If he belonged anywhere it was to the sea. He even qualified as a navigator with the rank of first mate. In the sixteen-hundred and nineties, the Spanish Government made a bargain with some English merchants to hire coast-guard ships for its troubled South American colonies. Sir James Houblon and several others outfitted a couple of brigs, the Charles the Second and the James, for the Spaniard’s business, and it was on the former that Avery was signed as first mate.
Thereafter things came about which made a matter for the King’s court of Old Bailey, sitting in admiralty. Among the persons involved was an ancient mariner by the name of William May, who on his trial has left us a story of the wickedness of Mr. Avery. Unfortunately Harry Avery was not brought to account for his crime, nor, so far as we are aware, for any piracy, but slips from the pages of history with these things unrecorded, probably to end his life as one, not the least evil, among the buccaneering hordes of the Caribbean.
II
Look at the sad plight of me, old Bill May, for thirty-five years in the service of my king and country! Here I lie in the hold of Newgate Gaol, condemned for a pirate and a-tremble like a loose sail in a gale of wind every time the sheriff comes in to read off the list of those appointed for the day to die.
My right forefinger and the top of my thumb I lost just thirty year ago when Admiral Tiddiman fought the Dutch in the harbor of Bergen. On the Hector, Captain John Cuttle’s ship, I was. We ran afoul a Dutch broadside, and down we went like a tub with a grindstone in it. Only a score of us came up again, and me, with my maimed hand, had to swim more than an hour for my life.
A man who has given his limbs for his country to be stretched at Execution Dock with no more to do than if he were a common picklock! Ah! what a port has old Bill May’s ship come to at last!
It does not become a man who has fought for England to whine at the king’s court. But charity begins at home; and from a kindness to the respectable name of May I am taking a quill in my fist to set out in order the things that brought me here—and shouldn’t have—which things the lawyers confabulated me out of properly telling at my trial.
The way the long-gowns[1] talked you would have thought they and not we were the ones to be hanged. Begging everybody’s pardon, I ask who ought to do the most talking—accuser or accused?
[1] Lawyers.
His Lordship, Judge Holt—who was master of the court—was pretty fair, but those king’s counsel blasted the whole dozen or more judges with words, words, words, till I looked to see them all blown through the wall of Old Bailey—and the big bench with ’em. Half the time those lawyers didn’t speak a man’s English, but yammered in a foreign tongue, calling us names we knew not what. Some of it sounded to me like Portugee.[2] Jack Sparkes[3] swore from keel to truck it was Irish. But when we came to talk, how was it then?