The letters from the Governor of Jamaica accompanied him all the way to England; yet they failed to unlock the doors he had hoped to find open. Scarce had he set foot ashore when John Massey was apprehended on a charge of piracy. He had nonetheless abandoned the piratical vessel, placed himself under the authority of the island’s magistrates, and furnished intelligence that brought about the seizure of several craft. Returning with letters of recommendation after having served the ends of justice was thus insufficient to blot out what he had committed prior to that service. Between his departure to erect a fort and this return under indictment, soldiers had starved, vessels had been plundered, and the officer had crossed a boundary he was now compelled to account for before the law.
Massey sprang from a family whose lineage the chronicler leaves unexamined, save to record two brothers established in reputable callings. His kin, perturbed by what they perceived as an excess of impetuosity, had purchased him a commission in the army serving in Flanders under the Duke of Marlborough. They trusted, according to the narrative, that such a discipline would mend his nature. It was amidst the trenches and bastions of besieged towns that the young man embarked upon a career whose termination was destined to bring him before a vastly different concourse of witnesses.
He took part in the sieges of Mons, Douai, and Bouchain, among other operations conducted by the Confederate armies. The memorial depicts him as bold to the point of temerity, affirming that he passed through the entire campaign without sustaining a single wound. Following the siege of Lille, he commanded as a lieutenant, bearing a reputation the chronicler accounts good. Nothing in this martial beginning openly presaged a pirate’s trial: Massey had acted under regular orders, in an army of the realm, before receiving in later years the command of men upon an entirely different coast.
Having returned to England, he lived at first in a sober and pious manner. The chronicler attributes this alteration to the perils of warfare and the reflections they had inspired in him regarding divine Providence. In London, Massey contemplated marriage with a gentlewoman from whom the departure of his regiment for Ireland ultimately parted him. The chronicle speaks ill of the lady, and likewise condemns his own conduct during his sojourn in Ireland; this moral portrait attends a career whose turning point was to be a fresh appointment. Upon the recommendation of the Duke of Chandos, the Royal African Company offered him employment.
He was appointed lieutenant-colonel in the company’s service and engineer charged with erecting a fort upon the coast of Africa. From this post he hoped to derive an honorable subsistence. Yet the passage placed the troops under the dominion of a shipmaster whom the chronicle accuses of having withheld their rightful allowance of provisions and treated them with gross indignity. Men began to perish. The chaplain had remained behind at Madeira; Massey, the relation observes, suffered acutely at beholding his soldiers bereft of both bodily sustenance and religious solace in their dying moments.
Their arrival in the Gambia River, where the fort was to be raised, brought no alleviation to their plight. The foul water, so the account runs, aggravated the distempers of men already enfeebled; several expired within days of going ashore. It was upon these surviving remnants that the company’s grand design depended. The prospect of establishing a new settlement gave way to the far more urgent necessity of bread and sheer survival. It was then that the commander of a lighter vessel proposed to Massey an expedient whose alleged necessity was long to shadow his memory.
He urged him to turn pirate rather than watch his men perish of hunger. After reiterated solicitations, Massey consented and went aboard with his soldiers. The victuals were wholesome; the men regained their strength. Ere long, they took part in prizes of considerable value. The very bottom that had afforded the troops sustenance was now conveying them to robbery on the high seas. A mere change of deck had sufficed to alter the men’s fare, and with it the nature of the deeds with which their officer stood irrevocably linked.
The chronicle depicts him as deeply troubled whenever the plunder came to be divided. He rejoiced to see his soldiers fed, yet grieved over the means employed to keep them alive. This contradiction was not merely attributed to him after his capture: the narrative records that he spoke of dreaming repeatedly of a boat carrying him toward the gallows, surrounded by other condemned wretches. In that vision he recounted, the sea offered no deliverance. The vessel bore steadily onward to the place where its passenger would fain never have arrived.
When the ship put in at Jamaica to take in fresh water and provisions, Massey made his escape and surrendered to the governor. His depositions, according to the chronicle, procured the seizure of several piratical bottoms. He thereupon petitioned Sir Nicholas Lawes for leave to return to England, and was granted letters of recommendation. These documents attested to his contrition and utility; they did not constitute an imperial pardon for the felonies that had gone before. The constable who met him upon his landing made that distinction fatal to him.
Admitted to bail soon after, he perceived that his sureties were growing uneasy at their recognizances. He voluntarily surrendered himself into custody to discharge them of their bond. Then followed the arraignment, the verdict of guilty, and the sentence of death. During his confinement, his gravity, piety, and composure impressed those visitors mentioned in the chronicle. Many deemed his fate overly rigorous. Yet this compassion purchased him no reprieve; the author affirms that he had ceased to look for mercy and prepared to meet his end without the snare of false expectations.
On the journey to the scaffold, he pointed toward the African House. He declared that he had received hard measure at their hands, yet wished the company all manner of prosperity and divine blessing in their undertakings. Thus did he join a reproach and a benediction toward the selfsame house. It had procured him his commission; its disastrous expedition had reduced his men to despair; its pecuniary losses were still to figure in his dying speech. The road to the gallows compelled him to pass before that very name to which so much of his misfortune adhered.
The Reverend Mr. Nicholson, minister of St. Sepulchre, attended him in his final hours. Shortly before the execution, Massey read a paper intended for the public. He therein besought prayers for his soul and declared that he heartily forgave those who had borne witness against him. He maintained that he had never committed an act of dishonor, while conceding that he had fallen into an action of the greatest rashness. Above all, he protested that he had never embraced piracy with premeditation, and lamented that he was unable to indemnify the Royal African Company for its losses. He likewise repelled as a malicious slander the rumor that he had ever intended an attempt upon the life of the Duke of Chandos, gratefully recalling the benefits his Grace had bestowed upon him. The declaration mingles self-justification, confession of error, gratitude, and a plea for forgiveness; it must be read as the solemn, public utterance of a condemned man standing upon the threshold of eternity.
Massey requested that this dying speech be committed to the press, so that his last sentiments might be preserved faithfully under his name. He added one final, private injunction: that neither his wife nor his relations should look upon his corpse once enclosed in the coffin. After a few moments spent in prayer, he was executed at Execution Dock on July 26, 1723, being twenty-eight years of age. The chronicle relates that his untimely end was universally lamented. The phrase belongs to the chronicler; the condemned man had subscribed to an accounting far more difficult to reduce to a single sentiment. He acknowledged a reckless transgression, mourned the company’s ruin, and denied all willful piratical intent. His speech was delivered to the printer. The letters he had brought back from Jamaica had availed him nothing.