The mysterious square-rigger was under sail and only a quarter mile from shore, but James Baker could see no sign of the crew. He pulled his fishing boat alongside and clambered aboard, but all he found was a dog. It was the morning of September 11, 1865, and the LaHave Islands fisherman had stumbled onto a crime scene.
The wheel had been tied off with rope, to keep the vessel on course until it sank or ran aground. The cabin doors were ajar and, below deck, Baker recalled, “everything was upside down and in confusion.” Damage to the hull suggested someone had tried to scuttle the vessel. Planks near the waterline had been chopped with an axe, allowing about two feet of water to seep into the hold. And black paint had been used to hide the vessel’s name, leaving only the letter R.
Baker and his companions, eager to claim salvage on the 200-ton ship and its cargo of coal, sailed it into LaHave Harbour on Nova Scotia’s South Shore. Other fishermen fanned out in search of the crew. They spotted a small boat on a beach and found three men who said they were from Zero, which had sprung a leak while carrying coal from Cape Breton Island to New York.
The mate, John C. Douglas, did all the talking. The cook, Henry Dowcey, and the cabin boy, Frank Howard Stockwell, nodded in agreement as Douglas explained that the captain, Colin C. Benson, had fallen overboard and drowned a few nights earlier. When the crew abandoned Zero, it had six feet of water in the hold and was sinking fast, Douglas claimed. They had come ashore and two other crewmen, Germans named Charles Marlbey and William Lambruert, had gone off on their own.
The fishermen were suspicious. Zero remained afloat, they reported, and had little water in its hold. Asked about the attempted scuttling, Douglas offered the dubious suggestion that another vessel must have overtaken the abandoned Zero, and its crew had painted out the name and tried to sink it.
It was obvious the mate was lying about why the vessel had been abandoned, and perhaps about how the captain died as well. The fishermen ferried the trio to the mainland, where the authorities could try to find out why. Those inquiries would expose a shocking tale of high-seas treachery and murder – and launch the courtroom career of a brilliant young Halifax lawyer destined to become prime minister of Canada.
* * *
The mate, cook, and cabin boy were brought before a magistrate the following day. When all three insisted the captain had died accidentally, they were released. But Attorney General William A. Henry, who was not convinced they were telling the truth, ordered Sergeant Lewis Hutt of the Halifax police to investigate.
Hutt rounded up Douglas and found Stockwell in Windsor, on the other side of the province. Dowcey, Lambruert, and Marlbey were arrested in Liverpool, a port just thirty miles from where Zero was discovered. Hutt was still in Liverpool with his prisoners when he was handed a telegram reporting that Douglas and Stockwell had changed their stories. Dowcey, they now said, had murdered the captain and thrown his body into the sea. The sergeant confronted Dowcey with the news. “The mate will get clear because he has turned Queen’s evidence,” the cook said angrily. It would be every man for himself.
“Suspicion was at once awakened that all was not right,” Halifax’s Morning Chronicle reported after the discovery of the abandoned brig Zero near LaHave, Lunenburg County. (Author collection)
Dowcey and the two Germans were shipped to Halifax. After appearing before a Halifax magistrate on October 10, Dowcey, Douglas, and Lambruert were ordered to stand trial for the murder of Benson. “From such hints as transpire from those who have the best means now of knowing facts,” reported the Unionist, a Halifax newspaper, “we are apt to think that the catalogue of crime has rarely produced a more cruel, brutal murder.”
The 1865 trial of three crewmen accused of murdering Colin Benson, the captain of the Zero, was held in Halifax’s newly opened courthouse on Spring Garden Road. (William Notman/McCord Museum I-39054.1)
The trial opened on November 9, 1865, in Halifax’s newly built sandstone courthouse on Spring Garden Road. After the presiding judge, Chief Justice William Young, turned down a defence application for the three men to be tried separately, twelve jurors were selected and the Crown opened its case.
Prosecutor Jonathan McCully’s star witness was Stockwell, the cabin boy, the son of a Springfield, Massachusetts, Baptist minister who had defied his parents and run away to sea. Although only fifteen, he struck the reporter for Halifax’s Evening Express as “very intelligent ... everyone who heard him being impressed with the conviction that he was telling the truth.”
Stockwell gave a chilling account of Benson’s murder. The youth said he had joined Zero in New York, as had the cook, Dowcey. Douglas was already on board as mate. When the vessel took on its cargo of Nova Scotia coal, Marlbey and Lambruert joined the crew. Other than a minor dispute between the captain and the Germans over wages, it was a routine voyage until Sunday morning, September 10.
