On the evening of 9 February 1720 Lady Campbell of Barbreck House, at the head of the remote Loch Craignish in Argyllshire, opened her door to two strangers of wild appearance. They claimed they were seamen sent by the captain of the 100-ton snow, Flying Eagle of Dartmouth, that was lying to her anchors five miles down the loch. She had been blown into this sea-loch in great distress by a gale while en route to Newfoundland and the fisheries. Their enquiry was not for food or shelter but whether or not there was a magistrate in the immediate vicinity. On hearing that the nearest resided in Inveraray, some forty miles by unimproved drove road round the coast, they took their leave.
It was never recorded what raised Lady Campbell’s suspicions to the degree that she felt she must send her son, by the shortest possible route directly over the mountains in midwinter, to summon help from Inveraray. These were certainly dangerous times in the West Highlands. Indeed, it was just over a year since the Spanish had landed hundreds of soldiers at Loch Duich, further up the coast, in a forlorn attempt to foment another rebellion on behalf of the ‘Old Pretender’.
Suffice it to say that these seamen – whether Jacobites or pirates – had the gross misfortune to have landed in Campbell territory. This was a staunchly Hanoverian area and a bastion of government law and order in the otherwise lawless region.
Her son, accompanied by a servant, safely reached Inveraray. This was the seat of the Duke of Argyll and the only town of consequence for ninety miles around. There they were ushered in front of the resident Sheriff Depute for Argyllshire, James Campbell of Stonefield. Their tale came hard behind recent reports of drunken strangers causing trouble on the shore road along Loch Fyne. This new piece of information provided Stonefield with the ultimate source of his problem.
Even as he was assembling an armed mounted posse, a group of ruffians entered a hostelry in Inveraray. Suspicions were fully aroused when this rabble paid for their strong liquor with Portuguese gold coins. On Stonefield’s orders, the men were immediately arrested. Over the next few days more suspects were rounded-up heading for Greenock and marched off to join their comrades in Inveraray’s small jailhouse.
Most were found laden with gold coins and treasure hidden about their persons. All in all, Stonefield impounded some 3,000 Portuguese moidores, 2,000 English guineas, 200 ounces of gold dust and over £5,000 worth of assorted jewellery and trinkets.
Stonefield then set about interrogating his prisoners. As a trained advocate, it took him only three sessions to destroy their cover story of being distressed seamen bound for Newfoundland on the Flying Eagle of Dartmouth. A number confessed to being reluctant pirates – forced men – off the Eagle of New York. This small snow, they divulged, had been taken while en route from Barbados for Virginia with bread, pork and other provisions. She was now lying to her anchors in Craignish Loch.
At the first sight of the Stonefield’s galloping posse charging round the head of the loch, those pirates still left on board the Eagle panicked. Cutting her cables, they made a frantic bid to escape out to sea, only to run her hard aground on the rocks off the ruins of the old castle that had been built to fend off the Scandinavian pirates of an earlier era. Stuck fast, her crew abandoned her.
When Stonefield’s men clambered on board the Eagle, she was listing heavily and in imminent danger of sinking. He immediately called off the pursuit of the fleeing pirates and put his men to work salvaging the Eagle and her perishable cargo. His first need was to organise a round-the-clock on board watch to deter the local pilferers. After this Stonefield rode back to Inveraray to recruit carpenters to repair her badly holed hull.
With that done, he set about separating the victims of this piratical attack – the members of the Eagle’s rightful crew, from the perpetrators of this capital crime – the pirates. Greatly aiding his task was the presence of Dr Archibald Murray amongst the prisoners. He was the son of Murray of Deuchar and had been the surgeon on board Woodes Rogers’ Buck of New Providence when Howell Davis seized her and turned pirate off Hispaniola. That was back in the summer of 1718 and he had, he claimed, been held captive ever since.
No doubt acting on his information, Captain James McIntosh of the Eagle and five of his crew were identified and released. Murray also confirmed that half the pirate crew, led by the Irishman Walter Kennedy, had got away south. Defoe, writing only five years later, states that two of them got so badly drunk on the way that they became separated from their group. They were later found murdered and stripped of their loot and clothing by the side of the track.
