On 18 August 1696, a Royal Proclamation was nailed to the ‘mercat cross’ on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, and at the major ports throughout Scotland, for Apprehending Henry Every, alias Bridgeman and Sundry other Pirates. The Lords Justices sitting in London promised to pay £500 sterling for information leading to the arrest of the great pirate captain and £50 for each of the English Men, Scots Men and foraigners, to the number of one hundred and thirty that were his crew. This reward matched that already offered (in rupees) by the Honourable East India Company the previous month.
Captain ‘Long Ben’ Avery (or Every) was the first European pirate to round the Cape of Good Hope to raid in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea, using Isle de Johanna and Madagascar as his bases. In the space of less than two years his exploits had, as Defoe put it, made a great noise in the world that shook the very foundations of the British presence in India.
At the centre of this great furore was the taking of the Mogul’s greatest ship, the Gang-i-Sawai, returning from Mocha in the Red Sea with 600 pilgrims from Mecca. This massive and heavily armed vessel was captured after a savage two-hour battle during which a number of Avery’s crew on his ship the Fancy were killed.
On finally boarding his victim, he exacted a terrible retribution on these ‘heathens’ that was barbaric even by the standards of cruelty of the day. The male passengers, many high-ranking court officials, were tortured to reveal their hidden gold and silver before being butchered.
The women found below decks, many related to the Great Mogul Aurungzeeb, were treated likewise. Some chose to jump over the side to their deaths; others killed themselves with hidden daggers rather than face the orgy of rape that followed. Those women who did not die from their injuries sustained during this brutal ordeal, were kept as captives for the crew’s amusement after the Gang-i-Sawai was finally cast adrift. Legend has it that Avery retained the granddaughter of Aurungzeeb as a wife.
It is little wonder that the Great Mogul raged against the Europeans in his Indian Empire. Such was his wrath that many officers of the English East India Company were imprisoned and a few executed over the following year. Once his anger had subsided and they were released, new restrictions were applied whereby they were forbidden to carry arms or display their national flags on their vessels. These measures were also extended to the Dutch and French factories.
To break the deadlock, the besieged Governor of Bombay offered to deploy a number of his armed East Indiamen – at full cost to the Company – as escorts to the Mocha fleets. He went further and commissioned the independent Scots merchant adventurer, Captain Alexander Hamilton, to make pre-emptive strikes against the native pirate nests along the Malabar Coast and the Persian Gulf. He also worked with his erstwhile rival French and Dutch counterparts to raise the fortune in compensation needed to placate the Mogul for his loss.
As the officers of the East India Company clawed their way back into favour and strove to avert the Company’s extinction in India, its directors in London joined those of the Royal Africa Company to petition King William’s government for respite. They demanded that immediate action be taken to clear out the nests of pirates that were now settling in their droves on Madagascar after Avery’s sensational success. The Crown’s response was to apply the ‘carrot and stick’ strategy (its first use since Elizabethan times). This entailed a general pardon for all but a few of the pirate captains operating east of the Cape of Good Hope, backed up by a small naval expedition to Madagascar.
Tremendous pressure was also brought to bear on the Crown to terminate the newest rival to the English trading monopolies: The Company of Scotland, trading to Africa and the East Indies. Usually referred to in English indictments as the ‘Scots African Company’, it had been set up in 1694 by a Scottish Act of Parliament during William’s absence on military campaigns in the Low Countries.
The English Companies claimed that their new Scots rival had immediately set about recruiting large numbers of Avery’s old pirate crew from their bolt-holes in Ireland and around the ports of Europe. Indeed, they insisted the Scots already had his old pilot safely in Edinburgh, where he was advising their directors on piratical schemes. Such was their concern that the English Lords Justices had a number of Avery’s men tracked down and dragged from the alehouses of Dublin to be interrogated on the matter. The great buccaneer William Dampier was also summoned and questioned in London as to his links with the Scots Company.