Benson turned in about four in the morning, leaving Lambruert at the wheel. Stockwell awoke at dawn and roused Dowcey, who began preparing the morning meal. After he heard “an unusual noise” coming from the captain’s cabin, the cook yelled his name and told him to summon Lambruert. Stockwell went on deck and relieved Lambruert at the wheel. When the German returned, he was wringing his hands. “The cook,” he exclaimed, “has killed the captain.”
Stockwell headed below and found the rest of the crew in the quarters they shared. Douglas was casually smoking a pipe. “Frank, go to the captain’s cabin and help the cook,” Douglas told Stockwell, who noted there were tears in the mate’s eyes. Stockwell, who by now realized the captain was dead, said he would rather jump overboard. Douglas repeated the order to Marlbey and Lambruert. They complied.
Stockwell watched as Dowcey and Lambruert carried Benson on deck, wrapped in a sheet. One side of his head was bloody and smashed in – the result of four blows inflicted with an iron bar as he slept – but he was still alive.
“Don’t, man, and I will go anywhere with you,” Benson pleaded as he was tossed into the sea. Stockwell went to the rail. The captain continued to struggle as he sank beneath the calm sea.
The five crewmen assembled in their quarters. Douglas and Lambruert were crying, by Stockwell’s account; Dowcey was “half laughing and half crying.” Douglas told Dowcey to wash his bloody hands. “God, that’s nothing,” the cook replied, wiping his hands on his shirt. Dowcey retrieved the paperwork for the voyage from the captain’s cabin and handed the documents to Douglas. “We can’t do as we intended,” Dowcey said. “There are too many papers, we could not get her to the West Indies or Mexico. She would be missed and a search instituted.”
Stockwell testified that Douglas ordered him to burn the papers. The crew divided up the captain’s clothes and Dowcey pocketed Benson’s gold watch. They agreed to head for shore and scuttle the ship. Spotting the beams of lighthouses in the darkness, they lowered the lifeboat and began to chop holes in the hull. After the head fell off the axe they were using, they abandoned the vessel and rowed to shore.
Douglas’s lawyer, W.A. Johnston, cross-examined Stockwell when the trial entered its second day and tried to minimize his client’s role in the mutiny. He established that both the mate and the cook had given orders and Douglas had seemed to be afraid of Dowcey “most of the time.” Johnston challenged Stockwell’s damning statement that Dowcey spoke to Douglas about taking the vessel to the West Indies “as we intended.”
“I do not think that he [Dowcey] said ‘as you intended,’” Stockwell replied, helpfully. Then he added, less helpfully: “He might have said so.”
Dowcey was represented by Halifax lawyers W.A.D. Morse and John S.D. Thompson. It was the first major case for Thompson, a future Supreme Court judge who would become federal justice minister and, in 1892, succeed John Abbott as the country’s prime minister. He had been practising for just three months and turned twenty during the trial. Given Stockwell’s damning testimony, all the two lawyers could do was point fingers at Douglas. Questioned by Morse, Stockwell said Douglas and the captain “were not on the best of terms” and the mate had “growled” because he was forced to work on board while other crewmen went ashore during their last port visit.
Lambruert’s lawyer, Robert Motton, established that Dowcey and Douglas had once sailed together on another vessel. But none of the defence lawyers had dented the main thrust of Stockwell’s testimony – Dowcey had been covered in blood; he had apparently beaten the captain, possibly in collusion with Douglas; and Lambruert had helped to throw him into the sea while he was still alive. Cross-examination “failed to shake him in the slightest degree,” in the opinion of one newspaper reporter.
Stockwell’s account was backed up by the remaining crewman, Marlbey. What’s more, Marlbey testified, he had seen Dowcey speaking with Douglas on the day before the murder. Then, Dowcey had asked Marlbey to join their plot to throw the captain overboard and sell the ship and cargo. “At first, I thought it was only joking,” he told the court through an interpreter. He had mentioned the discussion to Lambruert, who alerted the captain. Benson had thanked Lambruert for coming forward, but had not seemed to believe he was in danger. Less than twenty-four hours later, he was dead.
* * *
None of the defence lawyers called witnesses. In his summation, Morse argued there was “no positive proof” Dowcey had killed Benson. It was possible Douglas, as chief officer, was “the author and instigator of the bloody deed.” Johnston, Douglas’s lawyer, countered that his client was “doubtless a weak and cowardly man,” but this did not make him a killer. He had gone along with the lie about the captain accidentally falling overboard out of fear of Dowcey, the lawyer asserted, and he had been the first to recant.
The chief justice gave his legal instructions to the jury on the trial’s third day. Young stressed the evidence against Dowcey and he described the case against Douglas as “wholly circumstantial.” If the jurors found that the two men had formed a plan to murder the captain, however, it would be a “mockery” not to hold him equally guilty of the crime. The jurors were back within two hours with their verdicts. Dowcey and Douglas were found guilty of murder. Lambruert, who had helped to dump the captain overboard, was acquitted.
