We have endeavoured in our account of these transactions to be sternly and rigidly prosaic,—perhaps our readers may think we have no great merit in accomplishing such a resolution, but we also take merit for having adhered to the facts attested with impartial accuracy. To afford some relief to the plainness of our detail, we shall wind it up by treating the reader to a part of the eloquent and denunciatory exordium of Williamson's counsel, Maclaurin, brother of the great mathematician.
"Persons of every character, sex, and age, were kidnapped,—men, women, half-grown lads, and infants, some of them not above six years old. The whole country was in terror and consternation, afraid to let their children go near Aberdeen, and trembling for fear of a kidnapping excursion from that place. The unfortunate creatures that had been wheedled or pressed into the service, were at first confined in a barn or workhouse, where they had a piper to play to them, and cards allowed them, in order to hinder them to think, or meditate their escape; but that they soon attempted, and one or two of them with success; upon which the rest were shut up in the Tolbooth.
"During their confinement, the parents and other relations of those who had been enticed or forced away, flocked to Aberdeen in hopes of effectuating their release,—hopes which they would never have entertained had they reflected that the town-clerk and one of the bailies were deeply interested to thwart them. Accordingly, no entreaties or solicitations availed; and those who seemed too importunate were threatened themselves with banishment, incarceration, and other distress. It will readily occur that it is much easier to imagine than describe the scenes which it is in proof ensued; for nothing more piteous and moving can well be figured than to see fathers and mothers running frantic through the streets, crowding to the doors and windows where their children were imprisoned, there giving them their blessing, taking farewell of them for ever, and departing in anguish and despair, imprecating curses upon those who were the authors of their misery."
So much for the first step,—the catching of the prey.
We have some farther testimony to the judicious strictness with which the worshipful merchants protected their property after it was stowed away; but we do not hear that their "cargo of young lads," as one of them calls it in a confidential letter, was insured. William Wilson, one of the sailors, testified, however,—"that there were several men in the ship besides the sailors, and also several boys and girls; that he saw these boys and girls put on board; that they were brought to the ship in a boat, and were guarded by a number of porters from Aberdeen, who continued to guard them all night till the ship sailed, going home always in the morning and returning at night; that during the day they were guarded by the ship's crew, the one half of whom did the duty of the ship, and the other half took care of the boys and girls, notwithstanding whereof two of them made their escape. Some of these boys appeared to the deponent to be about fourteen years of age, some to be about sixteen or eighteen, and others not to exceed ten or twelve years of age; that after the boys were put on board, the hatches of the ship were put down and locked every night, both while the ship continued in the harbour of Aberdeen, and afterwards when she was at sea."
It will naturally occur to the reader, that though the magistrates and other public officers of a corporation might combine together to perpetrate such acts, they could not carry their authority across the Atlantic, or compel the governors of the foreign possessions of the crown to acknowledge the brand of slavery they had set upon their captives. This naturally suggested itself to us from the beginning, as throwing a doubt over the essential movements of the transaction; but it was speedily cleared away by discoveries very creditable to the ingenuity, if to no other quality, of these astute burgesses. Every captive was indented in the presence of a magistrate,—the captor himself, of course, or some other person engaged in "the servant trade"—and that for a limited number of years. The indenture was certified and transmitted to the place of destination. This expedient brought each captive within the colonial code, which applied very rigorous rules to indented emigrants,—rules which virtually placed them in the category of slaves. These harsh regulations were justified by the circumstance that the class generally consisted of convicts—indenture being the form in which criminals obtained the alternative of transportation as a mitigation of some more dreaded punishment. When the emigrant arrived at Virginia, the ceremony by which he was sold was an assignment of his indenture. This could, of course, only convey a right to the labour of his body for a limited period; but as the convict emigrants required to be under a very potent discipline, powers were put into the hands of the planters by which they were enabled to protract the indented period; and Williamson himself describes with apparent accuracy,—"the children sent off and sold, no doubt to cruel masters, whose ill treatment obliges them often-times to elope to avoid slavery; and as there is no probability of making their escape, as they are always taken and brought back, and for every day they are away from their master they serve a week, and for every week a month, and for every month a year; besides obliged to pay all costs and charges that is advertised for apprehending them, which will probably bring him in a slave for four or five years longer at least."
