by Dudley Pope
Foreshaw decided he could not leave the quarterdeck. He told the Master’s Mate William Turner: ‘Go down and see what’s causing the noise in the cabin.’
‘If you want to know you can go down yourself!’ retorted Turner.
At this, Foreshaw seemed at last to have realized the crew were mutinying and that the ship was in deadly danger. Knowing the nearest assistance lay with the Diligence away to leeward, he turned to Osborn, the man at the wheel, and ordered: ‘Put the helm up: wear the ship and steer for the Diligence!’
‘I’ll see you damned first,’ said Osborn.
Foreshaw promptly knocked him down, and Osborn yelled for help. At that moment a group of men who had previously been on the fo’c’sle—John Jones reckoned there were twelve or fourteen of them—ran aft along the gangway and seized Foreshaw.
Marine McNeil had by then gone back down the companionway to see what was happening in Pigot’s cabin. Looking through the door he saw, faintly lit by the feeble glow of the lantern outside, ‘the Captain on the larboard side, leaning against the gun, with his shirt torn and his body all over blood’.
Thomas Leech, Forester, Patrick Foster (who was Pigot’s coxswain) the Negro Jackson and several other men were standing over on the starboard side, near the Captain’s desk, as if uncertain what to do next. At that moment they heard Osborn’s cries for help coming through the skylight from the deck overhead.
Several of them, led by Nash and Farrel, immediately ran up to the quarterdeck, where they found that the group of mutineers from the fo’c’sle had seized Lt Foreshaw. While some told him his life would be spared others were warning him to prepare for death. Two leading mutineers—John Smith, the captain of the foretop, and James Bell, a quartergunner—then hustled both Foreshaw and Turner aft, saying they had nothing to fear and their lives would be saved. John Brown, still up in the maintop, could clearly hear the alternate threats and reassurances above the shouting and yelling.
But as soon as Nash and Farrel arrived on the quarterdeck the fo’c’sle group asked them what they should do with Foreshaw.
‘Heave the bugger overboard,’ ordered Nash.
Foreshaw, guessing that by now the mutineers controlled the whole ship, begged them to spare him: ‘I have a wife and three children entirely dependent on me,’ he said. John Jones heard him continually pleading with the men ‘to save him until next morning’, but ‘they would not hear what he had to say’.
David Forester walked over to Lt Foreshaw and grabbed him. He was later to admit that if he had not seized Foreshaw then, he thought the Lieutenant’s life would have been saved. But his gesture was the signal for the men to go berserk: they ‘began to chop at him with tomahawks and bayonets,’ recorded Jones. Trying to ward off the blows with his arms, Foreshaw slowly retreated to the ship’s side and when he could go no further climbed up on to the bulwarks, with the men still slashing at him, and then finally vanished into the darkness over the ship’s side.
With the quarterdeck now under their control, Nash, Montell, Forester, Farrel and Poulson went down to the Captain’s cabin again and found that Pigot was still alive, leaning on a couch, his body soaked in blood.
‘You bugger, aren’t you dead yet?’ exclaimed Farrel.
‘No, you villain, I’m not,’ retorted Pigot, and held out his dirk to ward them off. Both Forester and Phillips had already been wounded by that dirk and hesitated, as did the rest of the men.
But at that moment they were joined by William Crawley, who had a tomahawk in his hand and, miscounting the number of his confederates but probably fortified from the rum bucket, cried out: ‘What, four against one and yet afraid? Here goes then!’ He attacked Pigot with his tomahawk, giving courage to Farrel, who slashed the Captain across the head with his cutlass. Pigot collapsed on the deck, then struggled to his feet again, crying for mercy.
‘You’ve showed no mercy yourself and therefore deserve none,’ shouted Montell, lunging with the bayonet fixed on the Marine sentry’s musket. The bayonet ran Pigot through, and he collapsed again, dropping his dirk. Some of the mutineers then picked him up while others started smashing one of the stern windows. In the faint light from the sentry’s lantern Pigot, though barely conscious, recognized the face of one of his former favourites.
‘Oh! David Forester—are you against me too?’
‘Yes I am, you bugger,’ retorted Forester, and stabbed him once again.
