Tom Cringle's Log

by Michael Scott

  The indictment had been read before I came in, and, as already mentioned, the lawyer was proceeding with his accusatory speech, and, as it appeared to me, the young Spaniard had some difficulty in understanding the interpreter’s explanation. Whenever he saw me, he exclaimed, “Ah! aqui viene, el Señor Teniente—ahora sabremos—ahora, ahora;” and he beckoned to me to draw near. I did so.

  “I beg pardon, Mr Cringle,” he said in Spanish, with the ease and grace of a nobleman—”but I believe the interpreter to be incapable, and I am certain that what I say is not fittingly explained to the judges; neither do I believe he can give me a sound notion of what the advocate (avocado) is alleging against us. May I entreat you to solicit the bench for permission to take his place? I know you will expect no apology for the trouble from a man in my situation.”

  This unexpected address in open court took me fairly aback, and I stopped short while in the act of passing the open space in front of the dock, which was kept clear by six marines in white jackets, whose muskets, fixed bayonets, and uniform caps, seemed out of place to my mind in a criminal court. The lawyer suddenly suspended his harangue, while the judges fixed their eyes on me, and so did the audience, confound them! To be the focus of so many eyes was trying to my modesty; for, although I had mixed a little in the world, and was not altogether unacquainted with bettermost society, still, below any little manner that I had acquired, there was, and always will be, an under-stratum of bash-fulness, or sheepishness, or mauvaise honte, call it which you will; and the torture, the breaking on the wheel, with which a man of that temperament perceives the eyes of a whole court-house, for instance, attracted to him, none but a bashful man can understand. At length I summoned courage to speak.

  “May it please your honours, this poor fellow, on his own behalf, and on the part of his fellow-prisoners, complains of the incapacity of the sworn interpreter, and requests that I may be made the channel of communication in his stead.”

  This was a tremendous effort, and once more the whole blood of my body rushed to my cheeks and forehead, and I “sweat extremely.” The judges, he of the black robe and those of the epaulet, communed together.

  “Have you any objection to be sworn, Mr Cringle?”

  “None in the least, provided the court considers me competent, and the accused are willing to trust to me.”

  “Si, si!” exclaimed the young Spaniard, as if comprehending what was going on—”Somos contentos—todos, todos!” and he looked round, like a prince, on his fellow-culprits. A low murmuring, “Si, si—contento, contento!” passed amongst the group.

  “The accused, please your honours, are willing to trust to my correctness.”

  “Pray, Mr Cringle, don’t make yourself the advocate of these men—mind that,” said the lawyer sans wig.

  “I don’t intend it, sir,” I said, slightly stung; “but if you had suffered what I have done at their hands, peradventure such a caution to you would have been unnecessary.”

  The sarcasm told, I was glad to see: but remembering where I was, I hauled out of action with the man of words, simply giving the last shot—”I am sure no English gentleman would willingly throw any difficulty in the way of the poor fellows being made aware of what is given in evidence against them, bad as they may be.”

  He was about rejoining, for a lawyer would as soon let you have the last word as a sweep or a baker the wall, when the officer of court approached and swore me in, and the trial proceeded.

  The whole party were proved by fifty witnesses to have been taken in arms on board of the schooners in the cove; and further, it was proved that no commission or authority to cruise whatsoever was found on board any of them, a strong proof that they were pirates.

  “Que dice, que dice?” inquired the young Spaniard already mentioned.

  I said that the court seemed to infer, and were pressing it on the jury, that the absence of any commission or letter-of-marque from a superior officer, or from any of the Spanish authorities, was strong evidence that they were marauders—in fact, pirates.

  “Ah!” he exclaimed; “gracias, gracias!” Then, with an agitated hand, he drew from his bosom a parchment, folded like the manifest of a merchant-ship, and at the same moment the gruff fierce-looking elderly man did the same, with another similar instrument from his own breast.

  “Here, here are the commissions—here are authorities from the Captain-General of Cuba. Read them.”

