I
Captain Plowman, of the brig _Charles_, was looking for men, not just
for beef at the end of a rope nor a stevedore’s back; for sailors,
certainly, but something more than sailors--sea-fighters. For a fact,
this sort of thing was a little outside the usual jobs of both Captain
Plowman and his smart little brig. The brig and her master worked
in coastwise trading with an occasional venture to the markets of
London. But a civic emergency occasioned by the depredations of French
and Spanish war vessels and privateers, long vexing the New England
provinces, put a commission instead of a charter party into the hands
of Captain Plowman and cutlasses, cannon and round shot in place of
goods, wares and merchandise into the hold and on the decks of the
_Charles_.
For certain worthy merchants of Boston, indignant at the reprehensible
Frenchman and his obnoxious ally and impatient with the slow
incompetence of the Government, clubbed together and bought the
_Charles_ to refit her as a privateer to go against the enemy. It
was a recognized method of taking the law into one’s own hands. It
must not be thought that this was altogether a sacrifice, motived
by the pure principles of patriotism. There was a working chance of
shaking something worth while out of a captured Frenchman from which
at least current expenses might be paid; but in the main it was a
public-spirited thought and should properly have resulted in much
happier and more useful action than the peculiar and unforeseeable
circumstances which were to allow.
Having the ship, the merchants then procured from Joseph Dudley, her
majesty’s captain general, governor and commander-in-chief of the
province, a lawful commission for Captain Plowman, under and by virtue
of which, as the saying was, he set about the business of recruiting
the crew. But Plowman was getting along in years and was at that time
a pretty sick man. So the business of beating up the sea birds was
for the most part done by the mates, or “lieutenants”, as they were
called, taking a sort of man-of-war nomenclature, namely John Quelch
and Anthony Holding.
John Quelch was an eager, vigorous, adventurous and able young colonial
mariner with not a few of the superb qualities of those who were the
proper pride of a maritime province. Like the men of his type and
condition, he was quite unafraid of anything that could present itself
to one’s five senses. When at a later time he said he was not afraid
to die and feared only a great God and the hereafter, he was doubtless
telling the truth. What spoiled the life of John Quelch was that he did
not take these two factors of admitted fear into reckoning until the
evil was past mending.
However that may be, the immediate weakness of Quelch was that his mind
was a rudder that any hand might steer. Anthony Holding, quite evil,
sly and contemptible, designed to be the helmsman who should drive John
Quelch on to the rocks of ruin.
Holding and Quelch in due time gathered as ferocious and
villainous-looking a gang of ruffians as ever stood on the docks of
old Boston. Their subsequent conduct indicates that they must have
been about the toughest, hardest crew that an honest master ever
piped together for division into watches. If Plowman, gazing from the
quarter-deck upon that rabble, felt a premonition of trouble, the event
was to justify him.
But those were not days in which the master of a privateer could be
squeamish about such matters and get his ship manned. The _Charles_
would have rotted at her moorings while she waited for good burghers
or the sons of good burghers to come and take her to sea. Mostly the
driftwood of society, which instinctively dams up along a waterfront,
could be loaded on to such ships in such times. Anthony Holding, at
any rate, pulled at his long mustache and appraised the crowd with
satisfaction.
Sea-fighters were all right if you could keep them fighting the other
ship. With a hostile craft in front of them there was no trouble
about putting the medley of privateersmen at work, and a ship which
could provide a good naval battle every morning before breakfast was
more likely to be a contented ship than one which loafed a long while
between engagements, thus allowing the free gentlemen time to hatch
for themselves a little essential excitement. Mutiny was accepted as a
passable substitute for battle.
Perhaps Plowman felt more comfortable when he glanced at the rocky
features of Quelch and Holding; for if ever there were two men in the
right jobs such were they. With iron hands and iron nerves to drive
them they could meet any contingency the crowd of subordinates might
present. Perhaps Plowman was of the same sort, but he was a sick and
aging man. He was in the hands of his lieutenants.
