Long before pirates were paperback heroes or theme-park mascots, they were tabloid material. In the London of the 1700s, a pirate’s trial and hanging were covered, sold, and re-sold as popular print — and the appetite for that coverage did as much to shape the pirate’s public image as any novel that came later.
A regular publication built around the gallows
From 1676 to 1772, the chaplain of Newgate Prison — known as the Ordinary — published a running account of every execution at Tyburn, London’s main gallows site. The Ordinary of Newgate’s Account ran for roughly four hundred editions covering some 2,500 executed people, and its format grew with its audience: a single sheet selling for two or three pence in the late 1600s had become a six-page pamphlet by 1712, and by the 1730s a twenty-page booklet selling for sixpence. It followed a set structure — trial summary, the chaplain’s sermon, the condemned person’s biography and confession, and an account of the execution itself — built around a “sinner to saint” narrative in which the prisoner repented and made peace before dying. For readers who could not attend the hanging in person, and plenty who could, the pamphlet let them take part in the spectacle after the fact.
The business was lucrative. By 1729 the Ordinary was reportedly earning around £25 per account, printed in the thousands, and rival publishers competed for the same market with standalone criminal biographies and broadsides selling for as little as a penny. Horace Walpole complained in 1750 of the public’s “ridiculous rage” for reading about condemned criminals’ lives; one printer described his press running almost continuously for weeks to keep up with orders from across the country for a single popular account.
Where pirates fit in
Piracy trials were prime material for this market, since a pirate’s story already came with ships, treasure, and exotic ports built in. The single work that did more than any other to fix the modern image of the golden age pirate was itself a product of this same appetite: A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, published under the name Captain Charles Johnson in 1724, ran through multiple editions within its first year. It compiled the careers of Blackbeard, Bartholomew Roberts, Anne Bonny and Mary Read, and dozens of others into vivid narrative biographies, mixing documented court testimony with dialogue and detail no trial record could have supplied. Later writers, including the compilers of the 1837 Pirates Own Book, drew directly on Johnson’s account, which means that much of what modern readers picture when they picture a golden age pirate traces back not to a court transcript but to a commercial book competing for the same audience as the Newgate pamphlets.
That commercial pressure shaped the pirates on the page. A merchant sailor who quietly took the King’s pardon made a dull story; a captain who supposedly damned the judge to his face, as Jack Rackham’s crew and others were written as doing, sold copies. The genre rewarded defiance, wit, and a good last word at the gallows, and it is not always possible to tell, three hundred years later, how much of a given pirate’s recorded bravado was said and how much was supplied by an author who knew what his readers wanted.
A market, not a memorial
None of this makes the underlying trial records worthless — the Old Bailey’s own court proceedings, published alongside the Ordinary’s accounts, preserved genuine testimony that historians still rely on. But the pamphlets and the General History were written to be bought, not to be archived, and that purpose is worth remembering every time a pirate’s supposedly final words turn up in a modern account with suspicious polish.
Sources consulted: Wikipedia, “Ordinary of Newgate’s Account”; Anna Jenkin, “Crime and Punishment Was Early English Popular Literature,” Communicating with Prisoners (acrosswalls.org).
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