1665
MOTHER SHAFTOE KEPT TRACK of her boys’ ages on her fingers, of which there were six. When she ran short of fingers—that is, when Dick, the eldest and wisest, was nearing his seventh summer—she gathered the half-brothers together in her shack on the Isle of Dogs, and told them to be gone, and not to come back without bread or money.
This was a typically East London approach to child-rearing and so Dick, Bob, and Jack found themselves roaming the banks of the Thames in the company of many other boys who were also questing for bread or money with which to buy back their mothers’ love.
London was a few miles away, but, to them, as remote and legendary as the Court of the Great Mogul in Shahjahanabad. The Shaftoe boys’ field of operations was an infinite maze of brickworks, pig yards, and shacks crammed sometimes with Englishmen and sometimes with Irishmen living ten and twelve to a room among swine, chickens, and geese.
The Irish worked as porters and dockers and coal-haulers during the winter, and trudged off to the countryside in hay-making months. They went to their Papist churches every chance they got and frittered away their silver paying for the services of scribes, who would transform their sentiments into the magical code that could be sent across counties and seas to be read, by a priest or another scrivener, to dear old Ma in Limerick.
In Mother Shaftoe’s part of town, that kind of willingness to do a day’s hard work for bread and money was taken as proof that the Irish race lacked dignity and shrewdness. And this did not even take into account their religious practices and all that flowed from them, e.g., the obstinate chastity of their women, and the willingness of the males to tolerate it. The way of the mudlarks (as the men who trafficked through Mother Shaftoe’s bed styled themselves) was to voyage out upon the Thames after it got dark, find their way aboard anchored ships somehow, and remove items that could be exchanged for bread, money, or carnal services on dry land.
Techniques varied. The most obvious was to have someone climb up a ship’s anchor cable and then throw a rope down to his mates. This was a job for surplus boys if ever there was one. Dick, the oldest of the Shaftoes, had learnt the rudiments of the trade by shinnying up the drain-pipes of whorehouses to steal things from the pockets of vacant clothing. He and his little brothers struck up a partnership with a band of these free-lance longshoremen, who owned the means of moving swag from ship to shore: they’d accomplished the stupendous feat of stealing a longboat.
After approaching several anchored ships with this general plan in mind, they learned that the sailors aboard them—who were actually supposed to be on watch for mudlarks—expected to be paid for the service of failing to notice that young Dick Shaftoe was clambering up the anchor cable with one end of a line tied round his ankle. When the captain found goods missing, he’d be sure to flog these sailors, and they felt they should be compensated, in advance, for the loss of skin and blood. Dick needed to have a purse dangling from one wrist, so that when a sailor shone a lantern down into his face, and aimed a blunderbuss at him, he could shake it and make the coins clink together. That was a music to which sailors of all nations would smartly dance.
Of course the mudlarks lacked coins to begin with. They wanted capital. John Cole—the biggest and boldest of the fellows who’d stolen the longboat—hit upon another shrewd plan: they would steal the only parts of ships that could be reached without actually getting aboard first: namely, anchors. They’d then sell them to the captains of ships who had found their anchors missing. This scheme had the added attraction that it might lead to ships’ drifting down the current and running aground on oh, say, the Isle of Dogs, at which point their contents would be legally up for grabs.
One foggy night (but all nights were foggy) the mudlarks set off in the longboat, rowing upstream. The mudlark term for a boat’s oars was a pair of wings. Flapping them, they flew among anchored ships—all of them pointed upriver, since the anchor cables were at their bows, and they weathercocked in the river’s current. Nearing the stern of a tubby Dutch galjoot—a single-masted trader of perhaps twice their longboat’s length, and ten times its capacity—they tossed Dick overboard with the customary rope noosed around his ankle, and a knife in his teeth. His instructions were to swim upstream, alongside the galjoot’s hull, towards the bow, until he found her port side anchor cable descending into the river. He was to lash his ankle-rope to said cable, and then saw through the cable above the lashing. This would have the effect of cutting the galjoot free from, while making the longboat fast to, the anchor, effecting a sudden and silent transfer of ownership. This accomplished, he was to jerk on the rope three times. The mudlarks would then pull on the rope. This would draw them upstream until they were directly over the anchor, and if they hauled hard enough, the prize would come up off the riverbed.