In the meantime, the arch-pirate Avery got away ‘Scot free’ with over half a million pounds in gold, silver and diamonds. He had slipped away from his cruising partner, Thomas Tew, soon after the looting of the Gang-i-Sawai and headed for New Providence in the Bahamas. There he disbanded his crew. Some chose to head for America, others for Europe. Avery was last heard of landing from a New Providence sloop some miles north-west of Londonderry in Ireland. From there, according to one of his crew who was arrested, he intended to cross over to Scotland as ‘Captain Bridgeman’ on his way south to his retirement as an inconspicuous country gentleman of wealth.
The proclamation and its rewards for his capture yielded nothing. If anything, it served to promote the legend and inadvertently advertised the benefits of piracy. The public were advised that Avery and twenty-five named men from his crew, all hainous and Notorious Offenders … may be Probably known and Discovered by the Great Quantities of Persian and Indian Gold and Silver which they have with them.
In getting away with the crime of the century, he immediately became the role model for all those who sailed under the Black Flag. Indeed, his spectacular cruise did much to trigger the ‘Golden Age of Piracy’ that held sway for the next thirty years. His awesome reputation is evident from the fact that the pirate John Taylor, who attacked Macrae on the Cassandra at Isle de Johanna fifteen years later, had renamed his vessel Fancy in his honour. The sadist Edward Low also emulated Avery by regularly indulging in the torture of his victims, cutting off the ears and noses of any unfortunate Spaniards who fell into his hands.
The lure of pirate gold and silver also attracted those who embarked upon privately sponsored ‘pirate-chasing’. This quasi-public service was particularly attractive to members of the ruling Establishment with access to royal commissions. The opportunity seemed ideal as the renewed war with France had taken up most of the available naval resources.
The idea struck a particular chord with the newly appointed and self-righteous Governor of New York and New England, the Earl of Bellomont. This Irish peer had yet to sail to America as the replacement for the notoriously corrupt Governor Fletcher. Fletcher had taken a massive bribe from Thomas Tew to grant him a pardon and liberty to settle and sell his ill-gotten booty at New York.
Bellomont’s new scheme to end piracy in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, while making a handsome profit on his own account, was initially hatched by Colonel Livingston of New York, who happened to be in London at the time. His concept was as simple as it was appealing: a large powerful well-armed vessel with a large crew of war-hardened veterans would sail to Madagascar under dual privateering and pirate-hunting commissions. So empowered, her master could make prize those vessels caught sailing under the protection of the French flag while pursuing pirates of all nationalities.
The glittering lure of relieving pirates of their plunder attracted a number of Bellomont’s powerful Whig friends as silent partners: Sir John Somers, then Keeper of the Great Seal; the Duke of Shrewsbury, the Secretary of State; the Earl of Romney, Master of the Royal Ordnance; and Sir Edward Russell (later Lord Orford), First Lord of the Admiralty. Livingston’s fateful choice of captain for this money-spinning venture was the one-time privateering master and respected family man, Captain William Kidd, born in Dundee and resident of New York.
The tragic tale of Captain Kidd and the cruise of the Adventure galley rightfully belongs in the annals of privateering. It cannot be denied that he had the worst of luck and a mutinous crew during his three-year cruise (1696–9). He could have weathered all this had he not compromised his captaincy by a number of irresponsible acts which crossed the fine line that separates a privateer from a pirate.
He took only two vessels in all that time. Both were Moorish vessels which he approached under the ruse of flying the French flag. In this way he seized the great Quedah Merchant heading from Bengal for Surat with a rich cargo, which included seventy chests of opium belonging to Armenian merchants residing in Surat.
The capture took place on 30 January 1697, ten leagues off Cutsheen. Kidd ran in under French colours and her Dutch captain responded by sending over an old French-speaking gunner, posing as the captain, with their French passes. It was then common practice for neutrals to carry a set of passes from each of the warring European nations. At this, Kidd hoisted his English flag and declared the vessel lawful prize, to the great consternation of the Armenian owners who were on board.
Kidd refused a ransom of 30,000 rupees and decided, very foolishly, to escort his great prize to the pirates’ lair of St Mary’s Isle to divide the spoils. Once there, most of his disgruntled crew deserted him and joined up with Robert Culliford. This ‘privateer-turned-pirate’ was in harbour at the time with the Mocha frigate, an English East Indiaman he had recently taken and renamed the Resolution.
