The Archives

The ArchivesPlacesBoston

Boston

Chief town and port of the Province of Massachusetts Bay on the Shawmut peninsula, the largest town and busiest shipping centre of British North America in the golden age, and the colonial courtroom and gallows where the piracy statute of 1700 was tried out in America.

Also writtenShawmut / Shawmutt / Mushauwomuk / Mashauwomuk (the peninsula, indigenous usage, recorded in English 1630; Probable as to form, Disputed as to meaning); Trimountaine / Trimount (the peninsula and its western hill, c. 1630, superseded); Boston in New England (the town, in formal legal and print usage); Province of the Massachusetts Bay in New England (the jurisdiction of which Boston was the seat, 1691 to 1776); Nixes Mate / Nix's Mate / Nixes Island / Nick's Mate (the gibbet island in the harbour; the spelling never settled)

Boston here is the eighteenth-century town on the Shawmut peninsula, roughly 789 acres joined to the mainland at Roxbury by one low neck. Almost all of it lies within about a mile's walk. The Town House, the gaol, the wharves, the flats where the province hanged its pirates.

The peninsula was Shawmut first, set down in English by William Blackstone in 1630 as Shawmutt, from a term rendered Mushauwomuk or Mashauwomuk whose meaning is not established. Settlers briefly called it Trimountaine, now Tremont. Boston, after Boston in Lincolnshire, dates from 1630.

Boston was not a pirate haven, and nothing makes it a rendezvous in the way Nassau or Madagascar were. It is where pirates were brought, tried, hanged and printed. John Bonner mapped it in 1722, in The town of Boston in New England, street by street, with the gaol quarter and the harbour edge.

A royal province and a new statute

Boston was the seat of a royal province from 1691. The Act for the More Effectual Suppression of Piracy, 11 and 12 William III chapter 7, allowed commissioned courts of admiralty in the colonies to try piracy instead of shipping the accused to England. Boston used it at once: Quelch's company was condemned in 1704 under a commission grounded upon that act, and the court of October 1717 sat under another. These courts sat without a jury, a standing colonial grievance.1

The Court House, June 1704

The privateer Charles sailed from Marblehead in July 1703 under Governor Joseph Dudley's commission. Her commissioned commander Daniel Plowman fell ill, John Quelch took her, and she took at least nine vessels off Brazil, subjects of Portugal, an ally of the Crown. The arrests followed her return in May 1704. On 13 June, Quelch and others of his company were found guilty at the Court House. Six hanged on Friday 30 June: Quelch, John Lambert, Christopher Scudamore, John Miller, Erasmus Peterson and Peter Roach.2

That court is generally described as the first admiralty piracy trial held outside England. The gallows stood at the water's edge, on the flats between the tide marks, because admiralty jurisdiction ran to the low water mark; the printed account puts the place "in Charles River between Broughton's Warehouse and the Point". That is not Execution Dock at Wapping, and the two should never be run together.3

Bellamy's men, October 1717

Samuel Bellamy's Whydah was wrecked off Cape Cod on 26 April 1717. Survivors, with men taken out of her consort the Mary Anne, were sent up to Boston. A justiciary court of admiralty sat from 18 to 30 October, indicted eight persons, acquitted two and convicted six. They hanged on 15 November: John Brown, Simon Van Vorst, Hendrick Quintor, Thomas Baker, Peter Cornelius Hoof and John Shuan. Cotton Mather attended them, his diary recording a long and sad walk from the prison to the place of execution.4

The famous wreck and the courtroom record do not describe the same men. Only two men came off the Whydah herself, Thomas Davis and John Julian, and Davis was one of the two acquitted.

