The Last Pirate of New York

by Rich Cohen

  Each hand had a unique purpose. The captain set the course; the lookout sat in the crow’s nest, scanning for shadows; the harpooner chased the whale in a launch, then drove in the spike, the death dart; the butcher cut the blubber and boiled it down; the helmsman steered. Hicks served mostly as a carpenter, doing odd jobs, making repairs. Like everyone else, he worked for a cut of the take. The captain got one-eighth. A man who worked before the mast got much less. Hicks might expect to get about a one three-hundredth share of the final profit. Which explains the up-and-down mood on such vessels.

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  When the crew got a whale, everyone was happy and felt rich and acted like brothers. But if the ship went a month with no sightings, the crew turned restless and mean, and all bonds dissolved, and there was talk of mutiny. Most crew members were less like traditional sailors than like workingmen, or modern-day teamsters. If put in charge of a ship, they would not be able to command it—they would drift and die. But they had their own kind of power. These ships were too big to be sailed by just the officers—there might be sixty men on a crew. If half refused to work, the same fate would result: drift and die. In other words, a whaler was society in miniature. Management had the workers by the throat, and workers had management the same. Only the owners, back in their beds at home, awaiting news of profit, were safe.

  After that first voyage, Hicks went on dozens of others, not just on whalers but on sloops, clippers, merchant traders, fishing boats—whoever was hiring. He made repairs, hauled in sails, sorted the catch, kept watch. He was young, skilled, and strong. Did he take those first jobs with the intention of revolt? Was piracy his aim from the start, part of his general desire for revenge? Or did he go in search of adventure, only to change plans in moments of rage? He was a diligent crewman right up to the instant he flipped. Anything could set him off. Harsh words spoken by the captain, an insult or a superior look, an imagined slight—a man looking to be insulted will be insulted. Or perhaps it was the old boredom. Once the novelty wore off and he’d settled into a routine of meals and days at sea, something in him would have said, All right, what’s next?

  The first mutiny occurred aboard the Saladin. The crew, stirred to revolt by a man named Fielding, killed Captain Kenzie and his mate, broke into the booze, ran aground, and descended into a bacchanal on the shores of Nova Scotia, where they were seen by passing fishermen. In the end, the mutineers were arrested. A few were hung, including Fielding, but the rest, Hicks among them, were released. Hicks watched the men hang—the details would stay with him—then went back to sea. It was that mutiny, with Fielding teaching by example, that seemingly gave Hicks his basic template and educated him in the art of piracy.

  He commenced his life’s work soon after. According to the confession, it happened on a luckless whaler in the South Seas, where Hicks, in the way of Fielding, made the case to every man before the mast. Do the figuring. What’s zero profit divided by sixty? Zero. We could actually end up owing this sonofabitch money for expenses! Among Hicks’s gifts was a talent for persuasion. He quickly convinced a balance of the crew that it was their right to get into the rum and have a party. He led the assault on the officers: knocked ’em down, locked ’em up, went on a bender. In the end, once they’d sobered up and understood their situation—no one knew how to properly set a course—they surrendered. As the captain could not punish all the mutineers—without a crew, he too was lost—he punished only those who were considered instigators. Possibly for no reason other than that he was young and handsome, Hicks was not suspected. The “ringleaders” were locked below, where they spent the rest of the voyage in irons. As soon as the whaler reached port, they were carried off the ship half dead and locked in a local jail.

  Hicks quickly mastered the art of revolt, establishing a wildly effective pattern. He’d join a crew, labor till bored, then begin working on the other sailors, paying special attention to the angry and outcast. He’d stoke their resentment till it was red hot, then use a random incident to touch off a melee, kill the officers, get into the booze, and flee with the money. At some point, he killed his first man. He’d previously come close, in the woods during his prison escape. He knew he could do it if he had to. Then he had to. He actually came to enjoy it. Some men acquire the taste.

