That is the report in a history book of the nineteenth century "Robertson's Landmarks" about t he raid, as his part of the Battle of the Windmill, a raid by some disgrunteld patriots near Prescott on the St.Lawrence River by Pirate Bill Johnston and "his gang of burnt cork Indians" (that is how the pirates were described by Lt.Governor Bonnycastle at the time) on the steam vessel the Sir Robert Peel in 1838.

The Sir Robert Peel had been up bound on the river and put into Wells Island, in the Thousand Island area of the St.Lawernce River. for fuel for her furnaces, she being one of the old cordwood consuming sidewheelers that waddled from woodpile to woodpile in the very early days of steam. This seems to have been rather stupid, for adjoining Wells Island was "Fort Wallace," one of the several pirate strongholds established by William Johnston, a well known and legitimate pirate. Abel's Island opposite Alexandria Bay was another.

After bunkering the Sir Robert Peel lay over for daylight. Pirate Bill Johnston and Patriot sympathizers or members of the Hunters' Lodges in the United States, interrupted the midnight snores with shouts of "Wake up, Wake up, the nations are at war!" "Revenge for the Caroline! Revenge for the Caroline!"

The bewildered passengers found the deck swarming with a multitude of men with faces painted black and Indian feathers in their hair. The multitude is said to have totalled 13 by actual count, but the passengers and crew of the steamer, who outnumbered them many times over, allowed themselves to be robbed and herded ashore without a shot being fired. There were about eighty passengers, who saved scarcely an article. It has been reported that £20,000 in specie was on board for the pay of troops in Upper Canada. This same source says that Mr. Holditch lost £1,520 pounds in bank notes, Col. R.D. Fraser of Brockville, lost £300 in bank notes, and the passengers altogether lost their baggage and jewelry and £15,00 specie. Another report indicates that Mr. Holditch of Port Robinson lost ,000, and Capt. Bullock, of the Neptune, was also a heavy looser. After the steamer had been plundered she was set adrift, blazing like the Caroline, which had been sent over Niagara Falls six months before. She floated away with the current, rolled over, dropping her engines, and plunged hissing, near Rock Island. Pirate Bill Johnston and his make believe Indians rowed away with their booty, leaving the outraged passengers to the tender mercies of the next steamer that came along for wood. This was the Oneida, arriving next day.

Two weeks after his clean up of the Sir Robert Peel and her passengers, Pirate Bill issued this proclamation, dated June 10th, 1838;

The raid was Pirate Bill Johnston's biggest success, and it was carried out according to his best bloodless traditions. He was by this time nearing the sixtieth milestone, but he had forgotten neither his style of theatrical declamation, nor his abhorrence of gore.

Pirate Bill was a "real" Canadian pirate. He was a renegade and a pirate because of a grievance he cherished against the British Government. Some say that he failed to qualify fully as a Knight of the Jolly Roger or member of the Order of Skull and Crossbones, or even for the Collar of the Hempen Halters, despite the fact that he strutted around with a twelve-shot Cochrane rifle and six pistols, one dagger and a knife in his belt and his sash was the flag of the captured Sir Robert Peel.

The only time he used his weapons was when he shot a dragoon's horse and sent the rider back to his commander to report that he had lost his despatches. He never cut a throat or blew a brain out, or made a victim walk a plank - other than Sir Robert Peel's gangplank safe ashore on the Well's Island wood dock.

Pirate Bill Johnston was born at Three Rivers Quebec in 1772, a son of United Empire Loyalist times, perhaps a child of the migration. He had been driven from his home and holdings near Bath on the banks of the Bay of Quinte, Lake Ontario, about the time the War of 1812 began. He appears to have had property which he valued at £l,500 confiscated on some smuggling charge. He had been a merchant and may have tried to dodge the government salt monopoly. It is said that William was a member of the Frontenac Militia and was jailed for insubordination. This was probably the outcome of his dispute with authority in the matter of customs duties. Feeling himself unjustly treated by his country in peace, he may have refused militia service for her in the war.

With the dust of Bath, Upper Canada, on his shoes, he fled to Sackett's Harbour N.Y., which was the American naval base on Lake Ontario. He was either a renegade or a deserter or both. He was not enrolled in the United States army, but he is said to have shown the invaders the back-path up Queenston Heights. After that battle his activities against his native land were numerous in the war of 1812.

Commodore Chauncey hired the Pirate of the Thousand Islands for espionage. In 1814 he was hired specifically to destroy HMS St.Lawrence, the massive naval ship that won the war of 1812, before she was launched.

In his light skiff Pirate Bill carried into Kingston harbour at the dead of night with an American midshipman with the forefather of that deadly naval weapon, the torpedo. This very first torpedo was so crude one can almost pity the optimism of the inventor and one must admire the courage of the devoted operators.

