Category Archives: Massachusetts

1821: Owen Coffin, main course

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On this date in 1821, a first-time whaleship crewman named Owen Coffin was executed by a comrade to feed three starving mates.

Coffin was the second-to-last victim of an event which shocked the whaling community and inspired the novel Moby Dick.

Owen Coffin was a 17-year-old aboard a doomed whaling vessel called the Essex. He was cousin to George Pollard, Jr., who was making his first trek to the Pacific whaling grounds as a ship’s captain.

The Essex sailed from Nantucket Island in 1819, one of dozens of ships to leave port in search of whales and, ultimately, whale oil. In spite of the large numbers of whales slaughtered by whalers around the world, the Essex had the unfortunate honor of taking part in the first documented violent encounter by a sperm whale on a whaleship.

Of the whales available to the whalers of the day, the sperm whale was most prized: aside from the typical blubber found on all whales, which could be processed for its “oil” (actually a free-flowing form of wax), this whale’s head was filled with the clean-burning substance called spermaceti, a name inspired by its resemblance to the sexual fluid. Spermaceti fetched a high price at market when sperm whales were in sufficient abundance to hunt them.


A 1902 photograph of whalers cutting into a sperm whale’s jaw. (cc) image from Curious Expeditions.

There Once Was a Crew from Nantucket

At the time, Nantucket Island was the center of the whaling world.

The industry was primarily run by Quaker businessmen, who negotiated profit-sharing rates for young, largely local crews willing to risk their lives in search of whales. To fill out the ship numbers, poor non-Nantucketers were imported from other New England ports. The Essex was no different: the ship originally held 21 crewmembers, eight of whom came from off-island.

The ship’s journey began inauspiciously by being flattened in a squall, but after repairs, she continued on in pursuit of whales. The ship made its classic trip around the southern tip of South America, put in to port in Ecuador, then traversed 2000 miles of ocean westward in search of a recently-discovered sperm whale hunting ground.

The Essex being rammed by a sperm whale, sketched by crewmember Thomas Nickerson.

And the crew did find whales and made a mildly successful trip of it … until it really pissed off the wrong whale.

The Essex discovered a group of sperm whales consisting of two females and one male. When the call went out, the three small whaleboats — built to be light and fast for the pursuit — launched.

These boats separated the females from the male, and one of the crews made a kill. It was around that time that the male, probably already distraught at being partitioned from his group, first ran into the 38-foot Essex. The jostle, which may have been accidental, apparently further upset the abnormally large whale, which briskly left the area, made a sharp turn, then swam all-out on a direct collision course with the Essex.

The old timber ship didn’t stand a chance.

The crew which had stayed aboard the main vessel watched in horror as the Essex was shattered beneath them. Two of the whaleboat crews noted the sinking and returned quickly, and Captain Pollard immediately set his crew about saving as many of the provisions as they could, including water and food.

But the speed with which the Essex went under left them with too little of both. As the final whaleboat made its way to the carnage, it was clear that the full crew complement was doomed to a long trip on a trio of very small boats.

Call Me Ishmael

Pollard and first mate Owen Chase hatched a plan (crewman Thomas Nickerson indicates that it was largely Chase who pushed the plan) to set sail for South America, thousands of miles distant and through unfavorable currents and winds, rather than for the Pacific Islands, about half as far away and in the direction of both favorable winds and currents.

The choice was sealed by fear of the unknown and a century of tales of South Pacific cannibals. Hopefully they came to appreciate the irony.

The crew went through its supplies in the first month at sea, and finally came ashore at Henderson Island, a raised, uninhabited coral reef that they mis-identified.

The fortunate crew found a temporarily available freshwater spring from which to refill their casks, and they subsisted on local fauna for several days while deciding their next course of action. Though Tahiti lay just a few hundred miles westward (again, in the direction of favorable winds and currents), our wayfarers opted to continue towards South America.

Three of the crew decided to stay behind. The remaining 17 crewmembers set out in late December 1820, and again quickly depleted their supplies.

One of the ships — carrying the second mate but no navigational equipment — was separated from the others during a storm and never heard from again, leaving two to carry on under increasingly desperate circumstances.

Cannibal Corpse

Passengers on both boats began succumbing to want and exposure, and their starving former comrades had little choice but to devour their remains.

The boat containing Owen Chase, Thomas Nickerson, and Benjamin Lawrence was eventually rescued by the Indian off the coast of Chile, and both Nickerson and Chase wrote accounts of the the survivors’ cannibalism.

Yet it was aboard Pollard’s boat that the most gruesome events unfolded.

The deaths of two crewmen had provided for the others — but not nearly enough to hope for landfall.

Short on food and water and despairing of bringing all four remaining souls to port, Charles Ramsdell suggested that the quartet draw lots to both remove one consumer from the boat and provide for the remaining three. Pollard objected to subjecting his crew to such a fate, but Barzillai Ray and Owen Coffin agreed to the plan. The lots were cast, and Coffin pulled the black spot. The other three cast again to decide his executioner, and Ramsdell was chosen.

Pollard’s account indicates that he immediately spoke up for Coffin, offering himself up in place, but Coffin demurred and prepared himself for the execution.*

The following day, February 6, Coffin dictated a short note to his mother and declared, as per Pollard’s diary, that “the lots had been fairly drawn.”

Charles Ramsdell shot Owen Coffin, then joined Ray and Pollard in consuming his remains.

Ray died just days later, and Ramsdell and Pollard barely survived the next two weeks. When the Dauphin came up alongside the whaleboat on February 20, its crew thrilled to the spectacle of Ramsdell and Pollard sucking on the bones of their dead crewmates, emaciated beyond recognition.

Based on their statements about the events of the previous 95 days, a vessel was dispatched to find the three Henderson Island survivors. Because the crew had mis-identified the island, however, the search took longer than expected. Not until April 5, 1821, were the three located … out of fresh water and also scarcely alive.

A few books about the Essex

The Essex was a legend in its own time, and the story of the sinking and the harrowing events which followed continue to circle around Nantucket Island. Though the island’s economy collapsed less than 30 years later, Herman Melville kept the story alive through his literary classic Moby-Dick — which directly describes the Essex disaster in one of its many digressive expositions, and culminates in the vengeful captain’s ship being annihilated by the mighty whale.**

It is also suspected that a portion of Edgar Allen Poe’s 1838 novel† The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is based on the Essex disaster.

Closer to modern times, the rock group Mountain’s album and eponymous song “Nantucket Sleighride”, which was used as the theme song to London Weekend Television’s Weekend World, is dedicated to Coffin.

