In the early part of 1704, the sense of indignity and wrong which had been inspired into the national mind by the Darien disasters and other circumstances, was deepened into a wrathful hatred by the seizure of a vessel named the _Annandale_, which the African Company was preparing for a trading voyage to India. This proceeding, and the subsequent forfeiture of the vessel before the Court of Exchequer, were defensive acts of the East India Company, and there can be little doubt that they were grossly unjust. In the subsequent autumn, an English vessel, named the _Worcester_, belonging to what was called the Two Million Company (a rival to the East India Company), was driven by foul weather into the Firth of Forth. It was looked upon by the African Company as fair game for a reprisal. On the 12th August, the secretary, Mr Roderick Mackenzie, with a few associates, made an apparently friendly visit to the ship, and was entertained with a bowl of punch. Another party followed, and were received with equal hospitality. With only eleven half-armed friends, he that evening overpowered the officers and crew, and took the vessel into his possession. In the present temper of the nation, the act, questionable as it was in every respect, was sure to meet with general approbation. Before Captain Green and the others had been many days in custody, strange hints were heard amongst them of a piratical attack they had committed in the preceding year upon a vessel off the coast of Malabar. The African Company had three years ago sent out a vessel, called the _Speedy Return_, to India, with one Drummond as its master, and it had never since been heard of. It was concluded that the people of the _Worcester_ had captured the _Speedy Return_, and murdered its crew, and that Providence had arranged for their punishment, by sending them for shelter from a storm to the neighbourhood of Edinburgh. Vainly might it have been pointed out that there was no right evidence for even the fact of the piracy, still less for the _Speedy Return_ being the subject of the offence. Truth and justice were wholly lost sight of in the universal thirst for vengeance against England and its selfish mercantile companies. Green, the captain of the _Worcester_, Mather, the chief-mate, Reynolds, the second-mate, and fifteen others, were tried at this date before the Court of Admiralty, for the alleged crime of [Sidenote: 1705.] attacking a ship, having English or Scotch aboard, off the coast of Malabar, and subsequently murdering the crew—no specific vessel or person being mentioned as the subjects of the crime, and no nearer date being cited than the months of February, March, April, or May 1703. The jury had no difficulty in bringing them in guilty, and they were all condemned to be hanged on the sands of Leith, the usual place for the execution of pirates.