  I looked over them; they were regular, to all appearance; at least, as there were no autographs in court of the Spanish Viceroy, or any of his officers, whose signatures, either real or forged, were affixed to the instruments, with which to compare them, there was a great chance, I conjectured, so far as I saw, that they would be acquitted: and in this case we, his majesty’s officers, would have been converted into the transgressing party; for if it were established that the vessels taken were bona fide guarda costas, we should be placed in an awkward predicament, in having captured them by force of arms, not to take into account the having violated the sanctity of a friendly port.

  But I could see that this unexpected production of regular papers by their officers had surprised the pirates themselves as much as it had done me— whether it was a heinous offence of mine or not to conceal this impression from the court (there is some dispute about the matter to this hour between me and my conscience), I cannot tell; but I was determined to stick scrupulously to the temporary duties of my office, without stating what I suspected, or even translating some sudden expressions overheard by me, that would have shaken the credibility of the documents.

  “Comissiones, comissiones!” for instance, was murmured by a weatherbeat-en Spaniard, with a fine bald head, from which two small tufts of grey hair stood out above his ears, and with a superb Moorish face—”Comissiones es decir patentes—Si hay comissiones, el Diablo mismo las ha hecho!”

  The court was apparently nonplussed—not so the wigless man of law. His pea-green visage assumed a more ghastly hue, and the expression of his eyes became absolutely blasting. He looked altogether like a cat sure of her mouse, but willing to let it play in fancied joy of escaping, as he said softly to the Jew crier, who was perched in a high chair above the heads of the people, like an ugly corbie in its dirty nest—”Crier, call Job Rumbletithump, mate of the Porpoise.”

  “Job Rumbletithump, come into court!”

  “Here,” quoth Job, as a stout, bluff, honest-looking sailor rolled into the witness-box.

  “Now, clerk of the crown, please to swear in the mate of the Porpoise.” It was done. “Now, my man, you were taken going through the Caicos Passage in the Porpoise by pirates in August last—were you not?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Turn your face to the jury, and speak up, sir. Do you see any of the honest men who made free with you in that dock, sir? Look at them, sir.”

  The mate walked up to the dock, stopped, and fixed his eyes intently on the young Spaniard. I stared breathlessly at him also. He grows pale as death—his lip quivers—the large drops of sweat once more burst from his brow. I grew sick, sick.

  “Yes, your honour,” said the mate.

  “Yes—ah!” said the devil’s limb, chuckling—”we are getting on the trail at last. Can you swear to more than one?”

  “Yes, your honour.”

  “Yes!” again responded the sans wig. “How many?”

  The man counted them off. “Fifteen, sir. That young fellow there is the man who cut Captain Spurtel’s throat, after violating his wife before his eyes.”

  “God forgive me, is it possible?” gasped Thomas Cringle.

  “There’s a monster in human form for you, gentlemen,” continued the devil’s limb. “Go on, Mr Rumbletithump.”

  “That other man next him hung me up by the heels, and seared me on the bare—.” Here honest Job had just time to divert the current of his speech into a loud “whew.”

  “Spared you on the whew!” quoth the facetious lawyer, determined to have his jest, even in th
e face of forty-three of his fellow-creatures trembling on the brink of eternity. “Explain, sir; tell the court where you were seared, and how you were seared, and all about your being seared.”

  Job twisted and lolloped about, as if he was looking out for some opening to bolt through; but all egress was shut up.

  “Why, please your honour,” the eloquent blood mantling in his honest sunburnt cheeks; while from my heart I pitied the poor fellow, for he was absolutely broiling in his bashfulness—”He seared me on—on—why, please your honour, he seared me on—with a redhot iron!”

  “Why, I guessed as much, if he seared you at all; but where did he sear you? Come now,” coaxingly, “tell the court where and how he applied the actual cautery.”

  Job, being thus driven to his wit’s end, turned and stood at bay. “Now I will tell you, your honour, if you will but sit down for a moment, and answer me one question.”

  “To be sure, sir; why, Job, you brighten on us. There, I am down—now for your question.”

  “Now, sir,” quoth Rumbletithump, imitating his tormentor’s manner much more cleverly than I expected, “what part of your honour’s body touches your chair?”

