s wuddie,'[29] said the caddy on Leith Links;
and his employer struck his ball in the direction of the Captain's
gibbet on the sands. Mr. Duncan Forbes of Culloden sighed, and, taking
off his hat, bowed in the direction of the unhappy mariner's monument.

One can imagine this little scene repeating itself many a time, long
after Captain Thomas Green, his mate, John Madder or Mather, and
another of his crew were taken to the sands at Leith on the second
Wednesday in April 1705, being April 11, and there hanged within the
floodmark upon a gibbet till they were dead. Mr. Forbes of Culloden,
later President of the Court of Session, and, far more than the
butcher Cumberland, the victor over the rising of 1745, believed in
the innocence of Captain Green, wore mourning for him, attended the
funeral at the risk of his own life, and, when the Porteous Riot was
discussed in Parliament, rose in his place and attested his conviction
that the captain was wrongfully done to death.

[Footnote 29: Gibbet.]

Green, like his namesake in the Popish Plot, was condemned for a crime
of which he was probably innocent. Nay more, he died for a crime which
was not proved to have been committed, though it really may have been
committed by persons with whom Green had no connection, while Green
may have been guilty of other misdeeds as bad as that for which he was
hanged. Like the other Green, executed for the murder of Sir Edmund
Berry Godfrey during the Popish Plot, the captain was the victim of a
fit of madness in a nation, that nation being the Scottish. The cause
of their fury was not religion--the fever of the Covenant had passed
away--but commerce.

'Twere long to tell and sad to trace the origin of the Caledonian
frenzy. In 1695 the Scottish Parliament had passed, with the royal
assent, an Act granting a patent to a Scottish company dealing with
Africa, the Indies, and, incidentally, with the globe at large. The
Act committed the occupant of the Scottish throne, William of Orange,
to backing the company if attacked by alien power. But it was unlucky
that England was then an alien power, and that the Scots Act infringed
the patent of the much older English East India Company. Englishmen
dared not take shares, finally, in the venture of the Scots; and when
the English Board of Trade found out, in 1697, the real purpose of the
Scottish company--namely, to set up a factory in Darien and anticipate
the advantages dreamed of by France in the