Monthly Archives: January 2011

1721: John Stewart, pirate

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THE LAST SPEECH AND DYING WORDS,

Of John Stewart, who was executed within the Flood-
Mark at Leith, upon the 4th January 1721, for
the Crime of Piracy and Robbery.

UPON the 28 Day of March, one Thousand seven Hundred and Ninteen Years ; I Sailed from Dartmouth in England, in the Ship, called, the Mark de Campo, belonging to Ostend, Captain Mathias Garribrae Commander, in Order to make a Voyage to Guinea, and Mosambequie in the East-Indies; and having in some short Time thereafter arrived upon the Cost of Guinea; We hapned to our sad Misfortune upon the 2d Day of June next, thereafter, to be taken by a Pirate Ship, commanded by Captain Davies;* after we had made what Resistance we could, they compelled me and several others out of our Ship to go along with them; and upon our Refusal threatned to puts us immediatly to Death, or leave us upon some Desolate Island, which was nothing better than Death; and I refer it to every ode to Judge, whither or not any Man would have preferred immediat Death to go along with them, while there remained some Hopes of making an Escape, which I and those that were taken with me still endeavoured, and made several Attemps to Effectuat.

And I do solemnly Declare as a dying Man, that whatever I did while I was Aboard of the Pirate Ship, was by Force, and upon the Peril of my Life; and that I and these taken With me, are not only Innocent of What is laid to our Charge, but during the Time We Was Aboard of them, I never seed them wrong Man, Woman or Child; and I with several others having at last made our Escape, We Sailed for Britain, with no other Design but to free and clear our selves from the Tyranny of those Pirates, that had detained so fair contrary to our Inclinations; and having landed in the West of Scotland, every Body knew how we have been treated since that Time, and I might have purchast my Life, had my Conscience allowed me to Comply with the Sollicitation of them, who would have had me appear as an Evidence against those that were as Innocent as my self, but I never could think of Saving my Life at so dear a Rate.

And for the Judge and Jury I shall not Reflect on them, but do declare that I am Innocently put to Death, as to the Crimes for which I am condemned; And beg GOD Almighty that he may not lay this Innocent Blood to their Charge, but forgive them as I do. And begs GOD may forgive my other Sins, (through the Merits of JESUS CHRIST my only Redeemer) which has been the Cause of this Dismal Death.

Into thy Hands, O GOD, I recommend my Spirit.

EDINBURGH, Printed by Robert Brown in Forrester’s-Wynd, 1721.

(From the National Library of Scotland’s Digital Library here.)

…

Okay, couldn’t pass on that name.

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* Stewart apparently refers to the Welsh buccaneer Hywel Davies, aka Howell Davis, and this story of hijacking would put Stewart in some pretty august company: it was approximately this time and area that the Davies crew captured the slave ship Princess carrying third mate Bartholomew Roberts, who was pressed into navigational service for the freebooters.

Davies was killed in another pirate adventure later that same month of June 1719, and Roberts was elected to succeed him despite being only a few weeks aboard the ship. The latter went on to one of the most illustrious raiding careers in the Golden Age of Piracy … the original Dread Pirate Roberts.

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1786: Elizabeth Wilson, her reprieve too late

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On this date in 1786, Elizabeth Wilson was hanged in Chester, Pennsylvania for the murder of her infant twins.

“One of the melodramas of the early American republic,” our Elizabeth (sometimes called “Harriot Wilson” in the accounts) was a farmer’s daughter of Chester County who got knocked up by a passing sailor. When this gentleman declined to make an honest woman of her after she had borne the bastards, the kids disappeared — later to be discovered dead in the woods by a hunter.

The fallen woman denied having killed them directly, but “acknowledged having placed the children by the road-side, in order that any person passing that way, and who had humanity enough, might take them up.”

She would eventually, after condemnation, accuse her lover of having slain the children.

Elizabeth’s brother William Wilson vigorously undertook on this basis to secure her a pardon at the hands of the Commonwealth’s executive authority, the Supreme Executive Council — then under the leadership of no less august a character than Benjamin Franklin.

And he found a sympathetic audience. Council Vice-President Charles Biddle* “firmly believed her innocent, for to me it appeared highly improbable that a mother, after suckling her children for six weeks, could murder them … there was a large majority would have been for pardoning her.”

Instead of an outright commutation, it granted a stay of execution for William Wilson to investigate further, which he did to no successful effect.

“But here we must drop a tear!” exclaims the Faithful Narrative of Elizabeth Wilson, a popular pamphlet (pdf) sensationalizing the case. “What heart so hard, as not to melt at human woe!”

