Kiddies Saw Captain Kidd: Schooner Days MLXII (1072)

by C. H. J. Snider

The Jolly Roger—2

WAPPING OLD STAIRS

A.D. 1695

AFTER Billingsgate and Whitechapel, Wapping High Street and Sir Thomas More's Road (from the block on Tower Hill?) are enchanted ground, full of perfumes of Arabia and of the 1700s.

The air today is pungent with mingled mace and cinnamon, nutmeg and clove, from the Orient, Oliver's and Colonial wharves. One can imagine sandalwood and frankincense and myrrh on sighting the ancient tower of the Church of St. John standing stark and grim and propped up like a darkened lighthouse.

This church was blitzed at 1:25 some morning, according to the corroding hands over the dead face of the clock dial. Seventeenth, and eighteenth century tombstones in the barb-wired cemetery across the street were tossed about, and lie yet in confusion. But the parish school of St. John's was untouched.

Two lifesized figures of school children of 1695 still stand above the two doorways, labelled separately, "Girls" and "Boys," and pound together with the deep-cut inscription. "St John's School, Founded A.D. 1695. "

The painted stone presents the 17th century school girl garbed after the fashion of a familiar cocoa advertisement of one time a full skirt to her shoe-buckles, a demure bodice, folded kerchief and dustcap.

The corresponding schoolboy of 1695 wears a many-buttoned pointed vest, descending, well below his waist, and covered by a long-skirted coat of blue, to the knees of his knickers. He has white stockings and buckled shoes and a ruffled shirt. His little cocked hat is turned up neatly on three sides. His hair is long and curly. Girl and boy look like lady and gentleman, as the school intended them to be.

YET these children of 1695 were educated by sights more horrible than gangster films or the year-long Battle of the Blitz.

Public hangings were a part, of their curriculum. The first scholars of "St John's School, Founded AD 1695" could not have missed the dying agonies of Captain Kidd, hanged here for piracy in 1701; nor of hundreds of pirates, highway men, thieves and murderers publicly hanged afterwards. They may even have seen old women burned as witches. In Salem they were hanged, in London they were cremated, alive, and in the market place.

Execution Dock, where Kidd and many other pirates suffered, was only 100 yards or so from the school. Its site, hard by Wapping Old Stairs, has long been well obliterated by soap works and a paper mill. Cranes creak now and drums and winches rattle, trucks rumble and motors roar and choke, where malefactor's gasped while children gaped two hundred years ago.

If the little dears of 1695 could stand the sight of a public multiple hanging, perhaps you can shut your eyes and ears and endure the description of a later one vouched for by the author of Robinson Crusoe.

If not now, then next week. The words will be those of Schooner Days, the facts will be given by Daniel Defoe and the Dublin Journal, two hundred and twenty-seven years ago. Defoe's contribution was a thin leather-bound booklet like a school primer. Title page:

An Account of the Conduct
and Proceedings of the Late
JOHN GOW alias SMITH
Captain of the Late Pirates
Executed for Murder
and Piracy Committed
on Board of the GEORGE
GALLY, Afterwards Called
The REVENGE
With a Relation of all the
Horrid Murders
They Committed in Cold Blood
As Also of Their Being Taken
At the Islands of Orkney
And Sent Up Prisoners to
London
1725
Price One Shilling

SIX more of the Revenge's cutthroats hanged that same June afternoon before the tide came in were:

1. Belbin, Gow's blustering blundering four-pistolled boatswain. He said he was forced to join by Gow's persuasion, but he proved the worst ruffian of the gang, bar Williams. The latter was so bad that his fellow pirates kicked him out and turned him over to the Navy.

2. Dan Macaulay of Stornoway, just turned 20.

3. Wm. Melvin, an Edinburgh lad of 17.

4. John Peterson of Copenhagen, 21, a Dane.

5. Peter Rollson, a, Swede, 24; originally the ship's cook.

6. John Winter, another Swede, aged 23.

Two other pirates were reprieved. Michael Moore, an Irish lad of 16, was transported for life. His shipmate, Robb, reprieved at the same time, was so obnoxious in prison that he was hanged as the public nuisance he was, a month and a day after the others, that is, on July 12.

The Revenge's crew totaled 29. Five of these turned King's evidence and so escaped. Fourteen, including a Swedish boy of 10, proved that they had been kidnapped when the Revenge was shanghaiing a new crew in the Orkneys, or had been forced to remain when Gow and his confederates murdered the lawful captain and officers of the ship.

Not one of the pirates was over 30. Gow himself was 28. And he had only been pirating six months when he blundered into his own leg irons. He was of good family, and the original of The Pirate in Scott's novel—though a very different character.

A barker on a Thames excursion boat referred to "the fillum Gryte Expectytions w'ich you 'ave all seen, and the novel by the syme nyme by Dickens." I am not aware of The Pirate, by Sir Walter Scott, Bart, having been "fillumed" but that need not stand in the way of your hearing more about Johnnie Gow in Schooner Days.

WAPPING STEPS TODAY