NEIL MACLEOD AND HIS ASSOCIATES. 249 



ship with Captain Love. The story of the latter was 

 simple enough. He had narrowly escaped capture off 

 the coast of Ireland, where a number of his comrades in 

 crime were cut off by a party from the shore. There was 

 a rich cargo on board the Priam, consisting of cinnamon, 

 ginger, pepper, cochineal, sugar, 700 Indian hides, and 

 twenty-nine pieces of silver plate which had been taken 

 from an English ship ; and a remarkable box, containing 

 various precious stones of great value, which had been 

 captured from a Dutchman ; also, according to a con- 

 temporary writer, a large number of muskets. This valu- 

 able cargo had to be taken to a safe place of refuge, and 

 Love chose the Island of Lewis for the purpose. He could 

 not have made a worse choice. For a time, all went well 

 with the pirates. They resumed their occupation off the 

 Lewis coast, and captured the ship of a Lowland Scot, 

 one Thomas Fleming (Richieson) of Anstruther, whom 

 they detained as their prisoner, using his vessel as their 

 guardship. They also seized a Flemish buss, transferring 

 five of the crew to the Priam to work as slaves, and re- 

 placing them with a similar number of pirates. The buss 

 was driven by stress of weather on the coast of Shetland, 

 where the crew landed to the detriment, doubtless, of the 

 Shetlanders. 



The accounts given of Neil Macleod's dealings with 

 Peter Love are conflicting, but the main facts are tolerably 

 clear. A bond of mutual offence and defence seems to have 

 been entered into by the two outlaws, and for a time their 

 friendship remained unimpaired. The intimacy, indeed, 

 became so great that Love was about to marry a daughter 

 of Torquil Blair Macleod, who (apparently erroneously) is 

 described as Neil's aunt.* It is impossible to say what 

 was the immediate cause of the tragic interruption to the 

 friendship between the two men ; but an impartial ex- 

 amination of the facts points to the conclusion, that Neil 

 deliberately hatched a plot to seize the pirates and hand 



* We are not informed who Torquil Blair was ; he may have been another of 

 old Ruari Macleod's illegitimate offspring. 