For William Wilson’s suit on behalf of his sister had succeeded in earning, on the eve of the Jan. 3 hanging, a second respite on Biddle’s certain anticipation that clemency would be forthcoming. Ill himself, William took the stay of execution from Biddle’s own hands and raced through a fearful storm on the 15-mile ride from Philadelphia to Chester … but

did not arrive until twenty-three minutes after the solemn scene was closed. When he came with the respite in his hand, and saw his sister irrecoverably gone, beheld her motionless, and sunk in death, who can paint the mournful scene?

Let imagination if she can!

Imagination can do quite a lot with this sort of material, and so the tale of Elizabeth Wilson — the intrinsic pathos of the condemned, her widely-suspected innocence, her evangelical-friendly repentance, the cliffhanger conclusion — became widely re-circulated, and undoubtedly embroidered.

Quaker colonial diarist Elizabeth Drinker (who had firsthand experience of official injustice, when suspicious-of-Quakers revolutionaries had banished her husband from Philadelphia) was still seeing these publications over a decade after Wilson’s death.

May 16 [1797]. Unsettled. Wind variable. Read a narrative of Elizabeth Wilson, who was executed at Chester, Jany ’86, charged with the murder of her twin infants. A reprieve arrived 20 minutes after her execution, by her brother from Philadelphia. She persisted to the last in her account of the murder being committed by the father of the children, which was generally believed to be the truth. I recollect having heard the sad tale at the time of the transaction.

The Wilson story actually persisted (and persists) for centuries yet. Her shaken brother, William, withdrew himself from society and lived out his last years in a cave: he entered folklore as the Pennsylvania Hermit, affixed with his tragic sister to all manner of spook stories, like a spectral horseman galloping to Chester, or a ghostly woman rummaging the leaves where the bodies were found. You’ll hear all about the Pennsylvania Hermit when touring his former stomping grounds, now open to the public (for a fee, my friend) as Indian Echo Caverns.

* Biddle was a future U.S. Senator, but he’s probably best known through his son. Born just five days after Elizabeth Wilson’s execution, Nicholas Biddle was a bitterly controversial character as one of antebellum America’s original banksters.

Charles Biddle’s notes on the case veer into the era’s philosophical concern with the timeless problem of making a just response to infanticide.

“Perhaps,” he muses “the punishment of death is too great for an unmarried woman who destroys her child. They are generally led to it from a fear of being exposed … [and] while death is the punishment, a jury will seldom find a verdict against them.”

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1981: Cipriano, Eugenio, and Ventura García-Marín Thompson

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In the early morning hours this date in 1981, three young Jehovah’s Witnesses were hailed out of their cells at Havana’s La Cabaña Fortress, and apparently executed.

Cipriano, Eugenio and Ventura Garcia-Marin Thompson were three of eight Cuban Witnesses who attempted to claim asylum at the Vatican embassy in early December. After a few hours’ standoff, elite government anti-terrorism troops simply broke in and seized them.

(Rome still catches flak (Spanish link) for its failure to maintain a bigger diplomatic ruckus about this violation of its diplomatic prerogatives; the raid may in fact have been green-lighted by a Vatican embassy official.)

You’ll find this tale most commonly expounded on anti-Castro sites, such as this pdf from the Cuba Archive:

The three brothers were taken to Villa Marista headquarters and told by prosecutor Carlos Amat that they had been “tried and sentenced to death.” They were taken from their prison cells in early morning hours of January 2, 1981, and presumably executed, the others were sentenced to long prison terms.

An Interior Ministry official who defected in 1992 reported that their fate had been decided in “an extremely summary process.” The family was denied the remains of the three brothers for burial. The mother was sentenced to 20 years in prison for protesting the executions and served ten years after her mental health deteriorated.

Sources: Testimony of Margarita Marin Thompson (mother) in Ricardo Bofill, Diario Las Américas, September 9, 1997. Pablo Alfonso. El Nuevo Herald, 31 October 1997, p. 6A. Valladares, 1985, p. 416. Amnesty International Annual Report 1983, p. 130. Nuestra Cuba, 1998, p. 3. Reader’s Digest, October 1998, p. 83. Montaner, 1984, p. 267. Cuban American National Foundation, The Quilt of Fidel Castro’s Genocide, 1994. Reinaldo Bragado, 1998, p. 5. Instituto de la Memoria Histórica Cubana contra el Totalitarismo, 2002, p. 35. Fuentes 2002, p.s 102-104. Juan O. Tamayo, “Ex-Cuban prosecutor’s role in rights panel criticized,” The Miami Herald, April 16, 1998. Circuito Sur, July 2002, p. 35, and http://members.aol.com/aguadacuba/cs/datafusi/vaticano.htm.