Fly and the gibbet on Nixes Mate

William Fly's mutiny began aboard the snow Elizabeth of Bristol, John Green master, on 27 May 1726 about one in the morning. Green and the mate Thomas Jenkins were cut with a cooper's broad axe and thrown overboard, and the snow was renamed the Fame's Revenge. William Atkinson, a passenger the pirates kept for his skill as mariner and pilot, contrived with three others to seize Fly, and the captives were brought in to Boston on 28 June. A special court of admiralty under the Act of 11 and 12 William III sat there on 4 and 5 July 1726, William Dummer the Lieutenant Governor presiding; sixteen men were arraigned, Atkinson and eleven others acquitted and four convicted. Fly, Samuel Cole and Henry Greenvill were hanged on Tuesday 12 July at the usual place for the execution of pirates in or near Charles River, and Fly's body was carried afterwards to an island at the entrance of the harbour and hung up in chains. George Condick was reprieved for twelve months at the place of execution, the court having recommended him as commonly intoxicated with liquor, an ignorant man of about twenty who had no hand in the murders and served mostly as cook. The court record writes the island Nick's-Mate; it is now called Nixes Mate.5

The harbour

The approach from Massachusetts Bay threads between islands and shoals, and a vessel of any burden wanted a pilot, which is why Atkinson was aboard Fly's prize at all. Nixes Mate marks a hazard on it, so a body hung there was no accident of geography: every crew going in or out had to look at him. Boston was a place you were brought to.

The town that printed them

The first number of the Boston News-Letter is dated for the week ending Monday 24 April 1704, published by the postmaster John Campbell; it was the first continuously published newspaper in British North America. Mather is reported to have printed Instructions to the Living, from the Condition of the Dead after the executions of 1717. In 1726 he published The Vial Poured Out Upon the Sea, carrying his conferences with the condemned and the sermon of the day. Fly refused to perform repentance, which is the point of that pamphlet. Almost every surviving voice of a Boston pirate reaches us through a prosecutor or a minister.6

Shared hulls

Boston carried and processed rather than produced. Fish, timber and provisions went out; sugar and molasses came in, and the molasses was distilled into rum that went out again. Massachusetts merchants were participants in the trade in enslaved people, not bystanders. John Winthrop recorded on 26 February 1638 the return of the ship Desire from the West Indies with cotton, tobacco and, in his word, negroes. In 1705 to 1706 the province laid a duty of four pounds sterling on each enslaved person imported, with rebates that blunted it. The dates conflict: some accounts end the Royal African Company's monopoly in 1696, the standard legal date being the Trade with Africa Act of 1697, effective 1698.7

Fly's Elizabeth was in the Guinea trade, and Bellamy's Whydah was a purpose-built London slaving vessel before pirates took her. They share hulls.

What the sources cannot yet give is the ground itself. The 1704 print puts the gallows in Charles River between Broughton's Warehouse and the Point, which cannot be fixed on a made and cut shoreline without Bonner's map read against the town records and the Suffolk County deeds; the likeliest ground is the north shore tidal margin near the ferry ways. The names of the two men acquitted in 1717 rest on secondary report, and no excavated Boston object has been tied to any of these cases. The Fly affair as it stands here, its dates and the number hanged with him, comes from Mather's pamphlet and the court's own record.

What the evidence does not settle

Pirate gallows site

  • Exact site of Boston's pirate gallows is unlocated

The two 1717 acquittals

  • Two 1717 acquitted men's names come only from secondary accounts

William Fly's 1726 court

  • The 1726 sentences and George Condick's reprieve

Each line is one question with its own grade, taken from the register where a claim carries it. Nothing here is graded as a whole.

Sources for this record

Every statement above that rests on a checked claim carries a small number; the numbers lead here. Each entry gives what is claimed, how far the record supports it, and where it comes from.

