HOW THE SCHOONER _EXERTION_ FELL AMONG THIEVES
This is the story of a very shabby set of rascals who wrecked and
plundered an honest little merchant vessel a hundred years ago and
disgraced the profession of piracy. In truth, even in the heyday of
the black flag and the Spanish Main, most pirates were no better than
salt-water burglars who would rather run than fight. The glamour of
romance has been kinder to them than they deserved. Their vocation had
fallen to a low ebb indeed in the early part of the nineteenth century,
when they still infested the storied waters of the Caribbean and
struggled along, in some instances, on earnings no larger than those of
a minister or school-teacher of to-day. Ambitious young men had ceased
to follow piracy as a career. The distinguished leaders had long since
vanished, most of them properly hanged in chains, and it was no longer
possible to become a William Kidd, a Captain Ned England, or a Charles
Vane.
The schooner _Exertion_, Captain Barnabas Lincoln, sailed from Boston,
bound to Trinidad, Cuba, on November 13, 1821, with a crew consisting
of Joshua Brackett, mate; David Warren, cook; and Thomas Young,
George Reed, and Francis De Suze as able seamen. There was nothing in
the cargo to tempt a self-respecting pirate; no pieces of eight or
doubloons or jewels, but flour, beef, pork, lard, butter, fish, onions,
potatoes, apples, hams, furniture, and shooks with a total invoiced
value of eight thousand dollars. In this doleful modern era of the
high cost of living, such a cargo would, of course persuade almost any
honest householder to turn pirate if he thought there was a fighting
chance of stowing all these valuables in his cellar.
The _Exertion_ jogged along without incident for a five weeks’ passage,
which brought her close to Cape Cruz and the end of the run, when a
strange sail swept out of a channel among the sandy Cuban keys, with
sweeps out and a deck filled with men. There were forty of them,
unkempt, bewhiskered, and they appeared to be so many walking arsenals
of muskets, blunderbusses, cutlasses, pistols, and dirks. Their
schooner mounted two carronades, and flew a blue-and-white flag of the
Republic of Mexico, which was a device popular among sea-rovers who
were no better than they should be. It permitted liberty of action,
something like a New Jersey charter which corporations have found
elastic in times more recent.
Captain Lincoln hove the _Exertion_ to and hoped for the best, having
only five men and seven muskets with which to repel boarders. The
United States was at peace with Mexico and Spain, and he tried to
believe, as he tells us, that “the republican flag indicated both honor
and friendship from those who wore it.” Alas! it was soon discovered
that these were common pirates, for they sent a boat aboard in charge
of the first lieutenant, Bolidar, with six or eight Spaniards, “armed
with as many of the aforementioned weapons as they could well sling
about their bodies.” The _Exertion_ was ordered to follow the other
schooner, the _Mexican_ by name, and the two vessels came to anchor off
Cay Largo, about thirty leagues from Trinidad.
There one of the pirates, the sailing-master, who called himself
Nikola, remained in the _Exertion_ to examine the captain’s papers.
This forbidding person was, in fact, a Scotchman, as his speech readily
disclosed, and he was curiously out of place among the dirty crew of
Spanish renegades. In him the unlucky skipper of the _Exertion_ had
found a friend, of whom he said:
This Nikola had a countenance rather pleasing, although his beard
and mustachios had a frightful appearance,--his face, apparently
full of anxiety, indicated something in my favor. He gave me back
my papers, saying, “Take good care of them, for I am afraid you
have fallen into bad hands.”
The pirates then sent a boat to the _Exertion_ with more men and arms,
leaving a heavy guard on board and taking Captain Lincoln and his
Yankee seamen off to their own low, rakish craft, where they served
out the rum and vainly tried to persuade them to enlist, with promise
of dazzling booty. Captain Lincoln was not at all attracted by this
business opportunity, and sadly he returned to his schooner, where he
found Lieutenant Bolidar in the cabin and the place in a sorry mess. It
is well known that, whatever their other virtues, pirates as a class
had no manners. With a few exceptions the best of them lived like pigs
and behaved like hooligans. The captain’s narrative declares:
They had emptied a case of liquors, and broken a cheese to pieces
and crumbled it on the table and the cabin floor and, elated with
their prize as they called it, they had drunk so much as to make
them desperately abusive. I was permitted to lie down in my berth
but, reader, if you have ever been awakened by a gang of armed
desperadoes who have taken possession of your habitation in the
midnight hour, you can imagine my feelings. Sleep was a stranger to
me and anxiety was my guest. Bolidar, however, pretended friendship
and flattered me with the prospect of being set at liberty, but I
found him, as I suspected, a consummate hypocrite. Indeed, his very
looks indicated it.