  Hicks found a partner along the way. They became a dreaded team, legendary like Butch and Sundance, had Butch and Sundance been less charming and more violent. But who knows? Maybe Butch Cassidy was not so different from Albert Hicks. Hicks’s partner first appears in the confession as “a steerer”—a helmsman on a whaler. From his place at the tiller, he kept an eye on young Albert Hicks. When Hicks touched off a mutiny, the steerer joined in, then followed Hicks into town, then to the next ship. He’s eventually given a name—Tom Stone. Hicks did not mention that name until hours into his confession, then in a strangely matter-of-fact way. “Tom Stone…that was his name….I do not think I’ve mentioned it before.”

  Was Tom Stone a real name or an alias? It’s too common to be traced, so it was probably fake. It was not the name that mattered anyway; it was the relationship. These two men traveled and robbed and killed together for years—slept side by side beneath the stars on the decks of ships; camped in the fire warmth at western outposts; lived in the same houses and hotels, stormed cities, busted up casinos, and shared secrets. Not much is known about Tom Stone: Was he sloppy and mean, or precise like a harpooner? Was he blond and wild, or soft-spoken and dark? We know only that, for over a decade, he and Hicks were inseparable.

  In the whaling trade, all routes led to the South Pacific, with its archipelagos and atolls, its island kingdoms. Hicks and Stone turned up there in the 1840s, when large parts of the region were still unfrequented by Westerners and seemed as mysterious as lands in fairy tales. They arrived on a whaler that had not had much success—the crew was thirsty, looking for action. Once the ship anchored in the palm-fringed bay of what seemed a deserted island, fifteen sailors, Hicks and Stone among them, were sent ashore in two yawls to gather food and water. They beached the boats and scattered. A few climbed the palm trees to shake free some coconuts. Others went into the forest to gather figs. Such uncharted islands had a wild smell that put northerners in a bewildering trance. The sound of waves, the rattle of fronds…There will be no consequences. You have returned to an earlier state of creation. They hacked open the fruit with machetes, then drank the milk. As they were loading the yawls, strange men emerged from behind the trees—Hicks called them “natives.” They were in a state of undress, carrying spears. There was a standoff, then a hand-to-hand fight, the men so close each could feel the other’s breath. Hicks brought his machete into play. In a moment, several “natives” lay in the sand. The rest retreated. This battle pulled a lever in his mind, Hicks said. It gave rise to bloodlust, an urge to kill again. He told the men on the beach it was time. We’ll return to the ship, attack the officers, lock them in the hold, and sail to America.

  The men seemed to agree, then got back into the two yawls. As they crossed the bay, Hicks said, “As soon as we’re on board, select [a] man, kill him at once.”

  Hicks tried to keep up with the other yawl, but it zipped ahead. The men from that yawl were climbing onto the whaler before Hicks was across the bay. If he expected to see a flash of blades or other signs of mutiny, he was disappointed. The sailors in the first yawl sounded the alarm and reported on Hicks and Stone, who, as soon as they got up the rope and over the gunwale, were beset. The mutineers fought back but were bloodied and subdued and locked in what Hicks called “double irons,” their hands and feet bound in shackles like those he’d wear in the courtroom in Manhattan. A week later he was on deck when the ship sailed into a beautiful port that Hicks called Wahoo in what Captain Cook had dubbed the Sandwich Islands. Wahoo was in fact Oahu, the volcanic island where most Hawaiians still live.

  Hawaii was still autonomous in the 1840s and ’50s,
an antipodean paradise governed by an ancient royal family. The water around it was filled with longboats and surfboards. The waves that would become legendary curled as they broke offshore. The wharves were crowded with every kind of ship from every place on the planet.

  Hicks and Stone were neither reported nor arrested. Who had time? They were given one last thrashing, then set free. Honolulu was the big town on the island, a postcard picture of red roofs and steep green hills. Captain Cook had been the first European to visit the island—that was in 1778, just sixty-five years before. Modern technology had followed, then disease. The population was halved by smallpox, yet the place remained a kind of nirvana, God painting with a different set of colors. Pineapples were piled on market tables beside sugarcane and molasses. Hicks and Stone wandered the streets wide-eyed, amazed.

  What happens when you set the devil down in paradise?