Lawyers for the convicted men appealed. The Supreme Court dismissed Dowcey’s bid to overturn the verdict on November 24, and he was sentenced to hang. As for Douglas, Johnston argued the evidence against him was so weak that the chief justice should have acquitted him, instead of allowing the jury to decide. The mate’s sentencing was deferred until the appeal was decided.
On January 3, 1866, by a vote of four to one, the court upheld Douglas’s conviction. The dissenting judge believed there was not enough evidence of his guilt, casting some doubt on the verdict. The next morning, the mate appeared for sentencing. Given a chance to speak, Douglas launched into a lengthy defence of his actions. “I am perfectly innocent of the crime, of which I have been falsely accused,” one Halifax newspaper quoted him as saying. Douglas claimed he was asleep when Dowcey killed the captain. After Lambruert woke him up and told him what had happened, he entered Benson’s cabin. Dowcey, “his eyes glaring,” was standing over the body. “I was paralyzed at the sight and did not know what to do,” Douglas told the court.
Douglas continued his story. He had left the cabin and had been approached by Marlbey, who asked him to take the vessel to the West Indies. “It flashed on me at once that there was a mutiny,” he explained. “I trembled and thought to myself, ‘my turn comes next.’” As for Stockwell, the prosecution’s chief witnesses, “the young rascal was in the plot.” Douglas said Dowcey asked him to help throw the captain’s body overboard, but he refused. Dowcey then asked Lambruert, who turned to Douglas to ask permission. “Before I knew what I was about, I answered ‘yes,’” Douglas said. “I knew I had done wrong in giving permission. I supposed he was dead all this time. If I had known there was a spark of life in the captain then, I would have died to have saved that spark.”
Douglas said he convinced the crewmen the ship was too short-handed to reach the West Indies, and he steered a course for shore. He had hoped to reach a port and turn in the mutineers, but the crew decided to scuttle the ship. Douglas said he went along with the lie about the captain being knocked overboard by accident because Dowcey had threatened to kill him if he told the truth. “I had to yield to them. I took no command. Throughout, I knew my duty, wanted to do it, but had no power,” he told the court, his voice choked with emotion. “I was more like a child than a man – no strength in me.”
Chief Justice Young, noting that any respite would have to come from the government, sentenced Douglas to hang. Four days later, Dowcey summoned his lawyer, John Thompson, to his jail cell and dictated a lengthy statement. The belated confession was obviously calculated to prevent Douglas from escaping the gallows. “I am truly sorry for what I have done,” Dowcey claimed, “but I did wrong because I was constantly persuaded to it by the mate.”
Dowcey, in his statement, insisted that Douglas had been scheming against Benson all along, and had hatched the plot to kill him and take the vessel to the West Indies. Douglas had already recruited Stockwell and had asked Dowcey to try to convince one of the Germans to do the killing. While “I did not approve of it much,” Dowcey said of the plan, he did as he was told. He was unable, however, to enlist a killer. Dowcey admitted he had struck and stunned Benson as he slept, then convinced Lambruert to help throw the body overboard.
Dowcey provided a horrifying description of what happened next. The water was calm and, as the crewmen discussed their next move, they could hear Benson splashing in the water and calling for help. When they emerged on deck he had cleared the stern and he was still struggling to stay afloat. Callously, they had stood and watched. “He deserved it. He was nothing but a rogue,” Dowcey quoted Douglas as saying.
Despite Dowcey’s last-minute allegations, the government commuted Douglas’s sentence to life in prison at hard labour. One judge had expressed doubts about his guilt, and this appears to have been enough to justify sparing his life. “The hand that com-mitted this cruel murder will soon be cold in death,” Halifax’s British Colonist noted when it reported the government’s decision on January 19, “and society will be protected by the life-long imprisonment of his not less guilty accomplice.”
Some four thousand people signed a petition asking for similar leniency for Dowcey. Hanging only Dowcey in the face of new evidence of Douglas’s guilt would “create the impression of a partial failure of justice,” defence lawyers Morse and Thompson argued. The government, although “strongly impressed with the guilt of Douglas,” refused to spare the man who had, by his own admission, inflicted the blows and flung the helpless victim overboard. On January 24, 1866, a crowd of about two hundred gathered to watch Dowcey’s execution. It was the last public hanging in Halifax.
Who was telling the truth, Dowcey or Douglas? Cowardice alone does not explain Douglas’s actions. And since Dowcey lacked the skill to sail the ship, it seems unlikely he had acted on his own. Whatever Douglas’s role in the murder of his captain, Zero’s mate would die in prison.