He was a stout and well-built man, of a dark swarthy complexion,
with keen, ferocious eyes, huge whiskers and beard under his chin
and on his lips. He was a Portuguese by birth but had become a
naturalized Frenchman,--had a wife and children in France and
was well-known there as commander of a first-rate privateer. His
appearance was truly terrific. He could talk some English and had a
most lion-like voice.
[Illustration: THE PIRATE CAPTAIN BOARDING THE CAPTURED “EXERTION”]
Next day the scurvy knaves began plundering the _Exertion_ of her cargo
of potatoes, butter, apples, beans, and so on, ripped up the floors
in search of more liquor, found some hard cider, and guzzled it until
officers and men were in a fight, all tipsy together, and then simmered
down to sing sentimental ditties in the twilight. Soon after this both
schooners got under way and sailed to another haven in the lee of
Brigantine Cay. Captain Lincoln now saw something more of the roving
scapegrace of a Scotchman who called himself Nikola. He was a pirate
with a sentimental streak in him and professed himself to be unhappy
in his lawless employment and declared he had signed articles in the
belief that he was bound privateering.
A theatrical person was the bewhiskered Nikola, who properly belonged
to fiction of the romantic school. Sympathetic Captain Lincoln wrote
that he
lamented most deeply his own situation, for he was one of those men
whose early good impressions were not entirely effaced. He told me
that those who had taken me were no better than pirates and their
end would be the halter, but he added, with peculiar emotion, “I
will never be hung as a pirate,” showing me a bottle of laudanum
which he had found in my medicine chest and saying, “If we are
overtaken, this shall cheat the hangman before we are condemned.”
Another day’s cruise to the eastward and the trim, taut little
_Exertion_ suffered the melancholy fate of shipwreck, not bravely
in a gale, but mishandled and wantonly gutted by her captors. First
she stranded on a bar while making in for a secluded creek, and was
floated after throwing overboard the deck-load of shooks for making
sugar-barrels. Then her sails were stripped, the rigging cut to pieces,
and the masts chopped over the side lest they be sighted from seaward.
After that the pirates hewed gaps in the deck and bulwarks in order to
loot the rest of the cargo more easily, and the staunch schooner was
left to bleach her bones on the Cuban coast.
The amiable Nikola found himself in trouble because of his friendly
feeling for Captain Lincoln. The Spanish sailors tied him to a tree
and were about to shoot him as a soft-hearted traitor who was guilty
of unprofessional conduct, but a courageous French pirate surged into
the picture with several men of his own opinion, and remarked that when
the shooting began there would be other targets besides Nikola. This
convinced the mob that it might be healthier to let the Scotchman alone.
The captain and crew of the _Exertion_ were threatened and ill used,
but there seemed to be no intention of making them walk the plank or
hewing them down with cutlasses. What to do with them was a problem
rather perplexing, which was proof that the trade of piracy had fallen
from its former estate. These were thrifty freebooters, however, and
the business was capably organized. There were even traces of the
efficiency management which was to become the religion of the twentieth
century. The pirates’ largest boat was manned by a crew which discarded
some of its weapons, combed its whiskers, even washed its faces, and
set off for the port of Principe in charge of the terrifying Bolidar.
The boat carried letters to a merchant by the name of Dominico who
acted as the commercial agent of the industrious pirates and sold their
plunder for them. A representative of his was kept on board the wicked
schooner and went to sea with her, presumably to make sure of honest
dealings, a sensible precaution in the case of such slippery gentry.
The whole arrangement was most reprehensible, of course, but it had
flourished on a much larger scale in the godly ports of Boston and New
York during an earlier era.