Dick slopped away into the mist. They watched the rope uncoil, in fits and starts, for a couple of minutes—this meant Dick was swimming. Then it stopped uncoiling for a long while—Dick had found the anchor cable and gone to work! The mudlarks dabbled with rag-swathed oars, flapping those wings against the river’s flow. Jack sat holding the rope, waiting for the three sharp jerks that would be Dick’s signal. But no jerks came. Instead the rope went slack. Jack, assisted by brother Bob, pulled the slack into the boat. Ten yards of it passed through their hands before it became taut again, and then they felt, not three sharp jerks, exactly, but a sort of vibration at the other end.
It was plain that something had gone wrong, but Jack Cole was not about to abandon a good rope, and so they hauled in what they could, drawing themselves upstream. Somewhere along the flank of the galjoot, they found a noose in the rope, with a cold pale ankle lodged in it, and out came poor Dick. The anchor cable was knotted to that same noose. While Jack and Bob tried to slap Dick back into life, the mudlarks tried to pull in the anchor. Both failed, for the anchor was as heavy as Dick was dead. Presently, choleric Dutchmen up on the galjoot began to fire blunderbusses into the fog. It was time to leave.
Bob and Jack, who’d been acting as journeyman and apprentice, respectively, to Dick, were left without a Master Rope-Climber to emulate, and with a tendency to have extraordinarily bad dreams. For it was clear to them—if not right away, then eventually—that they had probably caused their own brother’s death by drawing the rope taut, thereby pulling Dick down below the surface of the river. They were out of the mudlark trade for good. John Cole found a replacement for Dick, and (rumor had it) gave him slightly different instructions: take your ankle out of the noose before you cut the anchor cable.
Scarcely a fortnight later, John Cole and his fellows were caught in the longboat in broad daylight. One of their schemes had succeeded, they’d gotten drunk on stolen grog, and slept right through sunrise. The mudlarks were packed off to Newgate.
Certain of them—newcomers to the judicial system, if not to crime—shared their ill-gotten gains with a starving parson, who came to Newgate and met with them in the Gigger. This was a chamber on the lower floor where prisoners could thrust their faces up to an iron grate and be heard, if they shouted loudly enough, by visitors a few inches away. There, the parson set up a sort of impromptu Bible study class, the purpose of which was to get the mudlarks to memorize the 51st Psalm. Or, failing that, at least the first bit:
Have mercie upon me, o God, according to they loving kindenes: according to the multitude of thy compassions put awaie mine iniquities.
Wash me throughly from mine iniquities, and clense me from my sin. For I knowe mine iniquities, & my sinne is ever before me.
Against thee, against thee onely have I sinned, & done evil in thy sight, that thou maiest be just when thou speakest, and pure when thou judgest.
Behold, I was borne in iniquitie, and in sinne hath my mother conceived me.
Quite a mouthful, that, for mudlarks, but these were more diligent pupils than any Clerke of Oxenford. For on the day that they were marched down the straight and narrow passage to the Old Bailey and brought below the magistrate’s balcony, an open Bible was laid in front of them, and they recited these lines. Which, by the evidentiary standards then prevailing in English courts, proved that they could read. Which proved that they were clergymen. Which rendered them beyond the reach of the criminal courts; for clergymen were, by long-hallowed tradition, subject only to the justice of the ecclesiastical courts. Since these no longer existed, the mudlarks were sent free.
