Thomas Green (captain)
Thomas Green (1679/1680[?]–1705) was an
Green was celebrated in a contemporary ballad:
Of all the pirates I’ve heard and seen
The basest and the bloodiest is Captain Green
The Worcester was seized, probably at the bequest of the Secretary of the
However, the evidence against Green has been considered flimsy; during the trial, the ship in question was never named, and neither the ship's owner nor any next of kin of the alleged deceased came forward. Furthermore, the exact time and place of the incident were never specified ("upon one or other Days of the Months of February, March, April or May, in the year 1703").[2]
As the alleged incident was outside Scottish waters, the veracity of the trial was also called into question; however the prosecution argued that the subjects of the piracy had, according to different witnesses, either sailed under an English flag or had spoken English, and as such, Green and his crew were subject to the justice of
Green was sentenced to death, originally intended for the 3 April 1705, but this was postponed for a time at the request of the Queen's
Green and two of his crew members, an Englishman, Simpson, and John Madder, a Scot, were found guilty and hanged on Leith Sands on 11 April. The men met their deaths, amongst the baying mob, with calm and resolve. It is probable that the Worcester was seized in an act of revenge against the
Trevelyan concluded that the deaths of the three men served as an outlet for a widely held Scottish resentment of their Anglo-centric government's mismanagement. Examples of the problems partially caused by this mis-governance included the
Scottish historians such as Andrew Lang instead contend that while Green and crew may not have taken Drummond's ship, they had engaged in some piracy after all, and so the trial was not unjust: "Hence I conclude that the 'Worcester' really had been pirating off the coast of Malabar, but that the ship taken by Captain Green in these waters was not the 'Speedy Return,' but another, unknown. If so, there was no great miscarriage of justice, for the indictment against Captain Green did not accuse him of seizing the 'Speedy Return,' but of piracy, robbery, and murder, though the affair of the 'Speedy Return' was brought in to give local colour. This fact and the national excitement in Scotland probably turned the scale with the jury, who otherwise would have returned a verdict of 'Not Proven.'"[5]
References
- ^ Menefee, Samuel P. (2004), "Greene, Thomas", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 23, London: Oxford University Press, pp. 532–33.
- ^ Anonymous (1720), Tryals for High Treason and Other Crimes with Proceedings and Impeachments for Three Hundred Years Past, vol. 4, London: Timothy Goodwin, pp. 448–463.
- ^ Anonymous (1705), The Tryal Of Captain Thomas Green and his Crew: For Piracy, Robbery and Murder, Edinburgh: Anderson, p. 42.
- ^ a b Trevelyan, George Macaulay (1932), England Under Queen Anne: Ramilles and the Union with Scotland, London: Longmans Green and Co., pp. 249–256.
- ISBN 978-3-8496-7426-7. Retrieved 28 December 2021.
Further reading
- "Historical Mysteries" by Andrew Lang (page 193–213) - contains an analysis of the Green case with footnotes and some additional correspondence.