The Last Pirate of New York

by Rich Cohen

  Hicks and Stone drank and slept till boredom overcame them. It was not money they craved but excitement. They studied notices posted beside the piers, then signed on to a ship bound for Liverpool, on the west coast of England. A capital of the industrial revolution, it was powered by textiles. Cotton was a crucial ingredient in that revolution, and much of it was shipped from New Orleans. The boom enriched planters and mill owners, sea captains, investors, and insurance men on both sides of the Atlantic. That explains the lucrative circuit Hicks and Stone traced in the 1850s, a triangular route of villainy that followed the cotton trade. They’d sail from New Orleans to Liverpool, then from Liverpool to Rio, then from Rio back to New Orleans, robbing at every opportunity. They’d hit ships and traders, fat cats and sailors, then return to their starting point and go again.

  The life of a nineteenth-century sailor was boredom shot through with incident. Even the dull hours were shadowed by the expectation of danger. The more time you spent on the water, the greater the certainty that tragedy would befall you. For many, Albert Hicks and Tom Stone were that tragedy, but of course, the pirates themselves were not immune. For them, disaster often came in the form of weather, a cyclone, a monsoon. A few miles off Waterford, England, a tremendous gale caught their ship, the Columbus, commanded by a Captain McSerin. For a moment, the ship stood atop a monstrous roller—from there you could see the entire topography of the storm, black clouds illuminated by lightning—then skimmed the face and was dashed to pieces. A moment later Hicks and Stone were in the water, clinging to wreckage as the Columbus slipped beneath the waves. Most of the crew died, but the devil drifted the outlaws till they could be rescued. They’d lost their treasure, saving only what they had in their pockets.

  They spent two or three days drying out, then went back to work—Liverpool, Rio, New Orleans—until they were again overcome by weather. It happened in America this time, a dozen miles from the Alabama coast. Hicks described the location as “Off Blackwater Banks.” A huge storm, a hurricane cooked in the warm waters of the Gulf, hit their ship—the Mobile—like a broad flat hand. “The waves ran mountains high,” Hicks said in his confession, “the wind blew great guns; sail after sail was carried away.” The men wept and prayed, but it didn’t help. Hicks put the total number aboard, crew and passengers, at eight hundred. In his telling, everyone died, “all but me and the devil.”

  “During the dreadful panic, I felt no fear,” he went on. “I felt as if I was protected by a superior power, and only thought of how I could turn the loss of the ship to account.”

  He drifted for two days, lashed to “a spar, [before] I was picked up by a pilot-boat and taken into port, as the American Consul at that time will certify.”

  Tom Stone was among the dead—he had been Sundance to Hicks’s Butch, the only man Hicks had ever trusted. The pirate took a moment in his confession—but no more than a moment—to eulogize his lost brother, “a brave fellow with a ready wit and a strong arm, ever on hand for any enterprise, no matter how desperate; and wicked as he was, I believe he loved and would have died for me.”

  Hicks was alone, as he’d been at the start. Solitude had its advantages. You had no one to share or disagree with, and no one to slow you down. Hicks caught a ship in Alabama—the Jeanette, bound for New York. There he caught another ship—the Eliza, bound for Boston. He met a new partner on the Eliza, a man he identified only as Lockwood. Little is known of Lockwood, not how he looked or spoke or where he came from, just that here was another marauding drifter who wandered the sea in a lawless age. “He was a strong, wiry man full of determination, cruel and desperate in his disposition, and totally without fear,” Hicks said. “I found he had led a life nearly similar to mine, and he thought no more of stealing a purse or cutting a throat than I.”

  They started right away, commandeering, robbing, and sinking the Eliza off Block Island. It must be down there still, a ruin in the ribbed sand. From there, they continued in the old pirate way, looting, burning, scuttling. In Chile, they signed on to the Ann Mills, named for a British pirate who had distinguished herself in a battle with the French in 1740. (There’s a portrait of this lady buccaneer holding up the head of a decapitated seaman.) The Ann Mills was an honest-to-God pirate ship. It had no country—it might as well have sailed from the netherworld—and operated under a black flag.

