The Massachusetts authorities sent her back to Rhode Island, making much of their mercy in the face of popular indignation over the executions of Stephenson and Robinson. But six months later Mary defiantly returned to Boston and was arrested yet again. She was brought before the magistrates on May 31, 1660.
“Are you the same Mary Dyer that was here before?” inquired Governor Endecott.
“I am the same Mary Dyer that was here the last General Court,” she replied.
“You will own yourself a Quaker, will you not?” the governor continued.
“I own myself to be reproachfully so called,” Mary answered.
“Sentence was passed upon you the last General Court; and now likewise,” Endecott pronounced. “You must return to the prison, and there remain till tomorrow at nine o’clock; then thence you must go to the gallows, and there be hanged till you are dead.”
“This is no more than what thou saidst before,” she rejoined.
“But now,” said the governor, “it is to be executed. Therefore prepare yourself tomorrow at nine o’clock.”
“I came in obedience to the will of God the last General Court, desiring you to repeal your unrighteous laws of banishment on pain of death,” she declared. “And that same is my work now, and earnest request, although I told you that if you refused to repeal them, the Lord would send others of his servants to witness against them.”
Endecott then sneeringly asked if she was a “prophetess,” to which she replied that she spoke the words the Lord spoke in her, and now the thing was come to pass. As she continued to speak of her calling, the exasperated governor abruptly interrupted. “Away with her!” he screeched. “Away with her!”
The next day Mary Dyer once again stood at the base of the great elm tree on Boston Common. As she ascended the ladder, she rebuffed all pleas to repent and save herself. It was then that Captain John Webb, commander of the military guard, told her she was guilty of spilling her own blood. “Nay,” she answered. “I came to keep blood-guiltiness from you, desiring you to repeal the unrighteous and unjust law of banishment upon pain of death, made against the innocent servants of the Lord, therefore my blood will be required at your hands who willfully do it; but for those that do it in the simplicity of their hearts, I do desire the Lord to forgive them. I came to do the will of my Father, and in obedience to his will I stand even to the death.” And so she did.
3
Anne Bonny: Pirate of the Caribbean
Anne Bonny was all sympathy when she came to see her condemned lover, Caribbean pirate “Calico Jack” Rackham, on the day of his execution. “If you’d fought like a man,” she snarled, “you wouldn’t be hanged like a dog!” It was a touching farewell worthy of a fellow pirate, which is exactly what Anne was. Though women were typically strictly forbidden aboard pirate ships, Calico Jack recognized that certain savage something in his girlfriend and made an exception. Together, the swashbuckling couple and the rest of their cutthroat crew prowled the waters of the West Indies, plundering merchant ships and terrorizing innocents during that romanticized period of history known as the Golden Age of Piracy.
As the privileged daughter of William Cormac, a wealthy plantation owner in what would become South Carolina, Anne might have made a respectable match and settled into genteel anonymity. But there was something feral about her, even at an early age. Some unsubstantiated accounts say that as a teenager she stabbed a servant girl to death with a carving knife, and later beat an unwelcome suitor bloody. Whatever the case, Anne Cormac was clearly not destined for proper Charleston society.
In 1718, at age twenty, she eloped with a drifter named James Bonny and settled with him in the Bahamas. It was a fateful move, for there she met Calico Jack. Historian Clinton Black notes that Rackham took Anne like he did any ship he plundered: with “no time wasted, straight up alongside…every gun brought to play, and the prize boarded.” There is no evidence of any resistance on Anne’s part, and soon enough the adulterous couple was out to sea.
Bonny quickly established herself as one of the most ferocious pirates in Rackham’s crew. Yet oddly enough, she wasn’t the only woman. Mary Read had spent most of her life at sea disguised as a man. And so she was when Rackham captured the Dutch merchant vessel she was working on and invited her to join his band of pirates. According to one story, Anne developed a crush on Mary, thinking she was a man. This apparently drove Calico Jack wild with jealousy, and he threatened to slit Read’s throat. It was then that Mary opened her shirt to reveal her breasts and said, “As you can see, sir, I am no threat to you.” After that Anne Bonny and Mary Read became inseparable friends—and one terrifying team.
