The Last Pirate of New York

by Rich Cohen

  THE MURDERS ON THE OYSTER SLOOP

  A Partial Confession from Hicks

  He Admits His Guilt and Details Some of the Particulars of the Tragedy

  “Hicks, I have formed a theory of the manner in which Capt. BURR, and the WATTS boys were murdered, and I believe it was done between the hours of 12 o’clock at night and 3 in the morning.”

  “No,” replied HICKS, “they killed them between 9 and 10 o’clock at night.”

  “What do you mean by they?” rejoined his questioner. “There were but four men on board the sloop, and you were one of the four. I am surprised at your attempt to deceive me, HICKS, and shall have nothing further to do with you, if you treat me in that way.”

  “But there were five on board,” said HICKS, with a cunning smile. “The devil was the fifth personage; he possessed me and urged me on to do it. You see, I was at the helm, and one of the WATTS was forward on the lookout, while Capt. BURR and the other lad were asleep below. I had entertained the idea of murdering them for some time, and the devil kept telling me now was the chance. I walked forward quietly, and before the young man was aware of my intentions, I dealt him a tremendous blow on the head. He fell down, but I had to repeat the blow several times before I could kill him. Meantime the noise and scuffling woke up the man who was sleeping in the hold, and just as he got on deck I struck him. He wasn’t so hard to dispatch as the first one.”

  Q.—“What sort of an instrument did you use? Was it a marlin spike or hand-spike?”

  This question HICKS could not be induced to answer, merely replying that it was a heavy instrument. His manner and subsequent remarks conveyed the impression to the mind of his questioner that an axe was the weapon he had used.

  HICKS resumed—“After I had finished the boys, I went to the cabin and found Capt. BURR just coming upon deck. He asked what the matter was, and I struck at him. He’s a mighty powerful man, and he attempted to grapple me, and it was a long time before I could overpower him. I brought him at last,” he added triumphantly.

  “Oh! the resistance of the Captain accounts for the marks of the terrific struggle in the cabin; the wood-work was hacked as if with an axe, and there was a great quantity of blood about.”

  To this remark HICKS assented, and the gentleman went on—

  “But there were bloody finger-marks on the gunwale, and you must have thrown one of them overboard before he was dead, and while he was clinging to the side, chopped his fingers off.”

  “No, Sir; they had all been dead more than an hour when I pitched them over,” said HICKS. He then said: “They tell me one of the bodies has been found; is it true?”

  “I believe so,” was the reply.

  “Well, I don’t; you see, when all this happened we were fifty miles from Sandy Hook, and I took care their graves should be deep—very deep.”

  He was then asked what his feelings could have been, alone as he was on the vessel, with nothing to be seen but the stars above him and the wide waters around him, while his shipmates, murdered by his hand, lay mutilated and bleeding on the deck?

  “Oh!” said he, “it makes me shudder now, but then I did not mind it. I told you the devil urged me on; he sustained me then, but now he has deserted me.”

  * * *

  —

  Hicks asked the warden and the deputy marshal to meet him in his cell. He’d been with the priest all morning, weeping and praying, holding and kissing the Bible, which he could not read. He said he’d come to a decision. He wanted to confess, tell the story of his crimes—not just the murders on the E. A. Johnson but all the murders. Not just on this ghost ship but on all the ghost ships. He wanted to tell the story of his life. It would turn out to be remarkable. More than the story of a single ruined man, it was the story of the underworld and the waterfront, oceans and tides, frontier towns and seaports, the Old West and the modern metropolis, the South Pacific and the Horn of Africa, gun smoke and gold strikes, the wildest parts of the hemisphere. It was Yankee enterprise deformed by rage, blood-soaked and shot full of holes. It was America as seen in a funhouse mirror.

