On this date in 1725, John Gow and seven comrade raiders hanged for piracy.
Having mutinied to commandeer a merchant vessel in November 1724, Gow managed merely a three-month career of seaboard outlawry* in European waters before an ill-fated landward raid in his native Scotland saw the ship run aground.
Captured, Gow and confederates were hailed to London to stand trial, the captain delaying matters by refusing to plead before the threat of being pressed forced his hand. The inevitable sentence came off a little … unevenly. During the hanging,
[Gow’s] friends, anxious to put him out of his pain, pulled his legs so forcibly that the rope broke and he dropped down; on which he was again taken up to the gibbet, and when he was dead was hanged in chains on the banks of the Thames.
Scottish scribbler Sir Walter Scott mined the local lore of “the Orkney pirate” heavily for his novel The Pirate.
* Exhaustingly catalogued in the Newgate calendar.
On this day..
- 1790: Seven officers of Papal Avignon - 2020
- 1942: Michael Kitzelmann - 2019
- 1916: Henri Herduin and Pierre Millant, "cry against military justice" - 2018
- Themed Set: The Calendar of Saints - 2017
- Feast Day of St. Barnabas - 2017
- 1877: George Washington Fletcher, Philadelphia goon - 2016
- 1561: 88 Calabrian Waldensians, like the slaughter of so many sheep - 2015
- 1948: Kiralyfalvi Miklos, Hungarian Catholic - 2014
- 1835: Captain Pedro Gilbert and the Spanish Pirates - 2013
- 1782: William Crawford, expeditioneer - 2012
- Themed Set: Ohio - 2012
- 1949: Koci Xoxe, Titoist - 2011
- 1981: Botak Chin, gangster - 2010
- 2001: Timothy McVeigh, Oklahoma City bomber - 2008