Coffin is not the only sailor adrift ever selected for cannibalism by lot, but his case is unusual because the particulars are so well-documented. Several other cases are provided in Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea. Arthur Gordon Pym uses a victim by the name of Richard Parker, coincidentally the same name as a man who was actually cannibalized in 1884‡ in an affair leading to the famous common law case R v Dudley and Stephens, wherein the killers were charged with murder and sentenced to 6 months in prison — unlike the 1835 incident of the Francis Spaight, which saw the crew acquitted for three such killings.

* One of the crueler accounts of such lot drawing occurred aboard the Peggy, where crewman David Flatt pulled the short straw. However, prior to the execution the following morning, the crew was rescued. Flatt, however, had a breakdown in the intervening hours and suffered mental illness which persisted even after their rescue.

** He was also inspired by the story of Mocha Dick, a notorious white whale which survived dozens of encounters with whalers and is now available in trenta sizes.

† Arthur Gordon Pym is Poe’s only full-length novel.

‡ Richard Parker was also the name of a man executed for the Nore Mutiny, as well as one killed in the wreck of the Francis Spaight in 1846 — not to be confused with the Francis Spaight on which cannibalism occurred 11 years prior.

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1659: The first two Boston Martyrs

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October 27 is International Religious Freedom Day, dating to the execution this date in 1659 of Quakers Marmaduke Stephenson and William Robinson on Boston Commons. They were two of the four Boston Martyrs, Quakers whose necks were stretched in Massachusetts for failing to either keep quiet or stay out of town.

(Fellow Quaker Mary Dyer, perhaps the more famous martyr, was led out to execution with Stephenson and Robinson but reprieved at the last moment. Her time was still some months away.)

As Puritans had fled C-of-E persecution earlier in the 17th century, Quakers migrated to the New World with Cromwell‘s Puritan ascendancy.

And in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the old dissidence had become the new orthodoxy — as described by the (obviously partisan) Horatio Rogers. (Via)

In June, 1659, William Robinson, a merchant of London, and Marmaduke Stephenson, a countryman of the east pan of Yorkshire, “were moved by the Lord,” in Quaker phrase, to go from Rhode Island to Massachusetts to bear witness against the persecuting spirit existing there; and with them went Nicholas Davis of Plymouth Colony, and Patience Scott of Providence, Rhode Island, a girl of about eleven years of age … During their incarceration Mary Dyer was moved of the Lord to go from Rhode Island to visit the prisoners, and she too was arrested and imprisoned. On September 12, 1659, the Court banished the four adults from Massachusetts upon pain of death

… On October 8, within thirty days of her banishment, Mary Dyer with other Rhode Island Quakers went to Boston, …where she was again arrested and held for the action of the authorities. Five days later William Robinson and Marmaduke Stephenson, who had been travelling about spreading their doctrines through Massachusetts and Rhode Island since their release from prison, also went to Boston to look the bloody laws in the face, in the words of the Quaker chronicler; and they too were arrested and cast into prison. …

The issue was now clearly made between Quaker and Puritan. The Quaker defied the unjust Puritan laws, and dared martyrdom. Dare the Puritan authorities inflict it?

On October 19 the three prisoners were brought before Governor Endicott and the Assistants, and demand having been made of them — Why they came again into that jurisdiction after having been banished from it upon pain of death if they returned? — they severally declared that the cause of their coming was of the Lord and in obedience to him. The next day they were again brought before the magistrates, when the Governor called to the keeper of the prison to pull off their hats, which having been done, he addressed them substantially as follows: “We have made many laws and endeavored in several ways to keep you from among us, but neither whipping nor imprisonment, nor cutting off ears, nor banishment upon pain of death, will keep you from among us. We desire not your death.” Notwithstanding which, he immediately added: “Hearken now to your sentence of death.” … When the Governor ceased speaking, however, Stephenson lifted up his voice in this wise: “Give ear, ye magistrates, and all who are guilty, for this the Lord hath said concerning you, who will perform this promise upon you, that the same day that you put his servants to death shall the day of your visitation pass over your heads, and you shall be cursed forevermore, the Lord of Hosts hath spoken it; therefore in love to you all take warning before it be too late, that so the curse might be removed; for assuredly if you put us to death, you will bring innocent blood upon your own heads, and swift destruction will come upon you.” …

Great influence was brought to bear to prevent the execution of the sentences. Governor Winthrop of Connecticut appeared before the Massachusetts authorities, urging that the condemned be not put to death. He said that he would beg it of them on his bare knees that they would not do it. … Governor Endicott, the Rev. John Wilson, and the whole pack of persecutors, however, seemed to thirst for blood; and it was determined that somebody must die.

The 27th of October, 1659, was fixed for the triple execution and elaborate preparations, for those days, were made for it. Popular excitement ran high, and the people resorted to the prison windows to hold communication with the condemned, so male prisoners were put in irons, and a force was detailed, in words of the order, “to watch with great care the towne, especially the prison.”…

The eventful day having arrived, Captain Oliver and his military guard attended to receive the prisoners. The marshal and the jailer brought them forth, the men from the jail, and Mary Dyer from the House of Correction. They parted from their friends at the prison full of joy, thanking the Lord that he accounted them worthy to suffer for his name and had kept them faithful to the end. The condemned came forth hand in hand, Mary Dyer between the other two, and when the marshal asked, “Whether she was not ashamed to walk hand in hand between two young men,” for her companions were much younger than she, she replied, “It is an hour of the greatest joy I can enjoy in this world. No eye can see, no ear can hear, no tongue can speak, no heart can understand, the sweet incomes and refreshings of the spirit of the Lord which now I enjoy.” The concourse of people was immense, the guard was strong and strict, and when the prisoners sought to speak the drums were caused to be beaten.

The method of execution was extremely simple in those days. A great elm upon Boston Common constituted the gallows. The halter having been adjusted round the prisoner’s neck, he was forced to ascend a ladder affording an approach to the limb to be used for the fatal purpose, to which limb the other end of the halter was attached. Then the ladder was pulled away, and the execution, though rude, was complete.

The prisoners took a tender leave of one another, and William Robinson, who was the first to suffer, said, as he was about to be turned off by the executioner, ‘I suffer for Christ, in whom I lived, and for whom I will die.” Marmaduke Stephenson came next, and, being on the ladder, he said to the people, “Be it known unto all this day, that we suffer not as evil-doers, but for conscience sake.”

Next came Mary Dyer’s turn. Expecting immediate death, she had been forced to wait at the foot of the fatal tree, with a rope about her neck, and witness the violent taking off of her friends. With their lifeless bodies hanging before her, she was made ready to be suspended beside them. Her arms and legs were bound, and her skirts secured about her feet; her face was covered with a handkerchief which the Rev. Mr. Wilson, who had been her pastor when she lived in Boston, had loaned the hangman. And there, made ready for death, with the halter round her neck, she stood upon the fatal ladder in calm serenity, expecting to die….

