rbusses that hung in the cabin; but there were shining swords
between them and the blunderbusses. By nine at night, on August 12,
Mackenzie's followers were masters of the English ship, and the
hatches, gunroom, chests, and cabinets were sealed with the official
seal of the Scottish African and East India Company. In a day or two
the vessel lay without rudder or sails, in Bruntisland Harbour, 'as
secure as a thief in a mill.' Mackenzie landed eight of the ship's
guns and placed them in an old fort commanding the harbour entry,
manned them with gunners, and all this while an English man-of-war lay
in the Firth!

For a peaceful secretary of a commercial company, with a scratch
eleven picked up in the street on a Saturday afternoon, to capture a
vessel with a crew of twenty-four, well accustomed to desperate deeds,
was 'a sufficient camisado or onfall.' For three or four days and
nights Mr. Mackenzie had scarcely an hour's sleep. By the end of
August he had commenced an action in the High Court of Admiralty for
condemning the 'Worcester' and her cargo, to compensate for the
damages sustained by his company through the English seizure of their
ship, the 'Annandale.' When Mackenzie sent in his report on September
4, he added that, from 'very odd expressions dropt now and then from
some of the ship's crew,' he suspected that Captain Green, of the
'Worcester,' was 'guilty of some very unwarrantable practices.'

The Scottish Privy Council were now formally apprised of the affair,
which they cautiously handed over to the Admiralty. The Scottish
company had for about three years bewailed the absence of a ship of
their own, the 'Speedy Return,' which had never returned at all. Her
skipper was a Captain Drummond, who had been very active in the Darien
expedition; her surgeon was Mr. Andrew Wilkie, brother of James
Wilkie, tailor and burgess of Edinburgh. The pair were most probably
descendants of the Wilkie, tailor in the Canongate, who was mixed up
in the odd business of Mr. Robert Oliphant, in the Gowrie conspiracy
of 1600. Friends of Captain Drummond, Surgeon Wilkie, and others who
had disappeared in the 'Speedy Return,' began to wonder whether the
crew of the 'Worcester,' in their wanderings, had ever come across
news of the missing vessel. One George Haines, of the 'Worcester,'
hearing of a Captain Gordon, who was the terror of French privateers,
said: 'Our sloop was more terrible upon the coast of Malabar than
ever Captain