by Travers, Tim
It is noteworthy that Low appeared to take his bloody revenge against specific individuals and groups: the masters and captains of ships, French and Portuguese captains and crew, and against New England ships’ masters and captains. This last was because one Rhode Island Governor had made considerable efforts to capture Low. Eventually, Low’s extreme behaviour alienated even his own crew, who mutinied and put him into a small boat, which was captured by the French. Low was then hanged in Martinique by the French in 1726. Low was one of those pirates, like the French pirate L’Olonnais (see Chapter 5), whose character was simply more brutal than the rest, possibly stemming from Low’s rough upbringing in Westminster, London.78 Another pirate captain, who sailed with Low for a while, Captain Spriggs, also practiced some cruelties, though to a lesser degree than Low. After capturing a certain Captain Hawkins’ ship twice, Spriggs’ pirates were so annoyed at having chased and taken a worthless ship the second time around, that they set upon Hawkins and laid him flat on the deck. Then Hawkins was forced to eat a dish of candles, and finally beaten for a while. Later, Hawkins and his crew were marooned on Roatan Island, though they were given a musket, powder and ball. Hawkins and his crew survived, partly because they were ferried to a nearby island by two men in a canoe, and were eventually rescued by a passing ship.79
Spriggs’ crew applied other cruelties, one of which was a familiar procedure to pirates. Called ‘sweating’, the idea was to stick lighted candles around the mizzen mast, below decks, and then the pirates formed a circle around the mast. The prisoners were then forced to run around the mast, within the pirate circle, as the pirates prodded them with penknives, forks and compasses to keep them moving while music played. According to Johnson, prisoners could keep up their running for about 10 to 12 minutes before they collapsed. In this particular case, the captain of a captured ship was sweated because he did not answer questions truthfully. Other familiar tortures included ‘woolding’ – twisting a rope around a person’s head with a stick as lever until the pressure caused the eyes to protrude and considerable pain. Henry Morgan was reputed to have used this treatment to persuade the inhabitants of Panama City to reveal where their treasures were to be found. And in general, Morgan’s men during his several raids, ruthlessly broke captives on the rack, and used fire, to persuade them to disgorge their wealth. Spriggs also practiced ‘blooding’, as did Captain Shelvocke, in which a captive would be pricked with needles, and then put in a barrel with cockroaches. Continuing with Spriggs, an unusual event occurred later when his ship took a boat, coming out of Rhode Island, containing a cargo of provisions and horses. For fun the crew rode the horses up and down the deck at full gallop, shouting and hallooing. Not surprisingly, two or three pirates were thrown, at which the pirates fell upon the ships’ crew and beat and cut them for bringing horses without proper boots and spurs. Less pleasant was the treatment of a ship from St Eustatia, captained by Nicholas Trot. Wanting some diversion, Spriggs’ crew hoisted the men as high as the main and fore tops and then let them run down fast, so that they ‘broke all the bones in their skins’, which pretty well crippled the crew. After some whipping, Trot and his crew were then released on their sloop. Spriggs’ eventual fate is unknown, although he is likely to have perished ashore on the island of Roatan in 1725.80
Spriggs and his crew were a milder version of Low, and seemed to epitomize the later more aggressive attitude of pirates in the 1720s. Similarly bloodthirsty was one of the crewmen sailing with the pirate captain Matthew Luke – perhaps really Matteo Luca – whose ship was caught off Hispaniola by the Launceston in 1722. Matthew Luke claimed to be a Spanish ‘guarda costa’ (coast guard), enforcing Spanish navigation laws under a commission from Puerto Rico. When taken, Luke’s crew of fifty-eight was composed mainly of Spaniards and mulattos. However, one bloodthirsty member of the crew confessed to killing twenty-eight English men ‘with his own hands’. Matthew Luke was put in irons, and forty-three of his crew hanged.81 Another example of an individual who dispensed rough justice was the English pirate Walter Kennedy. He seems to have followed the pattern of Edward Low in coming from a tough background, in his case, pick pocketing and house breaking in London, which translated into a violent attitude to life and piracy. Kennedy sailed with both Howel Davis and Bart Roberts, and then went