The Man Who Was Jekyll and Hyde by Rick Wilson Page A

behaviour when he flies from this place to London. He secretes himself in London for several weeks; search is made for him, but he cannot be found; he admits in one of his letters that he knew that Mr Williamson was in search of him, but he did not choose an interview; a vessel is freighted for him by some persons, contrary to the duty they owed to their country; she is cleared out for Leith; he goes on board of her in the middle of the night, with a wig on, in disguise, and under a borrowed name; he is carried to Flushing; he changes his name to John Dixon, and writes letters to people in Edinburgh under that false signature, explaining his whole future operations, in consequence of which letters he is traced and apprehended, just when he is on the point of going on board of a ship for New York. If he had been innocent … it is not possible that he could have conducted himself in this manner.

    The letters referred to, as well as passages given by witnesses in court, disclose much of the intriguing detail of Brodie’s shipboard flight and so have been dealt with in separate chapters (5 and 6); only unelaborated stages of the voyage are recounted in this chapter, before looking at the dramatic circumstances of his flight, arrest and repatriation.
    It was on yet another Sunday – 23 March – that Brodie found himself being led aboard the Scottish sloop Endeavour , of Carron near Falkirk, which lay at anchor at Blackwall and was supposedly set fair for Edinburgh’s port of Leith with a couple of homeward-bound Scots passengers. It was just before midnight when the captain, John Dent, came aboard with the owners, Messrs Hamilton and Pinkerton, in the company of what looked like ‘an elderly gentleman in feeble health’ who was dressed in a blue great-coat with a pulled-up red collar, round wig, black vest, breeches and boots – and who – before the ship set off the next morning – ‘was allotted a bed in the state room near the fire as he was sick’.
    Another deep sigh of relief must have emanated from the state room that morning when the Endeavour came alive, her sails billowing out as her mooring ropes were loosened to allow her a good start with a fair wind into the broad Thames estuary. Brodie too must have relished the movement, comfortable in the knowledge – despite his chronically sore throat – that he was making good his escape, as only a clever fellow like him could do.
    It was not to be quite so simple, however. Suddenly, just off Tilbury Point, the Endeavour made a heavy crunching noise as her hull scraped along the bottom of the sea; she had gone aground, and, despite the crew’s energetic efforts to coax her out of trouble, she was not to be refloated to clear the Thames and get out to open sea for a fortnight.
    In the resulting ‘dead’ time it became inevitable that the three Scots passengers would get to know each other. The others were John Geddes, a tobacconist in Mid-Calder, West Lothian, and his wife Margaret, who had been on a short break in London. As all three repeatedly paced the deck seeking fresh air amid waves of fog, there was much good-natured conversation, during which it became clear that the ‘sick old man’ who had come aboard in the darkness of their first day was relatively young and nimble of mind, despite the sore throat for which he had to go ashore at one point to buy some soothing milk. Turning on his legendary cheeky charm for the other passengers, he gave his name as John Dixon and, while volunteering little about his circumstances or professional interests, easily befriended the couple and at one point even took them ashore by skiff to a nearby village for dinner.
    But when the Endeavour was finally refloated to resume her interrupted voyage, the Geddeses’ original sailing plan was still not to be. To everyone else’s surprise – including the captain’s? – ‘Mr Dixon’ handed