Many years had passed over the guilty traffic, ere an accident having disturbed the placid surface it assumed to the world, some men of honour, courage, and high station resolved to probe its mysteries; and discovered that the sleek burgesses, by their corporate authority, had been able noiselessly to accomplish as wide and devastating a tyranny as ever had been revealed by the dungeons of some mouldering baronial tower to frighten this world against feudality.
Peter Williamson was born at Hirnley, in the parish of Aboyne, Aberdeenshire, the clergyman of which mentions him in the statistical account, along with the celebrated Father Innes, and Ross, the author of "the Fortunate Shepherdess," as one of the eminent men connected with his parish.[18]
The district, though situated on the slopes of the higher Grampians, has not, within the reach of history, been inhabited by Celts, and Williamson's name speaks to his Saxon origin. He says he was, "if not of rich, yet of reputable parents;" and they evidently belonged to a poor and frugal, but independent class, who may still be found rearing their humble fortunes on those somewhat sterile uplands, neither as masters nor as servants, but each independently farming his own croft. One of the witnesses, examined more than twenty years afterwards, said "he knew James Williamson having a plough going in Upper Balnacraig, to the best of the deponent's remembrance, and heard he had likewise a plough going in Hirnley, when he lived there; and that he was in such circumstances as to keep his children and his family, without their being obliged to beg their bread." We take the brief history of his seizure from Peter's own narrative.
"I was sent to live with an aunt at Aberdeen, where, at eight years of age, playing on the quay, with others of my companions, being of a stout, robust constitution, I was taken notice of by two fellows belonging to a vessel in the harbour, employed (as the trade then was) by some of the worthy merchants of the town, in that villanous and execrable practice called kidnapping; that is, stealing young children from their parents, and selling them as slaves in the plantations abroad. Being marked out by those monsters of iniquity as their prey, I was easily cajoled aboard the ship by them, where I was no sooner got, than they conducted me between the decks, to some others they had kidnapped in the same manner. At that time I had no sense of the fate that was destined for me, and spent the time in childish amusements with my fellow-sufferers in the steerage, being never suffered to go upon deck while the vessel lay in the harbour, which was till such a time as they had got in their loading, with a complement of unhappy youths for carrying on their wicked commerce."[19]
We shall take our further notices of this occurrence from a very different source—a huge bundle of papers, chiefly printed, consisting of the documents connected with the long train of litigation in which Williamson was subsequently involved, owing to the publication of the passage we have just cited. The papers consist of pleadings, accounts, letters, and the testimonies of witnesses—a sort of mass in which it is clear from the beginning that one cannot fail to find curious things by boring holes through it here and there. We are not aware that this valuable source of information about the manners of the place and period has ever been heretofore applied to literary uses, with the exception of some references made to it, in a curious and very able compendium of provincial lore, called "The Book of Bon Accord, or a guide to the city of Aberdeen;" a work which, like "Tooke's diversions of Purley," not unknown to collectors of juvenile circulating libraries, appears to have been christened with some peculiar object of hiding the learning and ingenuity of its contents under a frivolous exterior.
At the time when legal investigations were commenced, Williamson was a man in middle life, who had gone through adventures and vicissitudes enough for a century of ordinary human existence. The first step was to identify the trained travelled man with the poor boy who had mysteriously disappeared from the streets of Aberdeen; and the next to prove the act of kidnapping. Several witnesses remembered Williamson; he was described by them as "a rough, ragged, bumble-headed, long, stourie clever boy, by which is meant a growthy boy;" and "a stout, clever, rough loon, and very ill to guide, and very ragged till he got clothes." A neighbour of the old crofter said he believed, "upwards of four years before the battle of Culloden, it was the general report of the country, that when the said Peter Williamson was a little boy going with a clipped head, he was taken at Aberdeen, and carried to Philadelphia with several other boys." He remembered conversations with the youth's father, who complained that "he came into Aberdeen seeking his son Peter, but they would not let him near hand him; that his son Peter was in a barn in Aberdeen, and they would not let him speak with him;" and, "that the merchants in Aberdeen had carried away his son to Philadelphia, and sold him for a slave"—observing, that it was commonly rumoured that several merchants there, whom he named, "did deal in that way of carrying away boys;" and he concluded by saying "he saw the father shed many salt tears on that account." The session clerk, who had been at Peter's baptism, recognised him when he saw him, as "the same identical Peter Williamson at whose baptism he had been present," and confirmed the story of his father's having attempted in vain to get access to him in the barn, characterising the old man's lamentation as "very sore and grievous." Mr Fraser of Findrac, a neighbouring proprietor, "knew several of James Williamson's children, and had heard it was the practice of some of the merchants of Aberdeen to kidnap young children, and send them to the plantations to be sold as slaves. He heard in the country that the said James Williamson or his wife had gone into Aberdeen, and one of their sons called Peter Williamson had followed; and that James Smith, saddler in Aberdeen, had picked up the said Peter; and the deponent heard he was either put in prison, or put on board a ship, till the ship sailed; it was the voice of the county that James Williamson and his wife regretted, or made a clamour for the loss of their son, not knowing what was become of him."
