30[i.e. 32]pp., re-bound in matching calf-backed marbled boards, red morocco label, old red sprinkled edges, small 4to (205x150mm), London, James Nutt, 1705.
A very scarce pamphlet collecting vital evidence in support of Thomas Green, an English sailor condemned in Scotland for piracy and murder on the Indian Ocean. Part of a far wider conflict over trade and independence amid ongoing union negotiations between England and Scotland. With testimony by a “black Indian” cook onboard the ship.
This work is a collection of documents relevant to the trial of Thomas Green and his crew for piracy and murder. Green had, at the age of 21, captained a charter voyage to India, with the mission of transporting spices and other valuable substances for Thomas Bowrey, a London-based merchant. The outbound voyage, on the merchant vessel Worcester, proceeded from England along the expected route: rounding the Horn of Africa and arriving on the Indian Malabar Coast in mid-November 1702. On the return voyage, the threat of enemy cruisers led the Worcester to travel, via Ireland, around the north of Scotland: finally putting in at Edinburgh in July 1704 to await convoy south to London.
In Edinburgh, the Worster and her crew appear to have been drawn into far deeper conflicts over the national trade amid the impending union of England and Scotland. The Worcester was opportunistically seized by Scottish merchant authorities in reprisal for the seizure in London of a merchant vessel registered to the Scottish Darien company. During the course of the Worcester’s voyage, however, rumours had circulated that Green and his crew had been involved with pirates in the Indian Ocean. During their enforced sojourn in Edinburgh, more serious rumours began to emerge that Green and his crew had engaged in direct acts of piracy. These rumours – along with the unaccounted disappearance of another Darien Company vessel( The Speedy Return), en route to the East Indies – seem to have provided the necessary ingredients for the Scottish to develop the Worcester’s impoundment as a political statement. In March 1705, Green and his crew were charged with plundering the Speedy Return and murdering its crew (ODNB).
The case quickly became one of the most popular and controversial of the age. A predominantly English crew charged with plundering a Scottish vessel, Unionists typically protested Green’s innocence, while Nationalists typically charged his guilt. The evidence appears to have been based predominantly on suspicious statements made by Green’s crew – in particular, the cook’s mate’s testimony that he had witnessed the Worcester engaged in battle with an English-speaking vessel. Largely on the strength of this evidence, Green and most of his crew were found guilty by an Admiralty jury in Edinburgh on the 16th of March, and condemned to be hanged on the sands of Leith. Although the Privy Council, at the order of Queen Anne herself, exercised its influence to postpone the execution, they ultimately declined to commute the sentence, and Green and two of his crewmates were subsequently hanged on the 11th of April 1705.
This work sequences and reproduces a number of documents relevant to the case. Witness affidavits, for both the prosecution and defence, make up the bulk of the volume, which also includes a report from the Edinburgh Gazette and several pieces of contemporary evidence, including certificates and dispatches on piracy from the East India company. The work’s anonymous editor is firmly convinced of Green’s innocence, stating “By the foregoing Affidavits, & and by the Testimony of several other Persons… it does plainly appear, that no such Piracy or Murther has been heard of in India, nor no such Ship or Men missing, as is pretended to be Piratically taken and Murthered” (p28).
This edition would appear to have been published in the days before Green’s execution. Green has been “Tryed and Condemned”, but there is no reference to his execution, as there surely would have been had the edition been published afterwards. The latest dated material is from the 7th of April, and we might tentatively fix a publication date for this edition between the 8th and 11th of April 1705. During these tense few days in early April, the English government considered whether to intervene further in the case, and Green’s trial in the court of public opinion continued. In Edinburgh, it was reported that several members of the crew had confessed in exchange for pardons. In England, the East India Company produced certificates attesting that none of its ships had reported any charge, evidence or rumours of piracy against the Worcester, and further investigations suggested a quite different fate for the Speedy Return. This work collected and widely distributed the results of these investigations, and might be understood as a broader criticism of the Scottish merchants and the judiciary among the London public.
Daniel Defoe concerned himself extensively with the Worcester affair, and its implications for the ongoing Union negotiations – as James Kelly notes, in his History of the Union (1709), Defoe lists the ‘Seizing the Ship the Worcester” as one of the six crises which had materially jeopardised these negotiations (Kelly 2000). Earlier, he had published two commentaries on the affair in The Review. Incidentally, John Nutt, the present volume’s printer, had previously published works by Defoe, and would subsequently act as the first printer for the first incarnation of The Tatler.
Interestingly the collected affidavits include depositions by two Indian crewmates: Antonio Fernado (the aforementioned cook’s mate) and Antonio Francisco (the captain’s servant). Although filtered through an interpreter, these depositions nonetheless constitute important evidence of the experiences and contributions of people of colour in eighteenth-century Scotland, and in eighteenth-century maritime trade more generally.
In spite of its contemporary popularity, the trial has received extremely limited attention in the years since. Indeed, after Richard Temple\s New Light on the Mysterious Tragedy of the Worcester: 1704-1705 (1930), the next (and thus far, only) serious study is James Kelly’s The Worcester Affair (2000).
ESTC records Boston Athenaeum, Folger, Lilly Library and Yale only in the USA. There are two settings of this work published in the same year, the other (published without imprint) is recorded at the Huntington and John Carter Brown Library. The last copy recorded on Rare Book Hub before the present was at Francis Edwards in 1962.
Provenance: Earls of Macclesfield, disbound from a larger pamphlet volume – with a reproduction of the armorial bookplate on the front pastedown.