off on his own as a pirate captain. When Kennedy was on the Royal Rover, as part of Roberts’ fleet, the Royal Rover captured the Experiment in 1719, whose captain was Thomas Grant. Kennedy tried to kill Grant but some crew members kept Grant out of the way while Kennedy ran about with a cutlass looking for him. Another story comes from the sailor Edward Green, who served onboard the Loyal Merchant, taken earlier by Howel Davis. He claimed to have been wounded by Walter Kennedy and others, who ‘put a Rope about his neck & drew him up under the main top & kept him hanging there about a minute & let him down again and then put a Rope round his Head and tyed it across his Ears & twisted it untill he was almost blind and insensible…’ This obviously was woolding, and was employed to persuade the captive (Grant) to show where the ship’s wealth was hidden. However, it is not clear how much of the torture was carried out by Walter Kennedy himself.82
When Kennedy and his crew decided to retire from piracy, he aimed his ship toward Ireland. But Kennedy was illiterate and his navigator was ignorant, so their ship was wrecked in Scotland while on the way to Ireland. Kennedy eventually wound up in London, running a bawdy house in Deptford. There one of his prostitutes, obviously annoyed with Kennedy for some reason, gave evidence against him, and he was imprisoned in Bridewell prison and reformatory. The same prostitute, still angry, found a witness whose ship was taken by Kennedy. She evidently hoped to send Kennedy to the gallows. This witness was called Grant – probably the same Grant who was tortured earlier. Perhaps to try and save himself, Kennedy turned state’s evidence and gave the names and locations, where he knew them, of 13 of his former shipmates. This did not help him because Kennedy was hanged at Execution Dock, Wapping, on 19 July 1721.83
Moving forward in time, the pirates of the 1820s in the Caribbean and the Americas, and especially off Cuba, practiced some of the worst cruelties in pirate history. One who survived such an attack in 1823 reported on it in the American Monthly for February 1824. Sailing on a ship called the Mary from Philadelphia to New Orleans, the Mary, with a very small crew, was easily captured by pirates speaking a mixture of French, Spanish and English. The author of the story was slashed on the head with a cutlass and then tied to the foremast, facing the stern. If the author is to be believed, the unfortunate captain was brutally tortured to reveal where wealth was hidden. Refusing to speak, the pirates cut off his arms at the elbow. At this, the captain understandably gave way and told the pirates where the specie was hidden. Not satisfied, the pirates then burnt the captain to death on a bed of oakum soaked with turpentine, while filling his mouth with combustibles. Equally unhappy was the boatswain who was fixed to the deck with nails through his feet and his body spiked to the tiller. Then the remaining sailor was forced to kneel in front of a swivel gun which was fired, wounding him severely in the head. Finally, the pirates also shot the ship’s dog and cut out the dog’s tongue. With everyone else dead, the pirates turned to the author, and cut off his clothes with a knife, which revealed more money. At this critical point, things would have gone badly for the author except that a ship providentially arrived, compelling the pirates to leave. One last problem was that the pirates scuttled the Mary, which began to sink. Fortunately, the ship and the author were saved.84
Overall, pirates were often cruel, but this was a cruel age. And apart from unbalanced individuals, the conclusion is that most pirates, if they tortured prisoners, normally did so for specific reasons, usually to discover where treasure was hidden, or to exact revenge for past injuries. This latter situation occurred when a former master of a ship, by name Skinner, who had dismissed some of his crew and refused them wages, was captured by pirates that included one of those dismissed by Skinner. This pirate eyed S
kinner and said, ‘Ah, Captain Skinner! Is it you? The only man I wish to see; I am much in your debt, and now I shall pay you all in your own coin.’ Skinner trembled in every joint, as he had good reason to do, for he was fastened to the windlass, pelted with glass bottles, and then whipped around the deck until the pirates were weary. At last Skinner was shot through the head.85 So pirates did frequently inflict injury and death, even if for reasons that to them seemed necessary. This explains, but does not reduce the pain of the victims, and there were times, as in the 1820s, when pirate cruelty spiked, and victims did suffer very severely.