  1. Boston was the principal venue of admiralty piracy justice in northern British America, trying pirates by commissioned courts of admiralty grounded on the Act for the More Effectual Suppression of Piracy, 11 and 12 William III c. 7, rather than shipping the accused to England; the Quelch defendants were condemned in 1704 by virtue of a commission grounded upon that act, and the court of October 1717 sat under a commission and instructions founded on the same statute. Unverified Reported, not yet checked against the record. Statute and trial pamphlets: An Act for the More Effectuall Suppression of Piracy, 11 and 12 William III c. 7, Statutes of the Realm VII, pp. 590 to 594; The Arraignment, Tryal, and Condemnation, of Capt. John Quelch, and others of his company, London imprint 1705; The Trials of Eight Persons Indited for Piracy, Boston 1718, Evans N01688
  2. The privateer Charles sailed from Marblehead in July 1703 under a commission from Governor Joseph Dudley and, after her commissioned commander Daniel Plowman fell ill and John Quelch took command, took at least nine vessels off Brazil belonging to subjects of the King of Portugal, an ally of the Crown; Quelch and others of his company were found guilty at the Court House in Boston on 13 June 1704, and six men were hanged on Friday 30 June 1704: John Quelch, John Lambert, Christopher Scudamore, John Miller, Erasmus Peterson and Peter Roach. Unverified Reported, not yet checked against the record. Trial pamphlet and institutional research blog: The Arraignment, Tryal, and Condemnation, of Capt. John Quelch, and others of his company, London imprint 1705, Library of Congress item 99163093; Pirates in Boston: The Trial and Execution of John Quelch, Massachusetts Historical Society Beehive blog; 1704: John Quelch, pirate, Executed Today
  3. The Boston court of 1704 is generally described as the first admiralty piracy trial held outside England, a superlative that is credible and repeated by the Massachusetts Historical Society but is carried here as a label rather than a proved fact; and Boston's pirate executions were carried out at the tidal margin, on the flats between the tide marks where admiralty jurisdiction ran to the low water mark, the printed account of 1704 placing the gallows in Charles River between Broughton's Warehouse and the Point, which is a distinct site from Execution Dock at Wapping in London and should never be conflated with it. Unverified Reported, not yet checked against the record. Trial pamphlet, institutional research blog and secondary account: Pirates in Boston: The Trial and Execution of John Quelch, Massachusetts Historical Society Beehive blog; The Arraignment, Tryal, and Condemnation, of Capt. John Quelch; 1704: John Quelch, pirate, Executed Today
  4. A justiciary court of admiralty assembled at Boston sat from 18 to 30 October 1717 on men taken after the wreck of Samuel Bellamy's Whydah off Cape Cod on 26 April 1717 and from her consort the Mary Anne, indicting eight persons for piracy, acquitting two and convicting six, who were hanged at Boston on 15 November 1717: John Brown, Simon Van Vorst, Hendrick Quintor, Thomas Baker, Peter Cornelius Hoof and John Shuan, with Cotton Mather in attendance and recording in his diary a long and sad walk with them from the prison to the place of execution. Confirmed Directly supported by the record. Trial pamphlet and institutional research blog quoting the Mather diary: The Trials of Eight Persons Indited for Piracy, Boston 1718, Evans text N01688; The End of Piracy: Pirates Hanged in Boston 300 Years Ago, Massachusetts Historical Society Beehive blog
  5. William Fly's mutiny began aboard the snow Elizabeth of Bristol, John Green master, on 27 May 1726 about one in the morning; the master and the mate Thomas Jenkins were cut with a cooper's broad axe and thrown overboard, and the vessel was renamed the Fame's Revenge. After William Atkinson, a passenger whom the pirates kept for his skill as mariner and pilot, contrived with three others to seize Fly, the pirates were brought in to Boston on 28 June, and a special court of admiralty under the Act of 11 and 12 William III sat there on 4 and 5 July 1726, William Dummer the Lieutenant Governor presiding. Sixteen men were arraigned; Atkinson and eleven others were acquitted and four convicted. Fly, Samuel Cole and Henry Greenvill were hanged on Tuesday 12 July 1726 at the usual place for the execution of pirates in or near Charles River, and Fly's body was carried afterwards to an island at the entrance of Boston harbour and hung up in chains; George Condick was