With only thirteen men remaining loyal to him, and receiving death threats from his deserters should he attempt anything against Culliford, Kidd was forced to barricade himself in the great cabin of the Quedah Merchant with forty muskets. From there he was unable to intervene as his badly leaking Adventure galley was left to sink at her mooring.
Abandoned by his officers, Kidd compromised himself in his need to find a crew to sail home with. This he did by coming to an amicable agreement of mutual co-existence with Captain Culliford. The two men – the supposed ‘pirate-chaser’ and the pirate – raised their glasses of bombo in convivial toasts to each other. Kidd gave Culliford ammunition, two cannons and money in return for Culliford’s goodwill in fitting out the Quedah Merchant for a transatlantic crossing.
This deal got back to the ears of the agents of the East India Company in Bombay and, inevitably, to London. The directors immediately made it their business to have Kidd’s name added to Avery’s as one of only three pirates who were not to be granted the new pardon.
When Kidd finally made it back to Anguilla in the Leeward Islands of the West Indies in April 1699, he heard for the first time about the storm his escapades had raised. Indeed, the local island governors had been ordered by royal decree to apprehend him on sight on charges of piracy.
Faced with the prospect of hanging, many of his crew were for returning to Madagascar and turning pirate. He, however, clung to the belief that, with his powerful backers and his royal commissions, all could be explained away as simple errors of judgement or acts of expediency taken under dire circumstances many thousands of miles away in remote places.
Leaving the Quedah Merchant in the Higuey River at Hispaniola, he bought a small sloop, the Antonio, and made his way to New York to plead his case with his main promoter. On 3 July 1699 Bellomont finally heard his tale and took the French passes from him. Kidd’s logbook had been missing since the Adventure galley sank at St Mary’s Isle. So Bellomont insisted that he write a full account of his cruise, complete with a list of the booty taken and where he had buried it. Bellomont had already decided to distance himself from what was rapidly escalating into a national scandal. Three days later, he had Kidd arrested as a most abandon’d villain and, along with his crew found on the Antonio, clapped in irons.
By the time Kidd finally arrived back in the Thames, on board hms Advice on 11 April 1700, he was a broken man, having spent nearly a year in solitary confinement. Taken upriver on the royal yacht Katherine under a close military guard, he was already a public spectacle when he entered Newgate Prison.
By now, the whole of London was awash with rumours and conspiracy theories. Captain Kidd’s acts of piracy had been committed under royal commissions and for the financial benefit of high-ranking members of the Whig administration. At one stage the King himself seemed implicated. The Tory opposition, exulting in the scandal, intervened to made quite sure that there was to be no quick trial by which Bellomont and his friends could contrive an acquittal.
After yet another year in solitary confinement, during which time he was denied clothing, exercise, paper and pen and legal advice, Kidd was brought before the House of Commons in March 1701. In front of the assembled House, an attempt was made to badger him into implicating his partners in his venture, with a view to impeaching them. This he naïvely refused to do, claiming that, as he had done nothing wrong, they had nothing to answer for. As one weary Tory politician put it: I thought him a knave. I now know him to be a fool as well. This had been his last chance to bargain for a pardon. Afterwards all and sundry washed their hands of this pirate and left him for the courts to deal with.
The night before his appearance before the High Court of Admiralty of England, on 7 May 1701, the defence lawyers appointed on his behalf finally visited him in his cell. They told him that he faced six charges against which he would have to conduct own defence. He was aghast to find that the first was that of murder.
The incident this indictment referred to had happened just after the taking the Quedah Merchant. Kidd had endured a series of confrontations with his rabble-rousing and mutinous gunner, William Moore. This time Kidd snapped and threw an iron-hooped bucket at him that fractured the gunner’s skull, causing his death a few hours later. In any other court of this period, this act of manslaughter (given the circumstances of a master facing down a mutineer) would have been deemed justifiable. Not permitted to call witnesses in his defence, the abandoned Kidd fumbled his case and the suitably guided jury took only one hour to find him guilty.
For the already doomed man, the outcome of the other five charges of piracy was a formality. Even so, his trial was woefully compromised by the mysterious disappearance of the two French passes taken from the Quedah Merchant and given to Bellomont. Their production in court would probably have vindicated his claim that she was a lawful prize taken in time of war or at least that he had acted, albeit foolishly, in good faith.