  Hicks told Deputy Marshal De Angelis that he finally found his element on the Ann Mills, a ship “where I could gratify the highest object of my wicked ambition. I was a free rover, with no one to fear, and no one to obey.” He spent a year on the Ann Mills, sailing from Marseilles to the Dardanelles, from Constantinople to Gibraltar. Now and then the pirates smuggled alcohol. Now and then they smuggled slaves.

  What did Hicks have inside? At times, it seemed like he had nothing inside, just appetite and anger, a simple drive to avenge whatever slight he believed he’d suffered. At other times, as when he rescued the cabin boy from whipping, you sensed there was something, that his was a soul in torment, trapped and deformed, battling its own nature. Hicks personified a certain kind of struggle—in the violence he visited on the world, in the war he was waging, but also in that interior battle. His was a rotten body of which devils had taken possession, but better angels were there, too, buried beneath an accretion of harbors and days.

  Following one big score, for reasons never properly explained, Hicks split with Lockwood. Sometimes you just want to go it alone. A handshake on a London dock, turn and face the wind. Hicks was fixed for money, ruddy and strong. His good looks were dangerous in that they set people at ease. Since his release from Norwich prison, almost two decades had passed in a blaze of mutiny and murder. He planned to return to New York. He was getting old. A pirate at forty is like another man at seventy—he has lived so rough for so long and done so many terrible things. He has lost all faith in human nature, turned his back on God. He is the most cynical creature in the world.

  Hicks hired on to a British steamer carrying emigrants from Ireland to the United States. Called the Isaac Wright, it was no different from a dozen other brigs that took devastated multitudes across the Atlantic—one hundred thousand Irish made the crossing in 1847 alone. The ships left from Dublin, Limerick, Belfast, Londonderry, and Galway, bound for New Orleans, Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. It was a hard crossing, days and days on a rough sea, disease spreading from passenger to passenger. As many as 30 percent of Irish emigrants died in 1847. Some called the ships floating coffins. Healthy passengers, fleeing the cramped cabins, slept on deck. You’ve seen the pictures: all those faces, women in black as if dressed for a funeral, men in snap-brim hats, moth-eaten coats hanging from their emaciated frames. In the background, the Emerald Isle fades away. In the distance, America.

  Hicks spotted a young woman on the Isaac Wright. She was with her family. He spoke to her on deck, then took extra care of her for the rest of the voyage. He found her again in Manhattan, took her on walks, then visited when her family moved to Albany. He presented himself to her parents as a hardworking, God-fearing Christian man, but they didn’t believe it. He was unsettling—that sudden flash of anger, those hands.

  They married anyway, then moved to Connecticut, then kept on moving. They settled in New York City. Hicks tried to live like other people, but he returned to crime whenever he needed money. When he should have been at home, he walked the docks, listening to the waterfront gossip, forever searching for a certain kind of ship. “I kept a sharp lookout for small craft bound for cargoes of fruit, oysters, and in a quiet way gathered all the information I could in regard to the number of hands they shipped, and the amount of money they generally carried.”

  He looked for a ship with cash and a small crew—low-hanging fruit. Just once more, to set up me and the missus. He found the perfect target in the E. A. Johnson.

  The sloop went to sea on March 20, 1860. Hicks waited till the captain and one of the hands was asl
eep below, took an ax off the pilothouse wall, and stashed it at his side. The older Watts brother was at the helm, “and I asked him to allow me to steer a little while,” Hicks told Deputy Marshal De Angelis. “He consented and went forward. In a few minutes, I left the helm, and, taking the ax, went to him and asked him if he saw Barnegat Light. He said he did not. I told him to look again, and pointed with my hand. He turned round and looked in my face a moment, but even if he had suspected my cruel purpose, he could have read no indication of it there, for I was calm as though I were going to do the simplest and most innocent thing in my life.

