The Relapse and the Rope

This is the hinge of the Collection, the day the carrot became the stick. The pardon's weakness was designed into it: a man could take the certificate and go back to sea. Charles Vane did exactly that, surrendering to Captain Vincent Pearse at Providence about the latter end of March 1718, taking the benefit of the proclamation, and turning pirate again. He was one of many.

Rogers answered the relapse with a rope. His pirate hunter, Benjamin Hornigold, retook the company of John Auger and Phineas Bunce, men who had held the pardon and returned to the trade. Ten of them were tried at Nassau on 9 and 10 December 1718. Nine were convicted. Eight were hanged on 12 December 1718.

The count needs care, because it is the kind of figure that gets miscopied. The trial itself and the condemnations are firm from the calendared court copy. The detail of the gallows, that eight were hanged, that one convicted man, George Rounsivell, was reprieved at the rope, and that John Hipps was the one of the ten acquitted as a forced man, not the man reprieved, rests on consistent independent carriers while the primary manuscript is still unread, and it is carried here at that level. Highly Probable Some tertiary accounts hang nine, conflating the convictions with the executions, and some name Hipps as the man reprieved; both are corrected here on sight.

Read plainly, this is the enforcement moment the pirate pardons theme gallery treats as the pardon's failure condition. What this room adds is its place in the walk: after the proclamation, the governor and the haven, this is where mercy is shown to fail and the state reaches for the machinery. By what authority did that court sit, and what law sharpened it? That is the next room.