"We thought he was a wizard, but in truth he was a saint," said the people of Kerimor when they learned at last how the gold and silver so carefully hoarded, and the good fields all the more fertile for lying fallow so long, had been given over into the keeping of Father Mathieu. Well they knew how he would make good use of that store. For two years now there has been no hunger in the village of Kerimor. There is no wife or child of a lost fisherman who does not pray for the repose of the soul of Yvon Kergoz. In the little church there is a fine new altar cloth. The Blessed Virgin, become somewhat shabby, is beautifully robed and regilded. There are two brand-new saints in niches prepared for them. But Father Mathieu, the priest, still clings to his old black cassock. He will not buy a new one. Yvon Kergoz did not leave anything to him. DEAD MEN'S TALES. BY BENNET COPPLESTONE. V. JOHN NUTT OF LYMPSTONE. JOHN NUTT of Lympstone, within the estuary of the Exe, rover and sea robber, is one of the most amusing and most satisfying of the rascals in my collection. You will not find him in the 'Dictionary of National Biography,' though he was fully as worthy of a place in that mausoleum as was the third-rate and inefficient pirate, Captain William Kidd-if, indeed, Kidd ever was a pirate, or as that less than third-rate highwayman, Mr Richard Turpin, upon whom has been thrust the fame of a ride to York which was legendary a hundred years before the fellow was born. What I have to tell of John Nutt does at any rate belong to him; I owe him a resurrection in person, for I have already made free with his name and exploits. In a story which I published in 1922 1 there appeared a romantic character, a rover of the English sea named Richard Nutt, whose surname was stolen from John, whose ship the Wild Swan was one of John's ships, and whose playful ways with Secretaries of State and vice-admirals of the county and admirals of the Narrow Seas were John's ways. Though Richard was in personality him 1 self and a creation of imagination, he never could have come into being without the powerful impetus upon my mind of his ingenious protagonist. I am extremely fond of Richard Nutt. I love him the best of all the fictitious personages who have owed their being to me, and have lived with me for months and years together in the closest communion, and some of my affection slops over, as it were, and encompasses his true begetter John. The first act of the comedy of John Nutt opens in June 1623, after he had been in distinguished and successful practice as a sea rover for no more than two years. I call him sea rover or sea robber rather than pirate, because, though his performances were piratical in the legal sense, they were not stained by the cruelty and blood-lust of the Ishmaelite deep-sea pirates of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. John Nutt was in the direct line of English seamen who had been rovers and robbers in the Narrow Seas for five hundred years before his time. Every man put forth to sea with a sword in one hand and a tiller in the other; if he were not strong 1 'The Treasure of Golden Cap,' by Bennet Copplestone. Published by John Murray. 1922. enough to mount safe guard traders to specialise in trading. over the goods under his hatches he was speedily bereft of them by those stronger than himself. And he did to others as he was done by. The Narrow Seas swarmed with rovers who were also traders, and traders who were also rovers. All nations and bits of nations were represented, and those whose hearts were stoutest and whose skill waxed most adroit at Wordsworth's "good old rule" and "simple plan" grew into the nations which we call maritime. Our sea skill of to-day was all won for us in those days of sea fighting and sea robbery. The Narrow Seas swarmed with rovers; with English and Scottish and Irish; with Normans, Flemings, and Dunkirkers; with Spaniards and Biscayners; and with Turks and Salee rovers from the Mediterranean. There was no rule, no self-denying ordinance, under which the rover traders of one nation respected the property of trader rovers of the same nation. Just as the cogs of the Cinque Ports fell indifferently upon the cogs of Yarmouth or of the West Country or of Dunkirk or Fécamp, so the armed ship of John Nutt plundered indifferently less well-armed ships, be they English or Scottish, French or Spaniard, Barbary or Turk. Specialism entered into the business, as it always does into trades as they increase in organisation. The light highlyskilled rovers tended to specialise in roving, the heavy and perhaps less highly-skilled The light fast ship lived for the most part by robbery, the heavy and slower ship by commerce. On the one side developed a fighting and manœuvring technique, on the other side a technique of evasion and blackmail. Secretaries of State, vice-admirals of counties, even sometimes admirals of the Narrow Seas, played their parts in the game. John Nutt was a specialist in roving, yet no Ishmael as were the later pirates of the Spanish Main." He was countenanced by high official personages in London and Devon, and looked upon with reverence and affection by those common folk of his own county whom he had not robbed. The losers in the great sea game as it was played got scanty sympathy; they were more often laughed at than condoled with. 66 After a brief two years of roving, John Nutt reached eminence. His favourite pitch was Dartmouth, a harbour by its configuration admirably