Cameos in history

Every now and then you come across some figure in a history of whom you would like to know more. Someone interesting and improbable. Most recently, I came across John Harriott. P.D. James (the mystery writer) and T.A. Critchley wrote a book, The Maul and the Pear Tree, in 1971 recounting and reconstructing a brutal set of murders, the Radcliffe Highway murders which occurred in 1811 in dockside London.

John Harriott was the man in charge of the Thames River Police. Born in the 1750's he had led an interesting life. His peripatetic wanderings seem so improbable but there they are.

Harriott joined the Navy as a boy and sailed to the West Indies. He was shipwrecked off the Levant, then served under Admiral Pocock at the taking of Havana and again at the capture of Newfoundland. When peace came he enlisted as first mate in the Merchant Navy, lived for some time with the American Indians, then suddenly re-appeared in the East as a soldier, where he was acting chaplain and Deputy Judge Advocate. Sent to quell a refractory rajah, he sustained a matchlock wound in the leg, sailed off to Sumatra and the Cape, then after a spell in the wine trade settled down to farm in Essex, where he became a magistrate. In 1790 the farm was destroyed by fire. Harriott emigrated to the United States, returned after five years to England, and then (in 1798) helped Patrick Colquhoun to plan the River Police, with its headquarters in Wapping. In 1811 he was sixty-six; a flamboyant, brave, crafty old buccaneer, a founding father of the first British Empire, typecast for the pages of Robert Louis Stevenson.