When convicted pirates were executed in Boston during the 1720s, their bodies were often buried out on one of the Boston Harbor islands. Two surviving members of John Phillips’ pirate crew were executed near the Boston shoreline in May 1724 and their bodies were hauled out to a small patch of land known as Bird Island. One pirate, William White, was buried on the island. The other, John Rose Archer, was hung in a gibbet “to be a spectacle, and so a warning to others.” Bird Island no longer exists — it was originally situated near where Boston’s Logan Airport is now located.
Two years later, as I recount in my new book, At the Point of a Cutlass, three members of another pirate crew were executed in Boston. Their corpses were taken to Nixes Mate Island, a small patch of land less than six miles from Boston. In July 1726, before much of the slate on Nixes Mate had been dug up, it was a sizeable patch of land. Two of the pirates were buried there while the body of their leader, William Fly, was hung in chains. Today, most of Nixes Mate Island is gone, as well. It stands as little more than a mound of rocks capped by a cone-shaped harbor marker with black and white stripes.
At the Point of a Cutlass was released in June 2014 and is on sale now.
