Posted by John Barton on October 28, 2004 at 22:09:29 from 203.97.103.32 user Nostalgic.
Ransome needn't be thought romantic for introducing smuggling and pirates into the childrens' games of his stories. Both were well alive on the East coast when he wrote. Living on Mersea when the last case occurred, during the war, I recall the Essex County Standard account was dull compared with Wentworth Day's:
"But they did not tell the story of Zeb's [Zebedee Milgate, oysterman] part in the famous sea-fight off the Naas End, when a Tollesbury smack and a Mersea smack, both oystermen, ran alongside a big forty-six-ton marauding Burnham smack, boarded her, beat up her crew with hand-spikes and fists, and threw her cargo overboard and her dredges after it. It was a great fight, the shouting and the fisticuffs, the oaths and black eyes, on the slippery deck in the clear sea-sunlight, with the smacks grinding and cracking together on the swirling tide, their sails flapping and burgees dancing. In the end the Burnhamers, bloody-nosed and beaten, hauled up their anchor, set sail, and squared away down by the Bachelor's Spit and the Buxey Sand for home, defeated men.
But that was not the end of it, not by a bag of winkles. The case came up in the High Courts of Justice away up in London, and old Zeb, with two bloody wounds on his bandaged head, was one of a motley crew of Mersea men and Tollesbury chaps who stood, caged but incorrigible, in the dock on a charge of piracy on the high seas - the last trial for piracy in England. They were convicted but remain innocent in the eyes of all right-thinking men to this day.
"Ye see, it was like this here," said Ted, [Milgate, Zeb's son] settling himself on a stool and laying his gun carefully in the corner. He had been on a fox-shoot over six square miles of the cattle-marsh where the assorted populace of three villages had blazed B.B. and S.S.G. in all directions from muzzle-loaders. Five foxes had died bloodily, and at least a dozen, "big as hosses," had escaped. Here in Mrs Hone's, with a quart pot between us, he relaxed, safe, but foxless.
"Yes, yes," said Ted, puffing cigarette smoke at the stuffed heron. "Them Burnham chaps had been a-drudgin' shingle and oyster culch off the Naas End for days. That belong to Mersea an' Tollesbury, all that culch - and Dad and some on 'em towd 'em so. But that warn't no go. They cum agin and drudged up tons o' shell. So away go tew o' our smacks, an' ran alongside 'em. There warn't no more than tew men showin' on deck on each smack, one at the hellum and one on the runners. Dad an' them was down below. They tumbled up, soon as the gunwales touched, an was aboard that Burhamer like one o'clock, man o' war boardin' style! There was a rare old set-toal - arms an' legs a-'goin and anything they could lay hands on. They fit like tom cats an' gied them Burnhamers suffin tew take home. There warn't one but got a black eye, an' some had tew.
"Rum going's on - but Mersea's a head place for rum' uns and rum goes".