Just then an order for a reprieve, upon the petition of her son all unknown to her, arrives. The halter is loosed from her neck and she is unbound and told to come down the ladder. She neither answered nor moved. In the words of the Quaker chronicler, “she was waiting on the Lord to know his pleasure in so sudden a change, having given herself up to dye.” The people cried, “Pull her down.” So earnest were they that she tried to prevail upon them to wait a little whilst she might consider and know of the Lord what to do. The people were pulling her and the ladder down together, when they were stopped, and the marshal took her down in his arms, and she was carried back to prison. . .

It was a mere prearranged scheme, for before she set forth from the prison it had been determined that she was not to be executed, as shown by the reprieve itself, which reads as follows: “Whereas Mary Dyer is condemned by the Generall Court to be executed for hir offences, on the petition of William Dier, hir sonne, it is ordered that the sajd Mary Dyer shall have liberty for forty-eight howers after this day to depart out of this jurisdiction, after which time, being found therein, she is forthwith to be executed, and in the meane time that she be kept a close prisoner till hir sonne or some other be ready to carry hir away within the aforesajd tyme; and it is further ordered, that she shall he carrjed to the place of execution, and there to stand upon the gallowes, with a rope about her necke, till the rest be executed, and then to returne to the prison and remajne as aforesaid.“

Mary Dyer once again returned from exile the following year, and was hanged in June 1660.

The hours were numbered, however, for New England Puritans in their most cartoonishly obnoxious form. Upon the restoration of the monarchy in the mother country, an edict forbidding the death penalty for Quakerism closed the doors to the Boston Martyrs club.

An Account of the Sufferings of Marmaduke Stephenson is available free on Google books.

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1927: Sacco and Vanzetti (and Celestino Madeiros)

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America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die

-Allen Ginsberg, “America” (mp3)

We have now reached a stage of the case the details of which shake one’s confidence in the whole course of the proceedings and reveal a situation which undermines the respect usually to be accorded to a jury’s verdict.

-Felix Frankfurter in The Atlantic

America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have turned our language inside out who have taken the clean words our fathers spoke and made them slimy and foul

their hired men sit on the judge`s bench they sit back with their feet on the tables under the dome of the State House they are ignorant of our beliefs they have the dollars the guns the armed forces the powerplants

they have built the electricchair and hired the executioner to throw the switch

all right we are two nations

. . .

but do they know the old words of the immigrants are being renewed in blood and agony tonight do they know the old American speech of the haters of oppression is new tonight in the mouth of an old woman from Pittsburgh of a husky boilermaker from Frisco who hopped freights clear from the Coast to come here …

the men in the deathhouse made the old words new before they died.

–John Dos Passos, The Big Money (part of the U.S.A. trilogy)

Let us abandon then our gardens and go home
And sit in the sitting room.
Shall the larkspur blossom or the corn grow under this cloud?
Sour to the fruitful seed
Is the cold earth under this cloud,
Fostering quack and weed, we have marched upon but cannot conquer;
We have bent the blades of our hoes against the stalks of them.

Let us go home, and sit in the sitting room.
Not in our day
Shall the cloud go over and the sun rise as before,
Beneficent upon us
Out of the glittering bay,
And the warm winds be blown inward from the sea
Moving the blades of corn
With a peaceful sound.
Forlorn, forlorn,
Stands the blue hay-rack by the empty mow.
And the petals drop to the ground,
Leaving the tree unfruited.
The sun that warmed our stooping backs and withered the weed uprooted
We shall not feel it again.
We shall die in darkness, and be buried in the rain.

What from the splendid dead
We have inherited —
Furrows sweet to the grain, and the weed subdued —
See now the slug and the mildew plunder.
Evil does overwhelm
The larkspur and the corn;
We have seen them go under.

Let us sit here, sit still,
Here is the sitting-room until we die;
At the step of Death on the walk, rise and go;
Leaving to our children`s children this beautiful doorway,
And this elm,
And a blighted earth to till
With a broken hoe.

-Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Justice Denied in Massachusetts”

If it had not been for these things, I might have lived out my life talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have died, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life could we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of man as now we do by accident. Our words — our lives — our pains — nothing! The taking of our lives — lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish-peddler — all! That last moment belongs to us — that agony is our triumph.

-Bartolomeo Vanzetti


Ben Shahn, The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti

A recently discovered letter indicates that Upton Sinclair was convinced of his subjects’ guilt.

“Alone in a hotel room with Fred [Moore], I begged him to tell me the full truth … He then told me that the men were guilty, and he told me in every detail how he had framed a set of alibis for them … I faced the most difficult ethical problem of my life at that point … I had come to Boston with the announcement that I was going to write the truth about the case.”

But Sinclair had reasons beyond the “ethical” to tell what he saw as the larger truth. From a different letter:

“My wife is absolutely certain that if I tell what I believe, I will be called a traitor to the movement and may not live to finish the book … Of course, the next big case may be a frame-up, and my telling the truth about the Sacco-Vanzetti case will make things harder for the victims … It is much better copy as a naïve defense of Sacco and Vanzetti because this is what all my foreign readers expect, and they are 90% of my public.”

Well, the dying time came, the legal midnight hour,
The moment set by law for the Chair to be at work,
To substantiate the majesty of the State of Massachusetts
That hour was at hand, had arrived, was struck by the clocks,
The time for two men to be carried cool on a cooling board
Beyond the immeasurably thin walls between day and night,
Beyond the reach of airmail, telegrams, radiophones,
Beyond the brotherhoods of blood into the fraternities
Of mist and foggy dew, of stars and ice.
 The time was on for two men
 To march beyond blood into dust —
 A time that comes to all men,
 Some with a few loved ones at a bedside,
 Some alone in the wilderness or the wide sea,
 Some before a vast audience of all manking.

 Now Sacco saw the witnesses
 As the straps were fitted on
 Tying him down in the Chair —
 And seeing the witnesses were
Respectable men and responsible citizens
And even though there had been no introductions,
 Sacco said, “Good-evening, gentlemen.”
And before the last of the straps was fastened so to hold
Sacco murmured, “Farewell, mother.”

Then came Vanzetti.
He wished the vast audience of all mankind
To know something he carried in his breast.
This was the time to tell it.
He had to speak now or hold his peace forever.
The headgear was being clamped on.
The straps muffling his mouth were going on.
He shouted, “I wish to forgive some people
  for what they are now doing.”
 And so now
 the dead are dead????

