( Read the first part of Katharine Gerrard Cooke's story here.)
There was no time for tears or farewells. The small trading ship was waiting in the harbour, its threadbare canopy no protection against the scorching tropical sun. The English women and children who had lost their husbands and fathers in the massacre at Angengo on the night of 14 April 1721 were hustled into a ship and sent to safety.
Of the three women on the ship, Sarah Cowse had four children, and Cesar Burton's widow two. Records do not mention whether Katharine Gyfford had children with her at the time of their flight, even though she was mother of Thomas Chown and Anne Gyfford. Like most English parents of her time, she may have sent them to England for schooling, as the boy was eight years old and the girl six. The small vessel in which the women and children found themselves was carrying cowries from the Maldives, and took one month to pass Cape Comorin, at the southernmost tip of India. It reached Fort St. George, Madras, on 17 May 1721.
Katharine had tried to collect as much of her property and cash as possible, but there had been little time. She managed to take the account books and some official papers, as her husband's private business was mixed up with the East India Company's trade. Her actions provoked criticism from the Bombay Council, who accused her of misappropriating its documents. Historian John Biddulph, in his 1907 book The Pirates of Malabar, writes that she made an effort to persuade Lieutenant Peter Lapthorne, one of the few Englishmen who escaped the massacre, to go with her. However, Captain Robert Sewell, senior EIC servant at the Angengo Fort, stopped him. As the boat moved away from the harbour near the English fort on the Arabian Sea, she called out to Lapthorne to request that he take care of her remaining property, as her agent. Lapthorne and Sewell, however, had other ideas. A few weeks later, Lapthorne wrote to Katharine that the only property he could find belonging to her were "two wiggs and a bolster and some ophium" [sic] in the warehouse.