Gow was now a prisoner among the rest in the Marshalsea.  His behaviour there was sullen and reserved, rather than penitent.  It had been hinted to him by Mr. Fea, as by others, that by his behaviour he should endeavour to make himself an evidence against others, and to merit his life by a ready submission, and obliging others to do the like.  But Gow was no fool, and he easily saw there were too many gone before who had provided for their own safety at his expense, and besides that he knew himself too deeply guilty of cruelty and murder to be accepted by public justice as an evidence, especially where so many other less criminals were to be had.  This made him, with good reason, too, give over any thoughts of escaping by such means as that; and perhaps seeing so plainly that there was no room for it might be the reason why he seemed to reject the offer, otherwise he was not a person of such nice honour as that we should suppose he would not have secured his own life at the expense of his comrades.  Gow appeared to have given over all thoughts of life, from the first time he came to England.  Not that he showed any tokens of his repentance, or any sense of his condition suitable to that which was before him, but continuing sullen and reserved, even to the very time he was brought to the bar, when he came there, he could not be tried with the rest, for the arraignment being made in the usual form, he refused to plead.  The Court used all the arguments which humanity dictates in such cases,[106] to prevail on him to come into ordinary course of other people in like government, laying before him the sentence of the law in such cases, namely that he must be pressed to death, the only torturing execution which however they were obliged to inflict.

But he continued inflexible, carried on his obstinacy to such a height as to receive the sentence in form, as usual in such cases.  The execution being appointed to be done the next morning, he was carried back to Newgate in order to it.  But whether he was prevailed with by argument and the reasons of those about him, or whether the apparatus for the execution and the manner of the death he was to die terrified him, we cannot say, but the next morning he yielded, and petitioned to be allowed to plead, and he admitted to be tried in the ordinary way.  Which being granted, he was brought to the bar by himself and pleaded, being arraigned again upon the same indictment upon which he had been sentenced as a mute, and was found guilty.

Williams the lieutenant, who was put on board the Bristol ship (as hath been said) with orders to deliver him on board the first English man-of-war they should meet with, comes, of course, to have the rest of his history made up in this place.  The captain of the Bristol ship, though he received his orders from the crew of pirates and rogues, whose instructions he was not obliged to follow, and whose accusation of Williams they were not obliged to give credit to,