This letter, on which there was much comment, came at last into the hands of the authorities, who, having satisfied themselves that it was authentic, ordered the body of Shaw to be taken down from the gibbet where it still hung in chains and to be decently interred. As a further but somewhat empty reparation of his honour, a pair of colours was waved over his grave.
THE SAILMAKER AND THE BOATSWAIN.
A still more curious story is that of a sailmaker who many years ago went to spend Christmas with his mother near Deal. On his way he spent a night at an inn at Deal, and shared a bed with the landlady’s uncle, the boatswain of an Indiaman, who had just come ashore. In the morning the uncle was missing, the bed was saturated with blood, and the young sailmaker had disappeared. The bloodstains were soon traced through the house, and beyond, as far as the pier-head. It was naturally concluded that the boatswain had been murdered and his body thrown into the sea. A hue-and-cry was at once set up for the young man, who was arrested the same evening in his mother’s house.
He was taken red-handed, with ample proofs of his guilt upon him. His clothes were stained with blood; in his pockets were a knife and a strange silver coin, both of which were sworn to most positively as the property of the missing boatswain. The evidence was so conclusive that no credence could be given to the prisoner’s defence, which was ingenious but most improbable. His story was that he woke in the night and asked the boatswain the way to the garden, that he could not open the back door, and borrowed his companion’s clasp-knife to lift the latch. When he returned to bed the boatswain was gone; why or where he had no idea.
The youth was convicted and sent to the gallows, but by strange fortune he escaped death. The hanging was done so imperfectly that his feet touched the ground, and when taken down he was soon resuscitated by his friends. They made him leave as soon as he could move, and he went down to Portsmouth, where he engaged on board a man-of-war about to start for a foreign station. On his return from the West Indies three years later to be paid off, he had gained the rating of a master’s mate, and gladly took service on another ship. The first person he met on board was the boatswain he was supposed to have murdered!
The explanation given was sufficiently strange. On the day of his supposed murder the boatswain had been bled by a barber for a pain in the side. During the absence of his bedfellow the bandage had come off his arm, which bled copiously, and he got up hurriedly to go in search of the barber. The moment he got into the street he was seized by a press-gang and carried off to the pier. There a man-of-war’s boat was in waiting, and he was taken off to a ship in the Downs, which sailed direct for the East Indies. He never thought of communicating with his friends; letter-writing was not much indulged in at that period.
Doubts have been thrown upon this story, which rests mainly upon local tradition. As no body was found, it does not seem probable that there would be a conviction for murder. Of the various circumstances on which it was based, that of the possession of the knife was explained, but not the possession of the silver coin. It has been suggested that when the sailmaker took it out of the boatswain’s pocket the coin had stuck between the blades of the knife.
BRUNELL THE INNKEEPER.
The astute villainy of a criminal in covering up his tracks was never more successful than in the case of Brunell, the innkeeper at a village near Hull. A traveller was stopped upon the road and robbed of a purse containing twenty guineas. But he pursued his journey uninjured, while the highwayman rode off in another direction.