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1943: Lojze Grozde, beatified Slovenian

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On this date in 1943, Slovenian student Lojze Grozde was executed by communist partisans.

An ardent young Catholic, the 19-year-old Grozde was on his way from boarding school in Ljubljana in Italian-occupied Slovenia* to visit some relatives when he was stopped at a roadblock.

Partisans who found the devotional book The Imitation of Christ on his person were a mite hostile, since the Holy See was not exactly at loggerheads with fascism.

All of Yugoslavia had become one gigantic dirty war, and though individual Catholics might fall anywhere on the political spectrum, the institutional church did not shy from working with fascists, who had the virtue of sharing the See’s hatred of communism.

Catholic Action, to which our day’s victim belonged, was among the many entities supplying volunteer paramilitaries that partnered with the Italian occupation.

We’ve seen this dynamic elsewhere in Eastern Europe; it may be too pat to say that all these paramilitaries were fascists, but it’s much too little to characterize them as unwilling about the partnership.** The headsman does not issue verdicts; he only carries them out.

The Archbishop of Ljubljana, Gregorij Rozman, an “enthusiastic Nazi collaborator,”† had only weeks before enthused over the Italians’ growing openness to their Slovenian partners:

We should be allowed to establish protective armed units under Slovene command in all rural areas … from men worthy of trust, to fully guarantee that the arms will be used exclusively against rebellious elements that endanger the land either with arms or revolutionary propaganda.

The soldiers have already dispersed the camps and groups of the rebels, but many of them are still in the woods and in villages, where they are camouflaged as peace-loving citizens. Such persons are not known to the Italian armed forces. Because of their unfamiliarity with the language and the difficulty of finding those who help those who hide in the woods, it will be very difficult to find the culprits. But for the local young men such difficulties are nonexistent or can easily be overcome…

His Excellence, General Roatta, has said that the people must now choose between order and Bolshevism. We have chosen order, and propose the only way that in our humble opinion will be effective and certain to achieve complete order in active collaboration with the authorities.

(Quoted here)

The partisans who caught our day’s principal apparently jumped to the conclusion that Grozde was an anti-communist paramilitary based on his Catholic Action association and the Italian passes he was carrying for his visit; his body, when recovered, bore the marks of torture.

Even the partisans had to cop to an over-hasty judgment in this instance, and while there’s been some dispute over the years about whether Grozde might not have been up to something more political than “visiting relatives,” Rome has been energetic about rehabilitating its man — perhaps as the thin edge of the wedge for vindicating more controversial Slovene Catholic “collaborators”.

Lojze Grozde was beatified in 2010.

* Slovenia was partitioned between the Italians and the Germans early in the war; the German occupation was the more heavy-handed, but both countries designed ethnic cleansing policies. (pdf)

** Some representative slants on the matter, from different angles both sympathetic to Slovenian Catholics’ predicament:

the communists, who were in complete command of the Partisan movement, were concerned not so much about national liberation as such, as about eliminating their political rivals, carrying out their “social revolution”, and seizing power … [anti-communist Slovenes’] great disadvantage was that they had to carry out their struggle on the side of the Germans, who, on the other hand, did not hesitate to force them into compromising actions, for example, to take an oath to Hitler. As a result, they and their political exponents were branded as collaborators.

–Yugoslavia: A History of Its Demise

And:

If the Partisans had not been set on seizing power by revolution, one could speculate that the Catholics, who had dominated Slovenian politics before the war, could have conceivably regained power and run a government little different from that in Italy. The only difference was that, whereas Italian Christian Democrat leader Alcide de Gasperi had kept clear of the Fascists during the war, the Slovene Catholics collaborated … the Communist threat was real and life-threatening, and the Catholics can claim credit for opposing it consistently. However, Catholic writings of the time caricature Communists as devils and anti-Christs. Today such virulence seems overdone … the Communists equated collaboration with treason. However, this seems unfounded. The Catholics who opposed them loved their country as much as anybody else … They just wanted a different regime from the Communists to take power at the end of the war.

–Slovenia 1945: Memories of Death and Survival after World War II

† “We are thankful to God,” Rozman wrote in a 1941 pastoral letter, “who inspired the leader of Greater Italy with the thoughts of generous rightfulness and considerate wisdom … [to establish] the Ljubljana province.” (From Slovenia 1945: Memories of Death and Survival after World War II)

Not everyone is so harsh Archbishop Rozman.

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