Back in Inveraray Jail, Stonefield was left with twenty-one battle-hardened Black Flag pirates on his hands. He knew that his isolated little prison would not hold them for long, especially as a large number of their comrades were still at large. He decided, therefore, to send them south to the more secure Tolbooth in Glasgow, some ninety miles away. This long, difficult and dangerous march got under way at the first sign of spring. The terrain they had to pass through was very rugged, and frequented at that time by the outlaw at large, Rob Roy Macgregor. The mission was accomplished without losing a prisoner.
By now the agents of central government were fully aware of the magnitude of the crimes that these prisoners had committed. As their acts of piracy had been committed outside Scottish sovereign waters and against the vessels, property and persons of other nations, it was deemed necessary to try them under the ‘Law of Nations’. The most competent court to hear their case was, therefore, the High Court of Admiralty of Scotland sitting at the old Tolbooth in Edinburgh.
And so a squadron of dragoons was dispatched in late May to escort the prisoners, in chains, the forty-five miles from Glasgow to the dungeons of Edinburgh Castle. There they lay incarcerated for six months whilst the case against them was prepared. By this time two had turned King’s Evidence while another two disappear from the records. They may have either died or possibly been released due to lack of evidence.
The pleas of the remaining seventeen were heard on Friday 3 November 1720. Twelve days later their trial began, presided over by Lord James Graham, acting on behalf of the Earl of Rothes, the titular Vice-Admiral of Scotland. Such a high-profile case attracted the rising young stars of the Scottish legal profession. The young and newly appointed Lord Advocate, Robert Dundas of Arniston, led the prosecution team. He was ably assisted by the Procurator Fiscal to the Admiralty Court, Sir Patrick Grant. The nine defence lawyers were led by the formidable Charles Erskine of Barjarg, first Professor of Public Law at Edinburgh University, Advocate and Member of Parliament for Dumfriesshire.
From the outset Arniston was adamant that the Pannell (the accused) were all standard pirates. Indeed, three of them – Roger Hughes (or Hews), John Clerk and Richard Jones – were pirate ‘Lords’. These men, the jury was informed, were the aristocrats of piracy by virtue of their origins in the pirates’ nest on the island of New Providence.
In making his case to the jury, he sought to pre-empt the anticipated defence that they were forced men who had only recently escaped from their captors with the intention of surrendering themselves at the first opportunity. Had this been the case, Arniston argued, they should immediately have turned themselves over to Captain McIntosh, the lawful master of the Eagle. By retaining control of this small snow, changing her name and painting the British coat-of-arms on her stern, they had exposed their true intention. That was to slip unnoticed into a remote part of the Irish or mainland British coast with their immense booty. Only an Act of God – the storm that blew them off course and into Loch Craignish – had foiled this scheme for their retirement from piracy.
The accused, he proclaimed, were cut-throats who had freely served under a succession of infamous pirate captains: Howell Davis, Thomas Cocklyn, Olivier La Bouche, and finally the bloodiest of them all, Bartholomew Roberts. Over the past two years they had taken part in the most devastating raids in the annals of pirate history. They were party to the sacking and burning of a number of forts along the West African coast and the illegal taking and plundering of hundreds of vessels, both there and in South American and Caribbean waters.
During these piratical acts they had been actively involved in the murder of hundreds of people whose names and the circumstances of whose deaths would never be known. For it was the pirate way, as Arniston explained to the jury, to kill (dead men tell no tales) those who might later testify against them. The prosecution therefore could cite only one specific incident of murder – that of nine Africans – for their consideration. Conviction for this single act of barbarism alone would be sufficient to incur the death sentence.