It was to put a stop to such scandalous traffic that Richard Coote,
Earl of Bellomont, had been sent out by King William III in 1695 as
royal governor of the colonies of New York and Massachusetts. Colonial
merchants, outwardly the pattern of respectability, were in secret
partnership with the swarm of pirates which infested the American coast
and waxed rich on the English commerce of the Indian Ocean.
“I send you, my Lord, to New York,” said King William to Bellomont,
“because an honest and intrepid man is wanted to put these abuses down,
and because I believe you to be such a man.”
As a result of these instructions, Captain William Kidd was employed
to hunt the pirates down by sea while Governor Bellomont made it hot
for the unscrupulous merchants ashore who were, no doubt, the ancestors
of the modern American profiteers in food and clothing, who are also
most respectable men. Captain Kidd was a merchant shipmaster of brave
and honorable repute who had a comfortable home in Liberty Street, New
York, was married to a widow of good family, and was highly esteemed
by the Dutch and English people of the town. A shrewd trader who
made money for his owners, he was also a fighting seaman of such proved
mettle that he had been given command of privateers which cruised off
the coasts of the colonies and harried the French in the West Indies.
His excellent reputation and character are attested by official
documents.
[Illustration: ARMED WITH AS MANY OF THE AFOREMENTIONED WEAPONS AS THEY
COULD WELL SLING ABOUT THEIR BODIES]
How Captain Kidd, sent out to catch pirates, was convicted of
turning pirate himself rather than sail home empty-handed is another
story. Fate has played strange tricks with the memory of this
seventeenth-century seafarer who never cut a throat or scuttled a ship,
and who was hanged at Execution Dock for the excessively unromantic
crime of cracking the skull of his mutinous gunner with a wooden bucket.
Poor Captain Barnabas Lincoln of Boston, having lost his schooner
and cargo, was righteously indignant at discovering how the infamous
business was carried on. Said he:
I was informed by a line from Nikola that the pirates had a man
on board, a native of Principe, who in the garb of a sailor was a
partner with Dominico, but I could not get sight of him. This lets
us a little into the plan by which this atrocious system has been
conducted. Merchants having partners on board of these pirates!
Thus pirates at sea and robbers on land are associated to destroy
the peaceful trader.
Nikola remained true to Captain Lincoln, even sending him a letter from
Principe to tell him about the disposition of the stolen cargo and what
prices it was fetching. In this letter he revealed the fact that his
true name was Jamieson and concluded with this romantic flight:
Perhaps in your old age, when you recline with ease in a corner of
your cottage, you will have the goodness to drop a tear of pleasure
to the memory of him whose highest ambition should have been to
subscribe himself, though devoted to the gallows, your friend,
NIKOLA MONACRE.
Another streak of sentiment was discovered in one of the _Exertion’s_
sailors, Francis De Suze, a Portuguese, who finally weakened and
decided to join the outlaws. He was won over by the artful persuasions
of his fellow-countryman, Lieutenant Bolidar of the ferocious mien and
lion-like voice. To Captain Lincoln he explained, with tears in his
eyes:
“I shall do nothing but what I am compelled to do and will not aid
in the least to hurt you or your vessel. I am very sorry to leave
you.”
The pious master of the _Exertion_ bore up under his troubles with a
spirit truly admirable, but it was one thing after another, and under
date of Sunday, December 30, he wrote in his diary:
This day, which particularly reminds Christians of the high duties
of compassion and benevolence, is never observed by these pirates.
This, of course, we might expect, as they do not often know when
Sunday comes and if they do, it is spent in gambling. Early this
morning, the merchant, as they call him, came with a large boat
for more cargo. I was ordered into a boat with my crew, without
any breakfast, and carried about three miles to a small island out
of sight of the _Exertion_ and left there by the side of a pond
of thick, muddy water with nothing to eat but a few biscuits. One
of the boat’s crew told us that the merchant was afraid of being
recognized, and when he had gone the boat would return for us, but
we passed the day in the greatest anxiety. At night, however, the
boat came and took us again on board the _Exertion_ where to our
surprise and grief we found they had broken open the trunks and
chests and taken all our wearing apparel, not leaving me even a
shirt or a pair of pantaloons, nor sparing a small miniature of my
wife which was in the trunk.
