The Ship of Seven Murders by Alannah Hopkin

Author:Alannah Hopkin [Hopkin, Alannah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-84889-094-7
Publisher: The Collins Press
Published: 2010-07-10T16:00:00+00:00

When this child concluded his testimony, the jury intimated to the Coroner that there was no necessity for going further into the investigation. The jury retired for a few minutes and returned with the following verdict:

That the several Sailors and Passengers were killed by the hands of Capt Stewart, being then and for some days before in a state of mental derangement.

13

After the Inquest

Only when the inquest was over, late in the evening on Friday 27 June 1828, were John Howes and William Smith taken to the North Infirmary in Cork to have their wounds attended to. We learn this from a letter that Coroner Henry Hardy wrote on Saturday 28 June, the day after the inquest, to William Gregory (1762–1840), Under Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant, Richard Wellesley, at Dublin Castle. (William Gregory’s grandson, Sir William Henry Gregory (1817–1892) was Governor of Ceylon, and his second wife Augusta, Lady Gregory, was the founder of the Abbey Theatre.) Hardy asked Gregory to bring his letter’s contents to the attention of the Lord Lieutenant. He enclosed the detailed report of the inquest that had appeared that morning in the Constitution, stating that it was in his opinion ‘a very full and in substance correct account of the proceedings’. This ensured that the Lord Lieutenant in Dublin would know the details of the shocking and unprecedented case before the Freeman’s Journal broke the story in Dublin on 2 July.

The letter adds some details that did not appear in the newspapers, as they were not part of the evidence given at the inquest. We learn that Captain Callendar had sailed for Belfast; the mate Smith was allowed home to his wife and family who lived in Cove; John Howes remained in the North Infirmary ‘for cure’, and the other witnesses ‘are here’, meaning it would seem, that the boys Scully, Deaves and Richards were being held in custody at the Bridewell, pending a trial. (Cork city’s Bridewell was at the junction of Cornmarket and Kyrl’s Street on the site of today’s Garda Station. It was used as a house of detention for a variety of prisoners, from vagrants and prostitutes to debtors and vagabonds).

Then the Coroner writes that the Mayor has asked him to tell the Attorney General about a passage in the letter received from the Inspector in Skibbereen which the Mayor did not permit to be read out in court ‘for obvious reasons’. The passage in question states that ‘William Stewart charges William Smith, one of the wounded men of his brig, with the murder of a marine on board the Lopara frigate when she lay in the Downs … [illegible line] made his escape’.

There is no record of any frigate named the Lopara in the Royal Navy at the time, but given that this is a third-hand account from the lips of a deeply disturbed man who has just killed seven men, the frigate’s name could have got garbled in the telling.

On 30 June Captain Stewart was brought from Skibbereen

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