Victims of their raids reported the two women screaming like banshees as they boarded a captured ship, wielding their weapons as seasoned marauders. In one instance, a woman named Dorothy Thomas was attacked while alone in a canoe on the north side of Jamaica and forced aboard Rackham’s sloop for an ordeal that can only be imagined. A report on the deposition she gave later stated that Bonny and Read “wore Mens Jackets, and long Trouzers, and Handkerchiefs tied about their Heads; and that each of them had a Machet and Pistol in their Hands, and cursed and swore at the Men, to murther the Deponent; and that they should kill her, to prevent her coming against them; and the Deponent further said, That the Reason of knowing and believing them to be Women then was, by the largeness of their Breasts.”
Throughout the summer and early fall of 1720, Rackham and his crew conducted raid after raid, with Bonny and Read often leading the charge. But on the night of October 22, their reign of terror on the seas came to an end. A British navy vessel captained by pirate hunter Jonathan Barnett overpowered their anchored sloop and disabled it. After firing only one shot, Rackham realized there was no hope and called for quarter, which Barnett granted. Bonny and Read wanted no part of it, however. They put up a fierce fight with their pistols and cutlasses while the rest of the crew cowered in the ship’s hold. At one point Anne reportedly screamed down at them, “If there’s a man among ye, ye’ll come up and fight like the men ye are to be!” When that failed to motivate them, she fired into the hold and killed one of the crew. It was an act of defiant rage that would have done Blackbeard proud.
In spite of their frenzied resistance, Bonny and Read were overpowered and taken prisoner with the rest of the crew. Calico Jack and the other men were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death that November. After his kiss-off from Anne and subsequent execution, Rackham’s corpse was subjected to a rather ghastly ordeal: It was placed upright in a metal cage known as a gibbet and left to rot on the Jamaica coast, as a warning to other pirates. A week later the women were tried. One witness who had been taken prisoner described them as “very profligate, cursing and swearing much, and very ready and willing to do most any Thing on Board.” Another testified that “when they saw any Vessel, gave chase, or Attacked, they wore Men’s Cloathes; and at other Times, they wore Women’s Cloaths; That they did not seem to be Kept, or detain’d by Force, but of their own Free-Will and Consent.”
Neither woman offered a defense, and each was duly condemned to hang. Right after the sentence was read, however, both informed the court that they were pregnant. An examination proved this to be true, and the sentences were suspended. Mary Read died in prison soon after, perhaps during childbirth, but Anne Bonny’s fate remains a mystery. Some historians speculate that her wealthy father used his influence with the British authorities to get her released, but no direct evidence of this has ever been produced. Only one thing is certain: She fought like a man, and, unlike Calico Jack, she wasn’t hanged like a dog.
4
Tom Quick: “The Indian Slayer”
Back in the days when Native Americans were still seen as “savages,” the town of Milford, Pennsylvania, dedicated a monument in 1889 to Tom Quick, the lionized “Indian Slayer” who once roamed the wilds of the region picking off members of the Delaware Nation. “Maddened by the death of his Father at the hands of Savages,”
an inscription on the memorial read, “Tom Quick never abated his hostility to them until the day of his death, a period of over forty years.” By some accounts, the body count reached ninety-nine Delaware, though local historians limit it to four or five. The true number, like so much of Tom Quick’s life, is obscured by legend. The only certainty is that Milford had seen fit to memorialize a serial killer.
One of Quick’s few documented victims was his boyhood friend Mushwink, the son of a Delaware chieftain. The two had grown up together after the Quick family became the first white settlers of the northeastern Pennsylvania area around Milford in 1733. The local Delaware—by then a defeated tribe paying tribute to the six-nation Iroquois Confederacy—treated the Quicks kindly, and Tom and Mushwink became constant companions. Together they explored the great forests of the region, where Tom learned to hunt and trap with great skill and daring. The boys were like brothers, each practically adopted into the other’s family. It was an idyll not destined to last.