By then there was a large enough hole in one of the windows, and the men grasping Pigot’s body—which was slippery with blood—hurled him out into the sea. Some of them later claimed they heard Pigot’s cries as he was left astern. The murderers then quit the cabin.
Forester saw John Jones at that moment—the steward was busy bandaging the wounded Marine’s head—and tapped him on the shoulder. ‘I’ve just launched your bloody master overboard,’ he said. ‘The bugger—I gave him his death wound, I think, before he went out of the window,’ and told him of Pigot’s surprised cry. Jones was to remember that tap on the shoulder for more than five years.
The attack so far had taken little more than five minutes. The fighting in the Captain’s cabin almost overhead had finally roused Southcott, the Master. He scrambled out of his cot and in his nightshirt ran into the gunroom, where he jumped on to the table to climb out through the skylight—it was the quickest way up and one always used in an emergency.
‘Not conceiving mutiny,’ he said later, ‘I was in my shirt without arms.’ He had just grasped one side of the skylight and was heaving himself out when Richard Redman appeared on the deck above him crying out, ‘Here is one of the buggers coming up!
Knock him down!’ With that he lashed Southcott across the face and arm with a handspike—a long wooden bar tipped with an iron ferrule and used for heaving round the gun carriages.
Southcott collapsed, rolling off the table and falling on to the scuttle of the magazine. In the cabins round him and apparently still asleep were Lieutenants Reed and Douglas, the Surgeon, and the Purser. Sgt Plaice was still with the dying Marine officer while in the cabins forward of the gunroom the Gunner, Carpenter, Captain’s Clerk, Boatswain and his wife, were either undisturbed or preferred discretion to valour.
Midshipman Casey, however, soon woke up. ‘On the first alarm,’ he related afterwards, ‘I was in my hammock asleep.… Being entirely unacquainted with what was the matter, and seeing some men near the gunroom, I called out to know what was the noise, or what the matter was, but received no answer.
‘I then got up in my shirt and went up the after hatchway [to the half deck near Pigot’s cabin]… I heard a dreadful noise issue from the cabin door, and I saw several of the crew running from the starboard side towards the cabin door.
‘I again asked what the matter was, when two of the men, by the names of Farrel and Phillips, hearing me call out, inquired who I was. On finding who I was, told me that they were striking for liberty but they themselves wished me no harm and desired I would immediately go down below and stow myself away, or go to my bed, as they supposed some of the men would put me to death.
‘Finding there was no resistance being made, and being unarmed, I went below.… I perceived the outside part of the gunroom surrounded with armed men, one of whom, William Crawley, [was] making use of the following language, “That the first bugger who offered to move or make the smallest resistance they would immediately put them to death”, or words to that purport. Finding it was impossible to make the smallest resistance, I lay down in my hammock,’
By this time there was chaos in the gunroom and Southcott had regained consciousness. ‘After I recovered, I ran to my cabin and got my sword, called for the officers in the gunroom and made all speed.’ He could hear men outside and on the deck above shouting ‘Hughie’s overboard! Hughie’s overboard! Hurrah—the ship is ours!’ Southcott drew his sword from its scabbard and banged it against the cabins on either side—Lt Douglas’s forward and the Purser’s aft—to rouse them.
John Bro
wn, the frightened maintopman, now climbed down the shrouds to the deck, thinking from the cries that the mutiny was over. He was sadly mistaken: hardly had he stepped out of the rigging before he found James Bell, the quartergunner, busy smashing open an arms chest with a tomahawk. As soon as the lid was prised off Henry Croaker, John Elliott and Patrick Foster, all former Successes, seized the muskets and started handing them round to the other men. At that moment Bell looked up and saw Brown.
‘Here’s one of them,’ he said. ‘What shall we do with him?’
Both Leech and Smith, the captain of the foretop, said ‘Let him go,’ so Bell thrust a musket into his hands and told him to guard the after hatch, and not to let anyone come upon deck ‘without knowing them’. Brown later said he ‘felt obliged to take the musket to save my life’.
The second man in addition to Casey who had been near the gunroom door at the beginning of the mutiny was James Duncan, the lame foretopman acting as sentry at the porter cask, which was near the midshipmen’s berth. He later claimed that when the mutineers first rushed down the after hatch they knocked out his lantern and William Crawley swore at him, saying ‘Damn your eyes, I’ll knock your brains out if you don’t get out of my way: I don’t know friend from foe.’
