In addition to the charge, the indictments set out, through several pages of close print, the entire evidence which the Crown expected to prove. A great rigamarole, this, containing a particular recitation of everything that George Haines had said to the widow Seaton, her daughter Anne, Will Wood of the artillery, and Jamie Wilkie, with which we are already acquainted. Incorporated with all this, was a long-winded yarn by the ship’s doctor, May, who had been granted the comfort of turning state’s evidence, and from which it appeared that the doctor himself and some others (among whom was the second mate, Reynolds, according to the oral admission of the Fiscal) being ashore and hearing the firing of guns, came to the water’s edge and saw a captive ship riding at the stern of the _Worcester_. The cannonading had ceased by that time, so the surgeon went aboard, where he found the decks of the _Worcester_ littered with goods. He asked the reason of it all of one of the crew, whereupon John Madder, first mate, overhearing him, turned angrily to the doctor “in a tarpaulin temper” as the doctor says, and exclaimed, “D--n you! What have you to do to inquire? Meddle with your plaister-box!” The surgeon then went down to his “chest” and called for the wounded to dress them; three of whom, “Antonio Ferdinando, and one Duncan McKay, now dead, and another” came for treatment. These refused to tell him how they came by their wounds “whereupon the chirurgeon refused to dress them if they would not tell him how they got their wounds, and the said John Madder came to the chirurgeon in a passion, and asked what his business was to ask so many questions, when he did see the wounds so plain before him, calling him a blockhead for not dressing them,” and winding up by ordering the doctor ashore. There the surgeon met the ship’s interpreter, hired locally for the sojourn, who told him that some of the crew of the _Worcester_ had brought the captured ship into the Keilon River and sold it to Cogi Commodo. Such were the indictments, and they were so drawn because of the peculiar nature of the jury’s verdict under the Scotch practice, which did not find the fact of guilt “as charged,” but merely the truth of each item of the evidence, leaving to the court to pronounce the legal significance of those findings. It’s a jumbled-up thing and would take a treatise to explain. Some historians charge that this form of verdict was the child of political skullduggery and framed first to catch covenanters and other radicals for whom juries were showing too much sympathy and were acquitting on the general verdict; the idea being that a jury would have to find as a fact that Dougal was meeting in a bog with his confreres, while the judge could remove from the jury the temptation of turning in “Not guilty” by reserving to himself the declaration of the legal import of the finding of fact as to Dougal’s actions.