186 THE STORY OF THE BETTISCOMBE SKULL. 



as to whom neither place nor time of execution had been 

 ordered " all which were carried back to be kept in safe 

 Custody till further Orders are taken for their disposal " 

 appears the name of " John Pinney."* 



Whatever might have become of John Pinney it would 

 seem from the above extract that the fate of Azarias Pinney 

 was sealed and the death sentence carried out. 



Shortly afterwards I mentioned the result of my discoveries 

 to Miss Julia Huggins, an old lady who lives at " Montravers," 

 the mansion or big house of the sugar plantation of " Pinneys " 

 and who is the sole surviving grand-daughter of Edward 

 Huggins, who had purchased the estate, as already men- 

 tioned, about a century ago, from the Pinney family, who 

 evinced great interest in the inquiry which I was making, and 

 sent me later the following extract from a book entitled 

 '' Under the Blue Flag, or the Monmouth Rebellion," by Mary 

 E. Palgrave : 



" 1688, James II. 



" Azariah Pinney, to Mr. Jerome Nipho, who shipped him 

 to Nevis to work on his plantation on board the ' Rose Pink.' 



" A. Pinney was from Bettiscombe, nr. Lyme Regis." 



It would seem, therefore, as if the death sentence on Azariah 

 Pinney had been commuted, for it was no uncommon thing. 

 I believe, for judges in those days and for Judge Jeffreys in 

 particular to make large sums of money by disposing of 

 their convicts to persons who would send them to work on 

 their plantations abroad. If this story from Miss Palgrave's 

 book be true it would account for the fact that an Azariah 

 Pinney was living in Nevis at the end of the seventeenth 

 century. But he must soon have emerged from the condition 

 of a " white slave " in Nevis to that of a landowner and a 

 landowner of some means to have been able to purchase a 



* See " A further account of the Proceedings against the Rebels in the West 

 of England," September llth, 1685. (Reprinted from a contemporary 

 broad-sheet in the possession of Mr. A. M. Broadley in " S. and D. N. and Q.," 

 Vol. VIII., p. 226 (1903). 



