Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison 16 – Bidwell · Verses Across
Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison 16Piratical Cruise in Tropical Seas
18
Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison 16
Piratical Cruise in Tropical Seas
BidwellEnglish
The way to the bank vaults with their treasures had been laid open, but there remained many matters of detail to be carried out before we could enter them. There promised to be a delay of several months, but we were impatient over the prospect of delay of even six months in securing the fortunes we wanted, and which we had come to consider essential to our happiness.
Our plan to ease the bank of a million or two of her forty million sterling was, roughly stated, to borrow from day to day large sums upon forged securities, the bad feature of the plan, from our point of view, being the fact that the bank, as a matter of course, would retain these documents, which could be produced at any future time to found a criminal charge against us, provided justice ever had the opportunity to weigh us in her balances.
Protected as we were by the police in New York, we felt that the chance of our identity ever becoming known was remote. Still, there was an element of chance we wanted to eliminate entirely. In our recent raid on the bankers of France and Germany we never exhausted our letter of credit, but had the amount of cash we drew indorsed upon it, and brought the actual forged document away and instantly destroyed it. Had we been arrested in Europe, no doubt, under the laws prevailing there, they would have made us suffer upon the verbal statement of the banker; but in America to convict one of forgery the document itself must be produced in court.
I paid several visits to the bank, depositing and drawing out various sums of money. I had talks with the sub-manager, and, on various pretexts to get information, I interviewed bankers and money men in the city. Finally, after many conferences, we came to the conclusion that the boasted impregnability of the bank was imaginary, and that the vanity and self-sufficiency of the officials would some day prove a snare to the institution they ruled over.
The next conclusion we arrived at was that, easy as it might be to defraud the bank, yet there was an infinity of detail which would require six months of preparations to carry out. Then, again, the word forgery began to look black in our vocabulary. We knew John Bull was an obstinate fellow when he once got his back up, and we began to think it wise to keep beyond his dull weather eye.
Finally, as the result of many debates, we resolved to abandon the Bank of England matter temporarily, possibly forever, because it was too dangerous, and the delay would be too great. Our new plan was to go to South America on a buccaneering expedition. There being no cable in 1872, and it took, as we ascertained, forty days to send a letter from Rio de Janeiro to Europe and get a reply; so that, if we executed an operation boldly and well, we might hope for anything. We resolved to go to South America, but to leave my account stand in the bank, and if our success was as great as expected, we would let the Bank of England keep the million or two we wanted, and continue her century-long slumber until the time came when some adventurous but unscrupulous mind should accept the temptation she held out to seize some of her bags of sovereigns.
Our plan was, in the main, similar to the one we had lately used with so much success in Germany and France. Only in this case we proposed to use the credit of the London and Westminster Bank, and, therefore, obtained the documents required to carry through such an operation successfully.
The steamer Lusitania of the Pacific Steam Navigation Company was advertised to sail on the 12th, and we determined to go by her. Our plan was to go on the same steamer, to be ever within supporting distance of each other, and yet pretend to be strangers, or if associating together, to act so as to make all observers think our acquaintance merely casual.
Mac had his tickets in the name of Gregory Morrison. He carried letters of introduction to Maua & Co., who had branches in all the coast cities down the coast, including Montevideo and Buenos Ayres on the east coast, and Lima, Valparaiso and Callao on the west.
The steamers of the Pacific Steam Navigation Company, leaving Liverpool, touch at Bordeaux, Santander and Lisbon, then are off 6,000 miles away to Rio, never slowing the engines for a moment during the voyage. Two days at Rio to discharge cargo and take in coal, then off again to Montevideo, discharge cargo, and coal again, then away round the Horn, and thousands of miles up the west coast, touching everywhere to land mails and passengers; finally after 14,000 miles of sea travel they reach Callao, then take the home track for Liverpool.