This atrocity happened when the accused were crew on the flotilla led by Howell, La Bouche and Cocklyn, then cruising off the coast of Guinea. As Arniston recounted to the jury, they took these unfortunate Africans and kept [them] in irons that night and next day hang[ed] them by the feet to the yard arm and did barbarously shote them for target practice. To substantiate his charge that they were, indeed, bloodstained Blades of Fortune, Arniston offered the testament of a number of eye-witnesses. The principal witnesses to the atrocity were the forced surgeon, Archibald Murray, who had turned King’s Evidence for a full pardon, and the cooper on the slaver Loyalty of Port Glasgow, John Daniels, who had been a prisoner of the pirates at the time.
Erskine, for the defence, acknowledged that these dreadful events had, indeed, taken place as described. However, his clients were all forced men who were not in a position to intervene without incurring the gravest risk to their own lives. They could only stand by as silent witnesses to such acts of wanton savagery.
He claimed that each of the accused had also been the victim of unbridled pirate violence. From the moment of their capture they had to endure lengthy imprisonment in irons and mock executions for refusing to sign the Articles of Regulation which would signal that they had turned pirate with the Blades. Furthermore, a number of the accused in the dock had tried to escape, for which they were severely whipped and locked away after their recapture.
The truth was that his clients had been taken from their legally trading merchantmen by the pirates at different times along the African coast and retained because of their skills. He also claimed that they had steadfastly refused to take part in acts of piracy other than the safe navigation of the ship.
It was the Blades, led by Walter Kennedy, who took the Eagle off Jamaica, after which they had gone back on board their flagship, the Royal Revenge, and got badly drunk, leaving the defendants to mind the two vessels. It was then that his clients took their chance to escape. During the night, as the Blades slept below, they nailed up the touch holes of the pirate flagship’s cannons and threw all the small arms and shot they could find overboard, after which, they scrambled over the side and onto the prize that lay alongside. It was a desperate gamble, for had a Blade appeared on deck as they made off at first light, they would have been murdered on the spot.
Their sole intention, it was claimed, was to reach a British port where they could turn themselves in to the appropriate authorities. This, Erskine claimed, was evident from their enquiry after a magistrate at the doorstep of Barbreck House, that fateful evening in Craignish Loch. Thereafter, finding themselves in Danger, and ill treated by the highlanders; they were obliged to disperse in small Companies for their own safety. Their capture by Stonefield and his men unfortunately forestalled this plan to surrender themselves at the first opportunity and so clear their names.
Erskine ridiculed the prosecution’s case, based on alleged piratical acts that happened at some non-specific location and time against vessels and masters that could not now be identified. Tackling Arniston’s claim that, as Blades, they were bound by the Articles of their brotherhood not to bear witness against another, he petitioned that three of the least likely to be guilty in the panel should be tried first. If they were found innocent, he asserted, they would then testify as to who were the real Blades in the dock. This they would do readily as they would no longer be living in fear for their lives, as they had been during their shared confinement in Edinburgh Castle’s dungeons.
Arniston was for none of it. He had packed the fifteen-man jury with local shipmasters and Edinburgh merchants. These men could be trusted to give no credence to arguments as to what might constitute ‘force’, other than immediate fear of death, which would cause a seaman to co-operate with a pirate. He also had credible witnesses to specific events: the surgeon, the supercargo, bosun and cooper of the looted Loyalty of Port Glasgow and the crew of the Eagle. The trial lasted less than a week before the jury retired to consider their verdict.
On 22 November 1720, Lord Graham was handed the jurors’ sealed note. For seven of the accused the jury found their defences of force and fear of death and sickness proven exemplar. They were immediately dismissed at the bar. As for the remaining ten in the dock, the jury found by a plurality of voices … the lybll [of piracy] proven. On receiving their verdict, Lord Graham pronounced the statutory sentence of death by hanging on each of the accused.
Dundas departed for London to obtain the King’s signature on their death warrants. The warrant for the execution of Hyman Saturly was accompanied by the judge’s recommendation that, as he was only sixteen at the time of his offences, he should receive the King’s Pardon. This was granted.