Englishmen of the first or second generation made up the list of
seamen; Cæsar-Pompey, Charlie and Mingo, first or second generation
Africans, were in command of the galley. Cæsar-Pompey and Charlie were
pressed into the service; they had not volunteered to handle the pots
and pans of the brig.
They were the slaves of one Colonel Hobbey; and Quelch, finding them on
the street, ran them aboard the brig. You see he did not hesitate about
small matters. The ship would need cooks, of course, and here were two
black fellows who ought to know how to cook even if they did not, so
why not ship them? Why worry about the gallant colonel? Worry would be
his job when the _Charles_ was far at sea.
Thus casually Cæsar-Pompey and Charlie found themselves dedicated to
a life on the ocean wave. They were to travel far and see much ere
they beheld the good Colonel Hobbey again. Quelch was by way of being
something of a crimp.
Cooks and seamen being now on hand, in August, 1703, the brig spread
her square sails and drew away from the steaming wharves of Boston
toward the cool acres of the ocean. No doubt the worthy merchants and
a concourse of citizens cheered her departure; probably there were
speeches, and mayhap a town band was on the dock. Anthony Holding
especially must have enjoyed these marks of civic appreciation.
According to orders they headed off for Newfoundland; but Plowman, who
was still sick, must have left the managing of the ship largely to
Quelch, his immediate subordinate. Everything went snappily as with
leather throats and fisted hands Quelch and Holding hustled the men
into quick, effective action.
When they had been a week out from Boston it was easy to see that the
captain was in a bad way. Probably at his command they put in at a way
port to obtain medical help. The brig was anchored in the stream, and
Quelch went ashore in the boat.
Now among the riffraff aboard there was a handful--a small handful--of
the more decent sort of seamen, of whom Pimer and Clifford were
representatives. These two began to get anxious about the captain as
the afternoon dragged on and no boat, Quelch or doctor returned from
the shore. The sick man was groaning all the time and in apparent
extremes. Nobody seemed to pay any heed to him; but all afternoon the
crew roared and shouted and quarreled over their cards and dice, while
aft by the cabin only Holding turned about and about on the deck, his
hands behind his back, preoccupied with his thoughts.
It began to strike Pimer and Clifford as odd, to say the least; so
toward evening, as the August sun was turning red behind the hills,
Pimer and Clifford went to the cabin to give a little human help. As
they passed Holding, walking up and down the deck, he looked at them
queerly but said nothing.
Clearly, things were not just as they ought to be. In the twilight,
startlingly, a rough tongue ordered them away from the cabin. A
sentinel was there; Peter Roach stood guard at the captain’s door,
armed with a drawn cutlass. Had the skipper directed this?
Then they noticed that the cabin door was bolted from the outside with
a marlin-spike thrust through the bolt socket, the bolt itself having
long been lost. Obviously this was not the captain’s doing.
Pimer and Clifford looked at each other as men do in peril. Something
very evil was moving about them. At dark Quelch came back in the boat,
and there was a whispering between him and Holding. The ship lights
were hung out; and the lantern revealed something of the knobbly,
stupid face of Peter Roach, still standing at his sinister watch. No
one moved toward the ill-fortuned cabin.
Peter Roach, the sentinel, could not be said to have been a peculiarly
sensitive person. Some time later he was to die with as little feeling
for himself as he had had for poor Plowman. He was an automaton.
And so this crowd of men lay all about the hot decks, waiting for the
captain to die. Those were hard hours for Clifford and Pimer and the
one or two other loyal men.
A little before midnight the cries of the sufferer ebbed away, and
Peter Roach stolidly left his post and as stolidly grunted a few words
at Holding. He and Quelch, taking a lantern, entered the cabin and
found that nature had at last done their job for them: Captain Plowman
was dead.
Captain Quelch, now, if you please, by the law and usage of the sea.
Anthony Holding bobbed his tarry pigtail low in grimacing
courtesy--place was little to him, power everything. And he was the
power on this ship. He ordered the captain’s body thrown overboard like
so much rubbish. Then he called all hands together in the waist of the
brig and openly declared that which undoubtedly he had long secretly
prepared for,--piracy. The proposal was acclaimed with a unanimity
which indicated premeditation.