‘For God’s sake what’s the matter?’ asked Duncan.
At that moment John Holford, the Captain’s cook, who had been sleeping on the armourer’s chest a few feet away, woke up. Leaping off the chest he shouted—as if in answer to Duncan’s question—that the ship was on fire; but quickly realizing his mistake he followed the crowd to the gunroom door, where he heard them yelling, ‘Where is he? Where is the bugger?’
The fourth man near the gunroom—the Marine on sentry duty at the door—was apparently unaware of the mutiny: he cried out ‘Mercy’ as the mob ran past Duncan at the porter cask, making for the gunroom door.
The man they were hunting was Lt Archibald Douglas; but roused by Southcott’s sword banging on his cabin, and then hearing the shouts, he had leapt from his cot stark naked, and bolted into the sick Marine officer’s cabin next door.
‘When I first saw him, he was naked,’ said Sgt. Plaice. ‘He said, “Lord, Sergeant, what is the matter?”, then he crept under the officer’s cot.’ Douglas probably thought no one would dare come near McIntosh, who was known to be dying, and whose cot was soiled since he had no control over himself.
He was no sooner hidden under the cot than a crowd of mutineers, headed by Joe Montell, broke into the gunroom. Samuel Reed, the First Lieutenant, whose cabin was on the other side from the door, ran out and leapt on to the table, intending to escape through the skylight; but Montell, who had exchanged McNeil’s musket for a tomahawk, made a wild lunge and cut him across the face. Reed dropped to the deck and was trampled underfoot as a swarm of mutineers surged in behind Montell shouting ‘Where is he? Where is the bugger?… Where’s Douglas—we can’t find Douglas!’ They then shouted out for lanterns to be handed down through the skylight.
Southcott recorded that ‘I returned to my cabin, as I could get no assistance; I hove my sword behind my [sea] chest and lay down in my cot.’
According to Sgt Plaice, ‘At this time there were about twenty or thirty of the mutineers’ in the gun room, and many of them went into Douglas’s cabin ‘with tomahawks and bayonets and different kinds of arms and cut his palampour and his cot down. I heard them say, “The bugger is gone; we cannot find the bugger!”’
The mutineers then left the gunroom to search the ship and, said Plaice, ‘Mr Douglas went into his cabin again and took his bed gown down and brought it into our officer’s cabin and put it on. Then he went under the cot again.’
David Forester, having played his part in murdering Captain Pigot, then heard the men on the deck below shouting for Lt Douglas and—as he later confessed—he seized a lantern and went down to the gunroom, but by the time he arrived the rest of the mutineers had just left. As he reached the door he suddenly heard the excited shrieks of ‘Here he is! Here he is!’ from Lt Douglas’s fourteen-year-old servant, James Allen, who had apparently seen his master slipping back into McIntosh’s cabin after getting his dressing-gown.
The boy’s cries also brought the mutineers running back, a mass of bellowing men, many drunk, others frightened into a frenzy, and all ready to do what anyone they knew or trusted ordered. Forester was just in time to lead them.
‘Come out, you bugger: we’ve found out where you are!’ they cried as they converged on McIntosh’s tiny cabin.
Douglas crawled out from under the cot and at the sight of him the mutineers went berserk. Describing the scene three years later, Sgt Plaice could not keep the horror from his account: ‘I suppose there were twenty tomahawks, axes and boarding pikes jagged into him immediately in the gunroom,’ and within a few moments Douglas had ‘more than twenty wounds’. They took him out ‘and I saw no more of him, except his lifting his right arm and singing out for mercy. They cried out, “You bugger, we will show you mercy”.’
As they dragged Lt Douglas through the door, the boy Allen was lashing out with a tomahawk and screaming, ‘Let me have a chop at him: he shan’t make me jump about in the gunroom anymore’.
At that moment, however, Lt Douglas managed to break free and, streaming blood, his dressing-gown slashed to ribbons, he ran forward past where Midshipman Casey was lying in his hammock. ‘On [his] getting abreast of the midshipmen’s berth I saw him seized by several of the crew,’ Casey related afterwards. ‘Those men fell on him with different weapons and left him, apparently dead, on the gratings of the after hold’. Casey did not see the final blows struck—‘I was so shocked that I turned my head away’.
