Pirate tales from the law

by Arthur M. Harris

What became of Bowen after Weoley escaped from him we do not know, at least so far as the authentic record we are consulting is concerned. Probably he met the violent end of his ilk; one thing is sure, however; he was never hanged for the piracy of the Speedy Return, but—and this makes the dread, dark sequel of the crime—another man who knew not Bowen, Robert Drummond or the ill-fated ship Speedy Return suffered by one of the most notable miscarriages of justice known to the law as the murderer of Captain Drummond and the pirate of the Speedy Return.

II

On March 8, 1702, a ship called the Worcester weighed anchor in the Downs and so began the long voyage from England to India. Perhaps on that very day, certainly within a very few days of that date, the brigantine Content was burning to the edge of the waters of a Madagascar bay, and her consort from Scotland, the Speedy Return was romping toward the Comoro Islands beneath the stern and unlawful drive of a sea brigand.

The purpose of the Worcester in the East Indies was to trade, though she did not belong to the East India Company but appears to have been owned by a small group of investors, probably retired sea captains for the most part. To get a swift idea of what was meant by the East-India trade you have only to recall the Hudson’s Bay Company in Canada, for the methods of both these great trading corporations were practically the same. Just as the Canadian company stalked across Canada from fort to fort, so the India company ringed the coast of India with forts, which, like the Canadians, they called “factories” and put in charge of an officer termed a factor. Both companies held exclusive monopolies in their respective regions by virtue of government grants; both maintained fleets for the exportation of native products and the importation of English wares and supplies. Each had to meet a certain amount of competition in spite of its exclusive privileges.

The East India Company was far more seriously challenged by rivals than was the Hudson’s Bay Company, even in the devastating days of the latter’s struggle with the Northwestern Fur Company. Not only England but Holland and numerous other commercial nations of the continent hungered for the loot of India, and between the traders representing all these conflicting greeds an almost continuous state of warfare prevailed, which more than once drew in the governments themselves.

Not only foreign competitors harassed the English East India Company, for among its annoyances was what was called the “interloper,” the English trader who poached in their preserves, in defiance of law, to such an extent that not a few considerable fortunes were thus established. But the company did not always pursue these trespassers with the severity which they might lawfully have used; local conditions on the coast made another English ship, even an interloper, not unwelcome, and at such times these gentry were tolerated and even welcomed with a surprising friendliness.

In addition to the continentals and the interlopers, the Scotch African-Indian company had, as we have seen, following the wreck of the Darien colony, begun to send its ships out for a share of the Indian spoils, two of which ships, through the unwitting kindness of Captain John Bowen, had just been prevented rather forcibly from troubling the sleep of the English company.

The status of the Worcester, then, was that of an interloper, but in one of the more genial humors of the monopolizing company, and Captain Thomas Green, her commander, had reason to believe that it would not seriously molest him as he sought to pick up a couple of hundred tons of more or less profitable cargo.

An old, slow, lead-sheathed craft was the Worcester, formerly in the whaling business. She was about a hundred feet in length and twenty-two or so feet in breadth, and carried a crew of thirty-five men. Tom Green, her master, was an honest old sea dog, thoroughly loyal to his owners and to his vessel; the admirable sort of man who does Britannia’s drudgery at sea, happy if at last he can step off his quarterdeck with all the limbs he had when he first went up the gangway as a ’prentice, and content to sink into a permanent armchair on the sunny side of a cottage close to tidewater and the lanes of sea trafficking. And but for John Bowen, it is reasonable to suppose that Tom Green would at length have achieved his modest, commendable ambition.

Their objective was Malabar by way of Delagoa Bay. It took her five months to get from the Downs to Delagoa. Here they stayed long enough to build a sloop to be used in river work at Malabar, the materials for which they had brought with them from home. On November 15, after a voyage of a little more than eight months, she came to Anjango (now Aniengo) at the tip of the Malabar coast, where Captain Green politely put ashore to pay his respects to Mr. Brabourne, chief factor of the English East India Company’s fort at that place, and incidentally to make sure that the company was still in the generous notion of living and letting live. One never knew when its policy might suddenly veer like the weathercock on a church steeple.