Modern buccaneers, indeed, were we, engaged in a nineteenth century piratical descent upon the shores of South America. Instead of the burly, much-beweaponed pirate of other years, we were mild-mannered, soft-spoken, courteous youngsters, yet our steel pen and bottle of ink were more deadly instruments or at least of surer fire and of better aim, than the long toms and horse pistols of the piratical braves of the seventeenth century. Our hopes of gain were high, and we counted on an ample return for the trouble of our adventure. I say trouble, for danger we feared none, so confident were we of our ability to carry off everything with a high hand, and so complete was our faith in each other that we had no anxiety as to the result, but simply regarded our trip as a pleasant voyage into tropic seas--a happy change from the March wind and sombre skies of England to the bright skies and balmy air of the tropical world in the Winter months.
I had a balance in the bank of L2,335, and we, as a matter of policy, wanted to have our capital ready at hand. The bank has a rule that a depositor must never have less than L300 to his credit. My friends were somewhat skeptical as to whether the bank did not regard their new customer, F. A. Warren, with some suspicion and as a depositor to be watched. My personal relations with the bank people convinced me everything was all right, but to convince my friends I determined to give them a proof that the bank would break their rule on my account.
The Monday before we sailed for Brazil I called at the bank and told the sub-manager that I was going to St. Petersburg and on to Southern Russia for a time to inspect some work I was doing there, and I purposed to withdraw my account. He begged me not to do so, said many flattering things to me, and urged that it would be convenient to have an open account in London.
"Well," I said, looking at my passbook, "I see I have L2,335 to my credit. I will leave the odd L35 with you." He instantly acquiesced. Had he said: "No, you must leave at least L300, as our rules require," I should have said "All right," and made it five hundred. I drew out the L2,300 at once, intending to deposit L300 before leaving London, but in the haste of our preparations I neglected it, and my balance at the bank stood L35 for all the weeks I was on our piratical cruise to the Spanish Main.
Storing most of our baggage in London, we took the train to Liverpool, and, purchasing tickets for Rio, we went on board the good ship Lusitania, but not the "good" ship, for her first trip, this being her second, had won for her the name of being unlucky, and Liverpool insurance men, no less than Liverpool sailors, do not bank on an unlucky ship--their faith of ill luck following an unlucky ship has been justified in thousands of instances, as it was in the case of the Lusitania. But I am not going to relate the after history of the ship.
From the hour of our arrival in Liverpool we were outwardly strangers, and during the voyage no one ever suspected that we were anything else. We soon discovered we had a pleasant company of fellow voyagers, and as we steamed out of the Mersey and headed southward we settled down to have a good time. Boreas was friendly, and away we sped across the Bay of Biscay, rapidly neared the mouth of the Garonne, on an estuary of which is situated the old city of Bordeaux. Arriving there, the ship lay at anchor for some hours, taking in and discharging freight, and receiving emigrants for various parts of South America. When the steamer was about to leave, it was a strange and rather comical sight to witness the farewells and leave-takings from the crowds of friends who had come to see them off. The customary performance appeared to me so peculiar that I will describe it as well as I can after so many years: Two men standing face to face, one clasps the other round the body, the other passive, then leaning back lifts the party clear off the ground once, twice or thrice, probably according to the degree of relationship or amount of affection; then the operation is reversed, the embraced becoming the embracer. In some cases the ceremonial is repeated the second or third time, neither kissing nor crying being the fashion there.
The next morning we were off the coast of Spain, watching the silvery gleam from the ice-clad peaks of the Pyrenees--at least those of us who were not engaged in the more disagreeable employment of discharging their debt to Father Neptune. However, by the time the ship arrived at the small port of Santander the passengers were mostly recovering from the mal de mer occasioned by the rough water in the Bay of Biscay. While leaving this tiny landlocked harbor, one of the propeller blades touched the rocky bottom, and broke short off, but our ship continued her voyage with undiminished speed, and within three days was steaming up the Tagus to Lisbon. Here the passengers who wished to avail themselves of the opportunity had a few hours on shore; then we were off for the long diagonal run across the Atlantic.