The pirate schooner was employed a few days later to fill her hold with
cargo from the _Exertion_ and hoist sail for Principe. They lifted the
stuff out with a “Yo, ho, ho!” which made Captain Lincoln so unhappy
that he pensively wrote:
How different was this sound from what it would have been had I
been permitted to pass unmolested by these lawless plunderers and
been favored with a safe arrival at the port of my destination
where my cargo would have found an excellent sale. Then would the
“_yo, ho, ho!_” on its discharging have been a delightful sound to
me.
As a final touch to affect the modern reader with a sense of comedy
and the captain with additional woe, the pirates fished out the
_Exertion’s_ consignments of furniture and, for lack of space below,
sailed off with chairs lashed to the rail in rows and tables hung in
the rigging. There now appears the figure of the pirate commander
himself, for Bolidar was merely the lieutenant, or executive officer.
To Captain Lincoln, gloomily watching the pirate schooner in the
offing, with her picturesque garniture of hand-made New England
furniture, came Bolidar with five men, his own personal armament
consisting of a blunderbuss, cutlass, a long knife, and a pair of
pistols. This fearsome lieutenant took Captain Lincoln by the arm, led
him aside, and imparted:
“My _capitan_ sends me for your wash.”
Properly resentful, the master of the _Exertion_ replied:
“Damn your eyes! I have no clothes, nor any soap to wash with. You have
stolen them all.”
“Ah, ha, but I will have your wash, _pronto_!” cried Bolidar, waving
the blunderbuss. “What you call him that makes _tick-tock_, same as the
clock?”
Disgustedly Captain Lincoln extracted his watch from the place where he
had hidden it. The cloud had a silver lining, for Bolidar graciously
handed over a small bundle at parting.
It contained a pair of linen drawers sent me by Nikola, also
the Rev. Mr. Brooks’ Family Prayer Book. This gave me great
satisfaction. Soon after, Bolidar returned with his captain who
had one arm slung up, yet with as many implements of war as his
diminutive self could conveniently carry. He told me (through an
interpreter who was his prisoner) that on his last cruise he had
fallen in with two Spanish privateers and beat them off, but had
fourteen of his men killed and was himself wounded in the arm.
Bolidar turned to me and said, “It is a d--n lie,” which words
proved to be correct for his arm was not wounded and when I saw him
again he had forgotten to sling it up.
An accurate and convincing portrait, this, and painted with very
few strokes--the strutting little braggart of a pirate chief who
resorted to such cheap and stagy tricks as bandaging his arm to make
an impression! Having disposed of the cargo, it now transpired that
the prisoners were to be marooned and left to perish. After all, the
traditions of piracy had not been wholly lost and these sordid rascals
were running true to form. With an inkling of this fate, Mr. Joshua
Brackett, the mate of the _Exertion_, was heard to say:
“I cannot tell what awaits us, but it appears to me that the worst is
to come.”
This is how Captain Lincoln quoted it in his diary, but the mate of the
schooner, sorely tried as he must have been, was more likely to exclaim:
“I can’t fathom all their ---- ---- tricks, but it looks to me as if
the bloody rogues had made up their minds to scupper us, and may they
sizzle in hell for a million years!”
The pirate chief and his officers held a whispered conference and then
spent the last night ashore in gambling, the diminutive leader “in
hopes of getting back some of the five hundred dollars he had lost a
few nights before; which made him unusually fractious.”
Before they were marooned, Captain Lincoln took pains to note down that
the pirates were sporting new canvas trousers made from the light sails
of the _Exertion_ and that they had cut up the colors to make fancy
belts to keep their money in, and he added this vivid little touch to
the portrait of the chief, “The captain had on one of my best shirts, a
cleaner one than I had ever seen him wear before.”
At sunset the crew of the _Exertion_, with several prisoners taken out
of a Spanish merchant prize, were put into a boat. At this lamentable
moment, Nikola stepped to the front again and said to Captain Lincoln:
“My friend, I will give you your book,” (a volume of Rev. Mr.
Coleman’s sermons). “It is the only thing of yours that is in my
possession. I dare not attempt anything more. _Never mind, I may see
you again before I die._”
There were eleven prisoners in all, without arms, and to sustain life
only a ten-gallon keg of water, part of a barrel of flour, one ham,
and a little salt fish, not forgetting the precious volume of Mr.
