A Sink of Atrocity: Crime in 19th-Century Dundee (6 page)

In April 1892 he and Stewart discussed buying the engine and boiler of a wrecked vessel called
Speedwell,
then lying in the Thurso River. After buying the engine for £200, Hobbs suggested that Stewart have a hull built into which they could put it. Hobbs and Stewart met again at the Tay Bridge Station in Dundee and Stewart bought
Tryst
for £120. Hobbs had paid just £25 for the lighter. A tug was to tow the boiler to Leith and Hobbs insured it for about £900, on Stewart’s instructions. By that time Hobbs and Stewart had agreed not to build a hull but to lose the boiler and claim insurance. After loading
Tryst
with stones to ensure a fast sinking, Ellington bored holes in her bottom. Hobbs agreed he knew about the scuttling beforehand, but he claimed he was not involved and got no benefit. As in his previous trial he broke down in tears under cross-examination. In this case Stewart and Ellington were found not guilty. Hobbs was obviously out of his depth dealing with crime, but at least there were no deaths.

Nineteenth-century seamen often lived lives different from those men on land. They used a different vocabulary, experienced half the ports of the world and had unique customs and superstitions. It stands to reason that when seamen turned to crime, they could be just as unique. People steal anything, but sensible thieves prefer an item that is small, portable and easy to conceal. Probably the least likely object to be stolen would be eighty feet long, weigh upwards of fifty tons and have to be messily butchered and publicly processed to make it sellable, particularly if the initial theft was carried out in full view of the legal owners and about fifty other witnesses. Nevertheless, that is exactly what happened when George Thoms of Dundee saw an item he deeply desired.

It was 23rd August 1829, deep in the Davis Strait, that treacherous stretch of iced water that separates the western coast of Greenland from the eastern seaboard of Canada. The whaling vessel
Traveller
’s master
,
George Simpson from Peterhead, sighted a whale and was in hard pursuit, with a couple of other vessels,
Princess of Wales
from Aberdeen and a Dundee vessel called
Thomas
, close by, but everybody was there for the same end.

Traveller
sent out her boats and the oarsmen pulled toward the whale, with the boatsteerer ensuring the boat was out of range of the flukes of the whale’s tail. Alexander Buchan stood up in the bows, aimed and threw the harpoon. The barbs stuck in deep and the crew released a mighty shout of triumph. ‘A Fall!’ they cried. ‘A Fall!’

Alex Buchan heaved his foreganger over the boat and took the line a turn around the billet head, securing the whale to the boat. He hoisted a jack, a distinctive flag that announced he had harpooned a whale and the animal was now
Traveller
’s lawful property. They were the ‘fast boat’, the boat held fast to a whale. All they had to do now was kill the animal and they were guaranteed oil money to supplement their wages.

As was expected, the whale fled, pulling the boat behind it. The whaleboat held a number of lines but one by one they were used up, so although the whale and boat were still attached, the whaling seamen were in danger of losing their capture. Providentially, a boat from
Princess of Wales
thrust in one of her own harpoons, known in the trade as a ‘friendly harpoon’ to help tire the whale. However, the whale was still full of fight and struggled, dragging lines and boats behind it, until the lines of
Princess of Wales
were also finished. The whale remained alive, panting on the surface of the sea. Exhausted but triumphant, Alexander Buchan’s crew crept closer, readying their lances for the killing blow, but before they could strike, a boat from
Thomas
raced past and Alexander Kilgour, a Dundee harpooner, thrust his harpoon deep into the whale.

Giving a jerk that unbalanced one of the men in
Traveller
’s boat, the whale raced away, hauling
Thomas
’s boat behind it. It is easy to imagine the scene, with the waves heaving around, possibly dappled with icebergs and speckled with the Arctic birds that knew a kill meant free food. Eventually, and inevitably, the whale tired and lay on the surface, sobbing its exhaustion as the whaleboats circled around like the predators they were. A seaman from
Traveller
thrust in another harpoon. The whale barely stirred and the killing lances came out, thrusting for the lungs, the heart and the brain. The hunters of
Traveller
, the Peterhead Greenlandmen, congratulated themselves on a job well done.