William Penn had established good relations with the Delaware when he led a group of English Quakers to the new colony of Pennsylvania in 1682. His successors, however, were not so benevolent. Fraudulent land grabs, like the infamous Walking Purchase of 1737,1 and an ever-expanding European immigrant population pushed the Delaware farther and farther west, away from their homeland along the river for which they were named. It was only around the Quick homestead, their traditional burial grounds, that the Delaware remained in any significant numbers.
The increasing bitterness of the displaced tribe came to full fruition during the French and Indian War, when the British and the French, along with their Native American allies, clashed over territory, particularly around the Ohio River Valley. The Delaware, allied with the French, launched fierce raids into their former lands in eastern Pennsylvania, burning homes, pillaging livestock, and scalping men, women, and children alike. “Just now arrived in town an express from our frontiers with the bad news that eight families of Pennsylvania were cut off last week,” Benjamin Franklin, then postmaster of the colony, wrote to London in 1755. “Thirteen men and women were found scalped and dead and twelve children missing.” It was during this time that Tom Quick turned homicidal.
The Quick family and their white neighbors had taken refuge from the marauding tribe in a fortified stone house across the Delaware River in New Jersey. They had only carried with them a month’s worth of supplies, however, and as hunger and illness threatened to deplete them in the winter of 1756, Tom, his father, and a brother-in-law ventured back across the frozen river to a mill owned by Tom’s father. There they worked all night grinding corn. The following morning, heavily laden with sacks of cornmeal, the men started back. Nearly midway across the river, amid Delaware war cries, shots rang out from the Pennsylvania shore. Tom’s father fell. Rushing to his aid, Quick found the old man stricken. “I’m a dead man,” he gasped. “I can go no further. Leave me. Run for your lives.”
With the Delaware war party rapidly approaching, Tom had little choice but to flee to the other side of the river with his brother-in-law as the Indians fell upon his father. Safe on the shore, he watched helplessly as they stripped the elder Quick of his silver buttons and shoe buckles, then scalped him. Tom could just make out the features of the Delaware leader leaning over his father and desecrating his corpse. It was his boyhood friend, Mushwink. Overwhelmed with rage, Tom swore revenge. His oath is recorded in the Quick family papers: “The blood of the whole Indian race is not sufficient to atone for the blood of my father.”
Tales of the murderous rampage that followed were legion, often told in the same reverential tone reserved for other American folk heroes such as Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. An introductory poem to a book of Quick’s exploits, published in 1851, read:
Hero of many a wondrous tale,
Full of his dev’lish cunning!
Tom never flunked or turned pale,
Shooting as he was running.
In one perhaps apocryphal story, Quick ambushed a Delaware family and killed them all. Asked later why he hadn’t spared the life of the innocent baby, he reportedly snorted, “because nits make lice.” Another oft-repeated tale had Tom splitting rails one day when he was suddenly surrounded by seven Delaware warriors. They demanded that he come with them. Quick pretended to agree, but asked the warriors for their help splitting one last log. The Indians apparently saw no reason to deny this simple request. They dropped their guns and plunged their hands into a split in the log that Tom had opened with a wedge. With his enemies thus positioned, Quick suddenly knocked out the wedge, trapping the warriors’ fingers in the wood. At his leisure, he then killed them one by one.
Such stories, which grew richer with each retelling, are difficult to substantiate. But late in 1764 there was an encounter that is well documented. Tom was at a tavern near present-day Reading, Pennsylvania, when an intoxicated Delaware approached and offered to drink with him. Quick refused, but the Indian persisted. “You hate Delawares,” he said. “I hate you.” When Tom continued to ignore him, the Indian taunted, “You kill Delawares. I kill your father.” Perhaps Quick didn’t recognize Mushwink. After all, it had been almost ten years since his father’s murder. “Prove it,” Tom demanded. With that, Mushwink produced the silver buttons cut from the elder Quick’s coat and gleefully mimicked the old man’s death agonies. Enraged, Quick jumped up, grabbed a musket mounted on the tavern wall, aimed it at Mushwink, and forced him outside. “Indian dog,” he roared, “you’ll kill no more white men.” He then shot his former friend in the back and returned to the tavern.