Coleman’s sermons. They were carried to a tiny key, or islet, no more
than a shoal of white sand an acre in extent and barely lifted above
high tide, forty miles off the Cuban coast and well out of the track of
vessels. No wonder that Captain Lincoln was moved to ejaculate:
“Look at us now, my friends, left benighted on a little spot of
sand in the midst of the ocean, with every appearance of a violent
thunder tempest and a boisterous night. Judge of my feelings and
the circumstances which our band of sufferers now witnessed.
Perhaps you can, and have pitied us. I assure you we were very
wretched, and to depict the scene is beyond my power.”
They found a fragment of a thatched hut built by turtle fishermen, but
now whipped bare by the winds, and it served as a slight shelter from
the burning sun. Fire they kindled by means of a piece of cotton-wick
yarn and a flint and steel. They dug holes for fresh water, but it was
too salty to drink. At bedtime the captain read aloud selections from
the Rev. Mr. Brooks’s Family Prayer-Book, and they slept in the sand
when the scorpions, centipedes, lizards, and mosquitoes permitted.
Of driftwood, palmetto logs, and bits of board they fashioned a little
raft and so explored the key nearest them. There they discovered some
shooks, planks, and pieces of spar which had been in the _Exertion’s_
deck-load and were thrown overboard when she grounded on the bar. With
the amazing handiness of good seamen they proceeded to build a boat
of this pitiful material. “Some of the Spaniards had secreted their
long knives in their trouserlegs, which proved very useful in fitting
timbers, and a gimblet of mine enabled us to use wooden pins,” explains
Captain Lincoln. “And now our spirits began to revive, although
_water_, _water_ was continually in our minds. Our labor was extremely
burdensome, and the Spaniards considerably peevish, but they would
often say to me, ‘Never mind, Captain, bye-and-bye Americans or Spanish
catch ’em and we go see ’em hung.’”
David Warren, the cook of the _Exertion_, had been ailing, and the
cruel ordeal of being marooned was too much for him. The captain
perceived that he was soon to leave them and suggested, as they sat by
the fire:
“I think it most likely that we shall die here soon, David, but as some
one of us may survive to carry the tidings to our friends, if you have
anything to say respecting your family, now is the time.”
The young sailor--he was only twenty-six--replied to this: “I have a
mother in Saco where I belong--she is a second time a widow. To-morrow,
if you can spare a scrap of paper and a pencil, I will write something.”
No to-morrow came to him. He passed out in the night, and the skipper
thought of his own wife and children in Boston. They dug a grave in the
sand, made a coffin of shooks, and stood with bare heads while Captain
Lincoln read the funeral prayer from the consolatory compilation of the
Rev. Mr. Brooks. One of the Spanish prisoners, an old man named Manuel,
made a wooden cross, and with great pains carved upon it the words,
“Jesus Christ Hath Him Now,” and placed it at the head of the grave.
There was the old Puritan strain in Captain Lincoln, who commented,
“Although I did not believe in the mysterious influence of the cross,
yet I was perfectly willing it should stand there.”
Enfeebled and lacking food and water, they stubbornly toiled at
building the boat, which was shaped like a flat-iron. When at length
they launched the wretched little box, it leaked like a basket, and,
to their dismay, would hold no more than six of them and stay afloat,
four to row, one to steer, and one to bail. Three Spaniards and a
Frenchman argued that they should go in search of help because they
were acquainted with the lay of the coast and could talk to the people.
This was agreed to, and Mr. Brackett, the mate, was also selected to
go, because the captain considered it his duty to stay with his men.
The sixth man was Joseph Baxter, and there is no other mention of him
in the narrative, so he must have been one of the prisoners who had
been brought along from another prize. They were given a keg of water,
“the least salty,” a few pancakes and salt fish, and embarked with the
best wishes and prayers of the other survivors.
On the torrid key waited the captain, old Manuel, Thomas Young, and
George Reed, while the painful days and the anxious nights dragged past
until almost a week had gone. The flour-barrel was empty, and they were
trying to exist on prickly pears and shell-fish, while the torments of
thirst were agonizing. At last they sighted a boat drifting by about
a mile distant, and hope flickered anew. The raft was shoved off, and
two of them overhauled the empty boat, which seemed to offer a way of
escape. Imagine their feelings at discovering that it was the same boat
in which Mr. Brackett and the five men had rowed away to find rescue
in the last extremity! It was full of water, without oars or paddles.
