When a pirate was caught, the popular image is summary justice on deck or a plank walk into the sea. The real process was slower, more bureaucratic, and shaped by a single piece of legislation: the Piracy Act of 1698. Under an older law, England’s Offences at Sea Act of 1536, every piracy case anywhere in the world had to be tried in England itself, since the crown treated piracy as an offense against the high seas that only the High Court of Admiralty in London could judge. For a case originating in the Caribbean or the Indian Ocean, that meant shipping the accused, the witnesses, and the evidence across an ocean at government expense, then holding them in London jails for months while the docket cleared.
A Law Built for the Colonies
The 1698 Act fixed the logistics problem by letting the crown try pirates where they were caught. It authorized special commissions, usually called vice-admiralty courts, in any colony, island, or fort under English control. A court could be convened at sea or on land, and it needed only seven qualified men — merchants, planters, ship captains, or warrant officers — sitting as commissioners. There was no jury of peers. The commissioners investigated, heard testimony, and delivered the verdict themselves, with the same authority a full Admiralty court in London would have carried.
The Charleston Trials of 1718
The scale that system could reach is clearest in Charleston in November 1718, months after Blackbeard’s blockade of the harbor. Judge Nicholas Trott presided over thirteen separate trials that condemned forty-nine men to hang. The executions came in three waves: twenty-nine crew members of the sloop Revenge on November 8, nineteen survivors of Captain Richard Worley’s crew tried on November 24, and finally Major Stede Bonnet himself on December 10. All were hanged at White Point, just outside the town.
Execution Dock and the Three Tides
In London, piracy hangings took place at Execution Dock on the Thames at Wapping, deliberately sited just past the low-water mark so the execution occurred within the tidal reach the Admiralty claimed as its jurisdiction. The hangman used a shortened rope that killed by slow strangulation rather than a broken neck, a method sailors grimly nicknamed the “Marshal’s Dance” for the way the body convulsed. Custom required leaving the corpse on the gibbet until three tides had washed over it, a practice that continued into the late eighteenth century. Captain Kidd’s 1701 execution became the era’s most notorious: the rope snapped on the first attempt, forcing a second hanging, after which his body was tarred, chained, and displayed at Tilbury Point for three years as a warning to sailors passing on the Thames.
The Last Men Hanged for Piracy
The vice-admiralty system outlived the Golden Age by a century. The final hangings at Execution Dock came on December 16, 1830, when George Davis and William Watts were executed for piracy committed during a mutiny aboard the brig Cyprus. By then the site had been in continuous use for piracy cases for well over four hundred years, a bureaucratic machine built to solve a shipping problem in 1698 and still running when the age of sail itself was nearly over.
Sources consulted: Wikipedia, “Piracy Act 1698” and “Execution Dock”; Charleston County Public Library, “The Pirate Executions of 1718.”
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