The boat had to creep up, unobserved, to within a few yards of the victim. Then an iron harpoon had to be fired, point blank at the ships waterline, from a blunderbuss or musket in the small boat's bow. The harpoon had a loop near the head, to which was attached a short light line. The other end of this line was fastened to a powder-keg, which had a copper cylinder to buoy it up. The torpedo-man had to light a slow fuse in the cylinder, fire the harpoon into the ship, heave the line, keg and cylinder and lighted fuse overboard - and row away, if he could, before sentries riddled him with musket balls or the exploding powder-keg blew him and the ship he was trying to destroy to Kingdom Come!

Pirate Bill Johnston rowed Midshipman McGowan, U.S.N., around and around Navy Bay in the darkness until the first streaks of dawn began to light up the frowning face of the Stone Frigate. Never a man-of-war but this stationary one on the shore had they discovered in all this time, neither the big one they had heard of nor the little ones they had been fighting year after year. The whole fleet seemed to have vanished.

Here, when the sun came up, they had revealed to them the mystery of their being no ships in Navy Bay. Its first rays flashed back from the ensigns and pendants of the entire British fleet in the Upper Gap far above Kingston harbour, boldly taking the lake, as though there was not an enemy to be feared between Kingston and the Gulf of Mexico.

And there was none. For in the midst of the British fleet, like a sovereign among her servitors, and vassals, towered the new three-decker, topmast high above them all. She had been launched a few weeks before and had been christened the St.Lawrence in honour of the river which began to flow when she began to float.

A thousand men trod the decks of H.M.S. ST.LAWRENCE . She was on her way, not to destroy the American fleet and naval base at Sackett's Harbour, but to relieve beleaguered Niagara. Into that war torn peninsula she poured troops and stores; and, as everybody knows (or should know) the last invader was driven from British soil ere the old year died. And this was possible because British Canada, though with painfully few soldiers, now had complete control of the waterways, which enabled her to place those soldiers where they were needed. Thus, with no thanks to Pirate Bill, the war was effectively ended.

In his time Pirate Bill preformed many bold and hazardous exploits. Darting here and there among the Thousand Islands Johnston's gang intercepted despatches, attacked small craft and harassed Canadian settlements. On one occasion he robbed the mails between Gananoque and Kingston, took off the clothes of the coach's occupants, beat whoever refused him, and tied the coachman to a tree.

Pirate Bill had much to do with schooners in his 28 years of private warfare on Great Britain, but in the war of 1812 he favoured the six-oared barge which appeared here and there and everywhere. He was discriminating in his choice of small craft, and only Botell, the boat builder below Cape Vincent N.Y., on the American side of the St.Lawrence, could satisfy his taste. Of necessity he had to use all sorts of boats as emergencies arose, and he did not despise the Indian canoe. Once in the war of 1812 he was driven ashore on the Canadian side and all his crew were captured. But he himself escaped, and, after hiding for two weeks, found a canoe and paddled to Sackett's Harbour, thirty six miles across the lake. Sometime his flotilla in the Patriot rebellion consisted of a number of canoes, with his galley, as the rowing boat might properly be called, as his flagship.

Bill's "naval forces and flotilla" were somewhat sketchy, but not altogether a paper navy. If not much of a sailor, he was an A-1 boatman.

While William used both steamers and schooners in his navy, his preference was the light, open, fast-rowing boat know at the time as a gig. She had a double set of oars, 12 long sweeps and 12 short paddles for pulling through narrow passages and shortcut channels, and for making time in open water. She was light enough to be portaged on men's shoulders.

Typical of Pirate Bill's style was in 1838 and she made one or more raids on Amherst island, opposite Bath, the pirate's old Canadian home. Sir Richard Bonnycastle, Lt. Governor of Upper Canada, reported that "three farmhouses were plundered, and many valuables and some money obtained; whilst one farmer, in defense of his property, was inhumanely shot at, and lost three fingers and a part of his hand. The pirates were dressed as sailors and well armed and it is said they had one sixteen-oared boat, mounting two three-pounders." This story belies others that he was non-violent.

Pirate Bill Johnston used to lurk in his long rowing gig under St. Nicholas Island and the Scotch Bonnet at the eastern end of Lake Ontario, off the south shore of Prince Edward County, Ontario, until he saw a convoy of bateaux creeping across to Presqu'ille from the Carrying Place and then he would swoop down and rob them before they could get to salt Point. He dumped Thomas Parker, whose boat brigade he plundered, on Point Traverse, thirty miles away. Once, at night, he landed, robbed the henroosts of the Sellecks and Gibsons at Presq’ile Bay on the North shore of Lake Ontario, and set on fire the small schooner grandfather Gibson and his sons were building, amide wartime interruptions, inside the Calf Pasture. By the light of their blazing property they saw the pirate rowing away, in a long sharp galley with six oars to the side.