It was a different story for John Cole, the oldest of the group. He had been to Newgate before. He had stood in the holding-pen of the Old Bailey before. And in that yard, below that balcony, in the sight of the very same magistrate, his hand had been clamped in a vise and a red-hot iron in the shape of a T had been plunged into the brawn of his thumb, marking him forever as Thief. Which by the evidentiary standards then prevailing, et cetera, made it most awkward for him to claim that he was a clergyman. He was sentenced, of course, to hang by the neck until dead at Tyburn.
Bob and Jack did not actually see any of this. They heard the narration from those who had mumbled a few words of Psalm 51 and been released and made their way back to the Isle of Dogs. To this point it was nothing they had not heard a hundred times before from friends and casual acquaintances in the neighborhood. But this time there was a new twist at the end of the story: John Cole had asked for the two surviving Shaftoe boys to meet him at the Triple Tree on the morning of his execution.
They went out of curiosity more than anything. Arriving at Tyburn and burrowing their way through an immense crowd by artful shin-kicking, instep-stomping, and groin-elbowing, they found John Cole and the others on a cart beneath the Fateful Nevergreen, elbows tied behind their backs, and nooses pre-knotted around their throats, with long rope-ends trailing behind them. A preacher—the Ordinary of Newgate—was there, urgently trying to make them aware of certain very important technicalities in the Rules of Eternity. But the condemnees, who were so drunk they could barely stand up, were saying all manner of rude and funny things back to him, faster than he could talk back.
Cole, more solemn than the others, explained to Jack and Bob that when the executioner “turned him off,” which was to say, body-checked him off the cart and left him to hang by his neck, Cole would very much appreciate it if Jack could grab his left leg and Bob his right, or the other way round if they preferred, and hang there, pulling him down with their combined weight, so that he’d die faster. In exchange for this service, he told them of a loose board in the floor of a certain shack on the Isle of Dogs beneath which they could find hidden treasure. He laid out the terms of this transaction with admirable coolness, as if he were hanged by the neck until dead every Friday.
They accepted the commission. Jack Ketch was now the man to watch. His office, the gallows, was of admirably simple and spare design: three tall pilings supporting a triangle of heavy beams, each beam long enough that half a dozen men could be hanged from it at once, or more if a bit of crowding could be overlooked.
Jack Ketch’s work, then, consisted of maneuvering the cart below a clear space on one of the beams; selecting a loose rope-end; tossing it over the beam; making it fast with a bit of knotwork; and turning off the bloke at the opposing end of the rope. The cart, now one body lighter, could then be moved again, and the procedure repeated.
John Cole was the eighth of nine men to be hanged on that particular day, which meant that Jack and Bob had the opportunity to watch seven men be hanged before the time came for them to discharge their responsibilities. During the first two or three of these hangings, all they really noticed was the obvious. But after they grew familiar with the general outlines of the rite, they began to notice subtle differences from one hanging to the next. In other words, they started to become connoisseurs of the art, like the ten thousand or so spectators who had gathered around them to watch.
Jack noticed very early that men in good clothes died faster. Watching Jack Ketch shrewdly, he soon saw why: when Jack Ketch was getting ready to turn a well-dressed man off, he would arrange the noose-knot behind the client’s left ear, and leave some slack in the rope, so that he’d fall, and gather speed, for a moment before being brought up short with an audible crack. Whereas men in ragged clothing were given a noose that was loose around the neck (at first, anyway) and very little room to fall.
Now, John Cole—who’d looked a bit of a wretch to begin with, and who’d not grown any snappier, in his appearance and toilette, during the months he’d languished in the Stone Hold of Newgate—was the shabbiest bloke on the cart, and obviously destined for the long slow kicking style of hanging. Which explained why he’d had the foresight to call in the Shaftoe boys. But it did not explain something else.
