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Public Executions and the Pirate Curse of Nix’s Mate

Public Executions and the Pirate Curse of Nix’s Mate

Last updated on: October 30, 2026 at 7:46 am by Joey Cochran

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Public Executions and the Pirate Curse of Nix’s Mate 2026-10-30T07:46:30-04:00 Joey Cochran

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The Pirate Curse of Nix’s Mate.

There lies in Boston harbor an eroding island called Nix’s Mate. In 1636, a harbor pilot, John Gallop, received the grant of the island to graze his sheep. Once twelve acres square, it had been a safe natural pin for his flock. However, during the eighteenth century golden age of piracy the island became a haunting symbol of Britain’s brutal policy against piracy.

When the War of Spanish Succession concluded, out of work naval men resorted to piracy rather than accepting terrible wages on merchant ships. The British Empire suppressed this trend with an innovative policy on piracy, which was repeatedly renewed during the early eighteenth century. An example of this policy’s renewal is found in the London Gazette, which published the Proclamation of the Suppression of Piracy on September 14, 1717. The proclamation offered the king’s pardon to anyone that had been implicated in the act of piracy, as long as they turned themselves in prior to September 5, 1718. The proclamation reinforced a Christian sentiment of repentance. Those who turned from their old ways of piracy toward making an honest living would be spared the king’s judgment.[1]

However, those who accepted the king’s amnesty commonly exploited the latitude given in the proclamation, and they frequently returned to piracy. Carolina’s Governor Robert Johnson shared with the Council of Trade and Plantations in 1718 that he believed the king’s pardon failed to suppress piracy. According to Johnson, “some few indead surrender and take a certificate of there so doing and then several of them return to the sport again.”[2]

The infamous pirate Edward Teach (Blackbeard) provisionally accepted the king’s pardon in June of 1718. He subsequently married the daughter of a Carolina plantation owner in July but then returned to piracy within the coming months. His last cruise led to his undoing when he was killed at Ocrakoke inlet in a bitter battle to the death during November of 1718.

The pseudonymous author Captain Charles Johnson (perhaps Daniel Defoe) popularized Blackbeard’s exploits, among other pirates, in A General History of the Pyrates (1724). The legendary stories of this volume included women pirates Mary Read and Anne Bonney, Teach’s mentee Stede Bonnet, and the legendary Black Bart, Bartholemew Roberts. While it’s arguable that A General History of the Pyrates suppressed piracy, a case also may be made that the publication inadvertently emboldened disillusioned sailors to enact piracy.[3]

The Piracy and Execution of William Fly

One such case of a sailor who may have gained inspiration from Johnson’s publication is the story of William Fly and the mutiny aboard the merchant snow, Elizabeth. Fly and his cobelligerents took control of the Elizabeth on May 27, 1726 and cast its captain and first mate overboard, renaming the ship Fames Revenge. Renaming the ship Fames Revenge appears to be an honorific in homage to both Stede Bonnet and Edward Teach, who pirated ships named the Revenge and Queen Anne’s Revenge, respectfully.

Fly and his crews’ piracy lasted nearly a month before they were captured. During their cruise they took a sloop named John and Hannah on June 3, a ship called John and Betty on June 7, the sloop Rachel on June 11, and the schooner Jameson June 23. They flew under a black flag and offered quarter to sailors from the ships they took. Fly and his crew were poor pilots and unfamiliar with the inlets along the Massachusetts coast, so they pressed knowledgeable men into Fames Revenge’s service. Altogether they took 50 captives. A few sailors led by Captain William Atkinson employed subterfuge to capture Fly, slap him in irons, and turn him over to the Boston authorities.

The tale of his cruise was recorded by Joseph Edwards in the pamphlet The Tryals of Sixteen Persons for Piracy (1726), and the execution sermons and commentary from Cotton Mather’s A Vial Poured Out Upon the Sea (1726) and Benjamin Colman’s It Is a Fearful Thing to Fall into the Hands of the Living God (1726) corroborated Edwards’s pamphlet but also developed the spiritual consequences of Fly’s criminal acts.[4]

Pamphlets and execution sermons were published to extend the scope of influence that the ritual of public execution held for Puritan New England. Criminals were publicly punished for their sins by the sword of the state. The ritual of the gallows included the central role of clergy ministering to condemned criminals, offering them redemption and salvation in Jesus Christ, and giving them the opportunity to publicly testify to their repentance or to have the minister reassure the watching public that the condemned had reconciled with God. The drama of the execution sermons took center stage in the theater of the gallows and sometimes overshadowed the execution. The ministers preaching the execution sermons played a pivotal role on the stage of execution, often times subordinating the condemned into a passive, supporting role.

Execution sermons like Colman’s and Mather’s warned hearers to not follow in the criminality of the condemned; they also pled with hearers to accept the same offer of salvation that the condemned accepted. These sermons played a crucial role in upholding the Puritan moral order while also serving as an instrument for the morphology of conversion. Execution sermons consequently became bestselling publications for ministers because they re-enacted the drama of execution. Those who could not be present to observe the theater of the gallows might in some way benefit spiritually and morally from the lessons of the ritual. According to Daniel Cohen, about half of the execution sermons published in the first third of the eighteenth century recounted the executions of men condemned for piracy. Mather oversaw many of those men’s conversions and preached their execution sermons.[5]