  “Look again,” said Hicks. “I’m fairly certain that’s Barnegat Light.

  “He turned his head, and peered through the darkness in the direction I pointed, and as he did so, I struck him on the back of the head with the ax, and knocked him down.

  “Thinking I had not killed him, I struck him again with the ax as he lay upon the deck.”

  Hicks killed Smith Watts next—“the edge [of the ax] crunched through his neck, severing his head from his body”—dealt with Captain Burr, then finished off Oliver Watts, who’d survived the first blows.

  “My bloody work was done,” he told the deputy marshal. “Dead men tell no tales.

  “My intention was to run the sloop up the North River, then fire her,” he continued, “but I came near running her on the Dog Beacon, abreast of Coney Island and Staten Island lighthouse, after which I fouled with a schooner, and carried away the bowsprit, so I put the money and other such articles of value as I could pick up, into the yawl, and then sculled ashore three miles, landing just below the fort on Staten Island.

  “My movements after landing are well known,” said Hicks, “and when I look back upon the fatality that seemed to dog my steps, it seems as though the fiend who so long had stood by me in every emergency had deserted me at last, and had left me to my own weakness. But I never thought of this until after my arrest. I had no shadow of a presentiment that I should be checked so suddenly and brought to justice, and on my return to New York, made arrangement to go away with my family as coolly as if nothing had occurred which should counsel me to use caution.”

  Hicks had reached the end of his confession. The deputy sat quietly, swollen in the way of a dishrag, having soaked up all that blood and grime. “I ask no sympathy, and expect none,” Hicks said at last. “I shall go to the gallows cursed by all who know the causes which will bring me there, and my only hope is that God will, in his infinite mercy, grant me that spirit of true repentance which may lead to pardon and forgiveness in the world to come.”

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  —

  Did Marshal Rynders believe Albert Hicks’s confession? How about Detective Nevins and P. T. Barnum? It would be published on the day of the execution, then reported and quoted by newspapers across America, so editors were satisfied it was true, happy to profit from the ambiguity, or accepted it as a kind of folktale. It’s possible that Hicks made up the story to get money for his soon-to-be widow and soon-to-be fatherless child. It’s possible he made it up to please his audience—everyone plays the room. It’s even possible that the writer tasked with turning the notes into a narrative stretched some of the details supplied by Hicks. But there’s good reason to believe the confession was largely true. When published, lawmen from around the country used it to solve several unsolved crimes, closing the book on robberies and murders. But in the end, maybe it doesn’t matter that much. This was the story told by the pirate—that’s what counts. It tells us either about his deeds and adventures or about his inner life and sense of self. It’s a dreamscape. Even if you doubt the words, you can still be terrified by the music.

  News of Hicks’s confession, that outlandish rambling life, murder and piracy on the seven seas, quickly spread. If he had been famous before, he now became something more—a dark star, a symbol of all that was twisted in this raw country. He was the soul of America, courageous yet grotesque. The nation had begun with certain ideals, but reality was different. On our money, in our public places, we have images of the founding fathers, but there is another set of founders—underworld kingpins, gang lords who slept late, never went to an office, never answered to a boss. In Hicks, the public caught the image of such a man at cask strength. He spent his entire life outside the law, living by his own rules, following a creed that is the American creed stripped of all decency and sophistication. Albert Hicks personified this nation no less than Andrew Jackson, who drove the Cherokee down a trail of tears. He was the violence used to build the great cities and conquer the West. He became an antihero partly because people ignored his actual crimes and partly because he seemed to demonstrate reality instead of lie—he did whatever he wanted and took as much as he could, just like Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould. He was the masses in the shape of a monster—the best at being the worst. We need Al Capone and John Dillinger and Albert Hicks if only to show us that someone is living in defiance—absolute criminality is absolute freedom.

