The Black Ship

by Dudley Pope

  But the effect of the court’s findings on Sir Hyde was remarkable: because the men had not been sentenced to death he became so angry with Rear-Admiral Richard Bligh, the court’s president, that he at once wrote to the Admiralty ‘to request Their Lordships will remove Rear-Admiral Bligh from under my command, or that Their Lordships will allow me to resign from a situation which must be extremely unpleasant, finding myself so ill-supported by the person next to me in command, in keeping up the discipline and subordination of this particular squadron of His Majesty’s Fleet entrusted to me’.

  The verdict of the court martial ‘strikes me with astonishment, from its inconsistencies, three men [the younger Holford was twelve years old at the time of the mutiny] brought to a trial implicated most indubitably in the same crimes, and from the nature of those crimes are accessory [sic] in all the horrid crimes, which were committed on that melancholy occasion, unless proofs had been brought of their endeavours to resist the mutineers, or, that upon their landing, as some did, declare their innocence by a request to be deemed prisoners of war: but opposite to this is the conduct of such criminals when it is proved by the minutes of the court martial that each of the three received twenty-five dollars paid by the Spanish officers, as rewards for their crimes. Still more marked is the criminality of the prisoner Irwin, by his voluntary assistance to fit out the ship as a ship of war against His Majesty, this very act was certainly an act which would have proved fatal to a subject independent of the other atrocious crimes of which he was an accessory.’ He ignored the fact that the Holfords had given themselves up voluntarily.

  It was this type of warped and bigoted reasoning—if that is not too kind a word for the Admiral’s mental processes on this occasion—that throws so much light on Sir Hyde’s personality. No reasonable man—particularly after reading the evidence given at the trial—could condemn the seamen for not resisting when none of the Hermione’s officers, with the exception of Pigot and Foreshaw, put up any physical resistance.

  Both the prosecution witnesses, Brown and Mason, gave specific evidence on oath that neither of the Holfords took part in the mutiny or helped work the ship to La Guaira; Mason added that Holford did not help refit the ship in Puerto Cabello—on the contrary, the Spanish put him in prison for refusing. When Mason was asked by the court, ‘Did any act, word, or deed of the prisoners lead you to believe they took any active part in the mutiny or murders?’, Mason replied ‘No’. Brown declared that necessity compelled the men to work, while Mason, asked by the court ‘Could the prisoner Irwin have got his subsistence by any other means than by working at the fort or on board the Hermione?’ said ‘No, I don’t think so’. As far as the twenty-five dollars payment was concerned, Sir Hyde already had the word of the Captain-General of Caracas that the payment was not a reward but ‘in order that they might clothe themselves and relieve their wants’. The minutes told Sir Hyde quite clearly that the men could not have lived without working.

  Having decided that Holford was guilty—‘implicated most indubitably in the same crimes’—Sir Hyde wrote in the very next paragraph of his letter to the Admiralty that ‘Holford the Elder had made a declaration before a magistrate of the transaction of the mutineers, which from its being corroborated in many strong circumstances by Brown’s evidence and declaration upon a former trial, I look upon it as the truth, as far as man’s memory will allow, of facts being stated after such a lapse of time…’ Holford’s declaration (which Sir Hyde had seen before the trial and was also included in the minutes) was a description of his own activities as well as those of the mutineers, and showed quite clearly that he took no part whatsoever in the mutiny. Sir Hyde regarded this as the truth—yet demanded that his second-in-command be sacked, threatening to resign if he was not, because he did not find Holford guilty, and sentence him to death.

  The crux of Sir Hyde’s argument appears to be contained in his reference to the men being ‘implicated most indubitably in the same crimes’, and therefore accessories ‘in all the horrid crimes…’ In other words the fact they were on board the Hermione at the time of the mutiny made them mutineers.

  However, having told Their Lordships why a man and a boy who had been found innocent should have been found guilty irrespective of the evidence, the Admiral had by no means finished his tirade to the Admiralty: ‘Three of the members of this court [Dobson, Crawley and Loring] had signed the sentence of death passed upon the prisoners Benives, Herd and Hill, who were [previously] executed and gibbeted according to the sentence.… I can [therefore] only attribute the difference of conduct upon this solemn business to the difference of feelings of the two presidents, the one [Captain Bowen at the Benives trial] having all the energy for imposing discipline by the terror of exemplary punishment in this momentary crisis, when it becomes more than ever necessary for officers’ exertions to subdue the licentiousness and bloodthirsty ideas of seamen, and which from the supineness of the president [Rear-Admiral Bligh at Holford’s trial] in the discussion of the court martial he has been head of, would rather be encouraged’.