well suited to his peculiar methods. It is a harbour completely landlocked. The narrow entrance winds among high rocks, so that from within the sea without is invisible. A ship which has passed out through the channel cannot be seen unless one climbs to the top of the girdle of hills through which the estuary of the Dart has carved its way. Nutt would lie in the river off Dartmouth and watch ships load. He would from his post of observation learn every sail and rope of them, every gun tions with John, especially at his favourite Dartmouth, tended to grow as blatant as he was. According to Mr Case-Horton, who wrote on John Nutt and his less eminent and more commonplace brother Robert in the Royal United Service Institution's 'Journal' of August 1915, "It is on record even that a certain mayor of a seaport on one occasion was occupied in delivering from the quay a most vituperative harangue to Nutt on the subject of his manifold misdemeanours, while his own boats on the other side of the vessel moored there were engaged in removing the stolen goods which his wor ship had purchased." I must gratefully acknowledge my indebtedness to Mr Case-Horton for many of the facts in this tale. and man they carried, every those who had business associa pound of stores put on board. If they were by reason of weakness above deck and richness below holding promise of plunder at small risk, he would follow them out of the harbour when they sailed, and strip them comfortably at his leisure outside. Then he would escort ship and captured cargo to a port where facilities for disposal were adequate, and sometimes would actually take them back to be realised into plundered cash at Dartmouth itself whence they had lately sailed. The countryside, the peasants and farmers and others of much higher degree, favoured the rovers-by whose means they obtained cheap luxuries,-just as the countryside favoured smugglers and went on favouring smugglers until days within present memory. Smuggling, or "Free Trading," was still a staple industry of the West Country when my father was a young man. Had John Nutt been an ordinary rover, we should have heard no more of him than of those thousands of others who lived and fought and robbed and had their day. He owes his resurrection to that effrontery which passed all the bounds held to be decent in an age of easy morals. And so we arrive at Act I. in his comedy. I will assist my readers by setAnd ting out the cast. By these flagrant methods of his Nutt became notorious above less bold and less audacious rovers. He became an embarrassment. Highly-placed persons, though willing to profit by his depredations, found them difficult to wink at. He was so indecently blatant. John Nutt had by the middle of 1623, with his fast little ship of 120 tons carrying fourteen pieces of ordnance, become so notorious a depredator that Captain Best, Admiral of the Narrow Seas, clamoured for permission to devote a month to his capture. Whether this fine old officer would have succeeded we may well doubt. His ship, the Garland, was one of Elizabeth's light galleons some thirty years old, and had been classed as decayed and unserviceable " in the Navy Office List of 1618. By 1623, five years later, she must have been still more decayed and still more unserviceable. I fancy that Nutt would have been less audacious in his depredations if he had had any respect for the Garland's sailing qualities. Still Captain Best was eager to try what he could do. 66 But there were strong reasons why the zeal of Best was highly inconvenient in the eyes of two personages of high importance. These were Sir George Calvert, Secretary of State, and Sir John Eliot, Vice-Admiral of Devon. Unofficially and in his spare time John Nutt was a rover and sea robber; officially he was commissioned by Sir George Calvert to guard the Narrow Seas against foreign rovers, and especially to watch over those ships which left Channel ports for the Newfoundland voyage. Sir George Calvert (afterwards Lord Baltimore) was one of the very first statesmen of England who can be described as an Empire builder. In 1621, two years before the curtain went up on my Act I., he had begun that settlement of settlement of Newfoundland with which his name will always be honourably associated. In return for Nutt's assistance in safeguarding the Newfoundland ships, Calvert extended his protecting hand over the bold rover, and-I make no doubt whatever-winked at those other lawless operations of his protégé. I also have no doubt that Sir George Calvert's secretaries and his secretaries' clerks drew their percentages as a commission on Nutt's unlawful takings. From this it will be plain that the intrusive energies of Captain Best were frowned upon in the Secretary of State's office, and that the Commissioners of the Navy were not encouraged to let Best have his way. It was also unwelcome news to Sir John Eliot, Vice-Admiral of Devon and official suppressor of rovers within his jurisdiction, that Best should seek to butt in with the old Garland's heavy guns. For Eliot wanted to achieve the peaceful surrender of Nutt to the terrors of the law by the offer of a free pardon. Thereby the ViceAdmiral of the county would gain as a perquisite of his office Nutt's ship and any treasure which might lie on board of her. This free pardon dodge was much favoured by viceadmirals of counties, who, though they were responsible for the suppression of rovers, had no force whatever of their own by which to carry out |