American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [9]
When Washington Irving published his great satire of New York history under the pen name Diedrich Knickerbocker in 1809, he included a number of references to Gibbet Island. Mixing real history with myth, he wrote of a settler named Michael Paw who, according to Irving, “lorded it over the fair regions of ancient Pavonia and the lands away south, even unto the Navesink mountains, and was moreover patroon of Gibbet Island.” While Paw probably did own the area, the three-acre rock and sand island granted him little by way of power or prestige and was not a possession of which to boast.
Gibbet Island and the legend of pirate hangings also eerily appear in another Irving tale, “Guests from Gibbet Island.” In this ghost story, two pirates row out to Gibbet Island and find three of their fellow conspirators “dangling in the moonlight, their rags fluttering, and their chains creaking, as they were slowly swung backward and forward by the rising breeze.” When one of the pirates returns home, waiting for him are “the three guests from Gibbet Island, with halters round their necks, and bobbing their cups together.” The other living pirate would soon die, his body found “stranded among the rocks of Gibbet Island, near the foot of the pirates’ gallows.”
Pirate hangings on Gibbet Island were more than the stuff of ghost stories. Just after noon on June 11, 1824, a black sailor named Thomas Jones was hanged at Gibbet Island for his part in the murder of his ship’s captain and first mate. “There appears to be no doubt on the mind of those who attended him, that he has gone to the realms above,” according to a pamphlet written just after Jones’s execution. “He closed his life leaving to the world a past example of a great sinner, and also a proof of the richness of divine grace, and the willingness of Jesus Christ to save sinners.”
By the time of Jones’s hanging, the guilty were no longer left on gibbets, but the public still needed to draw lessons from these executions. Rather than being a lesson of vengeance, these widely distributed pamphlets emphasized the notion of Christian redemption, as the accused always repents of his sins and accepts the salvation of Jesus Christ. The pamphlets not only provided the public with gruesome accounts of murder and piracy, but also a soothing tale in which even the most wicked criminals confessed their sins before death in order to save their souls from eternal damnation.
A similar tale was told when William Hill was hanged at Gibbet Island two years later. But the Hill case was decidedly different from that of Jones. Both men were black, but while Jones was a freeman and a sailor, Hill was a twenty-four-year-old Maryland slave arrested after an unsuccessful escape attempt. Frederick Douglass, once a Baltimore slave, described what happened to Maryland slaves who misbehaved: “If a slave was convicted of any high misdemeanor, became unmanageable, or evinced a determination to run away, he was brought immediately here, severely whipped, put on board the sloop, carried to Baltimore, and sold to Austin Woolfolk, or some other slave-trader, as a warning to the slaves remaining.” That is what happened to William Hill.
On the night of April 20, 1826, Austin Woolfolk placed Hill and thirty other slaves bound in chains on the Decatur. From Baltimore, the ship would sail for New Orleans, where the slaves would be sold off to work on the large plantations of the Deep South. Rather than accept their fate, Jones and a number of other slaves managed to free themselves, take control of the ship, and throw the ship’s captain and first mate overboard. It is a tale familiar to readers of Herman Melville’s story “Benito Cereno” or viewers of the movie Amistad.
The slave mutineers were captured, but only Hill was convicted for the crime. He felt no malice toward