' For three or four days and
nights Mr. Mackenzie had scarcely an hour's sleep. By the end of
August he had commenced an action in the High Court of Admiralty for
condemning the 'Worcester' and her cargo, to compensate for the
damages sustained by his company through the English seizure of their
ship, the 'Annandale.' When Mackenzie sent in his report on September
4, he added that, from 'very odd expressions dropt now and then from
some of the ship's crew,' he suspected that Captain Green, of the
'Worcester,' was 'guilty of some very unwarrantable practices.'
The Scottish Privy Council were now formally apprised of the affair,
which they cautiously handed over to the Admiralty. The Scottish
company had for about three years bewailed the absence of a ship of
their own, the 'Speedy Return,' which had never returned at all. Her
skipper was a Captain Drummond, who had been very active in the Darien
expedition; her surgeon was Mr. Andrew Wilkie, brother of James
Wilkie, tailor and burgess of Edinburgh. The pair were most probably
descendants of the Wilkie, tailor in the Canongate, who was mixed up
in the odd business of Mr. Robert Oliphant, in the Gowrie conspiracy
of 1600.
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