The executions of the remaining nine were undertaken in the time-honoured manner. The establishment’s vengeance was given its full vent against these men who tempted oppressed seamen to turn pirate. It was, therefore, ordained that the two ‘Lords’, Roger Hughes and John Clerk, be taken first: to the Sands of Leith within the flood mark upon the second Wednesday of December. Betwixt the hours of two and four o’clock in the afternoon and there be hanged by the neck on the Gibbet till they be dead. Their bodies were then tarred and hung in chains so that they would reappear from beneath the waves with every receding tide for as long as the rotting corpses held together. This would serve as a grisly warning to every passing ship’s company of the inevitable price of piracy.
The second batch was hanged on the first Wednesday of the New Year. All four – William Fenton, John Stewart, William Green and James Sail – went to their deaths protesting their innocence to the last. Their pleas went largely unheard for, on the same day, a rival and more ghoulish event was taking place at the Grassmarket in Edinburgh which drew away the expected thousands of spectators. This was the mutilation and execution of Nicholas Mushet of Boghall for the barbarous murder of his wife. He first suffered having his offending hand struck off by the town executioner before being hanged.
The final three convicted pirates – William Minty, Richard Luntly and ‘Lord’ Richard Jones – were executed the following Wednesday. Just before his death Luntly, formerly from Barbados, told his sorry tale to a hack broadsheet writer. These carrion crows of the journalist profession usually hovered around the gallows waiting to pick up the dying last words of the condemned criminal. This journalist, however, seems to have gained access to Luntly in Edinburgh Castle vaults while he was awaiting execution. It is quite likely that he was the ‘ordinary’, the minister charged with hearing their last confessions; though it is possible that he simply bribed the guards.
If Luntly’s account is to be believed (the factual details are readily verifiable), he had been forced off the Guinea Hen when she was taken by Davis in the Gambia River early in February 1719. He could, therefore, bear full witness to a full year of plundering and murder as a reluctant member of both Davis’s and later Roberts’s crew. He was adamant that only ‘Lords’ Clerk and Jones deserved to meet their end on the gibbet on Leith Sands. The other seven (including himself) were, he insisted, innocent men who had endured extremes of cruelty at the hands of the pirates only to be sacrificed, as an example to others, by the state.
As John Stewart so bitterly put it in his Dying Words: having landed in the West of Scotland, every Body knew how we have been treated since that time, and I might have purchast my Life, had my conscience allowed me to Comply with the Solicitation of them, who would have me appear as an Evidence against those that were as innocent as myself, but I never could think of Saving my Life at so dear a Rate.
Only ‘Lord’ John Clerk admitted his guilt; I confess that I was upon the Island of Providence when Governor Rogers came with the King’s Pardon to the pirates that were there, and that I was one of those who was a pirating before I came into the Buck-Sloop. He claimed, however, that unlike Roger Hughes, he was not one of those that took part in the insurrection led by Davis. As for the other condemned men: I go out of this world with a heavy Heart, when I think how innocently these Poor Men must suffer. His final act was to point the finger at the man he considered solely responsible for this terrible travesty – the ‘turncoat’ and star witness for the prosecution, Dr Archibald Murray: I think they are much wronged and unjustly condemned. Sentence might very justly have passed on the Doctor and me, for he and I were long engaged in these wicked Courses. But these poor men they were taken by us and … forced to the Working of the Ship, which if they had refused they would have been shot to Death that Moment.
The taint of a gross miscarriage of justice did not curtail the careers of the jurists who had handled the case. All lived to a ripe old age, having served in the highest offices of their profession. The presiding Admiralty Court Judge – veteran of the infamous trial of Captain Green and the crew of the Worcester fifteen years earlier – retired soon afterwards and founded his own ancestral seat as Graham of Airth Castle.
Robert Dundas, who had only just received his office as Lord Advocate in time to prosecute the Craignish pirates, led a charmed career. Immediately after the trial he was made Dean of Advocates, and it is he who is credited with replacing the civil ‘proven/not proven’ plea and verdict with the ‘guilty/not guilty’ in Scots Criminal Law. In 1748 he was elevated, as Lord Arniston, to the highest position of Lord President of the Court of Session.