“See here,” Jack said, elbowing the Ordinary out of the way. He was on the ground below the cart, neck craned to look far up at Jack Ketch, who was slinging John Cole’s neck-rope over the beam with a graceful straight-armed hooking movement. “If you’ve got hidden treasure, why didn’t you give it to him?” And he nodded at Jack Ketch, who was now peering down curiously at Jack Shaftoe through the slits in his hood.
“Er—well I din’t have it on me, did I?” returned John Cole, who was a bit surly in his disposition on the happiest of days. But Jack thought he looked a bit dodgy.
“You could’ve sent someone to fetch it!”
“How’s I to know they wouldn’t nick it?”
“Leave off, Jack,” Bob had said. Since Dick’s demise, he had been, technically, the man of the family; at first he’d made little of it, but lately he was more arrogant every day. “He’s s’posed to be saying his prayers.”
“Let him pray while he’s kicking!”
“He’s not going to be doing any kicking, ’cause you and I are going to be hanging on his legs.”
“But he’s lying about the treasure.”
“I can see that, you think I’m stupid? But as long as we’re here, let’s do a right job of it.”
While they argued, Cole was turned off. He sprawled against the sky just above their heads. They dodged instinctively, but of course he didn’t fall far. They jumped into the air, gained hand-holds on his feet, and ascended, hand-over-hand.
After a few moments of dangling from the rope, Cole began to kick vigorously. Jack was tempted to let go, but the tremors coming down Cole’s legs reminded him of what he’d felt in the rope when poor Dick had been dragged down beneath the river, and he held on by imagining that this was some kind of vengeance. Bob must’ve had the same phant’sy, for both boys gripped their respective legs like stranglers until Cole finally went limp. When they realized he was pissing himself, they both let go at once and tumbled into the fœtid dust below the gibbet. There was applause from the crowd. Before they’d had time to dust themselves off, they were approached by the sister of the one remaining condemned man—also a slow-hanging wretch, by his looks—who offered them cash money to perform the same service. The coins were clipped, worn, and blackened, but they were coins.
John Cole’s loose board turned out not to be loose, and when pried up, to cover shit instead of treasure. They were hardly surprised. It didn’t matter. They were prosperous tradesmen now. On the eve of each hanging-day, Jack and Bob could be found in their new place of business: Newgate Prison.
It took them several visits just to understand the place. Gate in their usage meant a sort of wicket by which humans could pass through a fence around a hog-yard without having to vault over—not that vaulting was such a difficult procedure, but it was dangerous when drunk, and might lead to falling, and being eaten by the hogs. So gates they knew.
They had furthermore absorbed the knowledge that in several parts of London town were large fabricks called Gates, viz. Ludgate, Moorgate, and Bishopsgate. They had even passed through Aldgate a few times, that being their usual way of invading the city. But the connexion between gates of that type, and hog-yard-wickets, was most obscure. A gate in the hog-yard sense of the word made no sense unless built in a wall, fence, or other such formal barrier, as its purpose was to provide a means of passage through same. But none of the large London buildings called Gates appeared to have been constructed in any such context. They bestrode important roads leading into the city, but if you didn’t want to pass through the actual gate, you could usually find a way round.
This went for Newgate as well. It was a pair of mighty fortress-turrets built on either side of a road that, as it wandered in from the countryside and crossed over Fleet Ditch, was named Holborn. But as it passed between those turrets, the high road was bottle-necked down to a vaulted passageway just wide enough for a four-horse team to squeeze through. Above, a castle-like building joined the turrets, and bridged the road. An iron portcullis made of bars as thick as Jack’s leg was suspended within that castle so that it could be dropped down to seal the vault, and bar the road. But it was all show. For thirty seconds of scampering along side streets and alleys would take Jack, or anyone else, to the other side. Newgate was not surrounded by walls or fortifications, but rather by buildings of the conventional sort, which was to say, the half-timbered two- and three-story dwellings that in England grew up as quick and as thick as mushrooms. This Gothick fortress of Newgate, planted in the midst of such a neighborhood, was like a pelvis in a breadbasket.