But the Dundee men had other ideas. Ignoring the imprecations and complaints from
Traveller
’s boat,
Thomas
’s men surged forward to claim the whale as their own. Tying lines to the whale’s tail, they prepared to tow it back to their ship but the Peterhead men objected. Harsh words were exchanged, and no doubt so too were threats, but there were more men from
Thomas
than from
Traveller
and weight of numbers told who’d be the victors. The whale was towed to
Thomas
. It was blatant theft, carried out in the full light of the north in view of a dozen men from Peterhead – or so
Traveller
’s crew claimed. The men from Dundee had another version of events.

Alexander Kilgour did not deny that Buchan had thrust the first harpoon. On the contrary, he mentioned that he saw
Traveller
’s harpoon sticking out of the whale. However, he also said that there was no line attaching the whale to the boat; it was a ‘loose whale’ and therefore fair game. The whale was free to whosoever could harpoon it next.

At the time, the men from
Traveller
could do nothing but protest. They were outnumbered and far from any law save that of tradition and that imposed by a master on his ship. Captain George Simpson of
Traveller
complained to Captain Thoms of
Thomas
, but to no avail. When Captain Simpson brought his complaint to the Dundee Union Whale Fishing Company who owned
Thomas,
the trustees of the company backed their captain’s actions. Eventually, the owners of
Traveller
took their case to law, and the High Court in Edinburgh had the unusual experience of deciding who owned a captured whale.

The case was heard in Edinburgh on 8th March 1830, with traffic rattling past and the formal, learned judges a world away from the savagery of the Arctic seas. By that time, of course, the whale no longer existed in body. The whole idea of whale hunting was to secure the blubber and the whale-bone or baleen. The blubber would be melted down to oil, which was used for lighting, heating and, increasingly, for softening textiles. The baleen was cut up and used for a hundred different household purposes, from hairbrushes to netting to stays for women’s fashion. So the case was now over the value of the whale, and both parties agreed that £600 was about the correct figure.

After the advocates listened to the evidence they realised the whole case hinged on one fact: Was the whale ‘fast’ or ‘loose’? If it was ‘fast’, or attached, to Alexander Kilgour’s boat by a line, then
Traveller
had the right to compensation, but if it was what the whaling men termed a ‘loose fish’, a whale with no lines, then the Dundee boats had every right to harpoon and claim it for themselves. The judge made the problem as clear as he could:

A ‘fast fish’ which is entangled by any means, such as the entanglement by the line round it or the like, to the boat of the first striker … any harpoon struck by another person into the fish while so entangled is said to be a ‘friendly harpoon’ and that the fish belongs to the first striker … on the other hand, the instant a fish … gets free … it becomes a ‘loose fish’ and belongs to the person who next succeeds in making it fast.

With this advice as a background, the legal experts listened to the evidence, with Greenlandmen from opposing vessels giving vastly different versions of the events, each of which proved conclusively that their vessel owned the whale, until Henry Cockburn, later to become Lord Cockburn, gave his exasperated opinion: ‘I would confess that in all my experience,’ he said, ‘I never saw any class of men on whose evidence I had less reliance than on the depositions of Sailors. At all times, under all circumstances, they are ever ready to depone that their own ship was indisputably in the right.’

Despite the tangled evidence, the court gave its judgement. It was decided the evidence from
Traveller’
s crew was more reliable than that of the crew of
Thomas
. In essence, the judge said
Thomas
had stolen the whale and he ordered the Dundee Union Whale Fishing Company to pay £600 to the owners of
Traveller.

In this incident, only Dundee’s pride and the Whale Fishing Company’s bank balance were injured but there were other occasions when whaling voyages created more tragic results.

Every year whaling ships sailed to brave the ice and vicious storms of the Arctic. They were hunting for whales, seals and anything else they could bring back to make money for the ship owners and shareholders. Whaling was not an easy job. It was hard, dirty, often bloody and frequently dangerous. Many Dundee ships ended their careers crushed by the ice of the Davis Strait. Every voyage could end in injury or death for the Greenlandmen, so it was no wonder that the families crowded to the dockside when the ships sailed, and the farewells were always emotional as wives said goodbye to the men they would not see for many months.