  It is clear that Sir Hyde was not particularly concerned with justice, and that Bowen stood high in his estimation because he had handed over three men for hanging and gibbeting—-one of them being a man both prosecution witnesses said was blind at the time of the mutiny—while Bligh should be sacked for not producing more material for the gibbets, irrespective of whether the men were guilty or innocent. It perhaps explains why not one question was asked at the Benives trial about the capture of the Spanish cartel ship and its arrival at Port Morant Bay, a thousand miles from her intended destination, and Benives’s blindness was ignored.

  ‘Imposing discipline by terror’—that, perhaps, was the clue to Sir Hyde’s behaviour: he could think of only one way of driving thoughts of mutiny out of his men’s heads, and that was to hang and gibbet. His letter to the Admiralty shows better than anything else why Captain Pigot had never received moderating advice or reproof from the Commander-in-Chief about the cruel way he treated his men, first in the Success and then in the Hermione: he was maintaining discipline in the manner that Sir Hyde understood and approved. It apparently never crossed that worthy Admiral’s mind that good leadership—which included making sure that the men were well treated—was the best, indeed the only, antidote to mutiny: that despite the quality or quantity of the food issued, good captains could and did have contented ships’ companies.

  When Sir Hyde’s wretched letter arrived at the Admiralty on July 11, the First Lord took no action over Rear-Admiral Bligh or over Sir Hyde’s threat to resign. However, he raised the matter of James Irwin’s reprieve with the King, and later, on a turned-up corner of the court’s covering letter—which Sir Hyde had of course forwarded—was written: ‘Acquaint Admiral Bligh that upon laying the sentence and the minutes of the court before the King, His Majesty has been pleased to grant his [Irwin’s] pardon on condition of his being transported to New South Wales for the rest of his life, and that he is to send him to England as a prisoner by the first opportunity’. (When the Adventure arrived at Portsmouth from the West Indies in January 1799, her commanding officer wrote to the Admiralty that he had Irwin on board. He was ordered to put him on board the Porpoise ‘that he may be conveyed to the place of his destination’.)

  The last three Hermiones caught in the year 1798 were Adam Lynham, who had been born in Dublin forty-eight years earlier and had adopted the cumbersome alias of ‘Isaac Hontinberg’, Thomas Charlton, aged twenty-six from Stockton, who had become ‘William Thompson’, and John Coe, from Norfolk, who was one of the afterguard and had not changed his name.

  The trial of Lynham and Charlton was held on board the York at Port Royal, Jamaica, on August 7, when both men were found guilty of murder, deserting with the ship, and handing her over to the enemy. Only the court’s judgment has survived, so it is not known how they were caught. However, the log of Sir Hyde’s flagship records on Friday, August 10, ‘Answered the signal for punishment; at 8 tw
o seamen, lately belonging to His Majesty’s ship Hermione, were hung on board the Albion for mutiny and piracy; and their bodies gibbeted on one of the cays’.

  The men’s bodies were in fact hung in chains from gibbets erected on Gallows Point, in full view of all the warships anchored in Port Royal. They were soon to be joined by some of their former shipmates at this, the last resting place of some of the Caribbean’s most distinguished pirates and murderers.

  The third man, John Coe, had been captured in dramatic circumstances. After leaving La Guaira he had signed on as a member of the crew of the French privateer La Fleur de Mer. When she captured an American brig, the Ring Boston, bound from New York to New Orleans, the privateer’s captain chose Coe to be one of the prize crew to sail the brig down to the French base at Port Dauphine, Santo Domingo.