Kidd went to the gallows at the Old Stairs, Wapping, reeling drunk and fervently denying that he had ever committed an act of murder or piracy. His body was later hung in chains at Tilbury Point. His buried treasure, recovered from Long Island and conveyed with him on hms Advice, was too tainted by the scandal to be acquired by the usual office-bearers. Instead, the newly enthroned Queen Anne gifted this sum to the new Hospital for Seamen that had recently been installed in her old palace at Greenwich.
Kidd’s commanding place in the public’s imagination then, as now, had little to do with great swashbuckling deeds or Black Flag piracy. Indeed, throughout his extended cruise of the Indian Ocean he had steadfastly refused his crew’s demand to turn pirate and loot all vessels they encountered. His enduring fame is sustained by the public’s eternal fascination with the fact that he buried most of his treasure on an island.
During the three-year cruise of the Adventure galley, Madagascar had blossomed into the greatest pirate haven for companies raiding in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea. Following Avery’s example, pirate settlements sprang up at different locations around this giant island. The best known were at St Mary’s Isle in the north-east, Maritan, Port Dauphin and Charnock’s Point further down the east coast, and St Augustine and New Mathelage on the west coast. These were little more than hut villages fortified against attack from the sea and landward raids by the incessantly warring natives. When not pirating, many inhabitants of these stockades indulged in slaving or hired themselves out as mercenaries to the feuding local chiefs.
While all pirates lusted after readily disposable gold and silver coins and bullion, much of their booty was in the form of luxurious silks, damasks, ceramics and the spices of the East. Visitors to St Mary’s Isle brought back tales of beaches littered with discarded bales and broached chests of great value – had they reached their intended European markets.
It did not take long for the more adventurous European and American merchants to perceive these settlements as emporia, places where the plundered riches of the East could be had for a cask of rum or a barrel of gunpowder or a pair of shoes. There was also the prospect of slaving on the East African coast, which lay beyond the writ of the Royal Africa Company’s monopoly.
Scots traders had been preparing for such a venture ever since Avery captured the Gang-i-Sawai. In that year, Glasgow’s merchants took their first practical step to enter the African trade by granting a city burgess ticket to the Englishman Captain Davies as a person qualified to be useful to this burgh in voyages to Africa and America. This coincided with the Company of Scotland’s grandiose plan to found a Scots colony at Darien on the Isthmus of Panama. The public’s imagination was immediately swept up with this scheme, as were most of the disposable resources of the diminutive Scots nation.
By early 1699, however, the first news of major setbacks at the fledgling colony was filtering back, shattering any prospect of a return on the monies already committed. With expenditure still soaring as preparations for the second expedition continued, the Company scrabbled for other ways to generate desperately needed revenue. They looked to utilise the Company’s last remaining corporate asset, the ‘Letters Patent’ granted under their founding Act of the Scottish Parliament. These appeared to provide the legal cover under which small individual ventures could be sent out into the trading preserves of the English Companies.
Trading to the East offered the greatest prospect of high returns. To prepare the ground for such new ventures, the Company instructed their principal captain, James Gibson (then in Amsterdam fitting out their newest warship the Rising Sun), to open negotiations with the Armenian merchants. His contact was Martin Gregory, a merchant well-connected with those trading in Surat and some of whose goods Captain Kidd had recently robbed from the Quedah Merchant.
It was realised that engaging in such a joint venture to Surat would be taken as a direct challenge to the English East India Company’s monopoly. As the Scots Company’s armed forces were over-committed elsewhere, it was decided to circumnavigate this threat and trade directly with China.
The Eastern hopes of the Company rested with the ship Speedwell (250 tons) which had just returned from Darien under Captain John Campbell. The Company’s Articles of Agreement with Campbell and his chief supercargo, Robert Innes, were as ambitious as they were fastidious: you are to make the best of your way for Macow [Macao], where when it pleases God you arrive, dispatch your boat with some persons that can speak Spanish or Portuguese to the City of Canton to invite some merchants down in order to treat with the Mandarin to obtain trade. Much ink and paper was wasted on petty instructions as to who was allowed to sit at the captain’s table during the voyage and how best to pack silk and tea.