reprieved for twelve months at the place of execution, the court having recommended him as commonly intoxicated with liquor, an ignorant man of about twenty who had no hand in the murders and served mostly as cook. The court record writes the island Nick's-Mate; it is now called Nixes Mate. Likely More likely than not on the evidence we have. Trial record, execution sermon and contemporary accounts: Cotton Mather, The Vial Poured Out Upon the Sea (Boston, 1726), together with the record of the special Court of Admiralty at Boston of 4 and 5 July 1726, Benjamin Colman's account taken from Atkinson's own relation (Boston, 1726) and a Boston dispatch of 16 July 1726 printed in The Political State of Great Britain, vol XXXII, September 1726; read in the Internet Archive text The Vial Poured Out Upon the Sea, The Expanded Edition (archive.org/details/the-vial-poured-out-upon-the-sea), which marks off each interpolated source from Mather's own text with a heading and citation. Mather: the snow was "commanded by John Green, of that City" and sailed from Jamaica in April 1726; "on May 27. about One a Clock in the Morning" Fly and Alexander Mitchel seized the master, and "with a Cooper's Broad-axe, cut off his Hand, and threw him over-board", then served the mate "Thomas Jenkins" likewise; "On June 28. the Happy Captors brought in their New Captives". The testimony of Morrice Cundon, gunner, sworn 5 July 1726, names "the Snow called the Elizabeth (belonging to His Mayesty's Subjects in Bristol in Great Britain)"; the articles of indictment name the vessel "the Fames-Revenge, formerly called the Elizabeth". The court "Voted, That they should be Executed on Tuesday the Twelfth Day of July Instant, at the usual place for the Execution of Pirates, in or near Charles River", and that Fly, "being the Chief Leader of them, his Dead Body should be carried from the Place of Execution to an Island called Nick's-Mate, near the Entrance of the Harbour of Boston, and there be Hung up in Chains"; Condick was recommended for "a Reprieve for Twelve Months" as "commonly Intoxicated with Liquor, and an Ignorant Man, about Twenty Years of Age, having no hand (as appeared) in the Murther of the Captain, or Mate, and seldom taking up Arms". The Boston dispatch: "On Tuesday last, three of the Pyrates were executed at Charles Town, viz, William Fly Captain, Samuel Cole, Quarter-Master, and Henry Greenvil; but George Candick was reprieved for a Year and a Day". Colman: "AFTER the Execution, the three dead Bodies were carried to a small Island, about two leagues from the Town; where the body of Fly is hung up in Irons".
  6. Boston's print trade carried the meaning of these executions to a reading public: the first number of the Boston News-Letter is dated for the week from Monday 17 April to Monday 24 April 1704 and was published by the postmaster John Campbell, becoming the first continuously published newspaper in British North America, while Cotton Mather printed Instructions to the Living, from the Condition of the Dead after the executions of 1717 and, in 1726, The Vial Poured Out Upon the Sea, carrying his conferences with the condemned pirates, their behaviour at execution and the sermon preached on the occasion. Likely More likely than not on the evidence we have. Period newspaper and period imprint: The Boston News-Letter, number 1, from Monday April 17 to Monday April 24, 1704, Library of Congress rbpe.0330050a; Cotton Mather, The Vial Poured Out Upon the Sea, 1726, Evans text N02345; The End of Piracy, Massachusetts Historical Society Beehive blog, for the 1717 imprints
  7. Boston was a carrying and processing port whose trade ran on fish, timber, masts and provisions outward and West Indian sugar, molasses, logwood and rum inward, with distilling turning imported molasses into rum for export, and Massachusetts merchants were direct participants in the trade in enslaved people from the return of the ship Desire recorded by John Winthrop on 26 February 1638 onward, the province imposing an import duty of four pounds sterling on each enslaved person in 1705 to 1706 with rebates that blunted it; the sources conflict on the end of the Royal African Company's monopoly, the cited feature giving 1696 while the standard legal date is the Trade with Africa Act of 1697, effective 1698. Unverified Reported, not yet checked against the record. Institutional research feature and secondary literature: The Importation and Sale of Enslaved People, Massachusetts Historical Society online feature; John Bonner, The town of Boston in New England, 1722; Boston in 1700, The Pirate Empire