American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [10]
On December 15, 1826, Hill was sent to Gibbet Island to face death. According to one account, “All the way in the Steam Boat, to his place of Execution, he appeared to be perfectly resigned to God; and continually praying and singing—On his arriving at the island, he was showed his Coffin; he said that was only for my body not for my Soul; that has gone to GLORY, with my beloved Saviour.”
Present at the execution was Austin Woolfolk. While on the gallows, Hill spied the slave trader and in his final words on Earth forgave Woolfolk and said he hoped they would meet again in heaven. In response, Woolfolk cursed the doomed man saying he was going to get what he deserved. Members of the crowd, shocked at Woolfolk’s outburst, quieted him down. Then, the slave-turned-pirate was “launched into eternity.”
More executions followed. The most famous were the dual hangings of pirates Charles Gibbs and Thomas Walmsley in 1831. On a spring day in April, the harbor was again filled with boats whose passengers badly wanted to witness the executions. Gibbet Island was “crowded with men and women and children—and on the waters around, were innumerable boats, laden with passengers, from the steamboat and schooner, down to the yawl and canoe.” In the chaos of the crowded harbor, a few boats were overturned.
Confusion reigned. The Commercial Advertiser noted that it had received a call from a man who had given one of his clerks the day off to watch the execution and that clerk had not been heard from since. The Workingman’s Advocate also ran a notice about the mysterious disappearance of a thirty-six-year-old man who left his house the day of the hangings and never returned. His friends assumed that he went to the harbor to witness the executions and drowned. It is unclear whether either man actually drowned or whether they were just playing hooky from work, but an unidentified dead body was found the following day floating up to the Coffee House Slip at the foot of Wall Street.
Gibbs was a white man in his midthirties, reputedly from a respectable Rhode Island family. By one exaggerated account, Gibbs and his men were responsible for capturing more than twenty ships and murdering almost four hundred people. Gibbs, Walmsley, a twenty-threeyear-old stout mulatto, and their accomplices took control of the ship Vineyard in November 1830, killing the captain and first mate. Making off with the money on board, they grounded the ship off the coast of Long Island and headed ashore. Three of the conspirators drowned before making it to land. Gibbs and Walmsley were soon arrested and fingered as the ringleaders by one of their colleagues who seemed unhappy with his share of the stolen loot.
At the trial, Walmsley, who had been the ship’s steward, seemed to make the case for his innocence, pointing to racial prejudice. “I have often understood that there is a great deal of difference in respect of color, and I have seen it in this Court,” he testified. Nevertheless, on April 22, 1831, Gibbs and Walmsley, according to one account, “paid the forfeit which the laws demand from those who perpetrate such crimes as they have been convicted of.” Speaking to the gathered crowd at Gibbet Island, Gibbs addressed the crowd from the gallows for nearly a half hour. Both men acknowledged the justice of their death sentences. Rather than being dropped from a scaffold, the two men were killed by being slung up on a rope, on whose other end was tied heavy weights. While Walmsley died almost immediately, Gibbs suffered a much slower and more painful death because the knot on his neck had not been properly placed.
Their dead bodies swung on the gallows for nearly an hour, after which they were handed over to surgeons for autopsies. Before the surgeons took the bodies, a sculptor took a cast of Gibbs’s head so that phrenologists could