-Carl Sandburg, “Legal Midnight Hour”


(The executions took place just after midnight Aug. 22-23)

THE names of the “good shoe-maker and poor fish-peddler” have ceased to represent merely two Italian workingmen. Throughout the civilised world Sacco and Vanzetti have become a symbol, the shibboleth of Justice crushed by Might. That is the great historic significance of this twentieth century crucifixion, and truly prophetic, were the words of Vanzetti when he declared, “The last moment belongs to us–that agony is our triumph.”

…

Vanzetti was right when he declared that his execution was his greatest triumph, for all through history it has been the martyrs of progress that have ultimately triumphed. Where are the Caesars and Torquemadas of yesterday? Who remembers the names of the judges who condemned Giordano Bruno and John Brown? The Parsons and the Ferrers, the Saccos and Vanzettis live eternal and their spirits still march on.

-Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, “Sacco and Vanzetti”

Starting points for the many Sacco and Vanzetti resources online: Famous American Trials | Wikipedia | Massachusetts Supreme Court virtual tour | American Writers and the Sacco-Vanzetti Case

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1795: Pomp, a Negro

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On this date in 1795, an African-American near-slave (slavery’s official 1783 abolition in the state seems not to have constituted a completely bright line) was hanged in Ipswich, Mass. for murdering his master-slash-employer.

Thanks to Laura James at CLEWS, we are drawn to this story reproduced here at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Documenting the American South site. Pomp was perhaps mentally “touched”; he was certainly physically “touched” for any perceived inadequacy at his labors, and eventually chopped off his master’s head while the latter slept beside his wife. (The wife summoned the police, without molestation from Pomp.)

The victim, Captain Charles Furbush, was a minuteman who fought at Lexington, one of the opening skirmishes of the Revolutionary War.

Reprinted in full below (complete with breaks in the text where the original document is damaged) is the “Dying Confession of Pomp,” a broadsheet produced by a local merchant — who does not scruple to append some classified ads to the end of the text.*

I POMP now under sentence of death in Ipswich Jail, was born in [illegible], and brought from that place, so soon after I began my existence, that together with my Parents, I arrived at Boston when I was about three months old. My Father died soon after and my Mother has since had two husbands, and is now a widow. I have three sisters and three brothers now living in Boston, for whom a well as for my Mother I have a great regard.

My Mother soon after our arrival in this Country gave me away to Mr. Abbot of Andover. With this Gentleman I lived till I was sixteen years of age, but he being then on the point of moving back into the country some distance, told me if I chose it that I might then live with one of his sons, who was still to reside in Andover. I took up with his offer: choosing rather to continue in Andover, than to accompany my old master, to his new abode.

With young Mr. Abbot I lived not long, before I grew uneasy with the place. I told him that I meant to leave him soon, but he informed me that I was not free. About this time I was seized with convulsion fits which continued to oppress me at times ever after, to the fatal night that I murdered Capt. Furbush. Continuing still unreconciled to the new place, I went to the Select men of Andover to know whether I had not a right to leave it, and by their advice continued there a considerable time longer. But after a while it came to pass that Capt. Furbush took a notion to have a black man; and applying to the Select men, obtained their consent that I should be his servant. In compliance with the wishes [illegible] him; but soon found that I did not like him any better than the man with whom I had last lived. Furbush had a considerable farm and when I first began to live with him did some work himself, but I did not like the way he carried on his business, and after a while he left off work entirely, and by my desire left the whole management of the farm to me. I performed nearly all the work that was done on the place, cut all the hay, and with a trifle of help from the boy, whom my master desired to asist me a few days in a season, raised an hundred and seventy bushels of corn in a year. But my master still continued unkind to me, never letting me go to meeting on Sundays, and forcing me to clear out the cattle on those sacred days. When I asked him for money, he commonly gave me no more than four pence half peny, at a time: and even on Election day he gave me no more, nor would he suffer me on those days to go to frolicing till after one o’clock in the afternoon.

Though I did the best that I was able to do on the farm, my master was so far from seconding my endeavors, that he often brought whole droves of horses home with him in the night, and turned them in among the standing corn, that I had taken so much pains to plant, and hoe, and on the succeeding mornings he would charge me with the guilt of turning these horses into the corn field. In this way he often caused corn enough to be broken down in one night to fat a hog, and keep him fat a whole winter. I thought I found that he was a bad man, and a cheating horse jockey, and finally being unable to like him, I ran away from him, but was pursued, found, brought back, and severely flogged, by him for my pains. I afterwards ran off again but again met with the same fate. In this manner I went on ten or a dozen years, not liking my place, and not able to get away from it. I was frequently troubled with convulsion fits and sometimes crazy in such a degree, that I was generally bolted in to a chamber every night, in order to hinder me from getting into the chamber where my masters daughters slept. I worked very hard all the time. My master had one weakle son who was unable to work, and who often shed tears while he saw me labor and told me that he wished he was able to help me. I told him that perhaps I should contrive something after a while but did not explain myself. Continuing still uneasy I thought I would try once more the benefit of my legs. I accordingly ran off, but after a weeks absence, I was again brought back by my master, stripped naked, tied up by both hands, and unmercifully flogged. This was in the evening, and though it was late in the fall, and cold, frosty, icy weather, my master left me thus naked, and tied up, till the morning. My sufferings during the tedious hours of this lengthy night, by reason of cold and nakedness, a sore back and wounded spirits, were extremely great, and while under this torture, I thought it likely that my master would sometime or other feell the effect of his cruelty. My conjectures were so far right that it was the last time, that Furbush ever struck me.

My master used to tell me I might stay as long as I pleased at his house, adding that he should not stay in the world forever. From this I entertained an idea that Mrs. Furbush and the farm would be mine, after the death of my master. The hopes of being master, husband and owner, on one hand, and the cruel treatment I had received from Furbush on the other, prompted me to wish for his death and produced an idea of hastening [illegible] by [illegible] him myself.

In this state of mind the morning of the fatal day arrived. I arose considerably disordered having a great singing noise in the ears, and something whispering strange things to me I however went about my work as usual, cut up bushes all the day, near where there was another man to work but revealed nothing concerning my designs to him, at night went home, eat a beef steak for supper, and went to bed. Soon after I was seized with a fit, bit my tongue almost through, and after coming out of the fit, was delirious. I continued not long after this in bed, being impressed with an idea that I must get up and kill Capt. Furbush. The Lord a massy! said I to myself what is a going to take place now! The door of my chamber not being bolted as usual, I left my apartment and went down to the fire place. I was struck with horror by my reflections; but something still kept whispering in my ear, that now is your time! kill him now! now or never! now! now! I took an axe and went softly into the bed room of my master, and the moon shining bright, distinguished him from my mistress, I raised the ax before he awaked and at two blows, I so effectually did the job for him, that he never after even stretched himself.

