Trials of Every's Crew

Every escaped, so the state tried his crew instead. Six men stood at Admiralty sessions held in the Old Bailey building in the autumn of 1696: Joseph Dawson, Edward Forseith, William May, William Bishop, James Lewis and John Sparkes. These were sessions of oyer and terminer under the High Court of Admiralty, a separate jurisdiction from the ordinary City and Middlesex sessions. The proceedings survive through the printed record, The Tryals of Joseph Dawson and others, not through the Old Bailey Proceedings series, so this trial is not in Old Bailey Online.

The first sitting was Monday 19 October 1696. Dawson pleaded guilty; the other five pleaded not guilty and put themselves on their trial for the taking of the Ganj-i-Sawai. The Crown's two witnesses, the former crewmen John Dann and Philip Middleton, gave what the court considered full evidence, and Lord Chief Justice Holt summed up against the prisoners. The jury acquitted them anyway. The print records it flatly: "the Jury, contrary to the expectation of the Court, brought in all the Prisoners Not Guilty." That verdict is the famous embarrassment of the case, an English jury refusing to convict the most notorious pirates of the decade on the richest charge against them.

The court did not accept it. The prisoners were held on a new warrant for other piracies rather than released. As the second trial jury was empanelled, Holt warned that the earlier verdict "was a dishonour to the Justice of the Nation"; jurors from the first panel were challenged off the second, and Judge Hedges' charge to the grand jury pressed for conviction. This time the indictment was the Charles the Second mutiny, the seizure of an English ship from an English master, which the first jury had never ruled on. On Saturday 31 October 1696 the five were convicted on the mutiny. Further indictments for the two Danish ships and the Moorish Fateh Muhammed were tried on Friday 6 November and also brought convictions.

The retrial did work beyond the courtroom. With a Mughal diplomatic crisis running and East India Company trade at stake, the state needed convictions, and the fresh mutiny indictment, the charge the first jury had not acquitted, was the instrument that produced them. Douglas Burgess has read the printed pamphlet itself as a piece of public justification, the government explaining to its readers why these men hanged. The primary record shows the mechanism plainly; the political motive is Burgess's reading, held at Probable.

Six men were condemned: Dawson on four indictments by his own confession, the other five on three. Five were hanged at Execution Dock on 25 November 1696. The print closes on the sentence: "Edward Foreseth and the rest were Executed, on Wednesday, November the 25th 1696, at Execution-Dock, that being the usual Place for the Execution of Pirates." Joseph Dawson, the one man who had pleaded guilty, was reprieved. The pamphlet's phrase "and the rest" does not itself record the reprieve, so the execution date and the count of six condemned are Confirmed while the Dawson reprieve is held at Probable, on the trial print read alongside the scholarship.

One dating point belongs on the record. The pamphlet's title page says the sessions began on 29 October 1696, but its own body reads "Monday the 19th Day of October", and the internal adjournments to Saturday 31 October and Friday 6 November only work from a Monday start. The 29 October on the title page is a printer's error, corrected against the body text.