  The pirates hung around the waterfront saloons, gathering information about the island. They stole money and rented a house in the hills. In the distance, they could see Mount Ka’ala, the highest peak on Oahu. A small white house with a tin roof became their base of operations. They’d lay up all morning, then set out at night, down into the dark alleys and ginger-choked squares. They went on what Hicks called a “spree,” an orgy of stealing and boozing satisfaction. “For a long time we led the life of freebooters, robbing and plundering wherever we went, and dissipating the proceeds of our robberies in the wildest debauchery.”

  The pirates eventually aroused suspicion. They were stopped and questioned. No one knew what they had done, but they were rough-looking foreigners with no apparent means of support. Lock ’em up. They were detained in a dank prison, each morning the same. Gruel, the chattering voices of drunks, the harbor pitifully blue beyond the prison bars. In the end, they were saved by a sea captain. Several members of his crew had jumped—a common occurrence in Hawaii. He needed men, so he came to the jail and asked if there were any sailors among the inmates. Hicks and Stone went directly from their prison cell to another whaler.

  A few weeks later, anchored off the coast of an island a thousand miles from Honolulu, they jumped ship, fleeing with guns and knives. Hicks identified the place as “Typie Bay.” It must have been Tahiti, French Polynesia. They should have vanished into the jungle, set up in a thatch hut, married beautiful local women, lived a thousand months as if they were a single day, stood on the cliffs watching the sun sink into the firmament. They should have welcomed Typie as a chance for a new life. Hicks should have relaxed and changed. But he was a predator, a wolf, “the worst man who ever lived.” Such a person does not change, not even in paradise. He and Stone were caught breaking into a house. Just like that, they were back in jail.

  It was a Dutch captain who sprang them this time, the commander of a whaler registered in Amsterdam as the Villa de Poel. The ship was bound for Magdalena Bay, across the Pacific in Baja California. Magdalena was a mecca for whalers. They came from around the world to hunt the grays that mated there each winter.

  Crossing the Pacific Ocean took forever, it seemed to Hicks. He worked up a burning hatred in these weeks, the kind of hatred that, on other occasions, would’ve had him reaching for an ax. But the entire crew was Dutch. He and Stone could barely communicate with them, let alone stir rebellion. He fumed instead, vowing to take off as soon as they reached Magdalena Bay.

  Whalers were scattered across the waters when they arrived. Hicks and Stone could hear men everywhere, talking and laughing. The pirates got into a yawl and hit the water with a crash. They started rowing. The shore was a tangle of moss vines, a mangrove swamp. Once on land, they hiked till they reached a town. Mexico before the American War was a desolate land of stone churches and cobblestone squares, as sleepy as the Spain of Cervantes. Hicks and Stone, perfectly at ease, set off on an epic crime spree. It would’ve been hard to tell them from the western bandits of lore. Yankees on horseback, they drank in cantinas, raised hell in villages, slept it off on a beach or in a hammock that swayed in the breeze. Hicks was thirty-one, thirty-two, at the peak of his power, broad-shouldered, clear-eyed, and handsome. His hands, weathered and large, folded across his stomach as he dozed.

  Whenever word got out that a sheriff was looking for them, or whenever they got bored, they’d switch from land to sea, or vice versa: 1851, 1852—Hicks blurred the years into a run of cities and towns, Cabo San Lucas, Valparaiso, Mazatlán, spinning past like numbers on a roulette wheel. They encountered stevedores and merchants, import agents, an immigrant banana man separating ripes from turnings on a broken-down dock. Booming American industry was already endangering their wanton way of life. It would soon become impossible—no wild places left, no pirate islands. But for years they stayed a step ahead of the law, always coming or going, dropping or raising anchor, taking a berth or stealing away, counting the money, torching the ship.

  Deputy Marshal De Angelis, while hearing the confession, tried to keep track but soon lost count. Just how many men had Albert Hicks killed? Was it twenty? Thirty? Fifty?

  Hicks said he was not sure himself.

  Who was this man Hicks? the police wanted to know. Was he really a pirate? That was how the newspapers described him—Hicksy, the last of the old buccaneers, the last Blackbeard, the last Calico Jack. But we think of pirates working together in a bandit crew, operating in a hierarchy, following a constitution, pledged beneath the Jolly Roger. Hicks was different. He called himself a freebooter. He went about his work piecemeal, either alone or with a single partner. He did not attack frontally in the way of the famous pirates, but infiltrated, subverted, and overthrew. He was more like a virus, a dissident from a gangster nation, a shadow republic that exists all over the world. He was a perfect example of a pirate who adapted to the modern age.

