American Passage Page 3

  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 the murdered captain, but said he and his fellow mutineers were only seeking their freedom. In fact, he felt so bad about his role in the captain’s death that he wished that he had jumped overboard himself rather than kill another man.

  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 “examine minutely the skull of one of the greatest murderers ever known.” Phrenologists believed that measuring the size and shape of skulls would reveal the character and mental capacity of the individual.

  The island’s last execution occurred on June 21, 1839, when New Yorkers watched a pirate named Cornelius Wilhelms die. It would be their last chance to witness such a horrific spectacle at Gibbet Island, although two decades later some ten thousand New Yorkers, most in boats, would come to nearby Bedloe’s Island to watch the hanging of pirate Albert Hicks.

  By the end of the nineteenth century, pirate hangings were a thing of the past and both Bedloe’s Island and Gibbet Island would be transformed from their earlier dubious history into America’s mythic historical pantheon. By then, on the site of the gallows from which Albert Hicks was hanged, would stand the base of the Statue of Liberty. Gibbet Island would shed its notorious name and history and revert back to a previous name: Ellis Island. By the late 1800s, it would attract many more people than had ever come to witness a pirate execution.

  N EW YORK CITY IS an archipelago, a Philippines on the Hudson River, the handiwork of a glacier thousands of years ago. It is an island empire consisting
of nearly six hundred miles of shoreline. Only one borough—the Bronx—is actually attached to the mainland. There are some forty islands in addition to Manhattan, Staten Island, and Long Island. These minor islands are nestled in the bays, rivers, harbor, and other waterways that encase the city. One of the largest, Roosevelt Island, is a city within a city, 2 miles long and 800 feet wide, with a population of over eight thousand. Just south of its tip is one of the city’s smallest islands, measuring just 100 feet by 200 feet and named for former secretary of the United Nations U Thant.

  Many of the city’s islands once served important social functions and some still do. As the city grew northward up the island of Manhattan, along with it came the pesky social problems that afflict any budding metropolis. Under such circumstances, these islands became cordons sanitaires, in the words of writer Phillip Lopate, “where the criminal, the insane, the syphilitic, the tubercular, the orphaned, the destitute . . . were quarantined.” It is no surprise that they were also handy places for pirate hangings.

  Among these exile islands were Hart Island, which became the city’s largest potter’s field, the last resting spot for the anonymous poor; Blackwell’s Island, which once housed a mental hospital for prisoners, as well as a city hospital; North Brother Island, where a hospital for the treatment of infectious diseases was “Typhoid Mary” Mallon’s home for nearly three decades; Ward’s Island, the site of more mental institutions; and Rikers Island, which is still a city jail, with nearly fifteen thousand inmates housed in ten buildings, one of the largest such facilities in the country.

  In upper New York Harbor, just a few hundred yards from the shore of New Jersey, sits Ellis Island. During the last Ice Age, a thick blanket of ice covered most of New York. When the glaciers beat a retreat some twelve thousand years ago, they left behind a big marshland dotted with pockets of high ground. The coastline was some hundred miles farther out in the Atlantic. Much of what is harbor and sea today was once dry land. A person could have strolled from today’s Ellis Island to neighboring Liberty Island to the high ground of Staten Island and not have gotten his feet wet.

  As the waters continued to rise, the harbor was formed and much of the high ground became New York’s islands. Today Ellis Island consists of around twenty-seven acres, but for much of its modern history it was little less than a three-acre bank of sand and mud—“by estimation to high water mark, two acres, three roods, and thirty-five perches”—that barely kept its head above high tide.

  Seals, whales, and porpoises once swam in the waters near the island. And then there were the oysters. New York Harbor and the lower Hudson River were once home to 350 square miles of fertile oyster beds, supplying more than half of the world’s oysters. They were prized as delicacies, while cheap and abundant enough to be a staple of the workingman’s diet. A 1730 map of New York harbor shows the entire Jersey shore section of the harbor to be “one gigantic oyster reef.”

  In deference to the edible treasures that could be found in the waters surrounding the sandy outcrop, European colonists named the tiny island in the harbor Little Oyster Island, while its larger neighbor was dubbed Great Oyster Island.

  Little Oyster Island would figure into a small piece of early New Amsterdam history. In 1653, Peter Stuyvesant, the director general of the West India Company and de facto ruler of New Amsterdam, was ordered by his bosses to create a municipal government. In February 1653, the new city government met in Fort Amsterdam.

  One of the first orders of business that day was a complaint from Joost Goderis, the twenty-something son of a minor Dutch painter. In late January, Goderis had gone in a canoe with a boy “for oysters and pleasure” at Oyster Island. Goderis was interrupted and accosted by Isaack Bedloo and Jacob Buys, who taunted Goderis by shouting: “You cuckold and horned beast, Allard Antony has had your wife down on her back.” Another man, Guliam d’Wys, taunted Goderis that he should let d’Wys have a “sexual connection” with Goderis’s wife, since Antony already had done so. When Goderis, whom one historian had deemed “excitable” and “ill-balanced,” confronted Bedloo at his house, he slapped him. In turn, Bedloo drew a knife and cut Goderis on the neck.

