We have to take off our hats to lawyer Menzies. He put up a fine fight. He showed himself unafraid of court or council and stuck to his clients when more politic lawyers would have eased off. Really he beat the prosecution.
It was this way. The commission to this court of admiralty was issued under an act of parliament which provided that its proceedings should be according to what was called the civil law, which was a different procedure from that of ordinary criminal courts, being originally from the old Roman law. Now, by the civil law, in a trial for piracy an accomplice could not be a witness against the accused; and Pimer, Clifford and Parrot were technically accomplices. Menzies had chapter and book for it, too.
Mr. Attorney General floundered back on an act of Henry the Eighth, but if Menzies had had a modern court his point would have stuck. Not that this is a modern principle of law; but a modern court under the same rules as this old court would have held with Menzies. The president of the council, the provincial council constituting this court of admiralty, hemmed and hawed and fudged by.
Menzies was both a lawyer and a man, but he really had no court to try his case in. All the council could see was a case of piracy, and away with technicalities. That would be all right, of course, if technicalities did not exist for the protection of the innocent. Quelch was guilty, no doubt, according to the gossip blowing about Boston, but innocent so far as the court in its particular province was concerned.
Quelch didn’t say much. If he had he would not have done himself much good. It is fair to say on behalf of the court that though it erred in admitting Pimer, Clifford and Parrot as witnesses, there was a fair showing of other proof which went to help the State’s case, though that does not exonerate the court from the use of improper procedure in the particular which has been shown.
“Guilty,” said the council. Cæsar-Pompey and the other negroes were discharged along with the handful of men who showed they had sailed under a sort of compulsion.
Twenty men, including Quelch, were sentenced to die; and of these, six were hanged on “Charles River, Boston side, June 30, 1704.” They were John Quelch, John Lambert, Christopher Scudamore (the cooper who boasted of shooting Captain Bastian), John Miller, Erasmus Peterson and Peter Roach (the automaton). The record is silent as to the fate of the remaining fourteen; possibly their sentences were commuted.
The end of the matter is best told by one who saw it.
“On Friday, the 30th of June, 1704, pursuant to orders in the death warrant, the aforesaid pirates were guarded from the prison in Boston, by forty musketeers, constables of the town, the provost-marshal and his officers, with two ministers, who took great pains to prepare them for the last article of their lives. Being allowed to walk on foot through the town, to Scarlet’s wharf, where the silver oar being carried before them, they went by water to the place of execution, being crowded and thronged on all sides with multitudes of spectators.
“At the place of execution, they then severally spoke as follows, viz.: