Watery Grave

If you would be so good as to put your mind to it, you might try to imagine a storm at sea. Yet perhaps, reader, I ask too much, for unless you are a veteran of many voyages and have endured consequent dangers of fierce weather on shipboard, you could not conceive of such a storm as this one, which many an experienced seaman claimed to be the worst he had known.

The sky in mid-afternoon is darkened by clouds so that it be as deep night. From those clouds pours a rain which, though constant, is unsteady, for it often comes in great rushes near drowning the sea itself, then slacks in intensity for minutes at a time, only to explode once again in vast inundations of wet. The waters of the sea rise and fall in mountain-sized swells so that a ship of good size, a frigate of the Royal Navy, is tossed up and down, to and fro, like some small button box with sails.

Aboard that frigate, those of the crew on deck struggle to do what they can to keep the ship afloat. It slides precipitously down to the bottom of wave after wave to crash at the bottom, often taking on water, laying about port and starboard in the trough and taking on more water still. Those of the crew below-decks pray, curse, and stay close to the ladders that they may not be last to the boats should the ship begin to break apart.

Into this hellish scape two figures appear upon the poop deck, which, as the ship’s uppermost level, is in such circumstances also its most perilous point. Having emerged from below, they make their way slowly across the windswept space. Only one of them proceeds under his own power; he supports the other, who, though his feet touch the deck, can hardly be said to be walking at all. The two move

most uncertainly. He who bears the load of the other goes stiff-legged with the weight of him.

Thus slowly they make their way across the poop deck to the starboard ladder. But in the midst of their journey the frigate drops low into the trough of a deep swell, and the weaker of the two is torn from the grasp of the stronger. He is thrown against the taffrail just opposite the starboard ladder. Quite miraculously he keeps his feet —but not for long. His companion extends his arms —and the other man disappears overboard.

That fmal movement is seen by two men on the quarterdeck below. The first, who stands wrestling with the helm, glances across at the crucial moment and perceives it as a futile attempt to hold the doomed man back. The second, holding tight to the stout rope which secures a cannon in place, later describes it as the fmal push which sends the unfortunate to his watery grave.

Rescuer or murderer? That question would occupy us profoundly in time to come. And even to this day, this question of intent remains matter for heated discussion, even bitter argument among those many whose lives it touched.

On a day in July 1769, I had been sent by Sir John Fielding to accompany Lady Fielding to the Tower Wharf, where we were to meet her homecoming son, Tom, returned from near three years’ duty on the India station. I had been told by Sir John that the official welcome ceremonies for the H.M.S. Achenttire were not to begin until noon, and our departure from Bow Street left ample time for a prompt arrival. Yet the hour precluded the possibility that Sir John might have attended the occasion, as he would have liked, for he must sit his court in Bow Street that day, as he did every day, barring sickness or some unforeseen occasion. Therefore had he taken me aside, given me a proper allowance of shillings and pence, and charged me to convey Lady Fielding to the Tower Wharf and, with her son, back again to Bow Street. It was a considerable responsibility for a fourteen-year-old boy, as I was then, yet I was grown a pair of inches in the past year and was the size of a smallish man.

As we descended Tower Hill, the driver of our hackney carriage reined in with a call of command to the horses.” This is as far as I can take you,” called he to us.” You take the footbridge yonder.” He pointed ahead.” Cross it and up the stairs, and you will be at the bottom of Tower Wharf.”

And thus we proceeded, the moat on our left, in the direction of the Thames, down to the bottom of Tower Hill. It seemed certain to me that we were in no wise tardy for the proceedings. Yet just then, with a great roll of drums, a tootling of fifes, and a call of the clarion trumpets, an invisible band struck up beyond the stairs —and Lady Fielding shot ahead and disappeared up the staircase. By the time I caught her

up, she had joined the crowd on the wharf and was pushing into it like any Covent Garden housewife at the greengrocer’s stall.

There, above the hubbub and shouting, the band which had assembled only ten paces or so across the cordoned open space before us made an even greater din. There, too, near the front of the crowd, I had my best view of the Thames. As I now recall, I had some dim notion that the H.M.S.
Adventure
would be firmly docked at Tower Wharf, side by side with it. Yet it was not so. It lay tar out at anchor some distance up the river, sails furled, pennants flying. The reason for this was evident. The ship was surely too big to fit the wharf. As I learned later, it was also the custom for ships of war to maintain a discreet distance from the shore. A frigate the
Adventure
was, as I had heard. I knew there were bigger vessels in His Majesty’s Navy, yet I could not, for the life of me, imagine such.