We shall now, in the briefest shape, give an outline of Williamson's adventures, as detailed by himself, between his removal from the country, and his return to vex his oppressors with multiform litigation.
The vessel stranded on a sand bank at the mouth of the Delaware, and was for some time deserted by its crew, the cargo of boys being left to an anticipated fate, which Williamson says he often in his subsequent miseries wished had really overtaken them. Being afterwards taken on shore, they were relieved by a vessel sailing to Philadelphia, where they were sold "at about £16 per head." "What became of my unhappy companions," says Williamson, "I never knew; but it was my lot to be sold to one of my countrymen, whose name was Hugh Wilson, a North Briton, for the term of seven years, who had in youth undergone the same fate as myself.... Happy was my lot in falling into my countryman's power, as he was, contrary to many others of his calling, a humane, worthy, honest man. Having no children of his own, and commiserating my unhappy condition, he took care of me until I was fit for business." He was allowed by his indulgent master occasionally to attend a school, where he picked up some crumbs of education; and finally, at the age of seventeen, he became the old gentleman's heir. After a few vagrant years he married, and settled as a substantial planter near the forks of the Delaware. He was in a place much exposed to the inroads of the French Indians, who, he tells us, in the spirit of the military profession to which he was subsequently attached, "generally appeared in small skulking parties, with yellings, shoutings, and antic postures, instead of trumpets and drums." In one of these inroads they burned his comfortable dwelling and substantial steadings, and carried him off captive. All the world knows what is conveyed in the simple statement of such a fact; and Williamson's description of the tortures he underwent impart little additional horror to the simple announcement of his seizure. It is possible to discern people's nature in their own account of their actions; and not unfrequently do we see the brave man in the description of dangers avoided, as we do the poltroon in the exaggerated account of those courted and overcome. Williamson's narrative conveys the irresistible impression that he was a man of eminently firm nerve, undying hope, and unconquerable energy—such a character as the Indian tribe would respect, and, after a sufficient trial, desire to incorporate with itself. Hence, while others are slowly slaughtered, Williamson is still permitted to live, struggle, and endure. In the difference between his own trials, terrible as they were, and the ignominious brutalities heaped on a poor fellow captive, who met his fate with gentleness, prayers, and weeping, we see the indication of the savage respect paid to the unbroken spirit of the Aberdonian, whose body they might rend inch by inch, but whose spirit remained firm and impenetrable as his native granite. At length, after several months of wandering, he made his escape; and the manner in which he did so was in keeping with his resolute spirit. He planned no stratagems, and consulted no confederates, but fled outright; and, though naked, emaciated, and ignorant of the country, defeated his pursuers by sheer fleetness of foot and endurance of fatigue. Profusely bleeding—without even such a verdant show of clothing as Ulysses endowed himself with when he met Nausica—emaciated to the last extremity, he somewhat astonished and also alarmed a female neighbour by an unceremonious morning call, dropping exhausted on the floor ere he could communicate or receive intelligence. Little need had he too speedily to recover his faculties; the first news he heard was that his broken-hearted wife had not long survived the calamity of his capture. He seems to have now acquired a decided taste for vagrant habits, mingled with a spirit of vindictive animosity towards the Indians, against whom he records several exterminating onsets with a sort of horrible relish. He enlisted himself as a soldier. But American warfare then allowed a far wider latitude for varied military operations than the ordinary experience of the ranks: and sometimes he was an Indian warrior, patiently unravelling and following up a trail; at another time we find him commanding a detachment of colonists as one versed in the native mode of fighting, with the rank and emoluments of a lieutenant. In his little book he details his various military adventures with much spirit and apparent truthfulness. We have from his pen a description of one enterprise, which is a little romance in itself. A lover, hearing that the home of the object of his affections has been desolated, and his beloved carried off by a band of one of the most formidable of the tribes of predatory Indians, in his frantic zeal raises a party of adventurers, with whom he tracks their path. He arrives just in time to save the damsel from the worst horrors of such a fate, and the marauders are put to the sword. The whole narrative has an animation and interest not unworthy of Cooper, who appears to have been acquainted with Williamson's book, and may not improbably have derived from it a part of his information about the military operations of Vaudreuil and Montcalm with the Indians in the French interest. Williamson was indeed a captive at that capitulation of Oswego which has cast so deep a stain on the honour of this commander, and he was soon afterwards sent to England as an exchanged prisoner. He complains that, on his voyage, "though the French behaved with a good deal of politeness, we were almost starved for want of provisions." He arrived at Plymouth in November 1765, and, owing to a severe wound in one of his hands, was discharged as incapable of farther service.
