CHAPTER XXXIV.

ONE LOVELY JUNE MORNING INTO PLYMOUTH HARBOR WE SAIL.

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.

[Illustration: CHATHAM--CONVICTS AT LABOR.]

"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.

[Illustration: PRINCIPAL WARDERS, WOKING PRISON. No. 1 Scott, No. 2.

Metherell.]

[Illustration: ASSISTANT WARDERS, DARTMOOR PRISON.]

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.

[Illustration: A GANG IN BLOUSES MARCHING OUT.]