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They hauled down the black flag and shoved it in the locker, whence it was never withdrawn to flap its sinister warning in the winds, and proceeded to give their gang of perplexed French prisoners a trip to Scotland.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.