Gallery · The End of the Golden Age · Room 7 of 9
The Last Hanging
The exhibit
No scan of the 1726 Boston print is on display here. Its text is read and Confirmed, so the exhibit is the record's own words: the line on its title that shows the courts winding down, and the plain sentence of the last man.
The theatre that opened at Boston in 1717 closes at Boston nine years later, and smaller. By the summer of 1726 a special Court of Admiralty tried sixteen men and convicted only four. The print says so on its own face.
"Four of which were found guilty, and the rest acquitted"
The one who hanged was William Fly, the last celebrated pirate of the Golden Age, a captain who had murdered his commander and mate aboard the snow he seized. He went to the gallows on 12 July 1726, and his body was left in chains as a warning at the mouth of Boston harbour.
"Tuesday the Twelfth Day of July ... in or near Charles River"
"to an Island called Nick's-Mate ... and there be Hung up in Chains"
Read the two Boston trials as a pair and the arc has its frame: six men hanged in 1717, one man hanged in 1726, the same city, the same instrument, nine years apart. The Gallows room holds the census between them. What this room adds is the diminuendo, the point where the courts convict four of sixteen and the forced-man defence carries the rest, and the age runs out of famous men to hang. It does not, however, run out of a name. The name came last of all, and the next room is where it was coined.