Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison 35 – Bidwell · Verses Across
Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison 35One Lovely June Morning Into Plymouth Harbor We Sail
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Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison 35
One Lovely June Morning Into Plymouth Harbor We Sail
BidwellEnglish
Ten days after the events recorded in the last chapter I sailed once more into Havana. This time a prisoner. Two days after my capture, by order of the Captain-General of Cuba, I was put on board the little gunboat Santa Rita, a wretched little tub that steamed four miles an hour and took eight days going from Puerto Novo on the south to Havana.
I was taken by a guard of soldiers, not to the police barracks, but to the common prison, where an entire corridor was cleared of its inmates to make room for me and my guards. Pinkerton was the first man to call. He, of course, was delighted to see me. While giving me credit for my escape, he told me he did not purpose to have me leave him again, and having permission from the authorities, he or some of his men intended to keep me company night and day. Of course I respected him for his honest determination to do his duty. He really was an altogether good fellow, and showed me all possible courtesy and consideration; in fact, on his first visit he brought me a letter from my wife, along with a box of cigars and a bottle of wine on his own account.
One of his men, by the name of Perry, used to sleep in my little room with me, and every morning Mr. P. would relieve him, remaining until dinner time. We had many long talks on all sorts of subjects, and he gave me many inside histories of famous criminal cases which he had been engaged in. In time we became very good friends.
He also gave me full particulars of the really extraordinary way in which he discovered my presence in the West Indies and the reason which led him to conclude that F. A. Warren and I were one. William Pinkerton ordered him to look up the New York end of the business and see if he could discover the identity of Warren. He was one of the many working on the case, but to him belongs the credit of establishing my identity, also of locating my whereabouts and of effecting my arrest.
When ordered on the case he knew no more about me or the forgery than what he read in the newspapers. He soon made up his mind that I was an American, and that I was a resident either of New York or Chicago. This because I was so young and evidently had a good knowledge of finance and financial matters. So he determined to seek for a clue to F. A. Warren in Wall street. He procured a list of the names of every banker and broker in New York, and then spent some time in interviewing them, his one question being "Now, who is he?" With their assistance he soon made out a list of nearly twenty possible Warrens, and speedily narrowed it down to four, my name being one of the four. He soon located my home, and began making cautious inquiries on the spot from neighbors and others. He discovered that I was believed to be in Europe, and had been there before, and that when I last returned I had paid off debts and apparently had plenty of money. He had become convinced of my identity, but if I were Warren--where was I?
Without arousing suspicion, he heard from some of my acquaintances a saying of mine that whenever I had a bank account, I should live in the tropics. So he reported to his superiors that in his opinion F. A. Warren and I were one, and he believed that, if in America at all, I might be found at some fashionable resort in Florida.
He concluded to go to Florida, and visit the various resorts. Upon his arrival at St. Augustine, he sent letters to several of the West India islands, including Martinique, Jamaica and Cuba, inquiring for the names and descriptions of all wealthy young Americans lately arrived. One letter he sent to Dr. C. L. Houscomb, then the leading American doctor in Havana, who, replying to his inquiry, gave my name among others. After my arrest Dr. Houscomb told me how grieved he was to have betrayed me, but that he thought that Pinkerton was a newspaper man, and wanted the information as a matter of news.
With this letter in his hand, Pinkerton found a plain path before him. To go ahead of my story a little, I will say here that eventually the bank authorities made him a considerable present in cash, along with their congratulations over his clever detective work. Capt. John Curtin is to-day well and hearty, a prosperous man and very generally respected by the citizens of San Francisco, where he lives.
About ten days after my arrival he brought me a New York Herald containing these dispatches:
(Special to New York Herald.)
Madrid, April 12, 1873.
The American Ambassador, Gen. Sickles, has formally notified Senor Castelar that the American Government will consent to the surrender to the British Government of Bidwell, now under arrest in Havana upon charge of being concerned in the Bank of England forgery.
(Special to New York Herald.)
London, April 12, 1873.
To the great gratification of the authorities here, official confirmation is given to the rumor that the Spanish Government has concluded to grant the extradition of Bidwell, now under arrest in Havana. There seems to be no doubt that Bidwell is the mysterious Frederick Albert Warren, and there is a very general curiosity to see him. Many conflicting stories have been published of his extraordinary escape and equally extraordinary capture. The Times' report had it that he was mortally wounded, and that he had on his person when captured diamonds to an enormous value, which had disappeared soon after. Sergeants Hayden and Green of the Bow Street force and Mr. Good of the bank of England sail on the Java to-morrow to escort Bidwell to London.
So the web was closing in on me. Of my daily sad interviews with my wife I will say nothing here. But could I have foreseen that this woman, on whom I had settled a fortune, would have married another soon after my sentence, I should not have felt so sorrowful on her account. In due time Green, Hayden and Good arrived, and were introduced to me. I did not give in, but made, by the aid of my friends, a hard fight to persuade the Captain-General to suspend the order for my delivery, and succeeded for a time.
At last, after many delays and many plans, early one May morning I was taken to the mouth of the harbor. There the boat of the English warship Vulture was in waiting, and I was formally transferred to the English Government, and Curtin. Perry, Hayden and Green went on board with me. Soon after she steamed out of the harbor. Later in the day the Moselle, the regular passenger steamer to Plymouth and Southampton, came out, and 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.
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Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison 36
