Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 1).djvu/440

 for such was the term applied to harbour pilots, undertook to carry a vessel into port, and the vessel miscarried through his ignorance, and he had no means to make good the damage, or otherwise render full satisfaction, he was condemned to lose his head. While the twenty-fourth clause actually gave the master, or any of the mariners, or merchants on board, power to cut off the head of the offender without being bound in law to answer for it; they were only required to be very certain that the unlucky lockman who was hired at every river to guide the ship, in order to avoid rocks, shelves, shoals, and sand-banks, had not wherewith to make pecuniary satisfaction.

The twenty-fifth clause aimed at altering "the unreasonable and accursed custom" of lords of the coast, where a vessel was wrecked, claiming and seizing the third or fourth part of the ship, leaving only the remainder to the master, the merchant, and the mariners. "Therefore, all pilots who, in connivance with the lords on the coast," or to ingratiate themselves with such nobles, ran the ship on shore, were doomed to a most rigorous and unmerciful death on "high gibbets near the place where these accursed pilots brought the ship to ruin, which said gibbets are to abide and remain to succeeding ages on that place, as a visible caution to other vessels that sail thereby." The lords or others, who took away any of the goods, were also declared to be "accursed," and were frequently punished as "robbers and thieves." Indeed the twenty-sixth clause