  Hicks told it in the course of one long morning. He said he was doing it for his wife and child. They were impoverished. The confession would help, as he would sing for whomever was willing to pay most, which turned out to be New York publisher R. M. De Witt, whose typical titles included The Highwayman’s Bride; or, the Capture of Claude Duval; Clog Dancing Made Easy; and Revelations of a Slave Smuggler: Being the Autobiography of Capt. Rich’d Drake, An African Trader for Fifty Years—From 1807 to 1857. De Witt, headquartered at 33 Rose Street, would release Hicks’s book on the morning of the execution. According to one account, the prisoner asked for his fee in coins—he said he did not trust “the folding kind”—in hopes of bludgeoning his way to freedom with sacks of silver, but this story was a typical rumor. The man who took the confession, Deputy Marshal Lorenzo De Angelis—he worked at the command of Isaiah Rynders and was partnered with the transcriber G. W. Clackner—swore in a letter to the Times that the whole thing had been straightforward. “Every cent of the money realized from the sale of the confession will be applied to the use of the widow and the child,” De Angelis wrote, “and the wretched man will have the satisfaction of knowing that he does not leave them entirely destitute and dependent on the charity of the world.”

  To Hicks, the confession was about more than money—it was about eternal life. The way is narrow, the priest had explained to him, and if Hicks hoped to travel it, he must tell what he had done, and not just what he felt like telling but all of it. He did so on July 9, 1860, four days before hanging. He was in Cell 8, amid a few spellbound people, speaking in a singsong pirate patois full of waterfront lingo. No one had ever heard him talk at length—he had usually uttered no more than two or three sentences at a time, as few words as absolutely necessary. They now realized he was in fact an accomplished talker and a garrulous raconteur.

  Deputy Marshal De Angelis said the confession was taken down “as nearly as possible, word for word as it came out of the mouth of Hicks,” but reading it, you can tell it was edited and otherwise finessed by someone at the publishing house. The prose is ornate, high-flown, and Victorian, American literary writing as it was before the simplifying purities of Lincoln and Hemingway—fancy, baroque, spritzed with perfume, ten-cent words and the sort of wraparound sentences that a man like Hicks, a man of barrooms and ships, would never have spoken. It is, for example, impossible to imagine the killer saying, “I look back upon my way of life, and see the path marked with blood and crime, and, in the still midnight, if I sleep, I act the dreadful scenes anew.” His actual language was overwritten and lost. We can imagine it—we vaguely know how sailors spoke in the 1850s—but never recover it. What we have instead are the underlying facts, the skeletal bones of the epic story.

  The senselessness of the killings aboard the E. A. Johnson—that was what terrified people. One hundred fifty dollars, an old watch, two pairs of pantaloons, and a picture of a pretty girl he would never meet—was that really what it was all about, was that really why three innocents had to meet such a terrible fate? That motive was a pill the public could not swallow.

  Hicks fixed that problem in the first moments of his confession. Yes, the motive had been money, he said, but also something more. It was what had driven him to do most of the terrible things he had done in his forty years of life: his desire for revenge on the world. He wanted everyone to feel just as woebegone and forsaken and damned to hell as he did.

  * * *

  —

  Albert Hicks was born in 1820 in Foster, Rhode Island, the youngest member of a large family, the sixth of seven sons, meaning, according to folklore, he was marked by a blessing or a curse. His father was a farmer who was often said to be honest, which seems less a statement of fact than a critique of the son. Why can’t you be more like…Albert’s first m
emories were of fields—red in summer; green in spring; white in winter; gold in fall—that rose and fell around the house like a heaving sea.

  He had been unruly even when small, the kind of boy you’re warned to keep at a distance. “I was naturally of a wild, restless, reckless disposition, fonder of wandering about the fields, or lounging by the brook side, than following the habits of industry,” he told De Angelis. He got into fights constantly, set off by the merest provocation. Not many children battle as if they intend to do real harm. He did, and it made him feared. He’d take his first shot at a boy’s face and end it right there. He was always getting the paddle or the strap, the back of the hand. His father wanted him to work on the farm, but it was soon clear that he did not have the temperament. He wandered off when given even a small task. You’d find the hoe in the field and the boy gone, the forest lurking all around. “My only ambition was to be rich,” Hicks said, “but I had no desire to acquire riches in the plodding way in which our neighbors went through life; my dream was to become suddenly rich by some bold stroke, and then to give free reins to the passions that governed me.”