No wonder that Captain Lincoln wrote in his journal next day:
“This morning was indeed the most gloomy I had ever experienced.
There appeared hardly a ray of hope that my friend Brackett could
return, seeing the boat was lost. Our provisions gone, our mouths
parched extremely with thirst, our strength wasted, our spirits
broken, and our hopes imprisoned within the circumference of this
desolate island in the midst of an unfrequented ocean,--all these
things gave to the scene the hue of death.”
Later in this same day a sail was seen against the blue horizon. The
sloop boldly tacked among the tortuous shoals and was evidently heading
for the islet. Soon she fired a gun, and the castaways took her to be
another pirate vessel. She dropped anchor and lowered a boat in which
three men pulled to the beach. “Thinking it no worse to die by sword
than famine,” Captain Lincoln walked down to meet them. As the boat
drove through the surf, the man in the bow jumped out, waded ashore,
and rushed to embrace the captain.
It was none other than the Scotchman, Nikola Monacre, henceforth to be
known by the reputable and rightful name of Jamieson! He had shorn off
his ruffianly whiskers and abandoned his evil ways. The moment could
have been no more dramatic, the coincidence any happier, if it had been
contrived by a motion-picture director. To the modern reader it will
come as an agreeable surprise, I fancy, for until now the character of
Nikola, as conveyed in glimpses by Captain Lincoln, fails to win one’s
implicit confidence. While among the pirates he seemed a bit mushy and
impressionable, not quite the man to stand by through thick and thin
and hew a way out of his difficulties; but this was an unfair judgment.
He was leal and true to the last hair of his discarded mustachios. As
though he surmised that Captain Lincoln might have formed the same
opinion of him, the first words of this worthy hero were:
“Do you now believe that _Jamieson_ is your friend? And are these all
that are left of you? Ah, I suspected, and now I know what you were put
here for!”
Captain Lincoln explained the absence of the mate and the five sailors
who had vanished from the waterlogged boat. Jamieson had heard nothing
of them and ventured the conjecture:
“How unfortunate! They must be lost, or some pirates have taken them.”
He called to the two comrades who had come ashore with him, Frenchmen
and fine fellows, who also embraced the castaways and held to their
parched lips a tea-kettle filled with wine, and then fed them sparingly
with a dish of salt beef and potatoes. The others of the sloop’s crew
were summoned ashore, and while they all sat on the beach and ate and
drank, the admirable Jamieson spun the yarn of his own adventures. The
pirates had captured four small coasting-vessels and, being short of
prize-masters, had put him in charge of one of them, with a crew which
included the two Frenchmen. The orders were to follow the piratical
_Mexican_ into a harbor.
His captured schooner leaked so much that Jamieson abandoned her and
shifted to a sloop, in which he altered his course at night and so
slipped clear of the pirates. First he sailed back to the wreck of
the _Exertion_ on the chance that Captain Lincoln might be there.
Disappointed in this, he went to sea again and laid a course for the
key on which the prisoners had been marooned.
“We had determined among ourselves,” he explained, “that, should an
opportunity occur, we would come and save your lives, as we now have.”
All hands went aboard Jamieson’s sloop, and left the horrid place of
their banishment over the stern. The first port of call was the inlet
in which the _Exertion_ lay stranded. She was a forlorn derelict,
stripped of everything, and Captain Lincoln bade his luckless schooner
a sorrowful farewell. While beating out of this passage, an armed brig
was sighted five miles distant. She piped a boat away, which fired
several musket-balls through the sloop’s mainsail as soon as they drew
near each other, and it was suspected that these might be the same old
pirates of the _Mexican_. Declining to surrender, Jamieson and Captain
Lincoln served out muskets, and they peppered the strange boat in a
brisk little encounter until the brig sent two more boats away, and
resistance was seen to be futile.
