Bad Men of 1725 Paid Off Promptly: Schooner Days MLXIII (1073)

by C. H. J. Snider

The Jolly Roger—3

WAPPING OLD STAIRS

JUNE, 1725

ON JUNE 11TH, 1725, every window and wharfledge in Wapping was crowded with men, women and children, watching Capt. Johnnie Gow, his lieutenant James Williams the Welshman, and six of the crew of their pirate ship Revenge, come to a bad end. So crowded was every point-of-view that day that more spectators were drowned than were pirates hanged. A wharf stage collapsed, and dozens were swept into the Thames. But the improving spectacle was a complete success.

First came the Silver Oar of Admiralty, borne glittering before the pirates. They were in three carts, with the hangmen. They had been in fetters since the middle of February, and drunk from the day in 1724 when they captured their first wine ship. Two were so weak they had to be carried from, their cart to the scaffold. Williams raged like a wild beast. Others mopped and mowed at the surging crowd, and called to acquaintances. Only one, a Galway man who had been forced to join, tried to make an "improving" speech.

"Brother sailors," he cried, "if it should ever be your misfortune to be taken by pirates, suffer yourselves to be shot rather than join the villains which has been the source of my ruin."

He blamed his fate on Gow's persuasiveness.

HIS OWN LAWYER

Gow said never a word after his first protestation that he had surrendered voluntarily and had been instrumental in securing the surrender of his crew. He was a mock-heroic sea-lawyer, who thought he could not be hanged without a trial, and could not be tried without a plea.

When he would not plead, his thumbs were squeezed with whipcord pulled taut by two men till it broke, and till it broke again when doubled, and broke again when trebled. The agony of his crushed thumb bones was terrific. Still he would not plead.

So he was condemned to be "pressed." This sentence involved laying him on his back, naked, on a stone floor, with arms and legs fastened outwards, and "so much iron and stone, laid on him as his body might bear and more." The first day he might have three morsels of barley bread, the next, drink only from the common runnel of the cell, but no water from stream or fountain. And so on till he should die.

Seeing the preparations for this further torture being made, on the advice of the prison chaplain, Gow changed his "plea mute" to a plea of "not guilty." His brain cells hardened, with months of alcohol and hours of physical torment, he muttered: "Had I known what was wanted I would have saved you all this trouble."

The advocates and proctors in their scarlet robes and velvet caps, who had opened the trial in the justice hall of Doctors Commons and court No. 5 of the High Court of Admiralty made short work of Gow after that, for they had already heard 34 witnesses and convicted nine of his associates. He was promptly found guilty also and sentenced to be hanged here in Wapping.

THREE times he went through the ceremony. The hangings were in the Execution Dock, at low tide. The subjects were jerked off the scaffold and dropped into the empty dock, there to dangle until three tides had risen and washed them.

Gow gave his last guinea to the hangman to have his suffering shortened. The hangman bit the gold, and nodded to his helpers.

When the pirate chief was swung off these men in the dock below caught his kicking legs and threw their whole weight on his writhing body, to choke him the sooner. After four minutes the halter broke and all fell in a tangle.

The pinioned Gow, alive and conscious, was made to climb the ladder to the scaffold again. He argued with vehemence that it was not fair to hang him twice. The hangman, having got his last guinea, was not impressed. He fitted a new cord to the pirate's bull neck and with several hard thumps on the chest "whipt him off" again into the dock.

There Gow died, without the assistance he had paid for. The tide rose and flowed over him, ebbed, rose and flowed over him; ebbed, rose and flowed over him; and ebbed again. Salt water might wash from his hands the blood he had shed, but something still remained in them, tight clenched.

A lady who in happy ignorance had plighted to him her troth under Orcadian stars, journeyed all the way from Stromness to London to regain it. Reaching Wapping too late to see him in life she sought him in Execution Dock.

She was allowed to place her trembling hand upon Gow's water-cold fingers and swollen thumbs, contorted in their gyves. She murmured "I give thee back thy troth, and so I take back mine." Thus she departed for Orkney, assured against the ghost of her strangled betrothed haunting her chamber.

Her urgency to visit a dead pirate was not an unusual one, although her reason, unrevealed, was out of the ordinary. Women often come to the Dock to touch the corpses hanging in the chain gear called the Grace of Wapping while the three tides washed them. It was the current belief that contact with the dead hands was a cure for warts and wens and the king's evil.

THIRD TIME HANGED

STRIPPED so of his last possession, an innocent girl's troth, Gow was coated with tar of infamy from top to toe, and taken down the river, and hung for the third time in chains above Greenwich. It was to escape this ignominy that he had foolishly undergone the torture of the whipcord. For years he withered in the sun and rain as a warning to all other "land rats and water rats, I mean pirates."

His sadist lieutenant Williams, who had been hanged at the same time, was tarred and hung in chains over at Blackwall, opposite. Six lower ratings went to Surgeons' Hall to teach anatomy, to 18th century graduates of the School of St. John, founded 1695. Not one of these pirates was over thirty. Gow was twenty-eight. The youngest was seventeen. They had murdered four men and one woman, put the lives of fifty or sixty others in peril, and stolen six ships and about £5,000 worth of cargo while they were pirating. But their nefarious occupation only lasted four months.