XI Mr. May’s premonition was justified by the event. On Wednesday, November 26, 1696, at Execution Dock--which overlooks the Thames at Blackwall, and was the usual place of punishment for Admiralty felons--he and his fellow defendants were hanged. Reading his quaint story (which in substance was his evidence at his trial) we get the idea that if he and his fellow accused were to be convicted at all it should have been for the capture of the _Gunsway_ and not for the theft of the _Charles the Second_. Mr. May is borne out by the record when he says that he was convicted of the latter offense by the five words of Mate Gravet: to wit, that May knew of the plot. But there was no proof to support Gravet’s statement other than the word of one Creagh, to whom, as we have seen, Mr. May rather bitterly alludes, and accuses of seeking to serve his own interest in a serious scrape in which he had become involved. Creagh would seem quite unreliable. He had been one of the men who had left the _Charles the Second_ at the Groyne, on Henry Avery’s invitation to all who had not spirit enough to go along with him and collect their back pay to depart more or less in peace. Reaching England again, he fell in with an adventurous young chap by the name of Vaughan, who was then signing men on the _Loyal Clancarty_, a small sloop which Vaughan planned to, and did, turn over to the service of the then exiled Stuart king, James the Second, and in which Vaughan disturbed the shipping of the government until he was run down and captured in the Channel, after a fight in which the attackers had to wade to the _Clancarty_ through the shallows, with their weapons over their heads to keep them dry. He and his crew were taken first to Dover Castle, where the warden who registered them remarked that most of them were drunk at the time, to be removed later to Newgate, in which latter prison, by what was certainly a very odd circumstance, Creagh again met old shipmates of the _Charles the Second_ from whom he had parted at the Groyne. With the terrible charge of high treason lying upon him, Creagh saw his chance and, expecting thus to purchase clemency in his own affair, eagerly proffered his testimony against the alleged pirates, and was accepted. Thus there was a great premium upon the conviction of Mr. May and the others. His character was brought out most damagingly at his own later trial on the Vaughan business, during which his own brother was forced to take the stand and brand him a liar and a rogue; a petty, sneaking rascal, apparently, who did not hesitate to pilfer the poor resources of his relatives. He might have been telling the truth about Mr. May, but surely not beyond a doubt.