The armed vessel turned out to be a lawful Spanish privateer, whose
captain showed no resentment at the fusillade. Indeed, he was
handsomely cordial, a very gentlemanly sailor, and invited Captain
Lincoln and his men into the cabin for dinner, where he informed them
that he had commanded a Yankee privateer out of Boston during the War
of 1812. Jamieson and his crew, for reasons best known to themselves,
signed articles as privateersmen and stayed in the brig. This was
preferable to risking the halter ashore.
Captain Lincoln was landed at Trinidad, Cuba, where he found American
friends and was soon able to secure a passage to Boston. It was not
until months later that he learned of the safe arrival on the Cuban
coast of Mr. Brackett, the mate, and the five men who had vanished in
the open boat. What befell them at sea, and how they were picked up, is
not revealed.
It would be a pity to dismiss the engaging Jamieson without some
further knowledge of his checkered career. A year and a half after
their parting, Captain Lincoln received a letter from him. He was
living quietly in Montego Bay, Jamaica, and at the captain’s very
urgent invitation he came to Boston for a visit. While in the privateer
brig, as he told it, they had fought a Colombian eighteen-gun
sloop-of-war for three hours. After a hammer-and-tongs engagement, both
ships drew off, very much battered. The Spanish privateer limped into
Santiago for repairs, and Jamieson was sent to a hospital with a bullet
through his arm. From there he had made his way to Jamaica, where
friends cared for him and kept him clear of the law.
He had the pleasure of seeing several of his old shipmates of the
_Mexican_ brought into Montego Bay, whence they were carried to
Kingston and ceremoniously hanged by the neck. Among them was Baltizar,
pilot of the pirate schooner, and in the words of Captain Lincoln:
“He was an old man, and as Jamieson said, it was a melancholy and
heart-rending sight to see him borne to execution with those gray
hairs which might have been venerable in virtuous old age, now a
reproach and shame to this hoary villain, for he was full of years
and old in iniquity.”
You may be sure that the picaresque Scotch rover, who had been so
faithful and kind, found a warm welcome at the fireside of Captain
Lincoln and in the taverns of the Boston waterside. He was contented
to lead the humdrum life of virtue and sailed with the skipper as mate
in a new schooner on several voyages to the West Indies. In his later
years he tired of the offshore trade and joined the fishing-fleet out
of Hingham during the summer months, while in the winter he taught
navigation to the young sailors of the neighborhood who aspired to rise
to a mate’s or master’s berth.
His grave is on the shore of Cape Cod, and as Captain Lincoln wrote of
him, “Peace to his ashes. They rest in a strange land, far from his
kindred and his native country.”
According to his own account, Jamieson was of a very respectable family
in Greenock. His father was a cloth merchant of considerable wealth,
but being left an orphan, he had run away to sea and engaged in an
astonishing variety of adventures. Of him Captain Lincoln said:
He had received a polite education and was of a very gentlemanly
deportment. He spoke several languages and was skilled in
drawing and painting. He had travelled extensively and his wide
fund of information made him a most entertaining companion. His
observations on the character of different nations were very
liberal; with a playful humorousness quite free from bigotry and
narrow prejudice.
An entertaining companion and philosopher, indeed, whose outlook had
been mellowed by the broadening influence of piracy, and you and I
would like nothing better than to have sat down with this reformed
gentleman of fortune a hundred years ago and listened to his playful
comments on the virtues and the vices of mankind, and his wondrous
yarns of men and ships and the winds that tramp the world.
Perhaps as he moved so sedately in the ordered life of Boston and
Hingham, or fared to the southward again as mate of a trading-schooner,
he shivered at recollection of that day in Kingston when ten of his
old shipmates of the _Mexican_ dangled from the gallows-tree and the
populace crowded to enjoy the diverting spectacle. And in his dreams he
may have heard the wailing voice of Pedro Nondre, when the rope broke
and he fell to the ground alive: “Mercy! mercy! they kill me without
cause! Oh, good Christians, protect me. Is there no Christian in this
land? _Muero innocente! Adios, para siempre adios!_”
A true tale this, every word of it, as are all the others in this
book, but lacking one essential thing to make it complete. There is
no mention in the diary of Captain Lincoln to bring us the comforting
assurance that Bolidar, the swaggering lieutenant, and his diminutive
blackguard of a chief received the solicitous attention of the hangman,
as they handsomely deserved.