Death, Repentance and Hanging
The final end for many pirates was hanging. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, hanging was not a pleasant end for an individual because the ‘long drop’, which broke one’s neck, was not introduced until the 1870s in England and elsewhere. Instead the pirate (or any other person sentenced to hang), was left to slowly choke to death after being ‘turned off’ with the short drop. This short drop might take 15 minutes or more to choke the victim to death, so that sometimes the condemned person would hire the jailor to hang on to his legs and so hasten the conclusion. Equally, friends might run forward and also quicken the end in the same way. Nor was this all, because hanging was a very public spectacle, and the crowd would shout out curses and lewd comments to the victims, and throw dead cats and dogs and excrement into the crowd, as well as at the hangman. If the hanging was well organized, the pirate would be exhorted to penitence by the prison chaplain, called the ‘ordinary’, on the gallows platform. This individual made a nice income by selling to broadsheet sellers in London the last words of the condemned. As an example, the ordinary at London’s Newgate prison, Paul Lorrain, was worth the enormous sum of £5,000 when he died in 1700. After exhortations by the ordinary, the pirate or any other condemned individual would be allowed to sing psalms and make a farewell address before being turned off. On the positive side, the execution-bound pirate would be given drams of rum or other spirits as he made his way by cart from Newgate or Marshalsea prisons to Wapping, on the River Thames, where Execution Dock stood and where pirates were specifically hung. Consequently, many were quite drunk by the time they reached the gallows. Some pirates also would wear ribbons and hold nose gays in their hands, as a final gesture to the unkind world. After hanging, the dead pirate would be chained to a stake at the low water mark of the Thames, and the water allowed to wash over the pirate three times, to signify the authority of the British Admiralty over pirates. If the pirate was sufficiently well known, the body would be taken down and resurrected at Tilbury, the entrance to the Thames, as a warning to other pirates and would-be pirates.86
Starting in 1700, pirates could be tried and hung anywhere in the colonial world, and the largest mass hanging did take place at Cape Coast Castle, West Africa, when some 50 of Roberts’ crew were hung in 1722. This was in the middle of the period of the greatest number of pirate hangings, perhaps 400 to 500, which took place between 1716 and 1726 in the Anglo-American world. This was part of the ruthless campaign to exterminate piracy conducted by Britain and other countries in the early 1700s. If the numbers are correct, this meant that around one pirate in ten was hung at this time. To put this in perspective, 2,169 men and women were hung just at Tyburn in London between 1714 and 1783, for a rate of thirty-one to thirty-two per year. This means that pirates were being hung at a slightly higher rate, except for the obvious fact that overall pirate numbers were clearly very much smaller than the whole population of England. Thus, if caught, pirates stood a good chance of being hung. And if all other means of dying as a pirate are included, perhaps one pirate in four was executed, died of natural causes, or was killed, in this period. Also, while in the previous century only the captain and ring leaders tended to be hung, by the eighteenth century most of the pirate crew would hang. In this context, Johnson provides considerable detail on the manner of the hanging of Bart Roberts’ crew. Several of Roberts’ pirates were not inclined to show remorse for their lives, indeed one pirate called Sympson exclaimed just before he was hung that he saw a woman in the crowd whom he had lain with three times. Another pirate called Hardy, finding his arms tied behind his back, merely observed that he had seen many hangings, but in no case had he seen any brought to the gallows with their hands tied in this manner. But others did express remorse, for example a certain Scudamore, who requested an extra three days to say his prayers and study the scriptures. At the gallows, he sang the first part of the 31st Psalm through by himself. A deserter from the Royal Navy, Armstrong, was hung onboard the Weymouth, and spent his last hour lamenting his sins, and singing some verses of the 140th Psalm. Equally, one young man, Bunce, made a pathetic speech at the gallows, blaming his youth for having been tempted by a life of power, liberty and wealth. He begged God’s forgiveness, and asked the spectators to remember God in their early years, so that they would not go astray. Some pirates did therefore turn to religion at the end of their lives, and Johnson gives an example of this in the case of two pirates from Captain Phillips’ crew, John Archer and William White, who were hung at Boston in 1724. Johnson records that these pirates both blamed alcohol for the start of their problems, and Johnson printed their joint and lengthy religious submission on the gallows:
Oh! That in this Blood our Scarlet and Crimson Guilt might be all washed away! We are sensible of an hard Heart in us, full of Wickedness. And we look upon God for his renewing Grace upon us. We bless God for the Space of Repentance which he had given us; and that he has not cut us off in the Midst and Height of our Wickedness.87
One pirate who had an unfortunate hanging was William Kidd in 1701. He was well supplied with drink by the time he got to the gallows at Wapping, and shouted out his innocence while accurately enough blaming his prominent backers, such as Lord Bellomont, for his present condition. He was to be hung with three others, one of whom, the sickly Darby Mullins, called out pathetically just before hanging, ‘Lord have mercy upon me! Father have mercy upon me!’ The other two pirates were French, who naturally prayed in French before their deaths. Kidd shouted again that his backers were greedy men, and then as he was turned off, the rope broke. Kidd fell to the mud of the Thames below. Sometimes this accident was seen as an intervention by God to spare an innocent man, but the sheriff’s deputies brought him up again to hang a second time. By now Kidd was sober, and reportedly either committed his soul to God, or said farewell to his wife and daughter in New York City, before his second hanging.88 Yet for one unusual pirate, it was not necessary to be faced with hanging to find repentance. According to one account, the pirate Edward England was living in poor health and poverty on St Mary’s Island, Madagascar, in 1721. He ‘seem’d very penitent some time before his Death, and hoped that GOD would forgive him his Sins, desiring his Companions to leave off that Course of Life.’ This account claimed that Edward England’s death was caused by ‘the severe Stings of his Conscience for his Wicked Course of Life, and the Injuries he had done to several, by robbing them of their Properties.’89
In fact, pirates about to meet death were understandably quite varied in their attitudes toward their terrible situation, some penitent, some defiant. At New Providence, in the Bahamas, under the new and reformed Governor, Woodes Rogers, Captain Augur and a number of his crew were condemned as pirates in October 1718, and sentenced to hang. It appears that Woodes Rogers did not have authority for this action, having no commission for the trial, and he only appealed rather vaguely to the Laws of all Nations. In any case, the sentence was to be carried out, despite some concern that the residents of New Providence, long a pirate haven, would come to the rescue of the condemned pirates. However, this did not happen, and eight pirates were hung in November 1718. Some of these pirates were penitent, others were not, while the oldest, aged 45 (which was old for a pirate), William Cunningham, had been a gunner with Blackbeard. He expressed contrition, while Captain Augur, aged around 40, simply drank a glass of wine to the health of the Governor and
the Bahamas Islands before being turned off. The most surprising behaviour was that of Dennis Macarty, aged 28, who wore blue ribbons at his neck, wrist, knees and cap. Macarty appealed to the crowd saying that he knew a time when the residents would not have let him die like a dog, and appealed to the spectators to have compassion on him. The crowd was too cowed by soldiers to help him. Macarty kicked off his shoes, saying he had promised not to die with his shoes on, and so he died shoeless. Thomas Morris, aged about 22, was dressed with red ribbons, and criticised the new Governor. Before dying he defiantly said that he wished he had been a greater plague to the Bahamas Islands. Another of the condemned, William Lewis, aged about thirty-four, only desired liquors to drink with the other condemned and with the crowd of spectators. In contrast, William Ling, aged about thirty, was penitent and told Lewis that water was more suitable than liquors to drink at this critical time. The most reviled pirate, according to the account, was William Dowling, aged about twenty-four, who was said to have been a pirate for some time, and was rumoured to have murdered his mother in Ireland. Nevertheless, all these pirates apparently joined in reading prayers and psalms before being conducted to the place of execution.90
In regard to this group execution in the Bahamas, age did not seem to have an effect on the attitude of these pirates to their unpleasant end. The youngest was 18 and the oldest, as noted, was 45. One of the two pirate ring leaders was Macarty (the other had died), and it was Macarty who had dealt harshly with his captives, and this same bravado appeared as he faced death without his shoes. This pirate group also appeared surprised by the toughness of Woodes Rogers, and certainly hoped that New Providence’s former pirates would assist them. But the tide had turned against piracy, and the correspondent who sent Johnson the details of this New Providence trial and execution observed that there were few who watched the hangings that did not deserve the same fate, being former pirates, but they had been pardoned by a recent Act of Grace. These spectators at the hanging now reluctantly recognized that the world was changing. The golden age of piracy in the West was over.
