Pirate tales from the law

by Arthur M. Harris

Happily, Mr. Brabourne and his gentlemen were as genial as a June day. Madeira and compliments were enjoyed together and Green went back to his ship, rejoicing in at least the tacit consent of Mr. Brabourne to his trading operations. With that load off his mind, he sailed for the Keilon River, a few leagues farther on, and there established contact with Cogi Commodo.

We have mentioned big rival corporations and interlopers, but the coveted Indian trade produced another institution,—the petty ’longshore merchant, white or black, most generally a follower of the Prophet from some of the far eastern Mahometan countries. After he had prospered above the peddling stage, this gentleman usually established a little warehouse at the mouth of some one of the sluggish rivers emptying into the Arabian Sea, and there conducted a business which was for the most part illegal. Briefly, he was a purveyor of stolen goods brought to him by the pirates which infested those regions; a “fence” as it is called, and without whom piracy would have been almost impossible, for if a pirate could not dispose of the cargoes he took of perishable or ordinary mercantile stuff, his activity would have been immeasurably curtailed. For instance, before he made his lucky strike, Kidd took tons of butter, cargoes of coffee, opium enough to give his men a thousand years of delightful dreams, far more than could be used aboard his ship and which would have been useless without the obliging fence. This very same Cogi Commodo boasted to the crew of the Worcester that he was “merchant” for Kidd. The Cogi was suspected not only of buying from the pirates but of informing them of the movements of promising ships and even of assisting in their actual assault and capture. Not that Green wanted any such service as this from Commodo; he used him on the more legitimate side of trading, for the Cogi, like the rest of his kind, continually gathered in native products from under the noses of the English forts, for the prime purpose of supplying interlopers. You can see the Cogi was quite an irregular sort of gentleman on whichever side you took him.

The Worcester came to the Keilon River on November 21 by way of Callequilon; December 22 she was back at Callequilon, then made a big jump of a hundred or more miles up to Cochin, reaching there January 10, 1703, just about five years to a day after Kidd had made his big capture of the Quedagh Merchant in those very waters; and but a few months after the unfortunate Captain Weoley had made his escape at that place from the wicked John Bowen. Green’s northward trading seems to have been hurried, for two weeks later he was at Calicut, a month after that back at Cochin, and by March 8 was again anchored in the roadstead of Callequilon.

Life on a trading ship on the coast of Malabar in the morning of the eighteenth century was not easy. Sickness kept a large number of the crew helpless at all times. Doctor May, the ship’s surgeon—a young sawbones of twenty-six years—had so many patients that he had to put up a crude hospital ashore at Callequilon, where the sick were taken from the ship and left while the vessel worked up and down the coast.

Most of the time it was just a job of hard work, either in sailing or in stevedoring the piles of cargo which would be collected at one place and another by various Cogis to await the coming of the Worcester. The busiest man aboard was then the supercargo, on whom fell the burden of handling the cargo, keeping the accounts and looking after the financial interests of the owners. The work and worry of it all gave the prevalent fever when it struck him added force, and the supercargo slipped through an open port in a weighted canvas shroud to join the half-dozen or so of his companions who had already preceded him to the muddy hammocks that swing eternally in the tides of the sea.

But there was a lighter side. Even in Keilon a sailor could spend his wages, or gape about at the elephants, the palanquins, the ladies with rings in their noses or stare uncomprehendingly at the fantastic ornamentation of the ancient temple of Shiva. Captain Green himself found time for the social turn, and so ingratiated himself with a lady of the country that she gave him a well-trained young black slave, Antonio Francesco, to be his personal servant. Green thought a great deal of the lady’s kindness, for he took Antonio aboard and to make sure he would not lose him, chained him to a spike in the forecastle floor, in something of the fashion that seamen are wont to bring home a pet monkey.

All of this was very well to be sure, but April was to prove a month of hard luck for the Worcester. On the tenth of that month the sloop was driven ashore in a gale and destroyed. In the same storm Green tried to make Keilon, but was forced to anchor between that place and Anjango. Here his cable parted and serious leaks were sprung in his hull. Amid all that, however, he was mannerly enough to fire five rounds in salute to the Aureng-Zeb, another trader which happened by and who, as politely, returned the compliment. Green was so worried about the condition of his ship that when the weather moderated he invited the master and mate of the Aureng-Zeb to come aboard and survey his ship. Their unanimous judgment was that the Worcester was then unseaworthy for navigating to England.

That finished the trading cruise. Adverse circumstances had curtailed the enterprise, yet Green had made, on the whole, a profitable stay in Malabar. He had operated in a maximum distance of about one hundred and fifty miles; that is, from Anjango to Calicut, though his dodging back and forth had added much to his mileage. In ordinary event he would have been nearly ready for home. His most serious reverse was in the wreck of his sloop, which his owners had hoped he would be able to sell and convert into goods when he should have finished with her services.

Mr. Brabourne, of the fort, again most obliging, advised Green to go to Bengal for repairs, and on the fifth of May, 1703, the Worcester set forth to pump her way to the shipyards there.

Captain Thomas Green might fairly claim a grudge against the elements. They buffeted him in Malabar to the loss of his sloop, the damage of his ship, the lessening of his trading, laid his keel up for a long time in careen at Bengal, and now on his way home to England, after one would suppose the weather had done its very worst for that voyage, it met him off the coast of Scotland and in a seething fury of wind and wave hurled him into the Scottish port of Leith, where he was fain to run for shelter. Alas! he had fled the fierce wrath of nature to the yet more terrifying wrath of man.