  “After a lapse of a few years, during which time I passed through a series of adventures too numerous to mention, and the details of which would fill a volume”—gambling dives, whiskey and women, a succession of towns—“we found ourselves in Lower California about the commencement of the Mexican War,” Hicks told De Angelis.

  Hicks and Stone wanted to get as far as possible from the fighting—if you were not careful, you could end up in the goddamn army!—so they took jobs on a U.S. storeship that was headed up the coast to Santa Cruz Bay, California. They had no intention of staying on this ship—they were merely catching a ride. Soldiers patrolled the decks, making it a tricky jump. They waited for a moonless night, then stood on deck at two or three in the morning. The coast boomed past, unwinding like a ribbon. They stashed guns and other supplies in a yawl—it hung over the water on chains—then climbed in.

  Hicks looked to the left, then to the right. He and Stone seemed to be the only people awake in the world. To make certain, he dropped his hat into the sea. Was it a Monmouth, a wool cap that sailors wore to protect themselves from the salt and the sun in the 1800s? Or was it the Kossuth hat, with its wide brim? Gripping the side of the yawl, he watched the hat drift down and disappear. It must have hit the water, but no one, it seemed, was around to notice. So Hicks released the yawl, which dropped with a clatter of chains, metal on metal. The fall seemed endless, like plunging into a hole, deep and dark, or going through the mouth of a whiskey bottle into another life.

  Hicks and Stone hit the water. Teeth rattled against teeth. Shouts came from the deck. The pirates scrambled for the oars and began to row. There was a short burst of fire, then a fusillade. Guns from another ship were shooting at them as well. Bullets peppered the water—it was grapeshot—getting closer and closer, as if seeking out the yawl. They found it, as Hicks and Stone were pulling up onto the beach—it was cut to pieces beneath them.

  The forest began fifty yards from the shore. They ran for it, drawing fire as they went. They got into the trees, dense and overwhelming sequoias. “We remained in this wood for a few days, and then travelling on, we reached the city at night, where we stole horses
and made for the mines,” Hicks told the deputy marshal. In need of cash, they robbed travelers on the road, prospectors leading pack mules a-jangle with pickaxes and shovels.

  On January 24, 1848, gold had been discovered in Sutter’s Mill, a shithole of a factory town in northern California. The mineral shone through the wild river, amber and black. Word reached Hawaii before it reached Boston. The New York Herald carried the story on August 19, 1848: THERE’S GOLD IN THEM THAR HILLS! Hundreds of thousands of men were soon on the move, the so-called 49ers, in carts filled with shovels and Bibles, with the worn faces of prospectors, down-and-outers with mad vacant stares—if you leaned close, you could see their pupils looked like dollar signs. They traveled by road and sea or signed on to whalers, only to jump ship in San Francisco.

  These men, all in search of a claim—it was the American dream in its purest form, wealth for the taking, neither work nor virtue necessary—hiked into the wilderness that started beyond town. Some dug, while others panned the cold, clear rivers. At night, a hot wind blew through the mountain passes. Bare slopes and flawless skies—California was still as the conquistadors had seen it, mules humping across the soft brown swells that led to the Pacific.

  The country was awash in optimists intending to strike it rich. Gold fever! Stick a pan in a stream, and bang! You were eating a filet on Geary Street. Hicks and Stone had got the news along with everyone else. While most people were searching for a vein, the pirates were doing a much easier sort of mining—finding people who’d already found gold, then taking it away. For six months, they tramped through the hills, menacing the camps, most of which consisted of three or four men—a tent, tools, an accumulating pile of dust, the product of six or seven months of labor. The camps were isolated, a half-day ride from help, protected by an idiot with a rifle. There were no cops, no soldiers. The land was lawless—no order other than what you imposed. It was an ideal setup for desperadoes, a buffet, a smorgasbord. They could go in, take what they wanted, then head back for more.