Later that year, the solitary Speedwell, after fitting out at Leith, cleared from the Clyde for the Far East. The Company’s last instructions were that they were to make for the Straits of Sunda and the Dutch conclave of Batavia on Java. There they were to trade for pepper and then proceed to Macao and Canton to exchange this cargo for silk, tea, porcelain and sugar. After this, they were to proceed to the Cape of Good Hope where instructions would be waiting on where to go next, depending on the war situation in Europe.
The primary target of this venture was almost achieved: the Speedwell got within ten leagues of Macao before she was driven back by a typhoon. During her second attempt, her hull was severely damaged by storms, so that she had to be careened in a bay in the Malacca Straits. This was done with the knowledge and permission of the local Dutch commandant.
On being relaunched in February 1702, she was wrecked on nearby rocks in the bay. According to an incensed Innes, this was entirely due to the ignorant, self-willed, and obstinate commander who had deliberately sent ashore the much more experienced first mate.
Now stranded, they took a house close to the Dutch fort, where the commandant agreed to keep under lock and key their eleven chests of treasure and fine goods. They were unaware that the landlady of their house, the monstrous Mrs Kennedy, was the wife of the Irish pirate. She used her position of trust to slip the ship’s young surgeon (and acting second supercargo), Walter Keir, a philtre (love potion), the effect of which was to render him utterly besotted with her and unable to refuse her anything. Having got him under her spell, she asked him to steal £1,000 for her. Keir replied that he would readily do so but this would require getting the keys to the treasure boxes from his superior. He was sure that Innes would never consider parting with them.
In her rage she had a local old witch make up a poison which she fed to Keir in his broth. As the young man slipped into a declining state of sweatings and stomach cramps, Captain Campbell and the chief supercargo Innes took passage for China (taking the keys with them) on a passing ship from Surat. They left behind the sickly second supercargo in charge of the remaining stock and in the company of the purser and twelve crewmen.
Not long afterwards, in August 1701, the Scots pirate-chaser and merchant adventurer, Captain Alexander Hamilton, arrived at Malacca. This remarkable man was on his way back to Surat from Siam (Thailand) on his own account when he heard that some fellow Scots were stranded. Concerned for their welfare, he decided to pay them a visit. It is Hamilton who gives us the colourful account of the whole affair.
On arriving at the house, Hamilton found Keir in a deplorable state and close to death. Hamilton immediately sent for the fort’s physician. The Dutch doctor concluded that the young surgeon had been poisoned but he could do nothing for him until he knew what drug he had ingested. Suspicion immediately fell on Mrs Kennedy, who steadfastly refused to tell him the name of the poison or its source. Hamilton then took charge of affairs and called in an ancient medicine man. For a large fee the medicine man put a hex on the belligerent poisoner. This made her see a demon in her garden that soon had her close to madness and willing to tell the name of her accomplice. The old medicine man then tracked down this witch and threatened her with the same hex. Terrified of him, she promptly told him the nature of the poison she had supplied to Mrs Kennedy. Thereafter, Keir was treated with an antidote and made a good recovery. The evil Mrs Kennedy, however, remained much troubled by her demon.
Captain Hamilton struck a deal with the daily improving young man to return with his ship, after he had fulfilled his trading mission. He would then uplift the Speedwell’s crew and cargo and carry them directly back to Scotland. The return of the chief supercargo Innes, however, put paid to this plan, as he would have none of it. He was adamant that he wanted to remain in the East and sell his wares in India.
In his account, Hamilton hints that the reason for Innes’s rejection of his rescue plan was the nature of the goods that he had returned with from China: a Chest of Glassware in their own private Adventure, the most obscenely shameful that I ever saw or heard of among Merchants. There were Priapuses of a large Size, with a scrutom big enough to hold an English pint of liquor.
So dismissed, Hamilton left Malacca and voyaged on to Surat. Two and a half years later, he came across the chief supercargo at Surat. By then Innes was dying and sought out Hamilton to help settle his affairs and lodge his accounts. From these Hamilton deduced that his attempts to recoup his stock had led to a string of failed trading ventures in Amoy, Bengal and Persia.
