Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison: Fifteen Years in Solitude
about ten miles out at sea was met by the Vulture's boat, and I and my
four guardians were transferred to her.
At last I was off for England, and it looked very much as if Justice
would weigh me in her balance after all, the more certainly because I
found my wife on the Moselle. I had secretly resolved never to be taken
back, but intended the first night out of Havana to jump overboard,
possibly with a cork jacket, or something to help to keep me afloat. The
waters of the gulf were warm, there were many passing ships, and I
would take my chance of surviving the night and being picked up. But,
very cleverly, Curtin decided to send my wife with me and treat me like
any other cabin passenger, rightly divining I would not kill her by
committing suicide or going over the side on chances.
I was well treated all the way over, but every night my prayer was that
we might run on an iceberg or go down, so that my wife might be spared
long years of agony and me from the misery and degradation of prison
life.
I had obtained a position in Havana for one of my servants, but Nunn was
returning with me, feeling very badly and most unhappy over the sure
prospect of my future misery. I was pleased to think he had held on to
the money I had given him. Altogether, he was quite $2,000 ahead, and I
wanted to make it $5,000. He certainly deserved it for his constancy and
affection.
One lovely June day we sailed into Plymouth, there to land mail and such
passengers as wanted to take the express to London. I instructed my wife
to go to Southampton while I went ashore with my guardians.
From the London Times, June 10, 1873:
"Among the passengers who landed at Plymouth yesterday morning from
the royal mail steamer Moselle was Bidwell, otherwise F. A. Warren,
in charge of Detective Sergeant Michael Hayden and William Green,
accompanied by Capt. John Curtin and Walter Perry of Mr.
Pinkerton's staff. They were joined by Inspector Wallace and
Detective Sergeant William Moss of the city police, who had come
down from London the previous night to meet the steamer.
"It being known that Bidwell was expected from Havana in the
Moselle, an enormous crowd assembled in Milbay pier to await the
return of the steam tender with the mail, in order to get a sight
of the prisoner, and so great was the crowd that it was with some
difficulty that Bidwell and his escort managed to reach cabs, and
were driven to the Duke of Cornwall Hotel adjoining the railway
station. They left by the 12.45 train for London. A crowd of
20,000 persons were present to see them off, and cheered Bidwell
heartily.
"Bidwell will be taken before the Lord Mayor in the justice room at
the Mansion House this morning."
Accompanied by my escort of six, I arrived in London one bright Spring
morning, just as the mighty masses of that great Babylon were thronging
in their thousands toward Epsom Downs, where on that day the Derby, that
pivotal event in the English year, was to be run. All London was astir,
and had put on holiday attire, while I, now a poor weed drifting to rot
on Lethe's wharf, was on my way to Newgate.
Newgate! Then it had come to this! The Primrose Way wherein I had walked
and lived delicately at the expense of honor, ended here!
"Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap," was written by one
Paul. The wisdom of many was here and condensed in the wit of one, and
one with the shrewdest insight into things and a practical knowledge of
human history.
I was a prisoner in Newgate. Newgate! The very name casts a chill; so,
too, does a sight of that granite fortress rising there in the heart of
mighty London. Amid all the throbbing life of that great Babylon it
stands--chill and grim--and has stood a prison fortress for 500 years.
Through all those linked centuries how many thousands of the miserable
and heartbroken of every generation have been garnered within its cold
embrace! What sights and sounds those old walls have seen and heard! As
I paced its gloomy corridors that first night, pictures of its past rose
before me so grim and terrible that I turned shuddering from them, only
to remember that I, too, had joined the long unending procession ever
flowing through its gates, which had heaped its walls to the top with
one inky sea of misery.
In the cruel days of old many a savage sentence had fallen from the lips
of merciless judges, but none more terrible than the one which was to
fall on us from the lips of their ferocious imitator, Justice Archibald.
I found my three friends already prisoners there, and a sad party we
were. When we said good-bye that night on the wharf at Calais, where we
sat star-gazing and philosophizing, we little anticipated this reunion.
What a rude surprise it was to find how things were conducted in this
same Newgate. I took it for granted--since the law regarded us as
innocent until we were tried and convicted--that we could have any
reasonable favor granted us there which was consistent with our safe
keeping. But no. The system of the convict prison was enforced here, and
with the same iron rigor. Strict silence was the rule along with the
absolute exclusion of newspapers and all news of the outside world. The
rules forbid any delicacy or books being furnished by one's friends from
the outside. This iron system is as cruel as unphilosophical, for,
pending trial, the inmates are more or less living in a perfect agony of
mind, which drives many into insanity or to the verge of insanity, as it
did me. How can one, then, when the past is remorse--and the present and
future despair--find oblivion or raze out the written troubles of the
brain save in absorption in books.
