In the spring of 1705, the Worcester lay arrested in the harbour of Burntisland. Her commander, Captain Thomas Green, and his men were brought before the High Court of Admiralty of Scotland to answer a charge of piracy. The crime imputed to them had transpired at the farther end of their voyage: an encounter off the Malabar Coast, an armed sloop, and a vessel whose company had reportedly been put to the sword. To substantiate this onslaught, the prosecution brought forward, among others, a ship’s cook’s mate wounded in the arm. He swore he had seen men fall and had been commanded to hold his tongue.
The voyage had commenced from England under the colour of peaceful commerce. The Worcester had sailed to the East Indies bearing a company of five or six-and-thirty hands, according to Charles May, the surgeon. The libel of indictment subsequently described another vessel sighted off the Malabar shores: she flew a red pendant and was said to carry English or Scottish seamen aboard. The prosecution maintained that Green and his crew had first assailed this craft with their armed sloop, and had thereafter plundered and sold both hull and cargo.
The two indictments did not group the prisoners alike. The first joined Thomas Green, captain of the Worcester; John Madder, chief mate; John Reynolds, second mate; Thomas Linsteed, assistant to the supercargo; and men stationed upon the deck, at the great guns, or aloft. The second named, among others, the carpenter Henry Keigle, his mate Samuel Urline, the steward George Haines, the cook Daniel Stringman, and sundry foremastmen. A single voyage had assigned each man to a disparate station; the trial was now to determine whether these stations had likewise governed their share in the bloodshed.
Antonio Ferdinando, the cook’s mate, recounted the encounter from the vantage of the sloop. He declared that before any shot was fired, Green, Loveday the supercargo, and an Indian merchant named Coge Commodo had boarded the strange sail and tarried there some time. Upon their return, a party of about twenty men was assembled aboard the sloop, armed with four large guns and two pedereroes. Madder subsequently joined them. According to Ferdinando, the two vessels engaged in a running chase and exchanged cannonades for two days together. On the third day, the men from the sloop boarded the ship and hacked down her company with broadaxes.
Ferdinando counted some ten or twelve men aboard the taken prize, and scarce any goods. He affirmed that the survivors were slain and cast into the sea, whilst such lading as was discovered was transferred aboard the Worcester. He remembered also a menace: having been wounded in the arm during the affray, he averred that he had heard the captain swear he would kill him should he ever speak of the matter, to White man or Black. This testimony planted Ferdinando in the very thick of the fray; yet he was himself of the ship's company, called upon to swear away the lives of his former shipmates.
His allocation of posts aboard furnished the jury with an initial distribution of guilt. Haines, Bannantine, Bruckley, Wilcocks, Burn, Robertson, Glen, and Taylor were, by his account, aboard the Worcester during the action. Green, Madder, Simpson, Keigle, Kitchen, and Linsteed were aboard the sloop. The court would later recommend Linsteed to mercy, taking him to have been ashore when the prize was carried; the proceedings do not specify when he was supposed to have quitted the sloop.
Charles May had witnessed nothing of the boarding. The surgeon stated he had been put ashore upon the Malabar Coast. Some fortnight later, he heard the discharge of great guns; on the morrow, he beheld the Worcester riding at her customary berth, with another vessel astern of her, a few miles off the shore. His testimony corroborated that an engagement had taken place and that a prize had joined the Worcester, yet it shed no light upon the boarding or the fate of the adversary’s crew.
Another deposition retailed the words of Haines at Burntisland. William Wood, having found Haines in a heavy melancholy, swore the steward had remarked it was a wonder the earth did not swallow them up for the wickedness committed during the Worcester’s last voyage. Wood had thereupon brought up Madder’s uncle, who, by his account, had been boiled in oil for attempting to fire the Dutch ships at Amsterdam. Haines had answered that Madder deserved as much as his uncle, could one but know what he had done during that voyage. Henderson, who was present at this colloquy, confirmed the words. They told heavily, yet remained hearsay uttered after the fact, and no observation of the fight itself.
At the bar, counsel for the defence challenged the competence of several witnesses. They objected that the two Black men produced by the Crown were not Christians, and urged that the deposition of Anne Seaton could not be received because she was a woman. The Crown advocates replied that the witnesses professed themselves Christians, and that the cited exceptions did not hold with the same rigour in crimes committed against the law of nations. Borrow summarises the dispute without recording the detailed arguments of the advocates or the full tenor of the extracts from the books and papers produced.
Extracts from the journals and papers seized aboard were laid before the court. Ferdinando himself did not bear out every charge in the indictment: he asserted that the Worcester had indeed fired upon the stranger, yet had not boarded her. The boarding, he insisted, had been carried out solely from the sloop. Yet men from both decks stood together in the dock.
The assize, fifteen in number, returned their verdict by a plurality of voices. They found there was one clear witness to the piracy, robbery, and murder, together with cumulative and concurrent presumptions as to the piracy and robbery. They further found that Reynolds, the second mate, was ashore during the action. The verdict did not apportion guilt equally: it set apart Reynolds's absence and distinguished direct proof from the circumstantial presumptions that accrued to it.
The court had adjourned its deliberation to the 16th of March, and subsequently deferred sentence until the 21st. It then condemned fourteen men to be hanged upon the sands of Leith, within the flood mark, and ordered the confiscation of their goods, particularly the Worcester, saving such rights as might be established over the cargo. Linsteed was recommended to mercy; Reynolds was acquitted. The executions were appointed for the 4th, 11th, and 18th of April. The sentence divided the convicts into several bands; it did not yet reveal which of them would in truth mount the gallows.
On the 28th of March, the Privy Council granted Haines a reprieve until the 15th of May, having received his confession. In a letter dispatched to the Queen that same day, the Councillors likewise cited the admissions of Linsteed. They now asserted that the victim was Captain Drummond, who had sailed forth in a vessel belonging to the kingdom’s Company of Scotland trading to Africa and the Indies. They prayed that no further pardons or reprieves be granted save upon their own recommendation. In their eyes, the confessions set the seal upon the judgment; for the convicts who had made them, they opened an avenue of escape from the rope.
A letter from the Queen, read before the Council on the 11th of April, set forth the representations made by Green’s friends: Drummond, it was stated, was still alive in the East Indies, and two men of his crew, having returned from the voyage, had made affidavits to that effect. The Queen transmitted these papers to the Councillors, yet left to their discretion whether to carry out the sentence or grant further delays. The dispatch thus bore both a grave doubt as to the alleged murder and the warrant to proceed with the executions.
Green, Madder, and Simpson the gunner were hanged on the 11th of April 1705. The entry in the Dictionary of National Biography imputes their death to the fury of the populace and the terror of an insurrection. The remaining prisoners did not all follow the appointed calendar: on the 26th of April, an act of the Council prorogued the execution of Bruckley from the 15th of May to the 20th of June. He was still living long after the three fatal days which Borrow’s compendium gives as the destruction of nearly the whole crew.
The 11th of April thus bears two conflicting events: the reading of a royal letter announcing that Drummond was alive, and the hanging of three men. The records consulted do not permit us to fix their chronological order during that day. Still less do they suffice to resolve the entire affair. They leave hanging this unanswered question: what vessel had the company of the Worcester truly encountered, and upon whose supposed corpse had the judges pronounced their doom?