Pirate tales from the law

by Arthur M. Harris

BLACK FLAG FROM BOSTON

John Quelch

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.