Not so with Quelch. No back-alley dodging for him. With all the circumstances of a business man in lawful enterprise he went to the shop of one of the leading jewelers of Boston and there melted down a quantity of Portuguese gold and silver coins. May have been fooling with the jeweler’s crucibles when the rough hand of the officer thumped his shoulder. Captain Kidd was the last of the colonial pirates to be sent home to England for trial. After that the Government authorized such proceedings to be had in the colonies themselves, for the expense of dragging the accused and the witnesses across the Atlantic was too much. On June 13, 1704, Quelch and a group of his pirates were tried for murder and piracy at a “Court of Admiralty held at Boston, in her Majesty’s Province of the Massachusetts-Bay in New England, in America.” Mr. Attorney General of the province, assisted by eminent queen’s counselors, carried the prosecution; the defense was borne by the accused themselves with the help of a Mr. Menzies, a lawyer appointed by the court to assist them “in any matters of law.” It will be remembered that in those times a defendant in a criminal action was not allowed a lawyer for the purpose of ascertaining the facts of the case but merely to advise on matters of legal practice, whose only job in most cases was to assure the accused that what was being done to them was all according to law. The indictment was on nine articles or counts, beginning with the death of Captain Plowman and ending with the taking of the Bastian ship off Rio. The death of Plowman was made the fact of the murder charge. Pimer, Clifford and a fellow named Parrot turned queen’s evidence. The feeling of contempt which one seems to have for an informer can not be extended to these men; for their action here was quite consistent with their attitude from the beginning, which, as we have seen, had not been hidden even from the pirates. They never approved the deeds done or pretended they did. These are not your ordinary informers. We have to take off our hats to lawyer Menzies. He put up a fine fight. He showed himself unafraid of court or council and stuck to his clients when more politic lawyers would have eased off. Really he beat the prosecution. It was this way. The commission to this court of admiralty was issued under an act of parliament which provided that its proceedings should be according to what was called the civil law, which was a different procedure from that of ordinary criminal courts, being originally from the old Roman law. Now, by the civil law, in a trial for piracy an accomplice could not be a witness against the accused; and Pimer, Clifford and Parrot were technically accomplices. Menzies had chapter and book for it, too.