A boat of good size, manned by eight oarsmen, had set forth from the frigate. There were many more within the boat, so many in fact that the men at the oars made slow progress toward the wharf.

“Oh, Jeremy,” said Lady Fielding by my side, “what shall I do if I do not recognize him? He was but a boy when he left. Now, by his letters at least, he seems a man.”

“Surely a mother will know.” It seemed the right thing to say.

She considered that a moment, then gave a firm nod.” Yes,” said she, “surely.”

The boat had disappeared beneath the height of the wharf. I expected its passengers to pop up at an moment. Yet first there was a courtesy to be observed. I heard a voice boom forth from the river below.

“Permission to come ashore.”

A man in uniform stepped forward on the wharf and, in lieu of words, he responded with a long blast in several notes on a whistle.

Then, after a pause, crew members of the H.M.S.
Adventure
appeared from below. I supposed they had come up a ladder. The crowd applauded at the appearance of each mariner —and indeed that seemed appropriate, for there was something theatrical in all this. As the men came, one by one, they formed a ragged line along the wharf. By the time they had all assembled, they were fifteen in number. Once there together, standing in the same stiff attitude, they were forced to wait as a stout man of senior years came forward and stood before them.

He made a speech of some minutes’ duration. By throwing his voice back and forth, he managed to address both the seamen and the crowd that had come to welcome them. He was richly dressed in uniform, bemedaled, beribboned, and red of face. Without knowing his rank, I judged him to be a rear admiral at least. The speech he gave, though in no wise memorable, praised the men before him for keeping the trade routes open against attacks by pirates and privateers. He cited some twenty-odd separate engagements in which the officers and men of the H.M.S.
Adventure
had acquitted themselves admirabl —prizes taken, trade tonnage saved, and so on. All this was quite beyond me, as I believe it was to most of us there. Yet he continued —and here he addressed members of the crew only, commending them for remaining firm in their duty in the face of apparent dissension in the upper ranks and reports of violent attack.

All this struck me as passing strange, as indeed it seemed to do Lady Fielding, as well, for we two exchanged puzzled glances at his remarks. The crewmen seemed less puzzled than disturbed. A few dared turn their heads, exhibiting sullen looks to one another. One or two appeared downright angry.

“If any of you has information on these matters,” said the speaker, “I invite you to step forward no’w.”

He waited. None stepped forward.

“So be it,” said he.” But know that my office is open to any and all. What I am told in private will be kept in confidence.” Again he paused, this time no doubt to give weight to what he had said. Then he resumed: “All this aside, I wish you to know you have done your duty to your ship, your King, and your country. We are proud. Boatswain?”

As the man with the whistle stepped up to pipe another tune, the speaker moved forward, broke the ranks of the crewmen, and disappeared down the same ladder they had ascended. The last I saw of him, he was sitting in the boat conveyed by its eight oarsmen back to the frigate.

That struck me as odd. And odd, too, that he had not mentioned the captain as another for whom they had done their duty.

Then the boatswain whistled another tune and the band struck up again. With that, all thoughts of what was odd, strange, or puzzling in what I had just seen and heard suddenly left me, for crew members and the waiting crowd swarmed together. I was buffeted away Irom Lady Fielding and near knocked down in the rush.

When I managed again to locate her, she had attached herself to a young man of fair aspect some inches taller than I was then. He quite dominated his mother, who was even shorter than I, yet she clung to him, embracing him, squeezing him so tight that I thought she might rob him of his very breath. He took it well. Smiling and laughing throughout her attack, he pulled away at last and, holding her hands clasped in his own, began talking earnestly to her. She responded passionately, pulling a hand away to wipe the tears from her eyes. All this I saw, but none of it I heard, for I thought it best to keep a polite distance from this touching occasion until such time as my presence should be wanted. Through it all the band played on.

Lady Fielding had remarked to me but two evenings before that her last sight of her son, Tom, had been at the Old Bailey. When he was led from the courtroom in the company of two others, she’d been sure — because the judge had declared it—that he would be hanged.

I recall that we were in the kitchen, drinking a last pot of tea. Mrs. Gredge, cook and housekeeper, had retired for the night. Sir John was below, conferring on some matter with Mr. Bailey, the captain of the Bow Street Runners. Though I knew the circumstances regarding her son from Sir John, she had never before discussed these things with me, so painful were they in her memory.

