The East End, London
November 25, 1696
Several days after the second trial ended, the six convicted mutineers—including Joseph Dawson, who had pled guilty twice—were brought back to Old Bailey for sentencing. Standing at the bar for one last time, each man was asked in turn by the clerk why they should not be sentenced to death for their crimes.
Dawson answered first, with an air of resignation: “I submit myself to the King and the honorable Bench.” Forsyth maintained his innocence; the trial transcripts only note that he “went on to justify himself, etc.” Judge Hedges intervened to explain that “the prisoners at the bar have had a very fair trial, and been fully heard upon your defense.” But the jury’s verdict has been rendered, the judge continued. The question now was whether the state had any reason not to execute the men for their capital crimes.
Giving up on his last-minute defense, Forsyth announced, “I desire to be sent to India to suffer there.”
William May returned to his health complaints, and he, too, proposed an overseas assignment in lieu of execution. “My Lord, I being a very sickly man never acted in all the voyage,” he protested. “I have served my King and Country this thirty years, and am very willing to serve in the East India Company where they please to command me, and desire the honorable Bench to consider my case, and if I must suffer, I desire to be sent into India to suffer there.”
“I am an ignorant person,” James Lewes conceded, “and leave myself to the King’s mercy.” John Sparkes requested the same mercy from the crown. Young William Bishop offered perhaps the most tragic of the statements. “I was forced away,” he said, “and when I was but eighteen years old, and am now but twenty-one, and desire the mercy of the King and the Court.”
The pleas for mercy went unanswered. Judge Hedges announced the sentences by steering the indictments back to the original international crimes of piracy, as though the acquittals of the original trial had never happened.
“You have been found guilty upon three several indictments, for the same detestable crimes committed upon the ships and goods of Indians, of Danes, and your own fellow-subjects,” he announced. “The law for the heinousness of your crime hath appointed a severe punishment, by an ignominious death, and the judgement that the law awards is this: that you and everyone of you be taken from to the place from whence you came, and from thence to the place of execution, and there you, and every one of you be hanged by the necks, until you, and everyone of you be dead. And the Lord have mercy upon you.” Only Joseph Dawson, who had pled guilty in both trials, was spared.
On November 25, 1696, two and a half years after they had—willingly or not—thrown in their lot with Bold Captain Every, the five men were lead out of Newgate Prison and marched through the streets down to the wharfs at Wapping on London’s East End, not far from the dockyards where the Charles II had been originally built.
The specific location of Execution Dock is a matter of dispute among London historians. Three different pubs today claim to reside at the site of the original dock. But however ambiguous its exact location may be, we can imagine the general scene with some accuracy, given how closely public executions were covered by the tabloids of the day. The grim spectacle of the public hanging was, in a real sense, the closest equivalent in Every’s age to the modern experience of major sporting events: an act of physical violence viewed live by teeming crowds and indirectly experienced by thousands thanks to media coverage.
Execution Dock faced the river, for symbolic reasons. The pirates who were hanged there—their bodies often left to decay for days—sent a message to the nautical community: Do not delude yourself into thinking that you are beyond the reach of the law when you sail past the mouth of the Thames and into open water. The riverside placement forced the audience to crowd into a flotilla of rowboats, anchored against the tide in front of the dock. Imagine all those prurient spectators, bobbing in the Thames for hours, waiting for the condemned to appear before them, eagerly anticipating the ritual sacrifice. Imagine a flurry of activity on the steps leading down from Wapping Street to the shoreline: the crowd lunging to its feet, full-throated, as the five prisoners made their way toward the gallows.
As in most public executions, there were last words to be delivered. On a bustling urban river, with no technical ability to amplify speech beyond the limits of human vocal cords, most of the words spoken by the prisoners went unheard by the throngs floating in the Thames. But they were quickly amplified textually by the press. Within a month, a pamphlet had been published, promising “An Account of the behaviour, dying speeches, and execution of . . . William May, John Sparcks, William Bishop, James Lewis, and Adam Foresith for robbery, piracy and felony, at the execution-dock.”
Most of the confessions followed the conventional script of a crime-doesn’t-pay morality play. Forsyth, for instance, observed that “besides the Guilt of his Offences, and the present capital Punishment, his Wicked Life, attended with many Hardships and Hazards he had undergone in his Robberies, was little less than a Punishment; for wickedness . . . brings great many troubles and afflictions along with it.”
The last words of young John Sparkes, however, were the most haunting. He appeared to have been genuinely traumatized by sexual violence onboard the Mughal ship. “He expressed a due sense of his wicked Life,” the pamphleteer reported, “in particular to the most horrid Barbarities that he had committed, which though upon the Persons of Heathen and Infidels, such as the forementioned poor Indians, so inhumanly rifled and treated so unmercifully; declaring that his Eyes were now open to his Crimes, and that he justly suffer’d Death for such Inhumanity, much more than his Injustice and Robbery, in Stealing and Running away with one of his Majesties Ships, which was of the two his lesser concern.”
John Sparkes may have technically been convicted of mutiny aboard the Charles II, but he went to his grave atoning for the crimes he committed on the Ganj-i-sawai.
Their last words recorded, the five men stood on the gallows as a noose was tied around each of their necks. Pirates executed at the dock were subjected to an unusually cruel form of hanging, using a shorter rope than usual. The reduction in length meant that the neck would not break when the platform beneath them was pulled away. Enemies of all mankind did not deserve the split-second execution of a severed spinal cord. Instead, they were asphyxiated. Deprived of a sudden death, the five pirates dangled from the noose, their bodies twitching as they slowly suffocated in front of the jeering crowd.
With a guilty verdict and a public execution, the British government—and the East India Company—had managed to produce the show trial that they had originally planned. They had at last established a compelling ending for the dominant narrative. John Everingham’s contract was renewed, and the printer released the court transcripts—with only a brief allusion to the unsuccessful first trial—as a twenty-eight-page bound volume within a matter of weeks. The publication went through multiple printings, and was read throughout the British empire. Its final lines left no doubt where the Crown stood regarding the crimes of piracy:
According to this 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. FINIS.