  A few days later a strange sail was sighted from the brig—and from the intercepting course she was steering, it was obvious to the prize crew that she was interested in the Ring Boston. As she approached Coe soon recognized her as a British frigate—the 32-gun Aquilon, in fact—commanded by Captain Thomas Boys. who soon forced the Ring Boston to heave-to. As the frigate’s boarding party approached, some of the privateersmen, including John Coe, lowered a boat and started to row away in a frantic but hopeless attempt to escape. They were soon caught and lined up under a Marine guard in the Aquilon, and it did not take Captain Boys long to discover that among the prisoners was Coe, one of the notorious Hermiones.

  The Aquilon landed him at Port Royal, where both Sir Hyde Parker and Rear-Admiral Bligh were flying their flags. Because the ‘officer next in command to such Commander-in-chief had to preside at a court martial, Sir Hyde was forced to disregard his dislike for Bligh and order him to try Coe on board the Brunswick on December 8. Among the captains were Man Dobson, who was attending his fifth Hermione trial, and a newcomer to the judicial aspect of the Hermione story, Captain Edward Hamilton, who was soon to provide its exciting finale.

  The court’s verdict was a foregone conclusion: Coe was guilty of deserting to the enemy by running away with the Hermione and delivering her up to the enemy; not guilty of murder; and guilty of ‘being taken in arms against His Majesty’. The third charge would have been enough to condemn him, and two days later Coe’s body was swinging in chains from a gibbet on Gallows Point, beside his two former shipmates.

  Up to the end of 1798, fifteen months after the mutiny, seventeen Hermiones had been caught and court-martialled. Eleven had been hanged, one transported, two had turned King’s Evidence, and three were acquitted. It will have been noticed that the last two courts martial were held at Port Royal, Jamaica, where Sir Hyde had his flagship. The reason for this was that the British had evacuated Santo Domingo in the previous October, signing an agreement with Toussaint l’Ouverture, the leader of the Negroes who had rebelled against the French. At a time when the French held almost the whole of Europe from the Texel in northern Netherlands to Leghorn in the Mediterranean, ‘the folly of mortgaging the flower of the nation’s manhood for sugar islands had at last dawned on the authorities’, in the words of Sir Arthur Bryant. ‘In five years,’ he added, ‘100,000 young Britons had been killed or permanently disabled by the Caribbean climate.’

  So the year 1799 began—a year in which Britain’s chances in the war looked a good deal brighter, thanks to the victory won the previous August by a young admiral some sixty places lower down the flag list than Sir Hyde Parker. The admiral was, of course, Horatio Nelson; the victory was the Battle of the Nile, which had resulted in the capture or destruction of eleven French battleships.

  The year was also to see the capture of ten more Hermiones. The first three were caught together at the beginning of the year serving in an American ship, which they had joined after leaving La Guaira for Jacmel in a Danish schooner. Two of them were also former Successes, Henry Croaker, who had been born at St Anthony-in-Roseland, Cornwall, within sight of St Anthony’s light, the welcoming beacon for Falmouth; and Thomas Ladson, from Chatham, who was then twenty-nine years old. The third man was Peter Stewart, who had been transferred to the Hermione from the Adventure a month before Mr Southcott.

  Admiral Bligh again presided at the trial on board the Brunswick at Port Royal on January 15, and the court found Croaker and Ladson guilty on the charges of mutiny, deserting to the enemy and murder, and sentenced them to be hanged and their bodies gibbeted. In acquitting Stewart they said that it appeared ‘he was incapable from his state of health of assisting or repressing the mutiny’.

  If any one person’s evidence saved Peter Stewart it was that of young Holford. The first question the court had asked the boy after he was sworn in as a witness was: ‘How old are you?’—‘Thirteen years last August’.

  After he had said that he knew the three accused men, Peter Stewart asked him: ‘Do you recollect that at the time of the mutiny that I was not able to go to the head [the rudimentary lavatory in the bows, or head, of the ship] without assistance, and if I was blind at night so as to be deprived of seeing a star?’

  ‘Yes,’ answered the boy, ‘I do recollect you could not go without being led, your not being able to walk, but crawling with your hands and knees along the deck on your backside.’

  Stewart, in his written defence, added that he had been in hospital for three months at La Guaira, and when he recovered tried to give himself up to the Spanish authorities as a prisoner, ‘and was informed they would make no prisoners but would give me a pass to any place I wished to go’.

