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.”