It was no time for Pimer or Clifford to talk, though manfully they made
an effort at protest with no result but to endanger their own safety.
That they were not tossed over the side at once is a marvel. The only
question that agitated this bandit conference was where to pirate, one
suggesting this field and another that. Somebody, probably Holding,
persuaded them that Brazil, then a colony of Portugal, and the South
American coast gave the most promise of gain.
This policy and its execution were really masterly. They must have
been the products of careful pondering based upon information more
or less exact. Consider it geographically. From Cape San Augustine,
where Brazil thrusts its elbow into the Atlantic Ocean, away down to
Rio de Janeiro is one long, continuous coast line, well populated
even in the early eighteenth century with numerous ports of small
and great importance. Starting then at the cape, a pirate need only
drop continually down the latitudes, pausing as occasion suggested to
pick up prizes, never staying in a vicinity or returning to it to be
captured. At Rio, where the cruise was to be finished, swing out far
from the coast and make a bee line for home. It was an able plan and
strong because so simple.
Holding, or whoever the proponent of the South American cruise might
have been, had without question made a close study of the methods of
Captain Kidd, hanged some two years before in London. The parallel
between the Kidd and Quelch piracies is so exact as to be more than
coincidental. Both perverted the use of a commissioned ship; both
journeyed thousands of miles to their fields of operation; both
sought to make one quick, strong strike at fortune and return to
respectability.
Neither Kidd nor Quelch had a notion of being conventional pirates,
that is, of infesting some given locality and preying on passing
traffic, spending their gains riotously and expecting not to leave the
business except perhaps unluckily by way of the king’s rope. Kidd had
made a fortune which was the talk of the colony; and the incident that
he was hanged for it only proved his subsequent mismanagement and did
not impugn his actual methods of pirating.
Again, pirates of the type of Kidd and Quelch were attracted by a
combination of two favoring factors,--a good sea traffic and a weak
land government. In Kidd’s case the flourishing Indian commerce was
not completely protected by the decaying Mogul Government, while in
Quelch’s case the merchants of the east coast of South America were
considerably ahead of any authority which could guarantee them a
peaceful development.
In the middle of November, or just a little more than three months
after leaving Boston, the _Charles_, having reeled off three thousand
miles of journeying, arrived in the seventh degree, south latitude, off
the bold beak of Cape St. Augustine, and hungrily searched the sea for
prey.
Quelch was under English colors, and at the ports hereabouts where
he made his first stops he gave out that he was cruising against the
French and Spanish. That kind of talk kept things clear on shore.
With Quelch was one John Twist, who was either recruited in the
neighborhood of St. Augustine or came originally from Boston.
John was the ship’s “linguister”, as the quaint old word was--the
interpreter--and he was what army men might call the officer of liaison
between the New Englanders and the Portuguese. He was also the pilot
in the Brazilian waters, but died before the _Charles_ went home,
though apparently not until he had brought her to her extreme southern
objective, Rio de Janeiro.
On November fifteenth, after leaving the cape and working slowly
southward, a little Portuguese fishing boat was stopped by the pirates
as she was slipping into port, and her cargo of fish and salt was
quickly tossed over the bulwarks of the _Charles_. Fish and salt do not
make any great treasure; in fact, this particular fish and salt were
worth about three pounds to Quelch. But it was a little preliminary
workout.
Three days later the brig was opposite Pernambuco, where she coolly
picked up a small Portuguese vessel of fifteen tons right from under
the eyes of the townsfolk. She was stuffed with sugar and molasses to
the value of one hundred and fifty pounds. In the modern worth of the
pound this would be about six hundred and seventy-five dollars; but it
must be noted, of course, that that amount of silver would buy a great
deal more in those times than in these.
John Twist persuaded two white men and one negro of the crew of five to
sign up with the pirates. Quelch no doubt had the same experience that
Kidd had with his original crew; there was a continual attrition by
disease or desertion, and the man-power had to be kept up by recruiting
so far as possible from captured ships.