By the same token, the homecoming was joyful as the Greenlandmen erupted into the bars of Dock Street and the Overgate. The men picked up their wages from the whaling company offices in Whale Lane or Seagate, and alone, in groups or with their wives, they relaxed after the tensions of the voyage. In most cases the whaling men were good husbands and fathers, for the museums and archives of Dundee contain many documents showing wages being paid to their wives, or photographs where husband and wife stand united. However, there was always an exception to the rule.

Sometimes an area of a city will attract a bad element, and for a period of time will suffer from a notoriety that is unfair to the majority of the inhabitants. The Whitechapel area of London was such an area during the murders of Jack the Ripper and the Grassmarket of Edinburgh when Burke and Hare went on their rampage in the 1820s. Dundee did not quite have such a district, but in the late 1880s and early 1890s the streets around Dudhope Crescent became known for casual acts of violence. Dudhope Crescent no longer exists; a dual carriageway has obliterated the entire area, but in the later years of the nineteenth century it was the scene of possibly the only Dundee murder by a whaling man.

Richard Leggat was a Greenlandman on board the famous
Terra Nova
, the last whaling ship built in Dundee, but when he returned from the Davis Strait in 1896 he was not a happy man. At thirty years old he was an experienced seaman; he knew the Arctic seas well, and was used to bringing back a fat pay packet after his exploits in the north. The wage system for whaling men was fairly complex: There was a low basic pay augmented by oil money, striking money, fast money and bone money. Oil money was based on the amount of blubber the ship brought home, paid in proportion to the rank of the seaman. Bone money depended on the weight of baleen, or whalebone, brought back, while striking money was paid to the harpooner who actually fixed his harpoon into the whale, and fast money to men who were in the boat, or boats, that got ‘fast’ to a whale. In a good year, the whaling man could at least double his basic wage; in a poor year he would get only the basic, which was perhaps the equivalent of a minimum wage – a poor return for months of stress and effort.

The season of 1896 was not good for
Terra Nova
or Richard Leggat. The ship captured around 5000 seals but only one whale, so the wages were as low as the spirits of the men. Not that Leggat was a stranger to hard times; in 1888, while he was sailing on
Nova Zembla
, he took ill with what the doctors called ‘inflammation of the lungs and dropsy’ and had to leave the ship at Holsteinborg in Greenland. Although a Danish ship brought him back to Scotland, his wages would be drastically cut, for a seaman’s wages stopped the moment he left his ship. Perhaps that was one reason for the constant arguing that marked Leggat’s marriage.

At that period many Dundee whaling ships worked out of St John’s in Newfoundland, with the hands spending time and money in the local taverns. However, amongst a breed of men renowned for their heavy drinking, Leggat was noted for his quiet sobriety. In appearance he was thin-featured, almost gaunt, with a straight, prominent nose and a red, drooping moustache. As a line manager he had a position of some responsibility, rowing out in the small whaleboat from which the whale was harpooned and ensuring the line connecting the harpoon to the boat did not kink around the leg or head of any of the seamen. Their lives depended on his skill and concentration.

In her mid-twenties, Elizabeth had been married to Leggat for three years. She worked as a weaver in Mid Wynd Works at the Hawkhill, and that autumn moved from her home at Lawrence Street to a two-roomed attic in a John Street tenement, four floors above the flickering gas of a streetlamp. There was also a fourteen-month-old daughter to care for. John Street was a short street between Dudhope Crescent and Dudhope Crescent Road. Because Leggat’s wages were poor that season, Elizabeth had to work longer hours at the mill to make ends meet. ‘What will become of us? There’s only my wages to keep my man and myself and the bairn,’ she said once, and that single remark reveals so much about the constant work of ordinary people in Victorian Dundee. Neither Richard nor Elizabeth were great conversationalists, so save for the occasional brief greeting, their neighbours did not know much about them, but they did hear their frequent arguments and knew that all was not well in the Leggat household.

It is obvious that such a marriage was subject to stress: A man away for months at a time and a family dependent on wages that could fluctuate wildly from season to season. There was one other factor that was probably hidden from the outside world: Richard Leggat was racked with jealousy.