  He was trained in shoemaking and carpentry—his father insisted on it, knowing the boy, a son of his old age, would need a trade to survive in the world. But it was not shoe-making or carpentry that got Albert dreaming. It was treasure. “I used to wish I could find pots of gold and silver which rumor said had been buried in our neighborhood by pirates and robbers,” he explained. “I used to listen with rapt attention to stories of pirates, robbers, highwaymen.”

  The Rhode Island shore had long been rank with buccaneers—it was a famous privateer coast. Captain Thomas Paine, who sailed under a black flag out of Jamestown, Virginia, drove the French from Block Island and led a raid on St. Augustine, capital of Spanish Florida. Captain Kidd, the notorious British pirate who buried some of his treasure on Gardiner’s Island in Long Island Sound and some on Bedloe’s Island, where Hicks was to be hung, sailed his ten-gun ship, the St. Antonio, into Narragansett Bay in 1699, where he found refuge. This golden age of criminality lasted until 1723, when twenty-six pirates were hung on Gravelly Point off Long Wharf in Newport, Rhode Island, perhaps the largest public execution in U.S. history.

  Hicks was raised on these stories as later gangsters would be raised on stories of Hicks. They set his mind adrift, filled him with wanderlust. He had some savings from work doing errands and odd jobs. At fifteen, he took this money and ran away—lit out across the fields, his shadow stretching before him. He headed for the biggest place he knew, Providence, Rhode Island, which occupied a commanding position on Narragansett harbor, a gateway to the sea. Nearly fifty thousand people lived in Providence. There were taverns and boardinghouses, there were immigrant-choked streets. Hicks hung around the waterfront dives, amid tattooed men.

  He stayed till his money was gone, then went to Norwich, Connecticut, where he hoped to get a job. When he was still living with his family, they used to visit Norwich on market days—his father sold the autumn harvest there. The elder Hicks was, as a result, known in Norwich, a buzzing country town near the confluence of the Yantic, the Shetucket, and the Quinebaug rivers. Hicks walked in and out of the shops, skulked around the mills and the factories, looked for work and was chased away. If he had caught his reflection in a window, he would have seen a brooding adolescent, dark-eyed and oversize, with handsome features and the beginnings of a beard.

  After two days, he was hungry. He went into the train station. People were coming and going amid the shrill whistle of engines and early morning traffic. He noticed luggage set against the station wall to be transferred to connecting trains. He returned that night, picked up a bag, and walked out. He carried it into the woods, then went back and got another. He found little of value in these bags: clothes, a book, a lady’s underthings. He kept the underthings and traded the rest. He later said he’d swapped it with a peddler for bread and a few coins.

  All told, he was gone less than a week. He must have suffered his return as a defeat. His parents demanded to know where he’d been, but he wouldn’t say, or did say but his story was unbelievable, or did say but his story kept changing. Meanwhile the thefts had been reported in Norwich. The police made inquiries. Several people remembered seeing young Hicks hanging around the station. The police turned up at the farm in the middle of the night. They went into the boy’s room, woke him, and searched his things. They found the coins and underwear. He was arrested and taken to jail. He would, in a sense, never make it back home. He was leaving as one kind of person—reckless but innocent—and would return as another kind.

  He was tried and convicted in the town court. Not yet sixteen, he was sentenced to eighteen months in Norwich prison. It was 1835. To be a boy in a nineteenth-century penitentiary, in a cold germ-filled lockup, buggered and beaten, the plaything of grown men, was a variety of damnation. He changed in that prison. Whatever soft thing had remained bled away. He became mean. Otherwise he would not have survived. After three months, he saw an opportunity: a key in a lock, an unchained door. He slipped away—became an escaped convict, a dangerous man at large, at loose in the world.

  He gamboled across open country, slept in the woods, shed his prison outfit for clothes he found drying on a line. He made it to Glocester, Rhode Island, twenty miles outside Providence. He got a job on a farm, working in fields so much like those of his father, it could make you question the very nature of time. He was there six weeks before he was recognized and sent back to prison.