“You may believe me, Jeremy,” she had said to me, “when I tell you that when I saw my son, my only child, taken from the courtroom in chains to what seemed his certain dea.th — tat, my dear young friend, was the darkest moment of my life. He was but a boy, younger than you are now, and his young life was to be taken —and for what? For a few shillings, perhaps a pound, that he intended to give me, his mother, so that we might not starve further. In all truth, I cared not then whether I lived or died. Nay, I wished to be dead and would, I’m sure, have ended my life —had it not been for Jack.”

She referred to Sir John. So she called him, and so had the first Lady Fielding, as well, during those few weeks I knew her before her death.

Sir John Fielding had urgently petitioned the Lord Chief Justice for the lives of the three boys, out of respect to their young years —the eldest was but fourteen. He had managed to save others as young for a life on the sea in the Royal Nayy. Queen Charlotte herself had expressed her royal approval of this form of clemency, and the King had knighted the Magistrate of the Bow Street Court in recognition of it. And so the Lord Chief Justice was well prepared when Sir John brought his petition and arguments before him; yet he resisted them powerfully.

He resisted not from pure obduracy, or hardness of heart, but because in the course of the robbery bodily harm had been done to the victim, a shopkeeper. When the victim resisted, the eldest of the boys had dealt the shopkeeper great blows with a stout club he carried. A wound was opened on the man’s scalp and his leg was broken. He was quite unable to pursue them, of course, but the boys, frightened at their crime, had run from the shop. The hue and cry was raised, and they were apprehended.

In the end, it was the shopkeeper’s testimony that proved the salvation of two of the three. He gave it in court that the younger two of them were quite horrified at what the eldest had done and had wrestled the club from him ere he did further hurt to the poor man. Sir John had argued to the Lord Chief Justice that in this way two of them had demonstrated that while they were party to the robbery, they could not be blamed for the bodily harm inflicted upon the shopkeeper. The Lxjrd Chief Justice had reluctantly admitted the point had some merit and signed an order remitting Jonah Falkirk and Thomas Durham to duty in the Royal Navy. Thus they were saved. John Dickey, aged fourteen, was hanged at Tyburn two days after his fellows set sail from Portsmouth on the H.M.S.
Adventure
.

All this I had heard from Sir John, yet in the year I had shared the same roof with Lady Fielding she had never made direct reference to the matter, and indeed had never discussed her feelings regarding it until that recent evening in the kitchen over our pot of tea. She had continued only a bit further, explaining that Sir John had not informed her of his efforts on her son’s behalf until they were successful.

“He wanted to arouse no false hope in me, should they fail,” said she.” It was probably best so, yet had he known the depths of my despair he might have thought otherwise. Yet when he summoned me to Bow Street and informed me of his success —that is, his partial success —it was as if he had given me my life, given me a reason to live. It was the kindest act ever a man could do for a boy and his mother.”

She was silent then for more than a minute, so long in fact that I rose from the table and gathered my cup and the empty teapot and began to prepare for washing up.

Yet she resumed one last time: “And to think that that same good, kind, generous man should take me for his wife, knowing my history — that is, to me, a fair marvel of fortune. There Is no telling, Jeremy, what fate has in store for any of us.”

“And well I know that,” I said to her.

She smiled then at me the most serious of smiles.” And well you must,” she had agreed.

So it was we had had our talk two evenings past. How was I then to interrupt her reunion with her son there on the Tower Wharf? I held back until Lady Fielding looked around her, clearly wondering where I had got to.

Only then did I come forward. The wharf was emptvnng quickly. The crewmen who had been landed formed a line before an officer who sat at a table right there on the wharf.

“I must join the tail end of the pay line, ” said Tom to her, “else my three years will be for naught.”

“Go, Tom,” said she to him.” Jeremy’ will collect our hackney, and I shall wait for you here.”

He smiled and nodded at his mother as he backed off in the direction of the pay line.

To me he said: “Jeremy, take my ditty box with you to the hackney. It is all the baggage I have.” He pointed down at the object at my feet.

To her credit. Lady Fielding stepped forward and said, “Tom, Jeremy is not a servant. Please form that as a request, and I am sure he will be glad to oblige.”

“Oh, you do it, Alother. Make it right with him. I must collect my pay and my leave ticket.” x’Vnd with that, he left us and took his place in the pay line.

If I was not a servant, then what indeed was I? I seldom gave thought to my station in the household of Sir John Fielding, Magistrate of the Bow Street Court, so glad was I to be included in it. He had been master and friend to me ever since that day only a little more than a year before when I, Jeremy Proctor, had appeared before him falsely accused of theft. Though blind, he had seen through the Knng devices of those who had perjured against me, and then kept me, an orphan, as a helper in his house and court and occasionally as an assistant who served as his e’es in criminal inquiries.