Subverting the Power of the Theater of the Gallows

However, not all condemned criminals participated in the ritual the way the state and Mather wished. William Fly happened to be one such character in New England’s history who subverted the ritual of public execution. The record of Mather’s prison visits with Fly portray him as a stubborn, hardened, and irreverent man, who had no intention of repenting for piracy. Fly refused to forgive Captain Atkinson for turning on him and his accomplices, saying to Mather, “If I should say, that I forgive that Man, and that I wish him well, I should ly against my Conscience, and add sin to sin.”[6] Moreover, he conveyed no remorse for murdering the captain and first mate of the Elizabeth. Mather recounts Fly’s attitude concerning his circumstances:

I can’t Charge myself, — I shan’t own myself Guilty of any Murder, — Our Captain and his Mate used us Barbarously. We poor Men can’t have Justice done us. There is nothing said to our Commanders, let them never so much abuse us, and use us like Dogs.[7]

Fly refused to attend the execution sermon Mather preached because he did not wish to be a prop for the mob to behold, as he sat helplessly in irons. Rather, when he did appear for his execution, he inverted the gallows theater created by the state and the ministers. Mather described Fly’s extraordinary behavior:

He seem’d all along ambitious to have it said, That he died a brave fellow! He pass’d along to the place of Execution, with a Nosegay in his hand, and making his Complements, where he thought he saw occasion. Arriving there, he nimbly mounted the Stage, and would fain have put on a Smiling Aspect. He reproached the Hangman, for not understanding his Trade, and with his own Hands rectified matters, to render all things more Convenient and Effectual. When he was called upon, to Speak what he should judge proper to be spoken on that sad occasion, at least for the Warning of Survivers, he only said, That he would advise the Masters of Vessels to Carry it well to their Men, lest they should be put upon doing as he had done.[8]

Mather assessed Fly’s behavior, saying that the pirate was “a most uncommon and amazing instance of impenitency and stupidity.”[9] In Hanging Between Heaven and Earth, Seay observes, “The impenitence and insubordination of condemned criminals threatened to subvert the moral lessons of execution day in provincial New England and to rob the ritual of its significance.”[10] Regarding the Fly incident, Daniel E. Williams asserts, “Unable to control the character, the ministers set out to control the context, portraying Fly as a miserable sinner trapped in his own obdurancy.”[11]

Mather controlled the context by using Fly’s remains as a spiritual object lesson after the execution was completed. The authorities gibbetted his body and hung it from Nix’s Mate. Mather extended the shame of this pirate’s public hanging by using Fly’s remains as a prop that continually hung between heaven and earth. His carcass greeted travelers entering and departing Boston. Wrapped in chains and rotting, his corpse functioned as an intimidating message to any would be mutineers and pirates. Boston’s magistrates, ministers, and merchants would not tolerate piracy. His remains were eventually buried on the island along with those of two other condemned pirates.

The Curse of Nix’s Mate

Some may assume that Mather had the last word when he fashioned Fly’s corpse into an intimidating symbol of the power of the state and church. However, it may be the case that Fly’s final words were the memorial of his corpse, and the message sailors received when they looked upon it as they passed Nix’s Mate. His final words were a warning to merchant ship captains that they ought not misuse their crews lest judgment fall upon them and their ships. Those final words became the curse of Nix’s Mate.

Folklore spread that Fly spoke a curse that the island would disappear if he was wrongfully condemned. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth century the island had been harvested for ship’s ballast and slate, reducing its acreage. Removing stone from the island caused rapid erosion, and the island was covered and uncovered by the tide, seemingly fulfilling Fly’s curse. Tales about the curse of Nix’s Mate spread, including stories about the island causing shipwrecks. To prevent shipwrecks and alert merchant captains and pilots of the tiny island in Boston harbor, a wooden pyramidal daybeacon was placed on Nix’s Mate in the early nineteenth century. It warned passing ships of the dangerous shoals surrounding the island. Lore continued to spread about hauntings and mysterious deaths related to the curse of Nix’s Mate up to the present.

Regardless of whether you live in an era where public executions are deemed righteous or revolting, or you live in an era that believes in haunts or one that has overcome the specter of the spectral, there are lessons that may be gleaned from the story of the pirate curse of Nix’s Mate. Every theater of ritual has scripts that are intended to be followed and actors that are supposed to perform them. However, one never fully can know if an actor will improvise and subvert the script to reclaim their own power, or if the audience will receive the message of the script and its props the way that the writer intended.

[1] The London Gazette, Issue No. 5573, September 14, 1717, 1.

[2] Quoted in Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations, Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Beacon Press, 2004), 27.

[3] Captain Charles Johnson, A General History of the Pyrates (London, 1724).

[4] Joseph Edwards, The Tryals of Sixteen Persons for Piracy (Boston, 1726); Cotton Mather, A Vial Poured Out Upon the Sea (Boston, 1726); Benjamin Colman, It Is a Fearful Thing to Fall into the Hands of the Living God (Boston, 1726).

[5] Daniel A. Cohen, Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674–1860 (University of Massachusetts Press, 1993, 2006), 66.

[6] Mather, A Vial Poured Out Upon the Sea, 15–16.

[7] Mather, A Vial Poured Out Upon the Sea, 21

[8] Mather, A Vial Poured Out Upon the Sea, 47–48.

[9] Mather, A Vial Poured Out Upon the Sea, 47.

[10] Scott D. Seay, Hanging Between Heaven and Earth: Capital Crimes, Execution Preaching, and Theology in Early New England (Northern Illinois University Press, 2009), 30.

[11] Daniel E. Williams, Pillars of Salt: An Anthology of Early American Criminal Narratives (Madison House Publishers, 1993), 10.

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