  Henry Croaker, in his written defence, said, ‘I served three years in the Success with Captain Pigot, also five or six months in the Hermione, and had no reason to dislike him so as to have acted as has been stated…’ Ladson’s defence said more or less the same thing. It is noteworthy that none of the three men could write: their written defences were signed with a cross. Two days after the trial Croaker and Ladson were hanged and their bodies joined those of Lynham, Charlton and Coe on the gibbets at Gallows Point.

  The next Hermione trial took place in England when in March a letter from the Board of Admiralty addressed to ‘Charles Morrice Pole Esquire, Rear-Admiral of the Red and Second Officer in Command of His Majesty’s Ships and Vessels at Portsmouth and Spithead’, ordered him to assemble a court martial on board the Gladiator ‘as soon as conveniently may be,’ to inquire into the loss of the Hermione and try ‘John Williams, John Henison (alias John Slushing), James Parrott [Perrett], John (alias Richard) Redmond [Richard Redman] and Jacob Folliard (alias Jacob Fieldge)…’ (Folliard was Fulga, whose name was so spelled in the Hermione muster but also appears elsewhere as Fidtge, Fuldge and Fieldge.)

  The five men, like Chaucer’s Pilgrims on their way to Canterbury, each had a strange story to tell of how his travels had brought him on board the Gladiator to face his accusers. However one of them had a perfect alibi—but to prove it he had to confess to having committed another crime which could also result in being hanged.

  The man was Fulga. His problem was that he had not been on board the Hermione at the time of the mutiny because he had deserted while she was being careened at the Mole just before sailing for the last time. But the muster book recording that he had deserted had gone with the ship on her last voyage.

  When Fulga had deserted at the Mole he had managed to escape completely. He changed his name to Jacob Folliard, and all went well for eighteen months, until one day he was arrested in Portsmouth as a former Hermione, and accused of mutiny and murder. Would a court believe his story? Would there be a prosecution witness who remembered that he had deserted?

  The second of the accused men was John Williams, a Liverpool man who had served in merchant ships trading out of that port for more than twenty-five years. Then, at the beginning of the war, he was caught by a press-gang and forced to serve in the King’s ships. He was a simple man: a sailor who became caught up in a series of circumstances which were beyond his control or comprehension.

  The story of how he came to be a member
of the Hermione’s crew is a good example of how the Navy was able to use merchant seamen, as a reserve to be drawn on in wartime. As early as 1781 Williams had been a gunner’s mate in the Rumbold, and he served in her for three years until the Master, Mr Thomas Molyneux, bought another merchantman, the Ned. He took Williams with him as Gunner, which was a promotion. Both men were still in the Ned when the war against France began, but it was not until he transferred to the Mercy that Williams’s trouble began.

  The Mercy left Liverpool in the spring of 1797, bound for the West Indies, and arrived at Port Royal in July. Unfortunately for Williams the Hermione had also just reached there, and Pigot was under orders from Sir Hyde to take in ‘such things as you might be in want of’. Pigot was, as usual, in want of seamen, and before leaving sent out press-gangs. When they boarded the Mercy the lieutenant in charge chose John Williams: a merchantman’s gunner was a valuable man, and despite all the pleas of the Mercy’s Master, he took Williams off to the frigate.

  Thus John Williams, a mariner of Liverpool, was to become involved in the mutiny, It will be recalled that Williams was sent to hospital after the ship arrived in La Guaira because he was lame, and that when Price, the Carpenter, had seen him he had cried and declared he would go back to England and give himself up. We left Williams in company with James Duncan signing on in a Danish brigantine bound for Santa Cruz.

  The story of what happened to him after that is told in his petition to Admiral Sir Peter Parker, the Commander-in-Chief at Portsmouth. Since much of the story has proved to be correct when checked against official documents, it seems reasonable to accept the rest as also being true.

  The Danish brigantine had left La Guaira with a Spanish cargo and was bound for a Spanish port, so that she was a legitimate prize for the British privateer which intercepted her later and sent her into Tortola. There Williams was allowed to go on shore, without anyone realizing he was an Hermione. He saw a Liverpool merchantman called the Mona in the harbour and discovered that he knew the Master, who offered to give him a passage back to Liverpool. Williams gladly accepted, and two days later the ship sailed. The lameness which had resulted in him being sent to hospital in La Guaira was still not cured.