggy Orkneys, where even the poor copper penny was worked to death, is a puzzler.

Could it be that pirates sometimes grew homesick?

They hauled down the black flag and shoved it in the locker, whence it was never withdrawn to flap its sinister warning in the winds, and proceeded to give their gang of perplexed French prisoners a trip to Scotland. It would not be surprising if those victims of sportive destiny were beginning to get all turned around, as the saying is.

Without “being chased or giving chase” they reached the northern islands, and Gow, perhaps with a constricted throat and a wet eye, looked once again upon his native land. As they drew into the bay, Gow called his flock together and instructed them to retail to any curious inhabitant the plausible fiction that the _Revenge_ was bound from Cadiz to Stockholm, “but contrary winds driving them past the Sound till it was filled with ice, they were under the necessity of putting in to clean their ship, and that they would pay ready money for such articles as they stood in need of.” Of course, they were to leave undisturbed the assumption that they were the actual as well as ostensible owners of the aforesaid “ready money.”

One other craft was in the bay when the _Revenge_ put in, but to Gow’s relief she turned out to be only a French smuggler, or rather a smuggler belonging to the Isle of Man, laden with wine and brandy from France, and which had come north about to “steer clear of the custom-house cutters.” According to the amenities of the sea, Gow exchanged presents with the smuggler, as he did also with a Swedish ship which came in a couple of days later. The Swede and the Manxman marveled greatly at the generous gifts of dried salmon and pickled herring which this hospitable _Revenge_ almost thrust upon them.

VII

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 the _Revenge_, 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, he looked 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 the _Revenge_. 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 the _Revenge_, 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 of neighbors 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, the _Revenge_ dropped 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’s house. 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 too much, 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.

The _Revenge_ was 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 prisoner stood 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’s friends, 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 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.