If you actually did come into the city along Holborn, then when you ducked beneath that portcullis and entered the vaulted passageway beneath Newgate you’d see to the right a door leading into a porter’s lodge, which was where new prisoners had their chains riveted on. A few yards farther along, you’d emerge from beneath the castle into the uncovered space of what was now called Newgate Street. To your right you would see a gloomy old building that rose to a height of three or four stories. It had only a few windows, and those were gridded over with bars. This was a separate piece of work from the turret-castle-vault building; rumor had it that it had once done service as an inn for travelers coming into the city along Holborn. But the prison had, in recent centuries, spread up Newgate Street like gangrene up a thigh, consuming several such houses. Most of the doorways that had once welcomed weary travelers were bricked up. Only one remained, at the seam between the castle and the adjoining inn-buildings. Going in there, a visitor could make a quick right turn into the Gigger, or, if he had a candle (for it grew dark immediately), he could risk a trip up or down a stairway into this or that ward, hold, or dungeon. It all depended on what sort of wretch he was coming to visit.
On Jack and Bob’s first visit they’d neglected to bring a light, or money with which to buy one, and had blundered down-stairs into a room with a stone floor that made crackling noises beneath their feet as they walked. It was impossible to breathe the air there, and so after a few moments of blind panic they had found their way out and fled back into Newgate Street. There, Jack had noticed that his feet were bloody, and supposed that he must have stepped on broken glass. Bob had the same affliction. But Bob, unlike Jack, was wearing shoes, and so the blood could not have come from him. On careful inspection of the soles of those shoes, the mystery was solved: the blood was not smeared about, but spotted his soles, an array of little bursts. At the center of each burst was a small fleshy gray tube: the vacant corpse of an engorged louse that Bob had stepped on. This accounted for the mysterious crackling noise that they had heard while walking around in that room. As they soon learned, it was called the Stone Hold, and was accounted one of the lowest and worst wards of the prison, occupied only by common felons—such as the late John Cole—who had absolutely no money. Jack and Bob never returned to it.
Over the course of several later sallies into the prison they learned its several other rooms: the fascinating Jack Ketch his Kitchen; the so-called Buggering Hold (which they avoided); the Chapel (likewise); the Press-Yard, where the richest prisoners sat drinking port and claret with their periwigged visitors; and the Black Dogge Tavern, where the cellarmen—elite prisoners who did a brisk trade in candles and liquor—showed a kind of hospitality to any prisoners who had a few coins in their pockets. This looked like any other public house in England save that everyone in the place was wearing chains.
There were, in other words, plenty of lovely things to discover at the time and to reminisce about later. But they were not making these arduous trips from the Isle of Dogs to Newgate simply for purposes of sightseeing. It was a business proposition. They were looking for their market. And eventually, they found it. For in the castle proper, on the north side of the street, in the basement of the turret, was a spacious dungeon that was called the Condemned Hold.
Here, timing was everything. Hangings occurred only eight times a year. Prisoners were sentenced to hang a week or two in advance. And so most of the time there were no condemned people at all in the Condemned Hold. Rather, it was used as a temporary holding cell for new prisoners of all stripes who had been frog-marched to the Porter’s Lodge across the street and traded the temporary ropes that bound their arms behind their backs, for iron fetters that they would wear until they were released. After being ironed (as this procedure was called) with so much metal that they could not even walk, they would be dragged across the vault and thrown into the Condemned Hold to lie in the dark for a few days or weeks. The purpose of this was to find out how much money they really had. If they had money, they’d soon offer it to the gaolers in exchange for lighter chains, or even a nice apartment in the Press-Yard. If they had none, they’d be taken to some place like the Stone Hold.
If one paid a visit to the Condemned Hold on a day chosen at random, it would likely be filled with heavily ironed newcomers. These were of no interest to Jack and Bob, at least not yet. Instead, the Shaftoe boys came to Newgate during the days immediately prior to Tyburn processions, when the Condemned Hold was full of men who actually had been condemned to hang. There they performed.