My mistress being roused from sleep by the sound of the blows, said are you dead you? But receiving no answer she immediately left the bed, and called in a near neighbor. I did not try to escape not knowing that there was any necessity of it. I was told that I had but to go up to my chamber, I went there and perceived that somebody had bolted the door after me. Company soon began to croud into the house, and I was soon told that I should certainly be hanged. I was now very much frighted, nnd expected to be hung immediately, but my grief wore off considerably w [illegible] found that I was not to be hung there. I [illegible] soon brought to this Jail, and here enjoy mys [illegible] considerable well, though at Court time I [illegible] ry unhappy, and now some times, the idea [illegible] I have no friends, makes me dull.

The Ministers have been kind to me here, and I believe they are clever people: Mr. Stanniford too the Ja [illegible] keeper is kind and humane, and his wife and daughters clever people and pretty women. ([illegible] ndantly amiable ladies he ought to have said [illegible] whole family are clever folks.) The Ministers have told me to pray to God, and to the blood of Christ, for a new heart. I approve of [illegible] advice, and spend great part of my time in prayer, even ten or twenty times in a day I pray though I find it hard work, I do not however find fault with the hardness of the task, for [illegible] ieve it has been attended with great success. I have good hopes that I have got a new hear [illegible] the one that I used to have, used to ache [illegible] d, but the one I now have feels easy. I never [illegible] so well and hearty in my life as I now am, [illegible] fits and lunacy have left me entirely [illegible] hope to behave cleverly and graciously in this world.

I have prayed so much, that I have got all the minister’s [illegible] of praying and am not afraid to pray with [illegible] black coated man on the Continent. I [illegible] d make a very extraordinary priest, and inde [illegible] am turning very fast into one. When I [illegible] here, I was as black as any negro in the country, but now I have scarcely a drop of negro blood left in me, my blood having so far [illegible] ed into the blood of a Minister, that I am a [illegible] y nearly as white as a Mulatto. Minist [illegible] people and they can turn [illegible]

Some acc [illegible] the hapless POMP with some reflections [illegible] fate by J. PLUMMER, Jun.

Illustration of Pomp's hanging from the broadsheet

POOR POMP was a well made, considerable large, likely looking Negro. [illegible] e was very capable of contriving business on a farm, and such was his strength and industry, that besides the [illegible] which he received for his labour, Capt. Furbush could very well have afforded him 50 dollars per year–With such wages, or even with half that salary he might soon have acquired money enough to purchase 50 acres of excellent [illegible] land, and to have enabled him to clear and improve the same–In that situation some unfortunate white woman might possibly have sought [illegible] assylum in his arms, or at least the likelie [illegible] to girl that fell within the line of his ac [illegible] nce would have sprung like nimble doe [illegible] his marriage bed–The animating sweets of freedom, and of domestic life, had then been all his own–He would neither have sullied his hands with innocent blood, nor have been forced with unutterable woe, to breathe his last in a h [illegible] . But alas! instead of running this happy course, for want of understanding, and skill [illegible] him, to wife and laudable pursuits, we have seen him experience the sad reverse.

I ha [illegible] endeavored to preserve the ideas of poor Pomp, in the above speech, though I have taken the liberty to arrange the matter in my own way, [illegible] to word his thoughts more elegantly and [illegible] than he was able to express them. As to [illegible] said of something telling him to kill his [illegible] er, I believe it to be a falsehood of his ow [illegible] hing contrived by him to excuse his conduct, but as to the rest of his speech, I fancy that he believed it himself; though in several particulars he was pretty much mistaken. His [illegible] capacity was below the common pitch, and his understanding was undoubtedly considerably injured by convulsion fits, though his parts were vastly superior to those of an ideot. But for a rational being his mental improvements were extremely small; though when we consider the situation that he has lived in, this is not so very strange as we at first should think it. He lived either alone in the field, in bed, or in the kitchen of some people, who were too much above him to be his associates: and probably was never learned to read–There were few Negroes in Andover or any where near him, and all there was were unlearned people. From whom then or in what manner was it in his power to gain knowledge? ‘Tis true that he had some intercourse with his white neighbours, but very little that was profitable for instruction;– the discourse generally turning on domestic business, the raising country produce, the age, and strength, of oxen, and horses, the bulling of cows, or the lambing of sheep.– Of knowledge like this Pomp had a large stock. He knew all his master’s cattle, sheep, and hogs, and pretty exactly the age of each creature: and likewise the horses and oxen of many of his neighbours: could tell when such a particular cow of a certain neighbour had been bulled, and when his sow had pigged; but no man thought it worth his while to talk much upon other matters with him, nor would he have been much pleased with the discourse had it been otherwise. He knew not the names of the Seven Sciences, nor even that there were such things or names–knew nothing of ancient or modern history, nor even the late revolution in France, or the consequences of it so often rung through the universe–So little [illegible] ears–Of philosophy [illegible] , geography, good breeding, honor, politics, [illegible] he never heard, or heard with little attention, and less improvement– To crown his ignorance he lost his life by not knowing that murder was a sin: he expecting that he should immediately rise to a good estate and great felicity whenever he should be fortunate enough to kill his master. He knew nothing of the Laws of the United States or of this Commonwealth; and after the murder when he was told that he would be hung, he dreamed nothing of any previous imprisonment or trial: when he heard the sentence of death in Court, he expected to be hung the same hour but finding he was not to be executed that day, he conceived hopes that he never should be. He had seen others and been himself corrected in anger. He had observed that whenever his master was angry with him he either flogged immediately, or he for that time escaped correction, and that after the wrath of his master had subsided there was no danger. He thought the People of Andover and the Court at Ipswich would hang him in the same angry frame of mind, that his master used to flog him in, or that they would not hang him at all: he having no idea of the calm, but irrefutable ire, the deliberate, but vindictive, vengeance of the offended Justice, and of Heaven.

N. B. The reader will take notice that I do not attest to the truth of Pomp’s dying speech, but I affirm that he related to me as matters of fact the particulars [illegible] ted in this speech– Unfortunately for me [illegible] Jail keeper was absent when I visited the prisoner, [illegible] on his name does not appear a [illegible] tness: his lady was present, but perceiving that she was rather timorous, I did not trouble her with a request to be a witness; though I believe she will readly, orally attest to the truth of it.

Printed for and sold by JONATHAN PLUMMER, JUN. price 6d, who still continues to [illegible] various branches of trifling business–Underbeds filled with straw and wheeled to the ladies doors — Any person wanting a few dollars at any time may be supplied by leaving a proper adequate in pawn–Wanted 1000 junk bottles.

