Gallery · Samuel Bellamy and the Whydah · Room 4 of 5
The Boston Reckoning
a long and sad walk with them from the prison to the place of execution
The case closed on the men the sea gave back. Bellamy, dead six months, stood in no dock, and the court that sat at Boston weighed his crew.
Cyprian Southack, sent by Governor Samuel Shute, worked the wreck through early May and oversaw the burial of the drowned, a hundred and two men by his own count on his chart.
Eight men taken from the wrecks were tried at the Court of Admiralty in Boston. The court opened on 18 October 1717, convicted six and acquitted Thomas South on 22 October, and acquitted the forced carpenter Thomas Davis on 30 October. Cotton Mather, who published within about a month his relation of the shipwreck, ministered to the condemned and set down the walk to the gallows in the words above.
On 15 November 1717 six men, Simon Van Vorst, John Brown, Thomas Baker, Hendrick Quintor, Peter Cornelius Hoof and John Shuan, were hanged.
on the 15th day of November following at Charlestown Ferry within flux and reflux of the Sea.
Some later accounts move the hanging to Boston Common; the print made at the time puts it at Charlestown Ferry.
- 18 October 1717. The court opened and the prisoners pleaded.
- 22 October 1717. Six were convicted and Thomas South acquitted as a forced man.
- 28 October 1717. Thomas Davis arraigned.
- 30 October 1717. Davis acquitted as a forced man.
- 15 November 1717. Six hanged at Charlestown Ferry: Simon Van Vorst, John Brown, Thomas Baker, Hendrick Quintor, Peter Cornelius Hoof and John Shuan.
Southack reached the wreck about the second or third of May and recovered little that the shore had not already carried off. Likely
These were verdicts on the survivors of his company, and Bellamy himself was never brought to a bar.
The Court of Admiralty as an institution, and what a piracy trial did with the men before it, belong to the trials galleries. What the Bellamy case adds is a printed trial that judged a crew whose captain the court could never reach. The Whydah survivors' later fates, and the later story of John Julian, are held for the last room.