Those who did not care to join up with the _Charles_ were returned
to their boats in most cases and permitted to pass on their way. It
was quite unnecessary for the pirates to kill such as refused to go
along with them, for by the time they got back to port and had a chase
organized, the _Charles_ would be well ahead of them to the south.
The fifteen-ton brig with the sugar and molasses aboard was kept by
Quelch and made a “tender”, as he called it, of the _Charles_, and thus
created a sort of fleet, with the Boston brig as flagship and John
Quelch as admiral.
Latitudes seven and eight degrees south had yielded two victims;
November twenty-fourth found them in latitude nine degrees south, and
tumbling well around the elbow of Brazil, but still in the vicinity of
Cape St. Augustine.
Below the cape they took another Portuguese brig, this time of forty
tons. She was on her way from the plantations to Pernambuco, laden
with about eight hundred dollars’ worth of sugar and molasses. We are
vividly reminded of Kidd’s first catches, which so often consisted of
small sloops carrying butter, coffee and opium.
A cool piece of work was the taking of this ship, impudently
accomplished well within sight of land. Quelch, with John Twist, the
linguister, at his side, led in the capture, which was made without
resistance on the part of the Portuguese. It took two or three days to
shift her cargo to the _Charles_, after which she was tossed away like
a squeezed lemon to get back to port as best she might. Through Twist
Quelch informed these Portuguese that the _Charles_ was a French ship
and that the Portuguese, as allies of the English, had fallen on the
sad mischances of war. Another trick out of Kidd’s bag.
Isaac Johnson, a Dutchman, committed the chief crime on a pirate ship:
he talked too much. Somehow or other he told the Portuguese the truth
about Quelch. Gunner Moore had met his end at the hands of Captain Kidd
because of a fatal flexibility of the lips, and Ike Johnson likewise,
though not so severely, was made an example of by the decisive Quelch.
All hands were piped on deck,--not with a boatswain’s whistle, however,
but by a trumpet loudly sounded by the kidnapped though apparently not
disconsolate Cæsar-Pompey, who to the job of cook added that of ship’s
trumpeter. Johnson was brought forward and tied by the wrists to a
grating; and Anthony Holding, with malice aforethought and continuous,
laid on Ike’s bare back with a rope’s end, and thus counseled him as to
the wisdom of silence. It was an approved sea fashion of admonition.
December brought them to latitude thirteen degrees south and early
presented them with two jars of rum, a little linen and a trifle of
earthenware filched from a shallop. This was the smallest sprat that
came to their net during the cruise. She was taken by the tender, and,
being despoiled, was sent on her way.
The same day the tender took another small Portuguese boat. Both of
these takings were right under the guns of Fort Mora, so close that
the flag flying over the fort was clearly discerned. Being a little too
close to the fort to run needless risk, Quelch staved in the captured
boat and let her gurgle and bubble down into the green Atlantic. Her
crew went aboard the _Charles_, perhaps as recruits.
From her they took a quantity of vari-colored silk; and soon the crew
of the _Charles_ were gallant and picturesque in silk breeches and
shirts,--of homemade cut and tailoring, to be sure, but none the less
gratifying to the wearers.
The next capture was in latitude thirteen degrees south and below Mora.
The busy little tender here grabbed a twenty-ton brig, from which an
inconsiderable amount of rice and a negro slave were taken. The negro’s
name was Joachim; but his captors dubbed him Cuffee and turned him over
to Cæsar-Pompey as a flunky. In addition to these there was a young man
on board with a canvas bag containing two hundred and fifty dollars in
gold coin. The young man was allowed to keep the canvas bag.
After the fashion of the trade, the pirate crew were working on the
share basis; that is, after deducting for general expenses, a major
part went to Quelch--and of course Holding--and minor parts of the
plunder were distributed head for head. All cash taken was put in
the keeping of the quartermaster to accumulate for future division;
merchandise such as sugar and so on was probably marketed at way ports
and the proceeds put into the treasury, after the manner again of Kidd
in the East Indies.
Cuffee, the flunky, not being divisible, was auctioned off at the mast
to the highest bidder, who happened to be one Ben Perkins. The price
was thrown into the common pot. Cuffee’s sale brought a hundred dollars
to the cash account.