Pirate Bill boasted to his American friends that he had destroyed a new schooner being built for His Majesty at Presqu'ille, pierced for fourteen guns! This was not entirely true. George Gibson was building a schooner for one of his sons on the shore in front of his dwelling in Presqu'ile Bay.. .He had the schooner pretty well completed when spies, who were continually coasting along the Canadian frontier, reported that the vessel was being built for the government for war purposes.

The Americans recruited Pirate Bill Johnston to burn the boat.

Pirate Bill Johnston's daughter Kate shared his wanderings and imprisonments. She was nineteen when he captured the Sir Robert Peel. When he was a fugitive with a price on his head again and again she saved his life by her skill in detecting the approach of enemies, and her stout muscles at the oars of their sharp cedar skiff, which flitted to and fro like a moth among the Thousand Islands. In fact she was very much like Young Jane in the "female smuggler" who

Daughter Kate, Miss Piratina, like her father, never stained her hands with anything more sanguinary than the fish she gutted for the paternal breakfast.

At one time or another there were many rewards posted for the capture of Johnston; by the Canadian Government; by the State of New York.

His capture toward the end of the Patriot rebellion was in tune with the man. That mixture of farce and comedy which in part relieved and in part emphasized the grimness of the whole Patriot rebellion.

After the battle of the Windmill, which William fought out on the mudflat across the river with great comfort to himself, the United states made mild efforts to clean up the gang of guerrillas who using the American side of the St.Lawrence for purposes which might have provoked an international war. Federal troops searched the island and with no indecent haste captured one of the Johnston boys, who was lurking on the shore with a boat for his father. Then they ranged the woods and found the old man. He rushed to the river with the cry: "My boat! My boat!" but finding her filled with soldiers and his son a prisoner, he doubled back into the bush, meeting two United States troopers.

"Gentlemen," said William, "I am your prisoner, but upon these terms. I must retain those arms which I have taken up in the cause of Liberty, sacred alike to you and to me. If I lay them down it is but to place them in hands which will use them, may I hope, with happier fortune. Lead me to my son."

The troopers knew Bill Johnston well, and played their parts unhesitatingly. They walked with Bill to the boat, allowed him to divest himself of his rifle and two large pistols and hand them to his son, who was a prisoner, but with no charge against him. Bill still had enough hardware dangling around him to make fight impossible and death by accident probable; just four pistols and two knives. After some more heroics he deposited these with his already burdened offspring. His captors delivered him to a file of soldiers in the vicinity of Ogdensburg and the party adjourned to the American Hotel at Auburn. Here he was kept with John W. Birge, a rebel leader who had funked the Prescott raid and left Von Schoultz to lead it and be hanged. Indictments were prepared, but they could not find sufficient grounds for prosecution of Johnston merely because he had been on a schooner stuck on a mudflat. He was held for further investigation, but not very hard for that night both he and Birge walked away.

The burning of the Sir Robert Peel and the Prescott raid were too close to international "incidents" to be ignored however, so a reward of was posted for Johnston's recapture and this was effected near Rome N.Y. He was now in less friendly territory than on the St.Lawrence shore, and at Albany they fined him and sentenced him to a year in prison. There is some obscurity over the charge upon which he was convicted, but it appears to have been using United States territory on the St.Lawrence for the purpose of making war upon a power with which the country was at peace. No savagery was displayed against him, for his daughter Kate was given permission to share his imprisonment, as she wished. After six months Bill escaped one evening, walking 40 miles through the long spring night. He lived in hiding until the not to rigorous search cooled, and then went to Washington with a large petition for pardon in his pocket. Van Buren, who was president, left the onus upon his successor, Harrison, and the later restored William to society by making him lighthouse keeper at Rock Island, where he had burned and plundered the Sir Robert Peel.

Ex-pirate Bill Johnston remained as lighthouse keeper at rock island, for some 30 years.

Five years after the burning of the Sir Robert Peel, when the pardon from President Harrison and the lighthouse job from Washington had rendered his position secure, he dickered with Sir James Alexander, who had crossed the St.Lawrence for Kingston deserters, for sixty dollars for his pirate flagship!! Sir James didn't buy the buccaneer's bargain, but he did make a good note of the old desperado's appearance:

William told Sir James that he owned three islands which he called Ball, Shot and Powder, and that he would still row or sail against any boatman in the Thousand Islands.

The retired pirates family was not suffering. Decatur, one of his four bold sons, was proprietor of the Hotel Walton at Clayton N.Y. (or French Creek as it was called earlier). The pirates brother John was a member of the New York Assembly and president of the First National Bank in Clayton. The pirate's child, Kate, whom Sir James described as "his handsome daughter, the queen of the Thousand Isles," married Charles H. Haws of Clayton N.Y.

His life had been what he intended it to be, a thorn in British fingers for over a quarter of century. Because of his lack of violence to his victims he may have been, according to literary piratical standards, a sissy, but he died in bed.

The old pirate king died in his son's hotel, Feb. 17th, 1870, at the ripe age of 88: and one is almost tempted to add the phrase of the time, "much respected and lamented."