The Quality of Mercy

26



In contrast to the custom at Tyburn, there were no fixed hanging days at Execution Dock, where those found guilty of crimes at sea under the jurisdiction of the Admiralty were taken to pay their last dues. Within a week of the death sentence being delivered, Barber and Calley and Libby and Rimmer and Lees were led out from Newgate Prison and found the cart waiting for them in the yard outside, together with a great crowd of people who had come to follow the procession and see the hangings. The men would have been brought out earlier even than this, but the hangings by tradition took place in the mornings, on the foreshore of the river, and they had to wait four days for a low tide at the right time of the morning so as to remain on ground that lay within Admiralty jurisdiction.

Calley, who was the strongest of them in body but childlike in mind, began to weep when he saw the cart, and Barber, who had sometimes protected him from ill usage by Libby and one or two others aboard the slave ship, though hindered now by his bonds, contrived to put a hand on Calley’s shoulder as they walked to the cart and climbed up onto the platform that had been raised there, several feet high, so as to give the spectators a clear view of the condemned men. Here they took their places, sitting together side by side on the narrow bench. On a bench behind them, already waiting, were the executioner and his two assistants.

Erasmus Kemp was not among those who saw them emerge, nor was he stationed anywhere along the route or waiting at the place of execution. He had no smallest desire to witness the sufferings of the condemned men, even avoiding—as far as he could—any picturing of the hangings. The sentence was fitting, it had met the needs of justice and retribution, it had recognized his rights and those of his dead father. But all this was an abstraction to him, like drawing a line in some cosmic ledger. It was necessary too that there should be a measure of pain in the punishment, but he could take no pleasure in the thought of this. The sort of cruelty or vindictiveness that might have given gratification to another in the witnessing of such pain, or even in the knowledge of it, formed no part of his nature.

The cart moved off from the prison, turning into Newgate Street, passing St. Paul’s and proceeding down Cheapside toward Cornhill. Ahead of it, riding at a slow pace, were the Marshal of the Admiralty and the deputy Marshal, who bore the silver mace—the same that had lain on the table before the judges—over his shoulder. They were followed by two city marshals and a number of Sheriff’s officers. The whole cavalcade was conducted with great solemnity and with no sound but the horses’ hooves on the cobbles.

This stateliness was in marked contrast to the hubbub of the crowd thronging round the cart. The case had aroused a great deal of public interest. Hangings at Execution Dock were relatively rare; there had been only one so far that year, for a murder committed at sea. Commercial Road was lined with people and resounded with shouts of greeting, jovial witticisms as to the condemned men’s impending fate and the shrill sound of tin whistles that were being sold to children along the way. Rimmer—he who had dealt Captain Thurso his death blow—was the only one to show defiance, shouting insults at the people as the cart passed.

Hughes had positioned himself among the crowd in the yard of the Turk’s Head in Wapping. From here there was a public right of way that led down to the river and came out near Wapping Old Stairs, where the gallows were erected. The cart would stop at the inn, by long-established tradition, for the condemned men to be served with a quart of ale. He wanted this last look at his shipmates before they were struggling on the rope, but he did not want to be seen by them, for obscure reasons that were to do with the severance of spirit, the detachment from his fellows that he always felt and that reached a kind of paroxysm at such times of crisis as this, with the need to make a solemn farewell, unknown to them—the stronger to him for that—to men he had sailed with and suffered with and joined in half-willing community with in the twelve years of their time in Florida.

He saw the cart come into the yard, saw the aproned landlord come out to hand up the tankards, saw the men raise their pinioned hands to drink. They were white-faced, but Calley, tears still on his cheeks, was half smiling now, as if being the center of such public attention had overlaid his fears. The landlord was smiling too as he handed up the ale and saw the men drink. Unlike Calley, he had good cause for smiling, Hughes thought: he would be selling a good many quarts that day.