Hamilton blamed the complete failure of the Speedwell venture on the Company’s selection of officers. He described Innes as a Gentleman of a very courteous Behaviour, and understood a small sword excellently well, but not versed in Merchandize. Keir, the second supercargo, was a very good Surgeon, and Master of the French Language, but understood nothing in Accounts. He kept back his fiercest criticism for the Company’s choice of captain, John Campbell. Hamilton had the dubious pleasure of having this master’s company on board his own ship for twelve months, during which time he concluded that this Highlander and ex-cattle drover had a very mean Education, and could not tell what he meant either in speaking or writing. He had a brutal Courage, and was the Husband of three Wives all alive together. He knew nothing either of the Theory or practical Parts of Navigation, and yet had been honoured with a Commission for Lieutenant in the royal navy of England.
The voyage of the Speedwell was not the only Scottish venture that had set out for the East around this time and run into trouble. On 26 May 1701, the Company dispatched to Madagascar two of their Darien veterans, Captain Robert Drummond on the ship Speedy Return and Captain John Stewart (or Stuart) on the brig Content from ‘New’ Port Glasgow. Their cargo manifest of: Brandy, Mum [wheatmeal beer], Strong Beer, Cheese, Knives, Hats, Shoes, Stockings, Chests of firearms and Gunpowder leaves little doubt as to who their intended customers were – the pirates.
They took little money with them, as they intended to trade for wine at Madeira before rounding the Cape of Good Hope and making for Madagascar. They reached their declared destination without incident by the beginning of May 1702, having touched at Sao Tome and Angola in passage. Once safely in the anchorage of St Mary’s Isle, a stream of English and French pirates clambered on board to buy their strong liquors. To earn some additional revenue, Drummond and Stewart agreed to carry a consignment of slaves across to Isle Bourbon (La Réunion), over 300 miles due east. There they sold this human cargo to the local French governor.
While in that island’s main harbour, one Captain Honeycomb on the armed East Indiaman Rook galley boarded the Speedy Return. In high-handed fashion, he quizzed Drummond carefully to ascertain if he was a pirate or an ‘interloper’ in the trade. On his departure, the Scottish vessels sailed back to Madagascar, arriving in July.
In their quest for new customers, the Scots sailed down the south-east coast to the small anchorage at Maritan, at the mouth of the Matatana River. This was a new settlement raised by the pirate John Bowen (Ap-Owen). He was born in Bermuda to Welsh parents and, like so many, had turned pirate after suffering great abuse at the hands of his legal masters. Bowen and his men had only recently returned to Madagascar, having wrecked their pirate vessel, the large ex-slaver Speaker, on St Thomas Reef, Mauritius, at the end of their raid to the Red Sea.
On their arrival at Maritan, Captain Drummond and his surgeon Andrew Wilkie rowed ashore to a very cordial reception. The officers of the brig Content, including Drummond’s brother Thomas, also landed and joined in the revelry. According to two eye-witnesses, it was some nine hours after they had gone ashore that a long-boat came alongside the Speedy Return. On board was a small party of five armed men led by Bowen, seemingly intent on trading for goods.
Defoe described what followed:
[on the] pretence of buying some of their Merchandize brought from Europe, and finding a fair Opportunity, the chief Mate, Boatswain, and a Hand or two more only upon the Deck, and the rest at Work in the Hold, they threw off their Mask; each drew out a Pistol and Hanger, and told them, they were all dead Men if they did not retire that Moment to the Cabin. The Surprize was sudden, and they thought it necessary to obey; one of the Pyrates placed himself Centry at the Door, with his Arms in his Hands, and the rest immediately laid the Hatches, and then made a Signal to their Fellows on Shore, as agreed on; upon which, about forty or fifty came on Board, and took quiet Possession of the Ship, and afterwards the Brigantine, without Bloodshed, or striking a stroke.
Some six or eight days later, Bowen and his pirates set sail from Maritan on their newest acquisitions. They left behind stranded the duped Captain Robert Drummond, his chief mate Charles Broudly, the carpenter James Davis and a foremast man John Macclacbee. This was a bitter fate for Scotsmen who had sailed halfway round the world and survived the horrors of Darien. The rest of the Scots crews, numbering around seventy (including the surgeon) were forced.
