Captain Rogers Hanged for the Murder of Andrew Rose

A merchant captain at sea had almost unlimited power over his crew, and a sailor had nowhere to appeal until the ship reached port. In the spring of 1857 the Sunderland ship Martha and Jane, homeward bound from Calcutta by way of Demerara, put into Barbados for repairs. There Henry Rogers took command, and a seaman named Andrew Rose signed on. The second mate beat Rose so badly that shipmates advised him to run, and he did, but the police brought him back in irons, and the ship sailed on May 11.

For the next three and a half weeks, Rogers and his mates, William Miles and Charles Edward Seymour, flogged Rose almost daily. One Sunday morning, while he was in irons, he was heard singing the hymn “Oh, let us be joyful.” The captain answered, “I will make you sorrowful,” and gagged him with an iron bolt. Rogers trained his dog to bite him, sent him naked aloft with the mate whipping him up the rigging, and had him sealed in a water cask lashed to the ship’s side from noon to midnight. At last they hoisted him off the deck by the neck from the mainmast. Rose died on deck on June 5, so covered in sores that the crew dragged his body aft with a rope rather than touch him, and he was thrown overboard. When the ship reached Liverpool on June 9, the crew went to the authorities. All three officers were convicted of murder at the Liverpool Assizes in August and sentenced to death. The mates’ sentences were commuted, but on Saturday, September 12, 1857, Rogers was hanged outside Kirkdale Gaol before a crowd of about 50,000. Within a week, a Liverpool waxworks advertised “exact models” of Rogers and his mates, the captain “attired in the clothes actually worn at the execution.”

Broadside ballads on the case were printed that year in English and Welsh, and one of them survives in tradition as Andrew Rose. It follows the evidence closely, “Gagged him with an iron bar” and “Naked beneath the burning sun,” though it stretches the night in the cask to “seven long days” and declines to describe the worst of it: “The captain gave him stuff to swallow; / Stuff to you I will not name.” In Orkney the song was sung as Andrew Ross, and Orcadians held that he came from the island of Stronsay.