He followed the cart when it resumed its way along Wapping High Street. The prisoners were helped down the stairs to the foreshore, where the posts and crossbeam had been erected at the low watermark, with five separate stakes embedded deep in the river mud just beyond. There was a priest on the platform of the gallows, and he spoke to the men in tones that were perhaps audible to them but certainly to no one else.

Boats crowded with spectators were moored along the riverside, and barges, also thronged with people, lay farther out in the water. There was a ship anchored out in the Pool, and Hughes thought briefly of trying to get out to her, getting up into the topside and seeing his shipmates breathe their last from high above, just as he had watched from high above and heard the cries of pain when the first slaves were brought aboard and branded, just as he had watched when the sick were cast overboard and seen the doctor come forward and the confused struggle that had led to Thurso’s death and all that had followed upon that. The thought gave him a fierce sense of symmetry, but he knew he could never get there in time; the nooses were already being settled around the men’s necks as they stood in line below the beam.

By orders of the Admiralty, those convicted of piracy were hanged with a shortened rope, so that the drop would not be long enough to break the men’s necks. Calley was whimpering as they adjusted the noose and might have fallen to his knees if one of the assistants had not held him up. Rimmer spoke to the executioner and it seemed that he joked, for both men smiled. At the last moment Barber raised his head and called out in a loud voice, “God have mercy on us!”

Then the drop was released and there were no more words and only the movements that men make when they are fighting for breath. Hughes watched this terrible slow strangling of men he deemed guiltless, waited through the frenzied jerking of their limbs—the marshal’s dance, as it was called, because of the raising of the knees and the shivering of the body below the waist.

He stood still there while the struggle lasted, waited while the bodies were taken down and chained to the stakes, which were already being lapped by the incoming tide. He remained in his place as the water rose and slowly submerged the bodies, rising over their chests and finally covering their bowed heads. He knew the procedure, as did all those who had followed the sea. They would remain chained there for the space of time it would take for three full tides to rise over their heads. Then their bodies would be smeared with pitch, taken to the Isle of Dogs, hung on gibbets and left there to rot.

When he finally moved away, it was with the sense of solemn farewell renewed in his mind. He knew more clearly now why he had not wanted the leavetaking to be cheapened by words of recognition and farewell. The silence was pure; it gave sanctity, and an endorsement from beyond the grave, to his vow that he would visit the same fate on Barton.

This vow he nursed in the days that followed, allowing no doubt to enter, no lessening of resolve. He felt that he owed his life to the promise he had made in that moment when the mate was passing before him, and this gave him a feeling of dedication he had never known before.

He spent his days at the Gravesend docks, doing what work came his way, sleeping rough. It was here, where the river began to widen, that the slave ships were fitted out. Barton would sign on for a slaver when his Judas money ran out. It was work he knew, the wages were slightly better, he might think to be taken on again as mate.

After twelve days Hughes’s patience was rewarded. There was a ship fitting out, the Indian Prince, that carried the stench of the trade and had the build—high in the stern, so that the swivel guns could more easily be brought to bear on the deck in case of slave revolt, thickened at the rails to make death leaps more difficult. One evening he saw Barton coming down the gangplank, following a man in a long coat and cocked hat, who looked like the skipper. He guessed they were bound on a mission to make up the number of the crew, enlist the men they needed, either by force or persuasion. If this was so, the ship must be ready to cast off her moorings and move out into the Pool.

He waited through that night, saw two men dragged aboard by those that had been hired to do it, saw the return of Barton. At dawn the wind shifted and the tide began to ebb. The ship was roped to her tugboats, her moorings were loosed and she was towed out to the deeper water of the estuary. While she lay there, in the last hour before her sailing, Hughes paid what money remained to him to be rowed out to the ship. He climbed aboard her, gave his name to the bosun and signed on with his mark. It was only now, when the anchor was weighed and it was too late to quit the ship, that Barton came up from below and saw him. Hughes was smiling, a rare thing indeed.