em down."[340]

Some of the recalcitrant freebooters, however, were captured and brought
to justice. Major Beeston, sent by the governor in January 1672, with a
frigate and four smaller vessels, to seize and burn some pirate ships
careening on the south cays of Cuba, fell in instead with two other
vessels, one English and one French, which had taken part in the raids
upon Cuba, and carried them to Jamaica. The French captain was offered
to the Governor of St. Jago, but the latter refused to punish him for
fear of his comrades in Tortuga and Hispaniola. Both captains were
therefore tried and condemned to death at Port Royal. As the Spaniards,
however, had refused to punish them, and as there was no reason why the
Jamaicans should be the executioners, the captains of the port and some
of the council begged for a reprieve, and the English prisoner, Francis
Witherborn, was sent to England.[341] Captain Johnson, one of the
pirates after whom Beeston had originally been sent, was later in the
year shipwrecked by a hurricane upon the coast of Jamaica. Johnson,
immediately after the publication of the peace by Sir Thomas Lynch, had
fled from Port Royal with about ten followers, and falling in with a
Spanish ship of eighteen guns, had seized it and killed the captain and
twelve or fourteen of the crew. Then gathering about him a party of a
hundred or more, English and French, he had robbed Spanish vessels round
Havana and the Cuban coast. Finally, however, he grew weary of his
French companions, and sailed for Jamaica to make terms with the
governor, when on coming to anchor in Morant Bay he was blown ashore by
the hurricane. The governor had him arrested, and gave a commission to
Colonel Modyford, the son of Sir Thomas, to assemble the justices and
proceed to trial and immediate execution. He adjured him, moreover, to
see to it that the pirate was not acquitted. Colonel Modyford,
nevertheless, sharing perhaps his father's sympathy with the sea-rovers,
deferred the trial, acquainted none of the justices with his orders, and
although Johnson and two of his men "confessed enough to hang a hundred
honester persons," told the jury they could not find against the
prisoner. Half an hour after the dismissal of the court, Johnson "came
to drink with his judges." The baffled governor thereupon placed Johnson
a second time under arrest, called a meeting of the council, from which
he dismissed Colonel Modyford, and "finding material errors,