  “How, sir!” said the man of words—”how dare you, sir, take such a liberty, sir?” while a murmuring laugh hummed through the court.

  “Now, sir, since you won’t answer me, sir,” said Job, elevated by his victory, while his hoarse voice roughened into a loud growl, “I will answer myself. I was seared, sir, where—”

  “Silence!” quoth the crier, at this instant drowning the mate’s voice, so that I could not catch the words he used.

  “And there you have it, sir.—Put me in jail, if you like, sir.”

  The murmur was bursting out into a guffaw, when the judge interfered. But there was no longer any attempt at ill-timed jesting on the part of the bar, which was but bad taste at the best on so solemn an occasion.

  Job continued: “I was burnt into the very muscle, until I told where the gold was stowed away.”

  “Aha!” screamed the lawyer, forgetting his recent discomfiture in the gladness of his success. “And all the rest were abetting, eh?”

  “The rest of the fifteen were, sir.”

  But the prosecutor, a glutton in his way, had thought he had bagged the whole forty-three. And so he ultimately did before the evening closed in, as most of the others were identified by other witnesses; and when they could not actually be sworn to, the piracies were brought home to them by circumstantial evidence; such, for instance, as having been captured on board of the craft we had taken, which again were identified as the very vessels which had plundered the merchantmen and murdered several of their crews, so that by six o’clock the jury had returned a verdict of Guilty—and I believe there never was a juster—against the whole of them. The finding, and sentence of death following thereupon, seemed not to create any strong effect upon the prisoners. They had all seen how the trial was going; and, long before this, the bitterness of death seemed to be past.

  I could hear one of our boat’s crew, who was standing behind me, say to his neighbour, “Why, Jem, surely he is in joke. Why; he don’t mean to condemn them to be hanged seriously, without his wig, eh?”

  Immediately after the judgment was pronounced, which, both as to import, and literally, I had translated to them, Captain Transom, who was sitting on the bench beside his brother officers, nodded to me, “I say, Mr Cringle, tell the coxswain to call Pearl, if you please.”

  I passed the word to one of the Firebrand’s marines, who was on duty, who again repeated the order to a seaman who was standing at the door.

  “I say, Moses, call the clergyman.”

  Now this Pearl was no other than the seaman who pulled the stroke-oar in the gig; a very handsome negro, and the man who afterwards forked Whiffle out of the water—tall, powerful, and muscular, and altogether one of the best men in the ship. The rest of the boat’s crew, from his complexion, had fastened the sobriquet of the clergyman on him.

  “Call the clergyman.”

  The superseded interpreter, who was standing near, seeing I took no notice, immediately traduced this literally to the unhappy men. A murmur arose amongst them.

  “Que—el padre ya! Somos en Capilla, entonces—poco tiempo, poco tiempo!”

  They had thought that, the clergyman having been sent for, the sentence was immediately to be executed, but I undeceived them; and in ten minutes after they were condemned, they were marched of, under a strong escort of foot, to the jail.

  I must make a long story short. Two days afterwards I was ordered with the launch to Kingston, early in the morning, to receive twenty-five of the pirates who had been ordered for execution that morning at Gallows Point. It was little past four in the morning when we arrived at the Wherry Wharf, where they were already clustered, with their hands pinioned behind their backs, silent and sad, but all of them calm, and evincing no unmanly fear of death.

  I don’t know if other people have noticed it, but this was one of several instances where I have seen foreigners—Frenchmen, Italians, and Spaniards, for instance—meet death, inevitable death, with greater firmness than British soldiers or sailors. Let me explain. In the field, or grappling in mortal combat on the blood-slippery quarterdeck of an enemy’s vessel, a British soldier or sailor is the bravest of the brave. No soldier or sailor of any other country, saving and excepting those damned Yankees, can stand against them—they would be utterly overpowered—their hearts would fail them; they would either be cut down, thrust through, or they would turn and flee. Yet those same men who have turned and fled will meet death—but it must be as I said, inevitable, unavoidable death—not only more firmly than their conquerors would do in their circumstances, but with an intrepidity—oh, do not call it indifference!—altogether astonishing. Be it their religion, or their physical conformation, or what it may, all I have to do with is the fact, which I record as undeniable. Out of five-and-twenty individuals, in the present instance, not a sigh was heard, nor a moan, nor a querulous word. They stepped lightly into the boats, and seated themselves in silence. When told by the seamen to make room, or to shift, so as not to be in the way of the oars, they did so with alacrity, and almost with an air of civility, although they knew that within half an hour their earthly career must close for ever.