The investigation brought to light some other cases, and gradually opened up the whole mystery of iniquity. One old woman, the miller's widow, who remembered that Peter "was sent into Aberdeen, to be under his aunts, his mother being dead, and that soon thereafter he was missing," said that in the parish of Aboyne "they were generally afraid to send their boys on errands to Aberdeen, for fear they should be carried off." Some witnesses remembered having in their youth made marvellous escapes; and Alexander Grigson, domestic at Aboyne Castle, had a story to tell, "that about twenty years ago, he and another boy were coming from the mill of Crathie, where they had been seeking their meat; and near to a birch wood, near to the Kirk of Crathy, three countrymen on horseback came up with them, but the deponent knew none of them; and they asked him and the other boy that was along with him, if they would go with them, and they would clothe them like gentlemen; but the deponent being elder than the other boy, made answer that they would not go along with them, for it struck the deponent in the head that perhaps he and the other boy were to be carried abroad, in respect a rumour prevailed in the country that young boys were carried abroad at that time." The men threatened force; and the boys, who could not fail then to have the blackest notions of their intentions, took to their heels while the kidnappers were tying their horses, and defied discovery in the recesses of the old forest of Mar, which, fortunately for them, skirted the road. This incident may have been a trick to frighten two country lads. Another, recorded by a chairman in Edinburgh, has a more business-like appearance. "In the year 1728 or 1729, he went to Aberdeen to see an uncle and an aunt, who lived there; and whilst he was there he was carried up to a house by a person whom he did not know, where he got a dram and a piece of biscuit, and was promised a new coat and great encouragement, if he would agree to go over to America with the other lads that were engaged to go there; that he signified his willingness to agree to the proposal; that upon this he was desired to go and come back to his breakfast again; but when he told this to some of the countrymen of his acquaintance, they told him that he was a fool, for he would be sold to the blacks, and they would eat him; that upon this he resolved immediately to leave the town, which he did."
It appeared that those who endeavoured to recover their children were threatened with coercive measures; and the poor people seem to have been impressed with the conviction, that they were in the hands of an overwhelming power, with which it would be vain to contend. Thus one individual, having recovered possession of his son, met the captain of the transport vessel in the street, who bade him send back the youth, otherwise he might expect unpleasant consequences. Therefore he "promised and engaged to return his said son, which he accordingly did. Depones, that if he could have hindered his son from going to America he would have done it; and if he had known as much then as he does now, he would have done it. Depones, that before he promised to return his son to the said ship as above, he was himself threatened to be put into the Tolbooth."
The line of defence adopted by the kidnappers was, that no one was forced, in the first instance; that each boy was the object of a distinct agreement, either with his parents or with himself; and the subsequent coercion employed towards them, which could not be denied, was thus interpreted to be a judicious protection by the employers of the property they had fairly acquired. But the very evidence given by their own emissaries—almost every sentence bearing in its bosom a general assurance that nothing illegal was done—is quite sufficient in the description of minute facts to support, if not confirm, the darkest suspicions. Thus one of the crimps, desiring to excite some feeling against the exiles, as a graceless inconsiderate class, unworthy of sympathy, said "that such persons, whether boys or older people, whom the deponent engaged to go to America on board the said ship, the Planter, after they had been—some four, some five, some six weeks clothed and maintained by him at the expense of his employers, were endeavouring to desert and run away, and were tampered with, or decoyed to engage or take on with other people in the town of Aberdeen, who were, at the very same time, engaging and indenting servants to America; and, in order to prevent their being so decoyed, the older people so engaged by the deponent were put in prison, and the younger people were put into the workhouse or poor's hospital." There was, it seems, much competition in the trade; and, at the same time, the live commodity had a propensity to remove itself from the custody of its owners. Thus might the employment be termed a doubly hazardous one; and a certain scrupulous citizen, who had grave doubts about the propriety of joining the speculation, though he wished to be a part-owner of the ship in which it was conducted, gave this account of his hesitation: "Having been informed that servants had been indented by Ragg and his owners to go on board of his said ship to America, and the deponent not inclining to be concerned in that servant trade, proposed to Ragg to hold a share of the ship if he was to have no concern of that adventure of the servants, as he was an utter stranger to any merchandise or trade in that way; to which Robert Ragg said, that he could not have any concern with the ship without having a concern in the servants, which made him break up any farther communing with Ragg about the matter." But this witness was an instance of the instability of good resolutions: he was strongly pressed by friends for whom he had a high esteem; the profits and advantages of the undertaking—but that, of course, was a secondary matter—were largely spoken of in support of these importunities, "to hold a share in the same way as the other owners had done, as well in the adventure of the servants as in the ship,—to which importunities the deponent at last yielded." Not less tell-tale is a letter by the captain of the vessel, written in a spirit of honest indignation to one of the parties involved in the legal proceedings.
"Dear Sir,—I am favoured with yours of the 28th September, and am sorry you are put to trouble about one Williamson. I do not remember any of that name that went out in the Planter, and am certain, if he is not mentioned in the account of what was got for the servants' indentures," [that is to say, of course, for the sale of the 'servants' themselves,] "if even he was ever indented, he must have run away at Aberdeen, or at Cape May, where the ship was lost: and I am sure there was no servant in that ship but what was legally attested before they went from Aberdeen. I cannot tell if any register is kept at Philadelphia of the sale of servants, but I imagine not."