Bowen made use of their recent intelligence of an encounter with the East Indiaman Rook. He decided to set off in pursuit of this potentially valuable prize. This took him back to Isle Bourbon where he found that his quarry had long since gone. He then extended his search to Mauritius, where he found four or five armed ships in the main harbour. Bowen decided not to attack, as they were too strong a force should they decide to stand and fight. He chose instead to return to Madagascar, rounding the southern tip from Fort Dauphin to St Augustine’s Bay.
The Speedy Return arrived without the Content, as the latter had hit a rock-shelf in passage. When the brig eventually appeared a few days later, she was leaking so badly that the decision was taken to abandon her. Her crew was transferred to the Speedy Return, after which the Content was driven up onshore and burned.
At St Augustine’s Bay, they revelled for a fortnight while Bowen considered his next move. This was to seek out and join forces with another group of pirates known to be in the area and sailing under Captain Thomas Howard. The local natives reported that, after taking the East Indiaman Prosperous in the bay, they had moved on north to New Mathelage. Sailing up the coast, Bowen found that anchorage empty and so made for the Comoros Islands where he touched at Isle de Johanna. Around Christmas time 1702, he finally caught up with Howard in the anchorage of the neighbouring island of Mayotte.
The two captains made a pact to combine their forces and cruise in company. The following March, they tracked down the East Indiaman Pembroke at anchor and used their long-boats to board her. After plundering her for stores, they forced her carpenter and captain before they let her go with the remainder of her crew.
Captain Wooley was retained to act as their pilot for their planned raid along the Malabar Coast and Red Sea. Soon afterwards, however, the two pirate captains had a disagreement that stalled this plan for several months. It was not until midsummer that they set aside their differences and reunited at Johanna before setting off for the Red Sea.
Contrary winds put paid to this plan and they found themselves off the Indian coast near Surat. Around the end of August the quest for rich prizes met with success, as they sighted a small convoy of four large Moorish vessels out from Surat heading for Mocha. During the chase these four vessels split into pairs, one pair sailing north while the other pair ran south along the coast. The Speedy Return pursued the latter group and eventually came up with and took the largest. Bowen took this prize back to their rendezvous at Rajapore where Howard soon joined him. Howard had caught and looted one of his victims, which brought their combined booty to £70,000 – a princely sum.
At Rajapore they decided to burn the Prosperous and the Speedy Return after transferring their men and armaments to Bowen’s great Moorish prize (700 tons). He renamed her the Defiance, which, with fifty-six cannons and manned by around 160 lascars and around 100 fighting pirates, was now a formidable warship. During the refit, the very ill Captain Wooley was finally allowed to go ashore. Bowen and Howard then set off on a cruise down the Malabar Coast where they took and looted the unfortunate Pembroke for a second time.
By now Bowen had had enough and sailed back to Mauritius where the company disbanded. Howard and his men took over the Defiance and went off on their own account, while Bowen and forty of his men headed for retirement. In Bowen’s case, this proved short-lived as he died from an intestinal complaint within six months.
It was during the Defiance’s stay at Mauritius that two of the forced men from Drummond’s Speedy Return made their bid for freedom. The eldest, the 38-year-old Peter Freeland of Slains, near Aberdeen, escaped, taking with him the 21-year-old Israel Phipenny (or Fisonne) from New Salem. Phipenny had been an apprentice to the Glasgow merchant George Lockhart before joining the crew of the Speedy Return at Port Glasgow.
After the pirates had gone their separate ways, these two men managed to secure a berth on a passing homeward-bound East Indiaman, the Raper galley of London, that landed them at Portsmouth at the end of March 1705. It was close to four years since they had left the Clyde.
Waiting to meet them was John Green, whose brother Captain Thomas Green was currently languishing in Edinburgh Castle vaults awaiting execution for the Piracy & Robbery of the Speedy Return and the Murder of her entire crew. His hanging was scheduled to take place in twelve days’ time, having already had an eight-day stay of execution due to the direct intervention of the Queen.
John Green rushed these two walking ghosts before the Mayor of Portsmouth, who took their sworn affidavits as to the true fate of the Speedy Return and her men – taken by Madagascan pirates without a shot fired or a drop of Scottish blood spilled.