  Goderis decided to take his case before the new local government to restore the good name of his wife and the pride of his family. He also hauled in a number of other men, friends of the defendants, who reportedly had witnessed the incident. The witnesses refused to cooperate against their friends and the case dragged on for weeks. One of the men hearing the case was none other than Allard Antony, the alleged cuckolder himself.

  Goderis and the others have vanished into history, but Isaack Bedloo lives on. He became a wealthy merchant and later joined other prominent leaders of New Amsterdam in 1664 to convince Stuyvesant to turn over control of New Amsterdam to England. It was a purely business decision. In return, Bedloo received political patronage in the new British colony and was able to purchase Great Oyster Island. Bedloo, like other Dutch settlers under British rule, Anglicized his name to “Bedlow,” which later generations corrupted to “Bedloe,” the name that would eventually attach itself to the island that in 1886 became home to the Statue of Liberty.

  Little Oyster Island would also become known as Dyre Island and then Bucking Island in the eighteenth century. Ownership of the island from the late 1690s until 1785 was unclear. In that latter year, an advertisement appeared in a local newspaper offering for sale “that pleasant situated Island, called Oyster Island, lying in York Bay, near Powles’ Hook, together with all its improvements, which are considerable.” In addition to the island, the seller offered two lots in Manhattan, a “few barrels of excellent shad and herrings,” “a quantity of twine,” and “a large Pleasure Sleigh, almost new.”

  The seller was Samuel Ellis, a farmer and merchant who resided at 1 Greenwich Street. It is not known when Ellis bought the island, though a notice was found in a 1778 newspaper publicizing the fact that a boat had been found adrift at “Mr. Ellis’s Island.”

  Ellis died in 1794, still in possession of his island. His daughter, Catherine Westervelt, was pregnant at the time and Samuel’s will made clear that if she had a boy, it was his wish “that the boy may be baptized by the name of Samuel Ellis.” Ellis was clearly interested in his posterity. With three daughters, he most likely feared his name would not live on past his death, and having a grandson named Samuel Ellis Westervelt was the next best thing. His plans were tragically thwarted. Though Catherine’s child was a boy and christened as his grandfather had ordered, Samuel Ellis Westervelt died young. Yet through the agency of history and luck, the name Ellis would still attach itself to one of the nation’s most famous islands.

  Even during Samuel Ellis’s life, the island’s ownership became a matter of some controversy and confusion, as the new government of the United States became interested in the island. In the 1790s, tensions with England continued and the War Department began to devise a strategy for defending its shores. In New York, the military began to fortify the islands of New York Harbor to ward off a possible British naval attack.

  Before Samuel Ellis passed away, the city granted to New York State the right to the soil around the island from the high-water mark to the low-water mark. The city felt it had the right to that land, even though the island proper was in private hands.

  Over the next few years, the state built earthen fortifications on the island, some of them intruding upon private property. In 1798, Colonel Ebenezer Stevens advised the War Department that a troop barrack there had been completed, along with twelve large guns. However, he reminded his superiors that the island was still in private hands. “I think something ought to be done with respect to purchasing it and the State will cede the jurisdiction to the Federal Government,” Stevens wrote. In 1800, New York State transferred jurisdiction over all the fortified islands in New York Harbor to the federal government, even though it still did not have legal rights over Ellis Island.

  In 1807, Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Williams, chief engineer o
f the United States Army, declared that the fortification at Ellis Island was “totally out of repair.” He drew up new plans for a fortified New York Harbor that included a new fort at Ellis Island. But first the title of the island needed to be settled. The New York governor, Daniel Tompkins, wrote to Williams that although Samuel Ellis had agreed to sell the island, he had died before the deed could be executed. The military works constructed there, wrote Tompkins, “are occupied merely by the permission of the owner whose ancestor assented to it and whose first permission has never been withdrawn by his descendants.”

  In response, on April 27, 1808, the sheriff of New York County and a group of selected New Yorkers visited Ellis Island to appraise its value, eventually settling on the figure of $10,000, which astounded Colonel Williams. What the appraisers found on Ellis Island gives us some idea why it may have interested Samuel Ellis as an investor.

  It is found to be one of the most lucrative situations for shad fishing by set netts [sic] within some distance of this place, yielding annually from 450 to 500 dollars to the occupant from this single circumstance. The Oyster banks being in its vicinity affords an income in the loan of boats, rakes, etc. . . . besides this a considerable advantage results to the occupant from a tavern in the only possible place of communication for people engaged there, between the oyster banks and this city.

  Despite Colonel Williams’s reluctance, the government agreed to pay the money to clear up the confusion, and the state then transferred the deed to the federal government. The nation would soon be at war with England, yet when the War of 1812 ended, not a shot had been fired in anger from any of the forts of New York Harbor.

  N ATURE BLESSED NEW YORK’S island empire in many ways, especially with its four-mile-wide harbor sheltered from the rough Atlantic waters. The sand banks that line the Lower Bay south of Coney Island to Sandy Hook act as a natural breakwater, while the Narrows, a twomile-long bottleneck passageway between Staten Island and Brooklyn, protects the placid harbor from stormy seas and ocean waves. Standing at the Battery, staring at the expansive harbor, one cannot help but be soothed by its calm waters.