David Forester then found the other person the mutineers were seeking, Midshipman Smith, who had caused John Fletcher to be flogged a few days earlier. Forester seized the boy, who wriggled out of his grasp and ran. Forester promptly lashed out with Pigot’s sword and managed to hit him.
Several mutineers then chased the screaming boy, raining blows on his back and head with their tomahawks and bayonets until he collapsed near where Douglas had been left. Casey, having watched this, then heard the men on the maindeck above shouting down the hatchways ‘Hand the buggers up! Launch the buggers!’
The men who had been chopping at Smith then seized Lt Douglas—who groaned, giving Casey the first indication that he was still alive—and hauled him to a hatchway ladder. One of them climbed the ladder, dragging Douglas upside down by his heels, while others pushed from below. At that moment William Crawley, the Irishman who came from Kinsale, the town where Casey had been born, arrived with a tomahawk in his hand. ‘Where’s the bugger? Let me have another stroke at him before he goes!’ With that he smashed the pointed edge of the tomahawk down on Douglas’s head with such force that the ash handle broke.
Steward Jones was also a horrified onlooker, standing in the shadows only a few feet away. He saw Forester run up and ‘chop at him several times with a cutlass or tomahawk. There were ten or a dozen round him, chopping at him’. When Forester had not enough room to chop, said Jones, ‘he stabbed him; I saw the blood running down the Lieutenant’s thighs. His shirt was stained also with blood.’
Midshipman Smith was then dragged up the ladder after Douglas—‘as though they had been two dogs,’ said Casey, and the mutineers were at the same time ‘making use of the most horrid language’. He added that ‘on their getting under the halfdeck I again heard a great noise, saying “Cut the buggers!… Launch the buggers!… Heave the buggers overboard!”’
On the halfdeck outside the Captain’s cabin John Holford was a terrified spectator of what followed. Lt Douglas, an almost completely crimson figure and by then bearing little resemblance to a human being, was dragged to a port by the excited group of men and pitched out past the muzzle of the gun and into the sea.
David Forester and John Fletcher then seized Midshipman Smith. For Fletcher, who came from Whitby and had been in the Hermione for nearly five years, this was th
e moment of revenge for his recent flogging. Together they flung the boy out of the port.
There was a short pause while the mutineers collected their wits and lit some more lanterns. No leader had emerged to give orders and co-ordinate their murderous work—indeed, Osborn was still at the wheel and steering the frigate in chase of the privateer because no one had told him to do anything else. There were dozens of men still utterly bewildered and uncertain what to do: men like John Holford, who was still standing under the halfdeck near Captain Pigot’s cabin with some mutineers nearby.
One of them glanced round and suddenly saw something moving near the ship’s side, which in the darkness, looked very much like a ghost.
‘Who is that coming in that port?’ he called excitedly, pointing with his cutlass.
Another of the mutineers took a pace or two towards the shape. ‘Why it’s Foreshaw!’
The prospect of a conversation with an officer supposed to be dead did not deter a third man. ‘Let him come in and hear what he has to say for himself.’
And indeed it was the Third Lieutenant: ‘When I saw Mr Foreshaw come in at the port, the blood was streaming down his face from his head,’ said Holford.
Faint from loss of blood and shock, Foreshaw had not plunged into the sea when the mutineers on the quarterdeck had forced him over the side: instead he had fallen into the mizen chains—the broad and thick planks projecting horizontally from the ship’s side abreast and abaft each mast, to which the shrouds were fitted. They had provided Foreshaw with a resting place. Having recovered his strength, he had then climbed down on to the barrel of a gun and scrambled in through a port.
As soon as he saw the men running towards him, shouting threats, he clapped his hands together and cried, ‘Good God, men, what have I done to harm you, that I should be treated in this manner?’
Several of them, impressed by this appeal, answered that they would try to save his life. Meanwhile the news that Foreshaw was still alive travelled swiftly and Thomas Nash and John Farrel soon came running down from the quarterdeck, Nash grabbing Foreshaw by his right wrist.