  * * *

  —

  The more people knew about Albert Hicks, the less they seemed to understand. Questions filled the penny press: Where did he come from? What is he actually like? Is he truly different, or is he one of us? How did he get this way? Was his fate inevitable, cooked in him from birth by biology or God? Was he born evil? Or had there once been hope—could things have turned out differently?

  When these questions became overwhelming, the authorities contacted Lorenzo Fowler, New York’s famous phrenologist: he could read your personality in the shape of your skull. He could answer every question, solve every mystery.

  By 1860 Lorenzo Fowler and disciples had turned phrenology into a rage. Fowler had learned about the science, or pseudoscience, in his second year at Amherst College, in 1831. In a lecture, the visiting German philosopher Johann Spurzheim said phrenology had been pioneered in the late 1700s by Josef Gall, an Austrian physician who believed the nature of a person’s character could be read in that person’s skull. A phrenologist is a “doctor” who feels your head, mapping every bump and abnormality the way an astronomer maps mountains on the moon. Each place in your skull, as shown on the porcelain phrenology models that still crowd curio shops, was associated with a particular trait. A swelling in a certain spot would manifest in an excess of a certain trait. These traits were so eccentrically named and defined—see Phrenology: A Practical Guide to Your Head by Lorenzo N. Fowler—that people were convinced the science just had to be true: conjugality (monogamy, union for life, pairing instinct); philoprogenitiveness (parental love; attachment to one’s offspring; love of children, pets, and animals, especially young or small); alimentiveness (appetite, feeding instinct); ideality (perception and admiration of the beautiful and perfect). A big head meant you were probably selfish; a bump in back of the head, opposite the eyes, meant you were probably the sort of person who would stick with a task—killing every single person on an oyster sloop, say—until that task was accomplished. As a general rule, good people had symmetrical skulls with wide-set eyes, while lunatics, maniacs, and hatchet wielders had lemon-shaped heads, dead eyes, and weak chins. In short, a person’s fate was prefigured in the shape of his or her skull.

  Fowler fell for phrenology for the reason confused people tend to fall for ideas that make too much sense. It explained everything. No more mystery or confusion. No more sin or redemption. No more free will or guilt. Who could be condemned for committing even the worst crime if it was preordained in the frontal lobe?

  Lorenzo Fowler, sharing a byline with his brother Orson, published the definitive text, Phrenology Proved, Illustrated and Applied, in 1836. It went through at least sixty editions—it was the best seller that mainstreamed the movement. He trained Orson in phrenology, and together they opened an office at 135 Nassau Street in Manhattan, charging one dollar for a basic reading, and three dollars for a deep analysis, walk-ins welcome! In the early 1840s, with business bo
oming, they moved to 308 Broadway, a short walk from the photographic studio of Mathew Brady. Many famous Americans visited both shops the same day. Taken together—daguerreotype, phrenological study—you had the entire person, outside and inside. Horace Greeley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Margaret Fuller all sat for Fowler. The abolitionist John Brown was examined a few years before his raid on Harpers Ferry. According to the report, Brown had “firmness and energy enough to swim up the Niagara River and tow a seventy-four-gun ship, holding the towline in his teeth.” General George Custer, on the other hand, was diagnosed as the type “inclined to overdo.” Walt Whitman included his phrenological report in the first printing of Leaves of Grass.

  Albert Hicks, a few days before his execution, was escorted in shackles to Fowler’s Broadway office. The shingle in front said FOWLER AND WELL’S PHRENOLOGICAL CABINET. As his skull was examined, perhaps Hicks closed his eyes and thought of the sea, or the heft of a knife, or the roughness of a hawser, or the cry of the albatross, or the echo of a foghorn in the muddy streets of lower Manhattan, a shofar calling the sinners to the Temple to repent, or Charlie Parker blowing his alto sax in the dream future of the same town.