Chest Dead Man's Gives Up Secret: Schooner Days MLXXVIII (1078)

by C. H. J. Snider

The Jolly Roger—VII

STROMNESS

in the

Orkneys

1952

THERE are no secret springs, no hidden compartments in the sea chest of John Gow the pirate, no matter what these may have been in his life. There is nothing sinister about the appearance of this ancient box here in Stromness. No mark of knifepoint shows, no scratched image of skull-and-crossbones, no Spanish silver hacked to eight pieces by cutlass blade, no circular stains of rum-noggin or winecup, no splotches of women's tears long dried, or of human gore long shed. The chest is less imaginative than a carpenter's tool box or a boardinghouse trunk.

Yet it carries many secrets. Who was the lady who plucked her plighted troth from Gow's dead hand as he dangled in the Grace of Wapping before tarring? Why did he go a-pirating? How many hearts did he break, and whose? Why did Johnny Gow, well born and educated, who wanted to be a great sailor, a gentleman, and a hero of romance, never succeed at anything — not even at being a bad man, or getting himself hanged properly? His sea chest could tell.

SEA CHEST'S ANSWERS

On some of the questions it is coy. To the last, the "why" of his failures, it answers vociferously.

A bulkhead at one end, the right hand end when you go to open the chest, makes a snug fit for the secret of Johnny's undoing and his luckless crew's alcohol.

The compartment so formed is still filled as it was when his fellow scoundrels plundered it. Or almost, so. Three squareshouldered shortnecked bottles of dark brownish-green glass here fit so tightly that they cannot rattle. These bottles were full in 1725. In 1952 they are empty.

Johnny was always emptying them himself, but he was also always refilling them with Hollands gin and Nantz brandy, from a stock he believed inexhaustible.

The first thing he and his fellow cutthroats did after murdering the captain, mate, surgeon and supercargo of their own ship on the coast of Portugal, was to get blind drunk. So prepared, the next item on their agenda was to look for a big ship laden with wine.

They were so blear-eyed with the liquor they found in their own ship's looted cabin stores that they could see nothing but sloops coming from Newfoundland with dried salt cod, and snows steering for Genoa with fish, and American colonials bound for Lisbon with timber. All very dry drinking. They sank three such prizes in disgust after gutting them of guns and gear.

When they came across the French vessel Louis Joseph laden with oil, fruit, nuts and wine from Cadiz on Dec. 27, six weeks after their bloody mutiny they suspended active piratical business and never afterwards drew a sober breath.

FOOLS AND THEIR MONEY

They took one more prize, the Triumvirate of Bristol, and drunkenly sent their accumulated prisoners away in the wineship they had taken, with presents of beeswax, Turkish leather and woolen cloth, from the cargo of their own ship.

They may have been so drunk that they thought these presents would placate the men whom they had robbed of everything but their lives, and that they might put in a good word for them, sometime.

Within two months of this fourth outrage, six men and two boys "in a vessel of 60 tons bearing French arms on her stern put into the Scottish harbor of Stranraer, thirty miles across from Larne in Ireland, and surrendered themselves and the vessel to a magistrate. They were the New England captain Ben Cross and the Glasgow skipper John Somerville and the other victims of the Revenge, and they had much difficulty in assuring the authorities of their identity, and of how they came to be in possession of this battered French vessel with a disordered cargo of oil, figs, beeswax, linseed, almonds, raisins and firewood—the pirate's leavings after gutting the Louis Joseph of her wine casks and ankers of brandy.

They used another sloop as cartel to get rid of their blood-thirsty lieutenant, James Williams, who wanted to cut the throats of the prisoners as they came up from the hold, one by one, and toss them overboard. He had called Gow a coward and had snapped a pistol at him and tried to blow up the ship because he would not fight a French two-decker, one of 32 guns. Gow and the other alcoholics sent him off in irons in the Triumvirate's hold, to be turned over to the first man-of-war met. If that was not asking for a halter, what would be?

THE LAST FOLLY

After holding up the Portugese governor of Madeira for fresh provisions, more wine, and less water. Gow steered northward through the wintry seas to a supposedly safe hideout north of Scotland called Kerston Roads, and put his disguised ship on the mud for cleaning. In Stromness from mid-January he masqueraded as the master and managing owner of a trading ship bound, for Sweden and winterstayed by the storms add perils of the Pentland Firth.

He called his stolen ship the George Galley, and himself Capt. Smith, but made no secret of the fact that he was the young Gow boy who had made good in his profession. He had, he said, called in to give some good bargains to old acquaintances who had no objections to saving customs tolls. Smith was his convenient business name for the "foreign" trade. It was merely the English translation of the Gaelic gow, gobbha or goffe.

He gave nuts and raisins and dried figs and oranges to prospective victims whom he invited to take wine with him aboard ship, and he gave parties ashore to which the wealthiest were invited. However drunk Gow might be, he was always calculating how much his guests would yield in plunder—even to the value of the rings on the fingers of his partners in the cotillion and quadrille. He was a great one with the girls and a greater one with the jug.

DRANK THEMSELVES TO DEATH

When Gow sailed north to plunder his old schoolmate in Eday he got himself into a mess such as only John Barleycorn could contrive. He overstood in the harbor entrance and had to drop anchor quickly, to avoid running aground. He fetched up so close to the beach that he had neither depth, nor width to get under weigh again.

The only way out, unless the wind changed, was to kedge off, sending the big anchor ahead in the longboat. But he had lost his longboat before starting. He tried to steal one from the man he meant to rob, and in the first attempt he lost the only remaining boat and all five of his intended jobbers, helplessly drunk. When the wind shifted and freed him and the rising tide gave a deepwater passage away, neither he nor his crew were sober enough to slip their cable at the proper moment, and in attempting to cut and run they ran the ship ashore hard and fast, opposite the Red Head of Eday on the Grey Head of the Calf, at the top of the tide. Then Gow's alcoholic strategy brought on a bloodless surrender to a force of one fifth his strength—and death in Execution Dock.

If ever crew had cause to curse their captain or captain cause to curse his crew, it was Johnny Gow and his gallows-mates as they lay like roped calves in the barn at Carrick House, in the fetters newly forged by the Eday blacksmith. He worked all night in the forge to make them, twenty pairs.

But Johnny got off scott free. We may even say Scott Free, if Sir Walter Scott hadn't hinted something of this in The Pilot.