A certain secret disorder cured privately and expeditiously– Love-letters in prose and verse furnished on the shortest notice–The art of gaining the object beloved reasonably taught–

Nymphs and swains bow’d down with care
By cupid wounded to the heart,
Quick, O quick to me repair
For soon I ease the dreadful smart.

To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865 characterizes the dueling interpretations of Pomp and his white interlocutor as “[pitting] two explanations of black criminal behavior against each other for the first time in Afro-American autobiography. Plummer’s argument is based on the notion of the Negro as absence. His lack of remorse for murder shows that he has no moral sense, and in justifying his crime with the “whispering” voices, he proves that he lacks truthfulness. Pomp’s narrative, on the other hand, insists that there was something at work in the black man’s psyche, a dynamic whose manifestations in the actions and language of Pomp resisted Furbush’s methods of control and Plummer’s system of reference.”

* By the way, click on my sidebar ads, why don’t you?

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1704: John Quelch, pirate

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On this date in 1704, John Quelch was hanged on a Boston wharf for piracy.

Quelch had re-appeared in New England less than a year after hastily absconding with a new privateering vessel while the owners tried to sort out the captain’s sickness.

(The captain suspected his crew were up to no good, but the mutineers locked him in his cabin and set sail before the investors could act on the information. The ill captain died at sea and was pitched overboard — in what order, no one can say.)

The privateer Charles had been tricked out and licensed to raid French shipping off Newfoundland, but the avaricious mutineers saw much better buccaneering prospects preying on the gold-laden Portuguese possessions in South America.

One small problem: Portugal had formed an alliance with England.

So when the Charles re-appeared, heavy with the sort of mineral wealth not to be found in North America, authorities could not fail to notice that its crew

Have lately Imported a considerable Quantity of Gold dust, and some Bar and coin’d Gold, which they are Violently Suspected to have gotten & obtained by Felony and Piracy, from some of Her Majesties Friends and Allies …*

This all looks very neat on the legal docket (and it certainly did to the jury-less Admiralty court, the first time this instrument had been used outside of England), except that pirates and piracy were far more integrated into the fabric of the colonial frontiers than their desperado reputation might suggest. Pirates shifted in and out of their outlaw careers; even the strictly law-abiding colonists traded knowingly with these freebooters. Certainly some momentary mutual convenience between London and Lisbon for reasons of continental politics was very far from most colonists’ scope of care.

John Quelch seems to be among those operating in the grey economy, and in this case bringing “gold and silver to specie-starved colonial economies.”**

Hunger for hard currency in an environment of wartime depreciation of various sketchy paper notes helps explain why Quelch’s trial raised hackles in New England. Here were men who had by dint of enterprise and adventure plucked nearly 1,000 pounds of gold from faraway Brazil and hauled it back home to New England, honestly paid out the shares to the crew and gone to settle up with the privateering syndicate’s financiers.

And the high-handed English governor Joseph Dudley responded by clapping them in irons and trying them for their lives, using a dubiously legal and heretofore unprecedent drumhead military tribunal at which Dudley himself presided while his son† prosecuted.

It’s a nice setup for winning convictions, which is exactly what happened.

In the process, Dudley blew through a good portion of the pirates’ confiscated booty, making it rain for “Stephen North, who kept the Star Tavern in which the trial was held, for entertainment of the Commissioners during the sitting of the Court of Admiralty” and that sort of thing. If a later denunciation circulated by Cotton Mather is to be believed, the Dudleys did not scruple to wet their own beaks, either.

There have been odd Collusions with the Pyrates of Quelch’s Company, of which one instance is, That there was extorted the sum of about Thirty Pounds from some of the crew for liberty to walk at certain times in the prison yard. And this liberty having been allowed for two or three days unto them, they, were again confined to their former wretched circumstances.

(The rest of the cash went neither to the privateer’s investors nor back to the aggrieved Portuguese, but was shipped to English mints under the capable administration of Isaac Newton.)

Little wonder at the unrepentant Quelch’s parting shot on this date.

Sarcastically interrupting one of his five fellow-sufferers’ bog-standard scaffold injunction against running with a bad crowd, Quelch urged the throng of onlookers to better “take care how they brought Money into New-England, to be Hanged for it!”

Their bodies remained gibbeted in the harbor.

In Quelch’s Gold: Piracy, Greed, and Betrayal in Colonial New England, Clifford Beal argues that Quelch’s trial marked the onset of an official crackdown on pirates that would drive these formerly semi-legitimate operators further underground and therefore into greater violence. He even suggests, at a bit more of a stretch, that Quelch’s case presaged the colonial resistance to the mother country’s political and economic dictates that would later blossom into the American Revolution.

As for the gold, much of it was not recovered in 1704. Legends to the effect that it remains stashed on New Hampshire’s Star Island continue to attract treasure hunters.

* From the proclamation of Quelch and his crew‘s arrest, quoted in Pirates of the New England Coast, 1630-1730.

** Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age, by Marcus Rediker.

† That son, Paul Dudley, later endowed a still-extant lecture series at Harvard University — the oldest endowed lectureship, even though (or rather because) the donor’s intention that it be directed “for the purpose of detecting and convicting and exposing the Idolatry of the Romish church” was eventually neglected.

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1692: Bridget Bishop, the first Salem witch hanging

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On this date in 1692, the pious folk of Salem, Mass., hanged their first witch.

Local bawd Bridget Bishop, pushing 60 and onto her third husband, was a natural target for the emergent civic insanity.

She liked living it up down at the tavern with a red bodice and the occasional game of shuffleboard. When she entered the courtroom, all the little brats with the sorcery stories (strangers to the accused before all this started) fell down and howled. When the Salem goodwives were tasked with groping her for bodily disfigurements that might be a witches’ mark, they

discovered a preternathurall Excresence of flesh between the pudendum and Anus much like to Tetts & not usuall in women

Bishop was obstinate in repelling the charges against her, even uppity enough to question her persecutors’ categorical assumptions.

I am innocent I know nothing of it I am no witch I know not what a witch is.

(Both the above excerpts can be found in the proceedings against Bishop — and other witchcraft defendants — lodged here.)

The local respectable citizens certainly weren’t about to entertain any wisecracking about the whole “witch” construct from the likes of Bishop. (She’d already been accused once before, in 1680.) In Puritan Bible-basher Cotton Mather’s embarrassing 1693 defense of the proceedings, he’s got Bishop’s WMDsdaemonic influences confidently sussed out.