Sir Patrick Grant, the Procurator Fiscal in the case, was also appointed to the bench, as Lord Elchies, and raised to a Lord of Justiciary in 1737. His famous collection of cases was eventually published as Decisions of the Court of Session in 1813.
The defending advocate, Charles Erskine, received his knighthood and was later raised to the bench as Lord Tinwald. In 1746 he was made Lord Justice Clerk and attended the marriage of his son and successor, James, later Lord Alva, to Margaret Maguire. Captain James Macrae died in July of that year and may have lived just long enough to witness the culmination of his plan to ennoble Violer Hugh’s family.
As for the gold taken from the Craignish pirates, it became the centre of a lengthy legal wrangle. Campbell of Stonefield tenaciously held onto the hoard as long as his exorbitant claims for expenses were contested by Lord Graham. His most extensive bills were for the protection and repair of the Eagle, which he also claimed as his by right of salvage.
She had overset soon after being abandoned. To right her, another vessel, the bark Ann of Campbeltown, had to be brought up and lashed to her by a great hawser that took eight men to manage. In such a remote place the repair of her hull could only be effected at low tide. It was, therefore, June before she was able to sail from Loch Craignish round the Mull of Kintyre to the Clyde under the charge of John Bethune, the Collector of Customs for Edinburgh. He also submitted a substantial claim for his services.
One of the many ironies of this case is that when she finally arrived at the quay at Greenock she was moored alongside the Loyalty. This was the Port Glasgow slaver that had been ransacked and stripped of her rigging by Davis, Cocklyn and La Bouche off the Guinea Coast the previous year and had only just returned to the Clyde. The anchor watchman on the Loyalty was the star witness, the cooper Joseph Daniels, one of three skilled men forcibly taken off her during the attack. He had escaped from their clutches and made his way back from Africa in time for the arrival of his old ship.
The Earl of Rothes also threw his hat into the cockpit by demanding, as the Vice-Admiral of Scotland, his tenth share of the treasure and the salvage value of the Eagle.
At the time of the trial, the New York owners of the Eagle had petitioned the court for the return of their vessel. Stonefield successfully countered with the claim that she would have been a total wreck had he not expended his time and money on her salvage.
Indeed, this litigation over the ownership of the seized treasure and the snow continued long after the last pirate had been hanged. Three years later, the much-fought-over snow Eagle was finally released from judicial control and put up for sale at Leith. This brought the prolonged litigation to an end, the cost of which was met out of the gold hoard. Who received the residue – if any remained after all the legal experts had taken their fees – is not known.
It is interesting to note that the amount of treasure recovered by Stonefield accounts for less than a third of what was known to be on the Portuguese bullion galleon Sacrada Familia at the time she was taken off Brazil by Roberts. It would therefore seem likely that the pirates who escaped Stonefield’s men and the locals of Craignish got away with the lion’s share.
After the trial no more pirates off the Eagle were caught in Scotland. Defoe states that their captain, Walter Kennedy, made it safely to Ireland with his cache. Thereafter, he moved to the London area where he ran a house of ill repute on the Deptford Road. When he crossed one of his mistresses who knew about his past, she turned him in to the authorities for an armed robbery.
While he was in Bridewell Prison, she tracked down Thomas Grant, the mate of one of the vessels he had looted. Grant had been held as a forced man and had been severely punished for attempted escape before he finally got away. The avenging mate needed little prompting to take out a warrant against Kennedy on a capital charge of piracy. Transferred to Marshalsea Prison and finally cornered, Kennedy offered to turn King’s Evidence on eight other pirates who had escaped with him from Argyllshire in exchange for a pardon. Only one of these men was arrested. He proved he was a forced man and was later released.
Kennedy was subsequently convicted of piracy at the Old Bailey and hanged at Execution Dock in July 1721. This ended a blood-soaked career that stretched back two decades, a rare achievement for a Blade of Fortune, whose average life expectancy was under 30.