Pirate Chest's Link With Canada: Schooner Days MLXXX (1080)

by C. H. J. Snider

The Jolly Roger—IX

PIRATE GOW'S SEA CHEST has a relative here in Toronto.

Some time ago Lieut.-Col. James Murray Muir, of Toronto, at one time O.C. 12th York Rangers, exploring long-stored effects of his grandmother, came upon a black walnut box lined with old newspapers—one of the earliest forms of mothproofing. In or with the box were some dishes of antique Adderley-raised-blue stoneware, and a sampler, worked on linen, in wood which, thanks to the mothproofing, was quite legible.

The sampler had the date "1824" and the usual assortment of letters and figures which little girls used to stitch—and the whole alphabet, and numbers up to 10, and these initials: "M.F.," "J.F.," "J.F." repeated, and "E.F."

The newspapers were indeed old, older than the sampler, for their faded brown print described the Duke of Wellington's triumphant return from the great battle of Waterloo in 1815.

Col. Muir was not puzzled by the initials, although the reader may be puzzled by what all this had to do with Johnny Gow, who lost his chest and his life in 1725, ninety years before the battle of Waterloo was fought. Just wait.

TRACED TO ORKNEYS

The sampler was worked by a little girl who was a descendant, probably a great-granddaughter, of the public-spirited citizen who single-handed or single-headed captured the pirate and his crew of twenty-eight in the Orkney Islands.

Col. Muir's father, Thomas, was the son of James or John Fea-Muir. The reason for the hyphen, long since dropped by the Muir family, was that this ancestor had married an Orkney heiress, and to obtain her hand had to hyphenate her name with his by deed-poll. Her family were heritors of the lairdship of Sanday in the Orkneys, and in the absence of heirs-male, it was necessary to preserve the family name to preserve the title.

When the lairdship lapsed this branch of the Muirs reverted to their original unhyphenated name. It is not known what kinship they had, with the Muirs of Hayocks in Ayrshire, who, through an Elizabeth Muir, were collateral descendants of Scottish royalty, The Muir brothers, who established the drydock at Port Dalhousie in 1850 — still functioning — saw pirates hanging in chains on the Thames when they started out for Canada from their Hayocks farm in 1837. Alexander, of the family, had counted five pirates so decorating, the river when he came home from India on an earlier voyage.

The little girl who stitched the sampler and later became Murray Muir's grandmother was Elizabeth Fea, and the four "Fs" among the initials were for herself and her brothers or sisters, or parents.

HEROIC FEA

The two "J.F.s" make it probable that the name James Fea was preserved in her family nomenclature, as it was in other branches of the Feas. And with good reason. James Fea, the younger, of Clestrain, holding Carrick House in the island of Eday, was the captor of John Gow, his ship, crew and sea chest, as has already been told. Sanday, of which the Feas had the lairdship, is a large island lying directly east of Carrick House, not more than two miles across Eday Sound.

Carrick House dates from 1633. Over its monumental gateway swings the ship's bell of Gow's captured Revenge. The bell was made for a Spanish convent. It has the Latin inscription "Deo Soli Gloria," "to God alone the glory," and the date, 1640. James Fea, who installed the bell as an alarm signal for his estate, often echoed the motto on it. For one resolute man, with a force of five or six farmhands and fishermen, to haves laid by the heels twenty-eight blood-stained pirates who came to murder him, plunder his estate, and carry off his wife, was a miracle in which any Christian could see the hand of God.

How the Catherine (that was the name of the Revenge before Gow stole her) came by a convent bell for her forecastle head can only be guessed at.

James Fea was awarded £800 sterling, one third of the appraised value of the Revenge and her contents, besides £300 for the salvage of the ship when she was got off the rocks and sold by the admiralty. In addition he was voted a purse of £400 by the merchants of London, whose trade he had protected by his courageous exertions.

How much of this he received is unknown. He was plagued by counter claims and law suits until 1756, when he died. He was accused of Jacobite tendencies, and persecuted. After the battle of Culloden a house of his at Sound in Shapinsay wask burned by Butcher Cumberland's zealots.