"The Lady of the Lusitania," as she was called, because there was no other lady among the saloon passengers, was the wife of a captain in the British army, who was going out for a few months' hunting on the pampas of Buenos Ayres, and, of course, accompanied by many dogs, with an assortment of guns. There was also a chaplain in the British navy who was going out to join his ship at Valparaiso. A strange character was he; a big, burly man, about 28 years of age, the most inveterate champagne drinker on board, and that is saying a good deal. Whenever he met any of the "jolly" ones of the saloon passengers it was "Come, old fellow, will you toss me for a bottle of fizz?" as he called his favorite wine, and he had no lack of accepters. The majority in the saloon consisted of a party of fifteen young Englishmen, civil engineers, who were going under the leadership of a Swedish colonel to survey, for the Brazilian Government, a railway line across the southern part of Brazil, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In all there were twenty-five young men, full of frolic and fun, who made things rather lively about the ship. They went in for everything from which any fun could be extracted. At the equinoctial line they roped in the "greenhorns" to look through the field glasses at the line, and having fastened a hair across the field of view, of course, we could all see it plainly. Father Neptune came on board and those of the crew who had never crossed the Equator were hunted out of their hiding places, dragged on deck, lathered with a whitewash brush dipped in old grease, shaved with a lath-razor, and then tumbled unceremoniously backward into a cask of water.
After a prosperous voyage of three weeks we arrived within sight of the famous "Sugar Loaf," and were duly disembarked at the Custom House, our baggage passed, and were off to our hotels, each going to a different one, and each registering the name our letters of credit and introduction bore. While in Rio we went by day in the parks or cafes, and spent our evenings together, having a most enjoyable time.
This was our first experience of the tropics, and life under the Equator proved as novel and as fascinating as it ever does to the inhabitant of a cold climate. The show of tropical fruits in the markets was magnificent, and, although strangers are warned not to partake of it, yet our health was so good and our digestion so perfect that we disregarded all warnings and gratified our palates without stint, with no bad results following.
However, we felt after all that we were there on business; we wanted plunder, in fact, and not pleasure, in Rio. Our pleasure lay in Europe or America, there in the good time just ahead, when, as moneyed men, we returned, and, surrounded by those nearest and dearest, we would enjoy life to the full.
Mac was the grand swell of our party, and, wanting to excel us all in his financial successes, was eager to go to the front. Accordingly, we fixed everything so that he could everywhere strike the first and the heaviest blow.
Of course, on our twenty-two days' voyage we had ample time for discussion, and before we passed the Equator had settled on our plan. First of all, it was agreed that one of the party should keep his neck out of the noose, to stand by if either of the others came to grief. Very much to my satisfaction, it was again decided that I was the man to stand from under.
The firm of Maua in Rio was the most considerable in all South America, and Mac's introductions were to this firm. The plan was for Mac to present himself to Maua & Co., and to draw within twenty-four hours, at least L10,000, so as to make sure of our expenses, and a day or two before steamer day to arrange for a very large sum, twenty or thirty thousand pounds. As soon as that was obtained, George was to go to the Bank of London and Rio de Janeiro, and secure as much as he thought it safe to ask for, five or ten thousand pounds. This would be paid in Brazilian paper money, which I was to exchange for sovereigns. Then I was to buy a ticket for myself on the steamer going south, take the gold off and stow it away in my stateroom. At the last moment, in the bustle and confusion of sailing, Mac and George were to slip into my stateroom, conceal themselves and sail with the steamer, and when once out of the harbor, to see the purser, explain that they had arranged with a friend to purchase tickets; but, as he had not put in an appearance, they would be obliged to pay a second time. We purposed to go down the east coast and up the west to Lima. Visiting the cities as we went from Lima, we would go to Panama, there catch the steamer to San Francisco, and after a pleasant sojourn in California go overland to New York with a million.
This was our plan, but, as all the world knows, there is a vast difference between making plans and carrying them into successful execution.
Spotted a mistake or have an idea?
Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison 17
