Pirate tales from the law

by Arthur M. Harris

XI

Mr. May’s premonition was justified by the event. On Wednesday, November 26, 1696, at Execution Dock—which overlooks the Thames at Blackwall, and was the usual place of punishment for Admiralty felons—he and his fellow defendants were hanged.

Reading his quaint story (which in substance was his evidence at his trial) we get the idea that if he and his fellow accused were to be convicted at all it should have been for the capture of the Gunsway and not for the theft of the Charles the Second. Mr. May is borne out by the record when he says that he was convicted of the latter offense by the five words of Mate Gravet: to wit, that May knew of the plot.

But there was no proof to support Gravet’s statement other than the word of one Creagh, to whom, as we have seen, Mr. May rather bitterly alludes, and accuses of seeking to serve his own interest in a serious scrape in which he had become involved. Creagh would seem quite unreliable. He had been one of the men who had left the Charles the Second at the Groyne, on Henry Avery’s invitation to all who had not spirit enough to go along with him and collect their back pay to depart more or less in peace. Reaching England again, he fell in with an adventurous young chap by the name of Vaughan, who was then signing men on the Loyal Clancarty, a small sloop which Vaughan planned to, and did, turn over to the service of the then exiled Stuart king, James the Second, and in which Vaughan disturbed the shipping of the government until he was run down and captured in the Channel, after a fight in which the attackers had to wade to the Clancarty through the shallows, with their weapons over their heads to keep them dry. He and his crew were taken first to Dover Castle, where the warden who registered them remarked that most of them were drunk at the time, to be removed later to Newgate, in which latter prison, by what was certainly a very odd circumstance, Creagh again met old shipmates of the Charles the Second from whom he had parted at the Groyne. With the terrible charge of high treason lying upon him, Creagh saw his chance and, expecting thus to purchase clemency in his own affair, eagerly proffered his testimony against the alleged pirates, and was accepted. Thus there was a great premium upon the conviction of Mr. May and the others.

His character was brought out most damagingly at his own later trial on the Vaughan business, during which his own brother was forced to take the stand and brand him a liar and a rogue; a petty, sneaking rascal, apparently, who did not hesitate to pilfer the poor resources of his relatives.

He might have been telling the truth about Mr. May, but surely not beyond a doubt.

If he is eliminated, then it was only a case of Gravet’s word against Mr. May’s. There is nothing to be said against Gravet; he was under no charge, no peculiar advantage would be his for furthering a conviction, and his testimony was given in a pretty straightforward, manly sort of way. But Mr. May argues that the situation at the Groyne itself supports his own explanation of his conduct,—that the boat which Avery allowed to leave with those who were unwilling to go could not possibly hold the whole company of the brig and that he was one of those thus forced to stay behind.

It must be remembered, as Mr. May points out, that he and his co-defendants had already been tried and acquitted of the piracy of the Gunsway, where, although it is not reported, that trial must have been more likely, in the nature of things, to result in a conviction, for Mr. May admits that he was an accomplice in that crime, though present under a sort of duress. That the government was shocked at the verdict in that case is very plain from the words of the judges and prosecutors in the second case, where as Mr. May indicates, extraordinary pressure was brought to bear to keep the jury from straying out of the way as did the former one.

Somehow, Mr. May’s account lacks an ultimate convincingness, but it may be said for him at this late day that, technically, there is a very grave doubt of his guilt. His is the story of old dog Tray: willingly or unwillingly, he was in bad company and to that unfortunate circumstance he must lay a large portion of his misfortunes.

And what befell the naughty Henry Avery?