Pirate tales from the law

by Arthur M. Harris

So cargoed, they went on from St. Mary’s, Madagascar, to Mauritius, where they discharged their load of slaves and in March, 1702, were back again in Madagascar, at a place they called Maritan, but which has probably become Mananara, ready for another batch of blacks, and, though naturally this was beyond their expectation, the thunderbolt of as desperate a gang of pirates as ever cast dice with the hangman.

Gradually Bowen’s shipless crew gathered in the woods back of the town and impatiently waited for morning. When the tropic sun at length surged up abruptly from beneath the far, thin, eastern line of the Indian Ocean, they girded their belts about them, looked to their weapons, hefting their cutlasses and attending to the priming of their pistols, and waited the cheerful word of onslaught. Bowen called together the four English-speaking men he had first selected the day before, on the chance of being able to make immediate use of them, and left with them for the very outskirts of the town, where they settled themselves in the lush vegetation and watched their prey. Before separating from the main group, Bowen, like a true general, addressed his troops. “If it comes to trouble,” he said succinctly, “and ye find ye against a man bigger than ye, take your tools quickly”—here he tapped his cutlass, “and cut him down to your size.”

The plan was for the four men and Bowen to board the ship Speedy Return by stratagem, when, if the chance was good, Bowen would sound the bo’sun’s whistle which he carried for that purpose and the reserves were to come up in full force.

Early after breakfast the lurkers noticed what was evidently the captain of the Speedy Return, accompanied by a group of men, come ashore and set off through the woods to the neighboring villages, evidently in the transaction of their traffic in human beings. The day burned to high noon and high noon waned towards evening, and still the cautious Bowen, not risking a fizzle in this his great and long-sought opportunity, held his hounds in the leash. Quite late in the afternoon, when it was reasonably certain the captain had gone for a considerable time, and when the remnant of the crews of the two ships were scattered, some about the town and others dozing on the hot decks, John Bowen and his four aides stepped from the brush, strode past the thatched native huts and out on the dock. They ran up the ladder and were on the deck of the Speedy Return.

“Ho, mate,” called Bowen, grinning genially to what was evidently the ship’s cook, carrying a butcher knife in one hand and a leg of a sheep in the other, “who’s the master of this ship?”

“Cap’n Rab Drummond, frae Edinburgh,” burred the cook, “and who be ye, mon?”

“Oh, we’re nobody; just come aboard, looking to buy a bit of breadstuff and tobacco, if ye’ve such to spare.”

There were not more than a dozen men aboard, according to Bowen’s swift calculation. Over on the Content, a few yards away, there appeared still fewer. The hour had struck. Bowen drew a pistol from the arsenal of his sash and thrust it against the full girth of the cook. “Go on to your cookhouse, my lad,” he commanded. “You’re going to have a few friends for supper.” Thus the chef received notice of the change of management. He took it dully and obediently; anything may happen when one goes so far from Glasgie. Sharp and shrill the signal whistle beat echoingly from the cliffs of the Cape to the heights above the town, and with a terrifying shout, the rest of Bowen’s men hurled themselves over the bulwarks of both the Speedy Return and the Content. The gang that boarded the latter had a definitely prescribed job to do and expeditiously they did it. First of all, they ran the gaping sailors off her decks and on to those of the Speedy Return; then, hastening back, they smeared the decks of the Content with pitch, set a train to the small powder magazine, and as the thick brown-black clouds of smoke rolled sluggishly over the sides, they fled, whooping as demons may be supposed to whoop at the mouth of the Inferno, for the Speedy Return. Her sides they clutched even as she moved away in tow of the ship’s boats, out into the bay, where she picked up a helping breeze; where her hastily hoisted sails began to tauten and whence she began quite prettily to glide out into the wide, the welcome ocean. John Bowen was on a quarter-deck again; it mattered to him little who claimed that same quarterdeck; he was on it and the quartermaster at the whipstaff swung the helm to this side and that, in obedience to his orders. He felt the wind of the free ocean upon his breast and lifted up his great bellowing voice in song. Ha! ha! he! ho! in a jiffy the tables had been turned; John Bowen had had the shore and no ship and now Captain Robert Drummond, of Edinburgh, out of Glasgow, had all the shore he cared to use and no ship.

No stenographer was present to record what Captain Drummond said when he came out of the woods and found the black embers of the Content knocking about the piling or bobbing far out on the bay, and of his ship only the stupid, inarticulate remembrance of the gaping Malagassy natives, but without doubt it was something pretty. Captain Stewart was master of the Content and probably had been absent with Drummond of the Speedy Return—although he might have been on his own ship and been captured with the rest of the crew; nobody has given us the precise information—but if he came out of the woods at the same time that Drummond did, there is no doubt the inhabitants beheld two of the angriest Scotchmen they had ever seen or ever were likely to see. We don’t know what happened to Stewart, but a man who spent fifteen years in captivity among the Madagascans came home with the story that Drummond found his way to Tullea, on the southwest coast of the island, where, in an altercation with a Jamaican negro, who was of course one of those far-faring West Indian pirates, he received a wallop from the black rogue which deprived the Scotch African-Indian trading company of a faithful servant and the rising British Merchant Marine of a competent shipmaster.

Now, Bowen, between the two appropriated vessels, very likely gathered in some thirty men, all well-seasoned sailors. We know the names of only two of these honest tars to whom this vivid change of circumstance occurred; Israel Phippany and Peter Freeland. Some of these captives accepted the fate of the sea and even counted themselves among the pirates; others, naturally, found the situation not to their liking and stood by for an opportunity to escape. It was all one to their swaggering captors, whether a man liked it or not; a sailor he was and sail that ship he should. None of that topmast business for the bold pirate boys; in a jam they might lend a hand at working the vessel, but ordinarily they insisted that fighting was their specialty and avoided the rope and the tar bucket as quite beneath their dignity. But they were fair in their way, for when it came to a fight they did not call on the shellbacks for help; that too would have been essentially undignified for a master pirate. This gang of Bowen stood in a rough relation to the sailors aboard as the marines do to a war vessel. Many ships, of course, were completely manned by confessed pirates, and when that was so they had to do sailor work, but whenever they could they were great little chaps for pressing men aboard especially to do the ship’s chores. So the Speedy Return being happily in their possession, the pirates lay back under the awnings and drank copiously of arrack, the universal intoxicant of the East Indies, the while their bold chieftain drove his keel along for joyful fights and glorious plunder.