  His sentence was extended. He was beaten, then put to work on the road beside the prison’s most hardened convicts. As in the Hank Williams tune, he wore a ball and a chain; a number, not a name. “I had been at work a month in this way, when one day, by means of a stone hammer and chisel, I broke the chain from my leg, and made for the woods, pursued for some miles by a strong party of officers,” Hicks told De Angelis. “I took refuge in a house by the roadside, and had the satisfaction of seeing [the guards] go by at full speed, supposing me to be still ahead of them.”

  He hid in the forest, ate berries, and drank from streams. The next day, thinking he was in the clear, he headed for Providence. A man could lose himself in that city, change his clothes, change his name, never be seen again. He almost made it but not quite. Some busybody along the way spotted him in prison clothes. This man was on horseback. He called to the fugitive, who took one look and ran. He was soon among the trees. The man gave chase, hollering, raising a general alarm. The man came close and dismounted. Hicks knocked him to the ground. They rolled in the muck. “We had a long and terrible struggle in the mud and the water of the swamp,” said Hicks, “he all the time shouting at the top of his voice for assistance, which brought the neighbors to his aid before I could effect my determination to kill him.”

  Hicks was soon back in prison. Bloodied, beaten black and blue. What had been an eighteen-month sentence was now two years. There’d be no more outside work for him, not on the road crew, not even breaking rocks in the quarry. When you have a bird that flies, take no chances. They put him in a hole, where he had to sit and think. He said he spent an entire year in solitary confinement, closed up with nothing but his increasingly crazy thoughts. He said he went insane in those months, lost all semblance of his old personality. He became fixated on one thing: how unfair life had been to him—he was spending a year in a hole, two in a cage, for what? For stealing a few shirts and a pair of underwear. That was when he changed. That was when he took on the qualities that allowed him, years later, to tell a roomful of reporters, “Who am I? I am the worst man who ever lived.” That was when he developed the motive that explained the murders on the E. A. Johnson. The world had declared war on Albert Hicks, so Albert Hicks would declare war on the world. He would make the people of the world feel as hopeless and abandoned as he felt in that hole.

  Hicks made a classic mistake. He believed that bad luck had befallen only him, that he had b
een singularly cursed and thus was singularly entitled to revenge. In truth, bad luck befalls everyone all the time. Everyone Hicks would meet on the road was engaged in a fight for their life, but he did not care enough to see it. The few times he did are the few times he showed mercy. But mostly he considered his situation to be unique. He was rough and raw, a brand-new soul.

  When Hicks was released in 1837, he went to his father’s house but could find no work in the area. He had the mark of the convict on him, which made him a kind of outcast. He continued on to Glocester, where he got a job making shoes. Stitch the sole, hammer the heel, stand in the yard looking over the roofs of town. He did this for six or seven months. It wasn’t the desire for revenge that sent him roaming, but an even more basic engine—boredom. The world is big, and Glocester is small. Perhaps he remembered his childhood dreams of pirate treasure, rubies.

  So away to the port of Warren, Rhode Island, where he joined the crew of the whaling ship Philip Tabb. He was on deck the night the ship left the harbor. He had been on river ferries, but this was different—a great ship under sail, a whaler bound for distant seas. He was headed to the Pacific, which, in the days before the Panama Canal, meant a long cruise down the Atlantic Coast, then through the Strait of Magellan. He would have seen New York and Charleston on this first voyage, St. Augustine, Nassau, Barranquilla, Caracas, Fortaleza, Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre, Puerto Deseado, Rio Gallegos, Punta Arenas, Guayaquil, Acapulco, San Francisco, Seattle—months at sea, with only the occasional port of call for food, water, and a night in the taverns.

  In the 1840s the whaling industry was booming, arguably the most important business in America, supplying raw material for half a dozen other industries and, crucially, supplying the oil that kept the cities aglow. For sailors, life on a whaler meant months or even years at sea, circling the globe in pursuit of great schools of bowhead, fin, humpback, narwhal, and gray. But a sperm whale, which might measure sixty feet and weigh fifty tons, was the big prize. It took a strange company of men to thrive on a whaler—fortune seekers, ne’er-do-wells, ocean lovers, fugitives. Many, like Hicks, were running away, looking to get lost.