  The young Spaniard who had stood forward so conspicuously on the trial was in my boat; in stepping in he accidentally trode on my foot in passing forward; he turned and apologised, with much natural politeness—”he hoped he had not hurt me?”

  I answered kindly, I presume; who could have done so harshly? This emboldened him apparently, for he stopped, and asked leave to sit by me. I consented, while an incomprehensible feeling crept over me; and when once I had time to recollect myself, I shrunk from him, as a blood-stained brute, with whom even in his extremity it was unfitting for me to hold any intercourse. When he noticed my repugnance to remain near him, he addressed me hastily, as if afraid that I would destroy the opportunity he seemed to desire.

  “God did not always leave me the slave of my passions,” he said, in a low, deep, most musical voice. “The day has been when I would have shrunk as you do—but time presses. You have a mother?” said he. I assented. “And an only sister?” As it happened, he was right here too. “And—and”—here he hesitated, and his voice shook and trembled with the most intense and heart-crushing emotion—”y una mas cara que ambas?”—Mary, you can tell whether in this he did not also speak truth. I acknowledged there was another being more dear to me than either. “Then,” said he, “take this chain from my neck, and the crucifix, and a small miniature from my bosom; but not yet—not till I leave the boat. You will find an address affixed to the string of the latter. Your course of service may lead you to St Jago—if not, a brother officer may.” His voice became inaudible; his hot scalding tears dropped fast on my hand, and the ravisher, the murderer, the pirate, wept as an innocent and helpless infant. “You will deliver it. Promise a dying man�
��promise a great sinner.” But it was momentary—he quelled the passion with a fierce and savage energy, as he said sternly, “Promise! promise!” I did so, and I fulfilled it.

  The day broke. I took the jewels and miniature from his neck, as he led the way, with the firm step of a hero, in ascending the long gibbet. The halters were adjusted, when he stepped towards the side I was on, as far as the rope would let him, “Dexa me verla—dexa me verla, una vez mas!” I held up the miniature. He looked—he glared intensely at it. “Adios, Maria, seas feliz mi querida—feliz—feliz—Maria—adios—adios—Maria—Mar—”

  The rope severed thy name from his lips, sweet girl; but not until it also severed his soul from his body, and sent him to his tremendous account—young in years, but old in wickedness—to answer at that tribunal where we must all appear, to the God who made him, and whose gifts He had so fearfully abused, for thy broken heart and early death, amongst the other scarlet atrocities of his short but ill-spent life.

  The signal had been given—the lumbering flap of the long drop was heard, and five-and-twenty human beings were wavering in the sea-breeze in the agonies of death! The other eighteen suffered on the same spot the week following; and for long after, this fearful and bloody example struck terror into the Cuba fishermen.

  “Strange now, that the majority—ahem—of my beauties and favourites through life have been called Mary. There is my own Mary—un peu passée— but deil mean her, for half-a-dozen lit——” “Now, Tom Cringle, don’t bother with your sentimentality, but get along—do.” “Well, I will get along—but have patience, you Hottentot Venus. So once more we make sail.”

  Next Morning, soon after gun-fire, I landed at the Wherry Wharf in Port Royal. It was barely daylight, but, to my surprise, I found my friend Peregrine Whiffle seated on a Spanish chair, close to the edge of the wharf, smoking a cigar. This piece of furniture is an arm-chair, strongly framed with hard wood, over which, back and bottom, a tanned hide is stretched, which, in a hot climate, forms a most luxurious seat—the back tumbling out at an angle of 45 degrees, while the skin yields to every movement, and does not harbour a nest of biting ants, or a litter of scorpions, or any other of the customary occupants of a cushion that has been in Jamaica for a year.