At Shell-haven Creek, fishermen were accustomed to hauling their nets through a reach of the river that crossed the lands of Captain William Moir. The proprietor, who bore these passages with ill grace, was determined to enforce his boundaries. On March 24, 1830, Malcolm, a fisherman of Hammersmith, took to the water with his apprentice and another fisherman named Duke. Having arrived at the creek, they cast their nets. Moir soon appeared, accompanied by his servant Raven, carrying a knife in his hand, and ordered them to withdraw them.
Moir was born in Scotland in 1794. At nineteen, he entered the British Army and served for seventeen years across three regiments, in France, Spain, and America. Upon his return to England, he resided near London with his family; then, weary of an existence he deemed inactive, he turned his mind to husbandry. In the autumn of 1829, he entered into possession of Shell-haven Farm, near Stanford-le-Hope, an estate of some four hundred acres. Pelham presents this alteration of life as that of a gentleman of good birth turned country landholder; the selfsame estate was also traversed by fishermen drawn by the shoals of the creek.
In 1816, during his stay in America, he had married a young woman; upon his return, they established themselves near London. When the household removed to Shell-haven, three children were aged twelve, ten, and seven years, according to Pelham. At the hour of execution, the captain was thirty-six years of age and his wife twenty-eight. The account delivers these ages at the close of a notice that had lingered first upon his rank and connections; they assume a different cast when his wife visits him in prison, and subsequently receives his body after the sentence.
Malcolm protested and withdrew with reluctance. He was crossing the meadows to reach the dwelling of a man named Baker when the captain called him back, enjoining him to skirt the property by way of the sea-wall. The fisherman answered with fresh abuse and pulled off his coat, as though offering to fight; he then walked away. This altercation did not culminate in the affray the gesture seemed to herald. Moir returned home; Malcolm and his companions made their way to Baker’s cottage.
The halt lasted no more than an hour and a half. The fishermen set out again toward the creek, where their craft had remained, recrossing Moir’s pastures. Malcolm walked some seven yards ahead of the others. Upon his shoulder he bore a boat-hook, from which swung a basket of potatoes procured from Davis. The notice, which records these details with precision, does not distinctly report his reply when the captain and Raven rode toward the party once more.
They arrived on horseback, at a gallop. Moir reminded the fishermen that he had already forbidden them passage across his lands. Malcolm answered, but the witnesses could not hear his words distinctly enough to record them. Thereupon the captain drew his pistol and fired. Malcolm cried out that his arm was broken and let the hook fall. Moir threatened the two remaining men that he would serve them in like manner if they did not withdraw upon the instant.
The wounded man was conveyed to Davis’s cottage. At Moir’s request, Mr. Dodd, a surgeon, came to attend him; his condition was so perilous that a removal appeared necessary. Pelham relates that Malcolm subsequently developed what he terms “lock-jaw,” and expired two or three days after the shot. He provides no independent medical diagnosis. The man whom the compilation sketches in a few brief lines had been known for years upon that shore; he left a wife and six children.
On the very day of the shooting, Moir spoke of his conduct to the surgeon. He justified it by declaring that his land was his castle, and that he would act in the same manner on the morrow, under identical circumstances. This conversation, as reported by Pelham, does not transform the condemned man’s words into a formal deposition, yet it reveals how he accounted for the discharge of his weapon following the fatal wound.
The coroner’s inquest returned a verdict of wilful murder. Moir was committed to Chelmsford gaol to stand trial at the forthcoming assizes. The hearing was held on Friday, July 30, before Lord Tenterden. Moir pleaded the absence of all malice toward Malcolm, explaining that he constantly kept loaded pistols in his house because he believed his neighborhood to be filled with dangerous persons. Pelham records that the jury returned a verdict of guilty upon the capital charge; the sentence of death was pronounced in the ordinary form.
Following the conviction, his relations addressed a petition for mercy to the government, founded upon the possibility that he might have acted under an aberration of intellect. The answer reported by Pelham was that this question ought to have been examined during the trial, where sufficient evidence might have rebutted his responsibility. The compiler adds that Moir had declined to urge mitigating circumstances before the jury, fearing they might lead to perpetual imprisonment. This explanation belongs to the retrospective narrative; the appeal proved unavailing, and the sentence was sustained.
Within the prison, Moir attended divine service on Sunday, and subsequently received the visits of his wife, his mother, his sister, and a few friends, of whom he took his leave. On Monday morning, toward seven o’clock, he received the sacrament and declared himself resigned. He repeated that he had borne no animosity against Malcolm and had not intended to kill him. At nine o’clock, the drop fell and he died. His body was delivered to the surgeons for the prescribed dissection, and, following the procedures required for the execution of the sentence, returned to his widow for interment.
The notice specifies that Moir was thirty-six years of age at his execution on August 2, 1830, that he stood over six feet in height, and that he was allied to several distinguished families. The final paragraph returns briefly to Malcolm: he was of the same age as the captain, and had frequented the place for several years. The chapter, published in 1891, sixty-one years after the events, accords far greater space to the condemned man and his connections than to the slain fisherman. Yet its narrative preserves the essential lineaments of the scene: an initial expulsion, the return toward the skiff, and the shot fired during a second passage.