No longer able to apply his energies to Indian warfare, he looked around him for that employment which in his native country would best supply its place, and found it to be—literature. He published "A Brief Account of the War in North America, showing the principal causes of our former miscarriages; as also the necessity and advantage of keeping Canada, and maintaining a friendly correspondence with the Indians." This pamphlet is dated in 1760; and we here mention it, that we may not allow it to interrupt the narrative of the somewhat momentous consequences of a little book which he published two years later, with the title "French and Indian cruelty exemplified, in the Life and various Vicissitudes of fortune of Peter Williamson: containing a particular account of the manners, customs, and dress, of the savages; of their scalping, burning, and other barbarities committed on the English in North America, &c., &c." Mr Williamson was somewhat prolix in his title pages, and we cannot inflict the whole of this one on the reader. It was dedicated, with considerable sagacity, to William Pitt. In the frontispiece there is a full-length portrait of "Mr Peter Williamson, in the dress of a Delaware Indian." Much as Catlin's book and other works have tended to make us acquainted of late with Indian customs, the drapery of this portrait carries with it a decided appearance of accuracy, and attention to detail. The face is probably a likeness. Divest it of the feathered head-gear, it is that of a hard-featured inhabitant of the north-east coast, somewhat impregnated with an air of fierceness and excitement. Contemplate the entire figure: it is certainly a very fair representation of the Indian, such as we have seen him in the few importations exhibited in this country. For several years this representation was one of the main attractions of the booksellers' windows in Scotland; and many an infant has the careless parent or ignorant nurse frightened into constitutional nervousness, by the intimation that the wild man, whose picture had been seen during the morning walks, would appear to the infant in the dark, and visit his misdeeds with some mysterious punishment. Besides the occupation of the literary man, Williamson pursued that of the actor. During the day he sat behind a stall, vending his account of his adventures—in the evening he rehearsed them in the largest room of some popular tavern; where, like Catlin, he made the people acquainted with the costume and habits of the people, of whom he had acquired that acute experience which boys are said to have obtained of the boundary marks where they have been whipped.
In a moment of infatuation, the magistrates of Aberdeen, finding that the interest attached to Williamson's narrative and exhibitions subjected them to unpleasant reflections, resolved to punish him. He had migrated northwards, creating a little public curiosity and wonder wherever he went, until, on reaching his native city, he was brought before the magistrates, charged with a libel on the community, contained in that passage descriptive of his seizure on the pier of Aberdeen, which has been already quoted. The magistrates, being at once the prosecutors and the judges, had little difficulty in committing him; and he was thus very roughly awakened from a dream in which he "began to think himself happy in having endured these misfortunes, a recital of which promised to put him in a more prosperous situation than he had ever hoped for." The stock in hand of his books, amounting to three hundred and fifty copies, was seized and burned in the market-place by the common hangman, and he was committed to prison until he should sign a recantation of the passage containing the account of the kidnapping. The mind that bore up against the fiercest cruelties of the savages, seems to have bowed before these judicial terrors. In the centre of the torturing hordes, without a civilised eye to look on him, he acquired the stern virtues of those on whom he looked—
"Impassive, fearing but the shame of fear,
A stoic of the woods, a man without a tear."