Around the time of their birth, the King had come back to England and allowed the theatres, which had been closed by Cromwell, to open again. The Shaftoe boys had been putting their climbing skills to good use sneaking into them, and had picked up an ear for the way actors talked, and an eye for the way they did things.
So their Newgate performances began with a little mum-show: Jack would try to pick
Bob’s pocket. Bob would spin round and cuff him. Jack would stab him with a wooden
poniard, and Bob would die. Then (Act II) Bob would jump up and ’morphosize into the
Long Arm of the Law, put Jack in a hammerlock, (Act III) don a wig (which they had
stolen, at appalling risk, from a side-table in a brothel near the Temple), and sentence
him to hang. Then (Act IV) Bob would exchange the white wig for a black hood and throw
a noose round Jack’s neck and stand behind him while Jack would motion for silence
(for by this point all of the Condemned Hold would be in a state of near-riot) and
clap his hands together like an Irish child going to First Communion, and (Act V)
utter the following soliloquy:
John Ketch’s rope doth decorate my neck.
Though rude, and cruel, this garland chafes me not.
For, like the Necklace of Harmonia,
It brings the one who wears it life eternal.
The hangman draweth nigh—he’ll turn me off
And separate my soul from weak’ning flesh.
And, as I’ve made my peace with God Almighty,
My spirit will ascend to Heaven’s Door,
Where, after brief interrogation, Christ will—
Bob steps forward and shoves Jack, then yanks the rope up above Jack’s head.
HAWKKH! God’s Wounds! The noose quite strangleth me!
What knave conceived this means of execution?
I should have bribed John Ketch to make it quick.
But, with so many lordly regicides
Who’ve lately come to Tyburn to be penalized,
The price of instant, painless death is quite
Inflated—far beyond the humble means
Of common condemnees, who hence must die
As painf’lly as they’ve lived. God damn it all!
And damn Jack Ketch; the late John Turner; and
The judges who hath sent so many rich men to
The gallows, thereby spurring said inflation.
And damn my frugal self. For, at a cost
That scarce exceeds an evening at the pub,
Might I have hired those exc’llent Shaftoe boys,
Young Jack, and Bob, the elder of the pair,
To dangle from my legs, which lacking ballast,
Do flail most ineffectu’lly in the air,
And make a sort of entertainment for
The mobile.
Bob removes the noose from Jack’s neck.
But soft! The end approaches—
Earth fades—new worlds unfold before my eyes—
Can this be heaven? It seemeth warm, as if
A brazier had been fir’d ’neath the ground.
Perhaps it is the warmth of God’s sweet love
That so envelops me.
Bob, dressed as a Devil, approaches with a long pointed Stick.
How now! What sort
Of angel doth sprout Horns upon his pate?
Where is thy Harp, O dark Seraph?
Instead of which a Pike, or Spit, doth seem
To occupy thy gnarled claws?
DEVIL:I am
The Devil’s Turnspit. Sinner, welcome home!
JACK: I thought that I had made my peace with God.
Indeed I had, when I did mount the scaffold.
If I had but died then, at Heaven’s Gate
I’d stand. But in my final agony,
I took God’s name in vain, and sundry mortal
Sins committed, and thus did damn myself
To this!
DEVIL: Hold still!
Devil shoves the point of his Spit up Jack’s arsehole.
JACK: The pain! The pain, and yet,
It’s just a taste of what’s to come.
Jack, by means of a conjuror’s trick, causes the point of the spit, smeared
with blood, to emerge from his mouth, and is led away by the Devil, to violent
applause and foot-stomping from the Crowd.
After the applause had died down, Jack, then, would circulate among the condemned to negotiate terms, and Bob, who was bigger, would watch his back, and mind the coin-purse.