Pirate tales from the law

by Arthur M. Harris

Among the patrons of the house was a jolly old gunner, Will Wood, who used to come down from the fort in all his splendid regimentals to drink toddy and tickle the chin of the laughing Anne. He got interested in the “pumping” of George Haines, steward of the seized ship which lay outside at the dock, and resolved to try the bluff, hearty, man-to-man approach. He loaded George up with whiskey until he “fell into a melancholy fit,” from the burnt-sienna depths of which he emitted this frightful croak: “It is a wonder that since we did not sink at sea, that God did not make the ground open and swallow us up when we are come ashore, for the wickedness that has been committed during this last voyage on board that old bitch Bess.”

By the “old bitch Bess” he meant the Worcester, whose spars might be seen through the parlor window dripping in the mournful rain.

Will Wood slapped the steward’s knee. “Come, my lad, take a turn on the links; you’ll feel better; what’s a bit of wet?”

Dolefully George tottered out of the hot parlor. Behind him the genial artilleryman turned and winked portently at the watching company. “Now’s the time,” said the knowing wink; “we’ve almost got him.”

The pair strolled out by the castle, they walked on the golf links; they became intimate. Said jolly Will Wood at the right moment, “I heard a friend of mine say that he knew a man who got it right from a fellow that could swear to the truth of it, that the uncle of your first-mate, Madder, was burned in oil for attempting to set fire to the Dutch ships at Amsterdam.”

George stopped in his walk. He raised a finger toward the sky—a reeling, waving finger—in solemn affirmation. “If what Mr. Madder had done during this last voyage,” he declared slowly, “were as well known, he deserved as much as his uncle had met with.”

Under all the circumstances, that remark could only mean one thing—the Worcester had been concerned in the piracy of the Speedy Return and the murder of her crew, who were then supposed to be all dead. Incredible as it may seem, this drunken maundering of steward Haines, coupled with the unintelligent suspicions of the Wilkies, the Seatons and others, passed from the water front to the city until it reached the officers of the law who—no more intelligent—made it the basis for a charge of piracy and murder against Green and his crew, upon which they were all arrested and marched off to the dark holes of the old Tolbooth prison. The Annandale was forgotten; the Speedy Return and Captain Drummond took its place, and all Scotland roared with one voice for vengeance.

Why did George Haines thus seek to link the Worcester with the piracy of the Speedy Return? The conversations above reported between the steward and the Wilkies, the Seatons and Wood are exactly as given on the subsequent trial of Captain Green. At that trial the lawyers for Green and the rest of the crew accused with him of the piracy of the Speedy Return and the murder of Drummond, sought to explain Haines’ motive by his love affair with Anne Seaton and his desire to become proprietor of the little Seaton tavern. They also laid much of his talk to the influence of liquor. There is something in both of these arguments, but it is probable that a greater motive than these two dominated him, and that was fear. With the state of the public mind in Scotland in the condition it was about Darien, the Annandale, the English and English East Indian traders, it is not unlikely that a notion blew about the water front when the Worcester came in to Leith and was seized that perhaps this was one of the hated East India Company ships, from which it was just a short step to the suspicion that, as such, or at any rate as an Englishman trading in the East Indies, the Worcester might have had a hand in the disappearance of the long overdue Speedy Return. Evidently, reasoned the Scotchmen, the Speedy Return has come to harm; nobody would harm a Scotch ship in the Far East but some Englishman; here was an Englishman from the Indies; ergo, he probably had pirated the Scotchman. This thought, more or less tangible, was all about the Worcester’s men as they loafed on the water front. In those times, such was the rigor of the criminal law and the uncertainty of acquittal, innocent men would rush to turn state’s evidence and take the lesser evil of imprisonment rather than execution. That this was the condition of things would seem to be shown by the fact that Doctor May, the Worcester’s surgeon, became state’s evidence, as did the slave Francesco and another black who had been shipped at Malabar, and as many others made confessions as could hope for leniency. This fear, then, working on the steward’s liquor-muddled brain, together with his desire to ingratiate himself with the Seatons, brought about the last act of a play opened by John Bowen in the Bay of Antongil in Madagascar.

With all of Scotland from north to south and east to west crying for vengeance, very little time was lost in bringing Captain Green and all the rest of his men, excluding the doctor and the two blacks, and including George Haines, who somehow missed the privilege of becoming queen’s evidence, to their trial in the old court in Parliament Square in Edinburgh.

On March 5, 1705, the men of the Worcester, with the sturdy and indignant Green at their head, were marched between the bare bayonets of the City Guards from the Tolbooth to the old courthouse in Parliament Square, there to stand their arraignment and trial. George Haines’ liquorous eloquence is about to prove the efficient cause of many and tragic results.