Yo! Ho! Ho! And a Dead Man's Chest: Schooner Days MLXXVII (1077)

by C. H. J. Snider

The Jolly Roger—VI

STROMNESS

Orkney, 1952

HERE, in this little stone-built town with the Ontario namesake near Dunnville on the Grand River, is the sea-chest of Captain John Gow, the pirate, and it is worth the effort of getting to the Orkneys to see it.

Born in Wick in Caithness, across the swirling Pentland Firth in 1697, Gow was hanged at Wapping in 1725, in the 28th year of his age, and the ninth month of his piratical life. As four of those months were spent in shackles in the Marshalsea and Old Bailey in London his active criminal career was not lengthy. The 18th century was leisurely, but its justice was sharp.

Gow had gone to school here in Stromness, he had learned the mariner's calling here, and here he practiced his later profession of piracy for the last month of the four only which he put in at that trade.

This sea chest he lost many miles north of Stromness when James Fea the younger, of Clestrain, an old schoolmate whom Gow had set out to plunder, cleverly laid him and his whole crew by the heels.

The chest, an innocent-looking 2-by-4 box of unscarred oak, is not unlike Gow himself—smooth, pretentious, empty.

SEE what a clever lock is here — two strong metal arms, securely clamped by this arrow-headed lever when the lock is turned. It would take great adroitness to open that chest without the key. But what thief would wait for the key to open a wooden box which could be split with even a marline spike?

Johnny Gow's crew had no difficulty in dividing up the £1,000 he had aboard the ominously renamed "Revenge." When they thought he had "split" on them they did not have to split his chest to split his treasure, solid or liquid. He must have, left the key in the lock when he walked into the booby-trap. Loaded with liquor and lucre-about 15 guineas a man—the crew walked into the same trap after him within twenty-four hours.

GOW'S debacle began when about a third of his men ran away with his longboat, after the plundering of a gentleman's house near Stromness.

That was a dirty business, James Belbin, the boatswain, was sent with a boat's crew to sack Robert Honeyman of Graemsay's house on Ophir, on the east side of the bay. Honeyman was from home. His wife and daughter escaped with a considerable quantity of gold and the highly important title deeds, although the younger woman had to jump from the upper window and broke an ankle. The enraged pirates set the place on fire after ransacking it of its plate and all articles of value, and carried off three of the maids. They forced an old piper to come along with them and play madly as they retreated to the beach, to drown the screams of the terrified women. One they left dead on the shore. The two others were carried aboard the Revenge. According to one story they were treated honorably there by Gow's orders, and set ashore the next day with presents, before the pirate ship sailed to rob the house of another gentleman far from Stromness, in the island of Eday.

It was Gow's foolish fancy fo play the Lord Bountiful towards his victims, rewarding or consoling them with presents from his plunder. The captains whom he sent adrift in cartels after scuttling their ships received parting gifts of stolen cargo.

Even the drunkest pirates could conceive that having turned to house-breaking they would have to up anchor. There were only twenty-nine men in Gow's ship, and half of these were sailors captured at sea or shanghaied from the shore. Gow had even trepanned his own sister's son, Willy Clouston, a lad of 14, whose father took him aboard the pirate, thinking the "George Galley" was an innocent merchantman. Frightened at the further turn Gow's criminal career had taken, half a dozen of the reluctant pirates slipped overboard in the black February night, climbed into the big longboat moored astern, and vanished into the darkness.

THIS longboat was the most important item in Gow's piratical equipment. It was large enough to be armed with small cannon or carry a boarding party or transfer heavy loot, or tow the ship when endangered. The only other boat he had was too small for more than a half-ton load, and even that required smooth water. It was no use at sea.

Any sensible captain would have procured another another longboat before proceeding further, even if he had to buy one or build one. But Gow, improvidently, sailed north for the Orkney island of Eday, where his former schoolmate, now a well-lined proprietor, had Erskine House, the manor house of Carrick harbor and 600 sheep at pasture, and a herring fishery.

Beating into the Calf Sound here with cannon grinning from the Revenge's ports and mot a sober man aboard, Gow got her aground. A trifling mishap, easily remedied by getting the biggest anchor out ahead and heaving her off, when the tide rose.

But his only effective boat was gone, and all he had left was a yawl or cockboat which could carry five men at most. The anchor would sink it. The weather was mid-February and the Northern Sea was too cold to swim in. Gow knew the man he was going to rob had a large longboat for his fishery, so he sent five of his bully boys ashore, bristling with pistols, in the cockleshell. He gave them a smooth letter, requesting his old schoolmate's assistance. But they understood well that they were not to return without his longboat first and every guinea he had later.

JAMES FEA had only live farm hands on his land, and his wife was sick. But he managed to trap these first five ruffians, and to send out for help. He made them drunk as Barney's sow and trussed them up tight as mummies. He cautiously opened a correspondence with his piratical schoolmate, who was now very literally "stranded." Gow was inveigled into an interview on the beach—from which he emerged a prisoner. His leaderless crew, half of them kidnapped or forced men and boys, surrendered with equal tameness.

That is why, to this day, the Revenge's black iron ship's bell which once struck the half-hours on her forecastle head, adorns the entrance to Erskine House in Eday. It is suspended over the gateway, from an arch across the two stone pillars. And that is why Gow's sea-chest is a public museum-piece in Stromness.

SEA CHEST of Captain John Gow, pirate, hanged at Wapping, 1725, now at Stromness in the Orkneys. It was located by Mr, James Tait, a cabinet maker in Kirkwall and was presented to the Stromness museum.