When Claudo is doomed to die and go "he knew not where," peering into
the abyss, the fear strikes him that in the unknown he may be "prisoned
in the viewless winds" and blown with restless violence round about this
pendant world. A terrible figure! It filled at this time some corner of
my brain and would not out. It went with me up and down in all my walks
in Newgate.
If I had the pen of Victor Hugo, what a picture I would draw of a mind
consciously going down into the fearful abyss of insanity, making mighty
struggles against it, yet looking on the cold walls shutting one in and
weighing down the spirit, feeling that the struggle is ineffectual,
the fight all in vain, for the dead, blank walls are staring coldly on
you, without giving one reflex message, bearing on their gray surface no
thought, no response of mind. For they have been looked over with
anxious care to discover if any other mind had recorded there some
thought which would awake thought in one's own, and help to shake off
the fearful burden pressing one to earth. As a fact, a man so situated
does--aye, must--make an effort to leave some visible impress of his
mind as a message to his kind. It is a natural law, and the instinct is
part of one's being. It is a passion of the mind--a longing to be united
to the spiritual mass of minds from which the isolated soul is suffering
an unnatural divorce of hideous material walls.
It is this law which makes the savage place his totem on the rocks, and
it is, thanks to the same instinct, that this very day our savants are
finding beneath the foundations of the temples and palaces which once
decked the Phoenician plain, the baked tablets which tell us the family
histories, no less than the story of the empires of those days. When the
impress was made on the soft clay to be fire-hardened, each writer felt
or hoped in the long ages in the far-off unknown,
"When time is old and hath forgot itself,
When water drops have worn the streets of Troy
And blind oblivion swallowed cities up,
And mighty States, characterless, are grated
To dusty nothing"----
then some thought, some message from their minds, there impressed on the
senseless clay, would be communicated to some other mind, and wake a
response there.
Many a time, with a brain reeling in agony, did I turn and stare blankly
at those walls, and, in a sort of dumb stupor, search them over in hope
to find some word, some message impressed there, some scratch of pen or
finger nail. It might be a message of misery, some outcry from a wounded
spirit, some expression of despair.
Had there been one such--had there been! Every one of my predecessors
had left a message on that smooth-painted wall, but the red-tape
official rogues--the stultified images sans reason, sans all
imagination--had, after the departure of each one, carefully painted
over all such legacies.
The hideous cruelty of it all! My blood, boils even now, when I think of
it. Even in the days of Elizabeth the keepers of the Tower of London had
enough human feeling to leave untouched the inscriptions made by Raleigh
and others, and there they are to-day, and to-day wake a response in the
heart of every visitor that looks on them.
CHAPTER XXXV.
RUNNING THE GAUNTLET.
My life at Newgate was an ordeal such as I hope no reader of this will
ever undergo. Day by day I saw the world slipping from under my feet,
and the net drawing its deadly folds closer around me. Soon we all were
forced to realize there was no escape for any of us.
Of course, we were all guilty and deserved punishment--I need not say we
did not think so then--but the evidence was most weak, and had our trial
taken place in America under the too liberal construction of our laws,
undoubtedly we all would have escaped. But in England there is no court
of criminal appeal, as with us, and when once the jury gives a verdict,
that ends the matter. The result is that if judges are prejudiced, or
want a man convicted, as in our case, he never escapes. The jury is
always selected from the shopkeeping class, and they are horribly
subservient to the aristocratic classes. They don't care for
evidence--they simply watch the judge. If he smiles, the prisoner is
innocent. If he frowns, then, of course, guilty.
With us when a man is charged with an offense against the laws he
engages a lawyer--one is sufficient and quite costly enough. In England
they are divided into three classes, viz.: solicitors, barristers and
Queen's Counsels.
The solicitor takes the case and transacts all the business connected
with it. A barrister is the lawyer who is employed by the solicitor to
conduct the case in court and make the pleadings. He never comes in
contact with the client, but takes the brief and all instructions from
the solicitor. The Queen's Counsel is a lawyer of a higher rank, and
whenever his serene lordship takes a brief he must, to keep up his
dignity, "be supported" by a barrister. So my reader will perhaps
understand the raison d'etre of the proverb, "The lawyers own England."
As no solicitor can plead in court, so no Queen's Counsel will come in
direct contact with a client, and must be "supported" by a barrister.
Ergo, any unfortunate having a case in court must fee two, if not three
legal sharks to represent him, if represented at all.
We employed as solicitor a Mr. David Howell of 105 Cheapside, and a
thoroughgoing, unprincipled rascal he proved to be. He was a small,
spare, undersized man, with little beady eyes, light complexion, red
hair, and stubby beard, and when he spoke it was with a thin reedy
voice. From first to last he managed our case in exactly the way the
prosecution would have desired. He bled us freely, and altogether we
paid him nearly $10,000, and our defense by our eight lawyers--four