Next, after arraignment the indictment (we refer to it in the singular as both documents were of the same effect) must be approved by the judges; that is, the court must declare that if the evidential facts set out in the indictment are proved, such facts will make a proper charge and, if found by the jury, will be sufficient to convict. Obviously, then, the big battle of this campaign must be fought across the indictment. Alec the Fiscal, with his army, will struggle to get it approved; Davy Thoirs and his gallant legion are ready to break their hearts in an effort to get it condemned. The actual trial will not be important, for if the indictment be held good, the Fiscal’s witnesses will simply recite what is already written in that indictment, and all the jury will be able to say will be that sometime in February, March, April or May, 1703, the _Worcester_ was off the coast of Malabar, that the ship’s doctor heard but did not see firing, that he was told the prize was sold to a Malabar merchant; that a drunken sot babbled in a widow’s house, and the court will have already pledged itself to declare those circumstances constitute piracy, robbery and murder. Three occasions, March 5, 7 and 13, mark the chronology of this high forensic conflict. Its most lucent presentation requires that the time element be disregarded here, and the arguments put together as a whole. The debates were oral but we know what passed because, according to the fashion of the time, what was said in court must afterwards be put in writing by counsel and given to the clerk “to be entered upon the court books.” Choosing our own time arrangement, then, first the defense attacked the jurisdiction of the court to hear the case at all. It was argued that the alleged crimes were committed on the coast of Malabar and by Englishmen, therefore the accused should be sent to England for trial. Alec the Fiscal countered that the crime charged being piracy, and pirates subject to arrest anywhere, the place of arrest and not the place of offense determined the court’s jurisdiction,--what you might call the geographical boundaries of its power. What Alec the Fiscal is thinking of is the indisputable principle that pirates actually in the act of crime may be taken anywhere. That is not the same--and he must have known it--as a presumably innocent ship being informed against on suspicion. English admiralty practice was somewhat of a bar to the Fiscal’s theory, so he kicked the English admiralty courts out of the window, saying, “as for what may be the custom in England, it doth not concern, nor can be any rule for us.” Looking at it that way, of course the judges had little trouble finding themselves competent to arbitrate the fight. Roars of delight from the Darien stockholders.