There was little Occasion to prove the Witchcraft, it being Evident and Notorious to all Beholders. Now to fix the Witchcraft on the Prisoner at the Bar, the first thing used, was the Testimony of the Bewitched; whereof several Testify’d, That the Shape of the Prisoner did oftentimes very grievously pinch them, choak them, Bite them, and Afflict them; urging them to write their Names in a Book, which the said Spectre called, Ours. One of them did further Testify, that it was the Shape of this Prisoner, with another, which one Day took her from her Wheel, and carrying her to the River side, threatned there to Drown her, if she did not Sign to the Book mentioned: which yet she refused. Others of them did also Testify, that the said Shape did in her Threats brag to them that she had been the Death of sundry persons, then by her Named; that she had Ridden a man then likewise Named. Another Testify’d the Apparition of Ghosts unto the Spectre of Bishop, crying out, You Murdered us! About the Truth whereof, there was in the matter of Fact but too much Suspicion.

With this kind of slam-dunk evidence, Puritan New England wasn’t the sort of place to suffer a condemned enchantress a lot of dilatory appeals. Victims demanded closure, and two days after Bridget Bishop heard her sentence, she was strung up at Salem’s aptly named Gallows Hill.

There is at this point in the timeline of the Salem hysteria a slight pause in the proceedings as, having crossed the Rubicon and actually begun stretching necks, colonial elites consulted one another as regards the unfolding tragedy (and in the case of one of the judges, resigned).

The remainder finding themselves still committed to the crazy, Salem fired up its witch trials in earnest at the end of the month and greased the hanging rope for 18 more noosings, plus the nasty pressing to death of Giles Corey, over the months ahead.

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1622: Not quite Squanto (Tisquantum), Pilgrim befriender

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On this date in 1622, or very close to it, the Patuxet Native American Tisquantum (better known as Squanto) was about to be yielded by Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford to Wampanoag chief Massasoit for immediate execution … when the unannounced appearance of a strange ship fortuitously saved him.

Squanto is most famous as the Indian godsend who saved the Mayflower Pilgrims at the Plymouth Bay colony from starvation by teaching those pious wayfarers how to live off the land in the New World.

In that capacity, he made possible (and participated in) the “First Thanksgiving” harvest gorger in 1621 that figures as the antecedent of the modern American holiday. Our day’s principal has therefore been portrayed on the stage by generations of schoolchildren from Cape Cod Bay to California.

But this was only the tail end of one of the most remarkable lives in history.


Photo of Tisquantum bust by N. Ayad of Cupids Cove Chatter. Photo was taken courtesy of the Pilgrim Hall Museum, Plymouth, MA, United States.

As a youth, Squanto was kidnapped from his native soil by English explorer George Weymouth, who sold him into slavery in Europe. Squanto wound up in London in some sort of forced-labor capacity, before hitching a ride back to the Americas with Captain John Smith — the Pocahontas guy.

It was thanks to this improbable abduction and return trip that Squanto was available to materialize out of the woods, speaking the Queen’s English on this alien continent, in the nick of time to save the Plymouth immigrants from disaster.**

However, because Squanto was a real person and not a Disney character, he began exploiting his privileged intermediary position for his own advantage.

According to Plymouth Gov. William Bradford’s chronicle Of Plymouth Plantation,

Squanto sought his own ends and played his own game, by putting the Indians in fear and drawing gifts from them to enrich himself, making them believe he could stir up war against whom he would, and make peace for whom he would. Yea, he made them believe they kept the plague buried in the ground, and could send it amongst whom they would, which did much terrify the Indians and made them depend more on him, and seek more to him, than to Massasoit. Which procured him envy and had like to have cost him his life; for after the discovery of his practices, Massasoit sought it both privately and openly, which caused him to stick close to the English, and never durst go from them till he died.

Seeking Squanto’s life both privately and openly, Massasoit sent messengers to the Plymouth colony requesting the Machiavellian diplomat’s return in accordance with the colony’s treaty arrangements with the Wampanoag.

Bradford ducked and dilated, not wanting to give up this valuable asset, but the precarious colony also needed the amity of its Indian neighbors.

Massasoit remained insistent, according to the account of Edward Winslow,

entreating [Bradford] to give way to the death of Tisquantum who had so much abused him … [Massasoit] sent his own knife and [two messengers] therewith to cut off his head and hands and bring them to him

Bradford was on the point of yielding to this demand when a strange boat appeared unannounced — and the guv hit the “pause” button on everything.

he would first know what boat that was ere he would deliver him into their custody (not knowing whether there was a combination of French and Indians). Mad with rage and impatient at delay the messengers departed in great heat.

The delay turned out to be permanent … which for Squanto was only a few more months before he caught ill† and died later in 1622.

The ship that quite unknowingly bought Squanto this extra purchase on life had nothing at all to do with the drama unfolding between Bradford and Massasoit: it was the Sparrow, the advance party of the coming Wessagusset (or Weymouth) colony which would plant itself adjacent to the Plymouth settlers and completely crash and burn.

And the Pilgrims and the Indians lived happily ever after.

* This site asserts May 31 was the date that the Sparrow came ashore at Plymouth. Most sites are slightly less specific, noting only that the ship arrived in very late May.

** Among Squanto’s good deeds for the fledgling colony was tracking down a boy who got lost in the wilderness. The boy was John Billington, the eponymous son of the first man hanged in the Plymouth Colony.

† Some suspect that Squanto’s “illness” wasn’t so accidental, and the frustrated Wampanoag chief simply dispensed with the diplomatic rigmarole and poisoned him off.

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1821: Stephen Merrill Clark, boy arsonist

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On this date in 1821, a 17-year-old ne’er-do-well was hanged at Winter Island near Salem, Mass., for arson.

Several fires had menaced Newburyport in 1820, and skulking juvenile delinquent Stephen Merrill Clark was swiftly suspected. Clark’s father had even been trying to fix up some kind of intervention for the boy, who had twice washed out of apprenticeships.

Stephen’s main squeeze, a “night walker” and “person of lascivious behavior” by the name of Hannah Downes, obligingly informed on him in the arson matter, and this was sufficient to secure his conviction. (Trial transcriptions are available here.)

The perp’s youth and the impeachable evidence against him helped raise the general public hand-wringing over the matter; even Clark’s convicting jury recommended mercy, which the Bay State’s Governor’s Council declined to extend in view of the serious public menace posed by fires.

And Clark, in the end, provided an obliging 11th-hour confession to set everyone’s mind at ease as regards the shaky stool-pigeon testimony that hung him. Clark blamed that night-walker girl of his for instigating everything, licensing the circulation of outstanding doggerel like the following from an execution broadside.