With the French and Indian War over and trade with the Delaware resumed, Mushwink’s murder was seen as a dangerous breach of the peace. Quick was arrested, but the local townspeople arranged his escape. He was free to resume his murderous career, which, some say, lasted another thirty years. Smallpox finally finished him off in 1796.
As the years passed, the famed “Indian Slayer” gradually faded into obscurity. But his memory was revived in 1997, when a vandal defaced his memorial in Milford. The nine-foot-tall zinc obelisk was removed and repaired, but there was sharp resistance to returning it to its former place of prominence. Behavior that was once seen as heroic was now condemned as barbaric. “Lynchings in the South were part of history, too, so are we going to start putting up monuments to the grand wizards of the KKK?” Chuck Gentle Moon Demund, interim chief of the Delaware Nation, said in 2004.
Given the controversy, Tom Quick’s monument remains hidden away from public view. When asked for the exact location, Lori Strelecki, curator of the Pike County Historical Society’s The Columns Museum, was rather Quick with her response: “If I told you, I’d have to kill you.”
5
Mary Jemison: “The White Woman of the Genesee”
It was a spring day in 1758, with the French and Indian War in full fury, when the terror every frontier family dreaded most was visited upon the Jemisons. A raiding party of six Shawnee warriors and four Frenchmen burst into their home near what is now Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and took them and another family captive. The three adults and seven children were marched through the forest until they reached the spot where most of them would be slain. Only young Mary Jemison, who was about fifteen, and a little boy from the other family were spared. The two children were driven farther into the woods while the rest were killed. Both then had to watch as the bloody scalps of their loved ones were meticulously scraped, dried, and stretched over hoops by the Indians who treated them as trophies.
“Those scalps I knew at the time must have been taken from our family, by the color of the hair,” Mary Jemison recalled many years later. “My mother’s hair was red, and I could easily distinguish my father’s and the children’s from each other. That sight was most appalling; yet I was obliged to endure it without complaining.”
What happened to Mary Jemison was hardly unique at a time when European settlers were routinely abducted by Native Americans. But her story, first publ
ished in 1824, was among the most widely read of the Indian captivity narratives that once abounded—perhaps because it offered something different. Not only was Mary snatched away by Indians, a familiar enough horror to many readers, but she also lived among them for the rest of her life. Thus her account provided a tantalizing glimpse into an alien society that both frightened and fascinated so many people.
The narrative is marred somewhat by the unfortunate intrusions of James E. Seaver, the writer to whom Mary told her story at the end of her life. He infused commonly held prejudices against Native Americans into the tale, not to mention an abundance of his own overwrought language (like this bathos-laden passage: “But alas! how transitory are all human affairs! how fleeting are riches! how brittle the invisible thread on which all earthly comforts are suspended!”). Still, Mary Jemison does manage to be heard, and her portrait of the native people is far more balanced and sympathetic than most. She had, after all, become one of them.
After the murder and mutilation of her family, Mary was taken to Fort Duquesne (now Pittsburgh) and given to two Seneca sisters who adopted her as a replacement for their dead brother. This was a common practice among some tribes, who believed the spirit of their loved ones resided in those they adopted, including white prisoners. She was ceremoniously dressed as a Seneca maiden and initiated into the tribe at their village on the Ohio River. “In the course of that ceremony, from mourning [the dead warrior] they became serene,” Mary recalled. “Joy sparkled in their countenances, and they seemed to rejoice over me as over a long-lost child. I was made welcome among them as a sister to the two squaws before mentioned, and was called Deh-he-wä-mis; which, being interpreted, signifies a pretty girl, a handsome girl, or a pleasant, good thing. That is the name by which I have ever since been called by the Indians.”
A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans Page 2