Be warn’d, ye youth, who see my sad despair:
Avoid LEWD WOMEN, false as they are fair.
By my example learn to shun my fate:
How wretched is the man who’s wise too late!
Ere innocence, and fame and life be lost,
Here purchase wisdom cheaply, at my cost.*

Indeed.

The Essex Register of May 12, 1821 printed this eyewitness report of the scaffold, similarly suggestive of a prisoner just barely keeping his composure.

O, how changed from that sturdy, robust and apparently unconcerned youth who, but a few weeks before, was tried, convicted and sentenced to suffer death. Then, his countenance was flushed and ruddy with the glow of health, his eye was quick and animated his nerves unshaken by the array and circumstance of the judicial proceedings, and his whole frame was firm and strong — Now, a ghastly paleness covered his face, his eye was languid and declined to earth, his aspect bespoke an inward grief and agony that could not be uttered, and as the Rev. Clergyman supported his feeble steps toward the scaffold, his very soul appeared to quake at the terrors of the law that surrounded him.

He was conducted up the first flight of steps … here the agony of his spirit almost overpowered his strength, and he was near fainting, but was in some measure revived by the kind and assiduous attentions of those about him … a profound and solemn silence reigned throughout the vast multitude of spectators, whose countenances were marked by feelings of the deepest interest, and who remained uncovered during the residue of the tragic scene… when he ascended the second flight of steps, and took his stand upon his last support, the sympathies and pity of the beholders were raised to the highest pitch, and when his bosom and his neck were bared and he meekly inclined his head to enable Mr. Brown to adjust the fatal cord, and submissively placed himself in the position most convenient for the dreadful purpose for which he was brought there, the feelings of the multitude could no longer be suppressed, and mingled sighs and groans were heard in every direction. These preparations were soon finished, & at a signal from the High Sheriff, the spring was touched, and Clark was, in a moment, launched into eternity! — Thus died Stephen Merrill Clark, aged 17 years — cut off in the morning of his life, for a heinous offence, and made a public example of the terrible retributions of the present world, and held up as an awful warning to all survivors, and especially to young persons, to shun the paths of vice.

* Not that it wasn’t circulating already; this poem was just an execution-day twist on the argument of Clark’s defense counsel, that “respectable citizens have been unfortunately led, by the wicked arts of the most abandoned of women … of notoriously profligate character … on whose word no reliance can be placed.” Sally Chase, another woman of circumstances similar to Hannah Downes, provided similar testimony against Clark.

Oh, along with a bunch of other confessional things Clark admitted to various authorities under various states of cajolery or duress.

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1789: Rachel Wall, female pirate

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(Thanks to Jonathan Shipley of A Writer’s Desk for the guest post. -ed.)

“Into the hands of the Almighty God I commit my soul, relying on his mercy … and die an unworthy member of the Presbyterian Church, in the 29th year of my age.”

These were the last words of Rachel Wall, on this date in 1789. It was she, whom the Presbyterians must have frowned upon mightily, who was the last woman hanged in Massachusetts and, further, the first noted American-born female pirate.

No walking the plank for her. She was hanged, proven guilty of robbery, by Sheriff Joe Robinson on a beautiful fall day. Her downfall after a brief career with her husband of piracy, thievery and murder? A pretty bonnet.

Rachel, around the age of 16, loved the water. The boats and dockyards always spoke to her. Born on a farm outside of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it bored her; so, while in Harrisburg, she went to the docks. She was harassed, harangued and attacked by a group of girls. Enter George Wall –- a fisherman and former privateer who served in the Revolutionary War. He saved Rachel from the girls and Rachel, against her devout Presbyterian parents, eloped with him.

They went to Boston where she stayed on as a servant girl while George plundered. He convinced her to join him and his cohorts in piracy. It proved successful, for a time.

Their plan was this: anchor near an island during a storm. When it passed, make their boat appear damaged. When another boat came, Rachel would shout for help. Help would come. They’d then murder the would-be rescuers, steal their valuables, and sink their ship. Those awaiting the unfortunate sailors would think simply that the storm had taken them away, not Mr. and Mrs. Wall. Between 1781 and 1782 they captured 12 boats, murdered 24 sailors and kept around $6,000 in booty for themselves.

Another Brick in the Wall

This plan worked quite well, until September of 1782 when one storm proved too powerful. George Wall and his motley crew drowned. The only survivor was Rachel. She returned to Boston and in the remaining years of her life she became a maid, a petty thief, and possibly a prostitute, stealing from johns as they slept.

Then, the bonnet incident.

One day Margaret Bender, a 17-year-old Bostonian, was minding her own business, walking down the street, a pretty bonnet affixed to her head. Wall, seeing said bonnet, pushed Bender down, stole the bonnet and then tried to rip out the girl’s tongue. Wall ran from the police when they were summoned. She was caught, put in jail and tried on September 10, 1789 for robbery (she copped to her piratical career, but claimed she had never killed anyone). Less than a month later, she hung from the gallows.

Part of the Themed Set: Women Who Kill.

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1630: John Billington, signer of the Mayflower Compact

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On this date in 1630, Massachusetts’ Plymouth Colony held its first hanging — of a guy who’d come over on the Mayflower.

In this unfinished epic poem of the American experience by Stephen Vincent Benet, Billington is mourned at the foot of his gallows as “a man who came with the first and should have thriven.”

John Billington‘s John Hancock is on the Mayflower Compact, but he and his progeny had an ill reputation from the start.

Billington’s son almost torched the Mayflower while the pilgrims were still living in it; the old man himself achieved the distinction of “the first offence since our arrival … for his contempt of the captain’s lawful command with opprobrious speeches, for which he is adjudged to have his neck and heels tied together; but upon humbling himself and craving pardon, and it being the first offence, he is forgiven.”

(It wasn’t all bad. Another Billington kid gave the family name to an inland pond. (pdf))

Billington was condemned for shooting a neighbor.

This year John Billington the elder, one that came over with the first, was arraigned, and both by grand and petty jury found guilty of wilful murder, by plain and notorious evidence. And was for the same accordingly executed. This, as it was the first execution amongst them, so was it a matter of great sadness unto them. They used all due means about his trial and took the advice of Mr. Winthrop and other the ablest gentlemen in Bay of the Massachusetts, that were then newly come over, who concurred with them that he ought to die, and the land to be purged from blood. He and some of his had been often punished for miscarriages before, being one of the profanest families amongst them ; they came from London, and I know not by what friends shuffled into their company. His fact was that he waylaid a young man, one John Newcomen, about a former quarrel and shot him with a gun, whereof he died.
-Plymouth Gov. William Bradford (Source)

Billington is supposed to be a distant ancestor to American President James Garfield.

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