The Last Pirate of New York

by Rich Cohen

  Hicks was unusual. Based on his crimes, you’d guess him to possess an idiot’s skull, undersize and studded with protrusions, as misshapen as a busted watermelon. He in fact had a beautiful cranium—not the skull of a philanthropist or a concert pianist, maybe, but not that of a killer, either. “He has a remarkably strong muscular organization and bony system,” according to Fowler’s report, “which has a powerful influence on the tone, quality and direction of his mind. His mental temperament is fairly developed, but not to such an extent as to give the finer qualities to the mind and character. He is excitable, and susceptible of intense feeling, yet it is rather a heated impulse of passion, than a delicate and refined sensibility.”

  Of course, if you took your time and really knew your business and examined closely, you would find the abnormalities from which tragedy followed as sure as the night follows the day. Fowler made special note of the area associated with combativeness—above the right ear—which was “strongly developed,” exaggerated in a way that suggested “a power to overcome obstacles, and if provoked, and had some selfish purpose to subserve, render him capable of almost any act of desperation.” Hicks’s alimentiveness was equally overdeveloped, proof that he was the sort that “loves to gratify the appetite highly, and is liable to indulge it too freely.” But the key flaw was not excess but lack. A flat place above the eyes—an area associated with spirituality—resulted in the outlaw’s failure to believe in or heed the metaphysical. “His Spirituality is deficient,” Fowler explained. “He has very little idea of the unseen, and of subjects pertaining to the higher life, and has scarcely any Veneration at all, which leads him to act without due regard to the Higher Power, and without feeling his dependence on, or much responsibility to, his Creator.”

  Phrenology succeeded, for a time, because it expressed a universal fear—that we are not in control of our own fate or even our own actions, that we are playthings of biological forces that can neither be seen nor escaped. Deficiencies in our nature, flaws in our makeup, bumps in our skull—that’s the entire story. We call phrenology a pseudoscience because it turned out to be incredibly wrong, even ludicrous, but it did get at a greater truth, which is why Lorenzo Fowler was such a hit in antebellum America. He came not as a charlatan but as a precursor and a premonition of Darwin and Freud and abstract expressionism and punk rock and free-form jazz and dada and existentialism and nonsense. It was not a working medicine he gave us but a picture of the world controlled by invisible forces. It was a world we can almost understand but never control. It was a world at night, sketchy and filled with shadows. A great force was at work in this world, but it was not God, and it did not care about us. It was the same force that had made Albert Hicks and sent him out to sea. It was Albert Hicks.

  Fowler ended his report with a thought that would become typical of the coming century: it was not the man who had failed the system, but the system that had failed the man. Hicks might have been good, but the decrepit towns and institutions, life on the wheel, had made him bad. “The crimes that he has been led to commit are full as much the result of a want of the right kind of education, as from his natural organization,” wrote Fowler. “He has strong passions, and an unbending and headstrong will; but with proper culture and good circumstances, he would most likely have used his energy and talents in a way to secure success and respectability, instead of warring upon the right and interest of his fellow men.”

  In other words, though we cannot take Fowler’s report on Hicks seriously, though every sentence in it is antiquated and silly, it nails a deeper truth as sure as Captain Ahab nailed the doubloon to the mast of the Pequod. Hicks was the sum of his flaws—almost good, which, in practice, is the same as evil. In the end, his only hope was to be loved and cared for by parents and prisons and institutions, but that was not the American way, and the result was this monster, those severed fingers, that ghost ship. Fowler included a line in his report that captured the terror of the coming age: “If you are not with God, then everything is permitted.”

  * * *

  —

  P. T. Barnum sent his plaster of Paris expert to see Hicks in the Tombs. He sat close to the killer, preparing the concoction, chatting as Hicks breathed through a tube and the cement was applied. The result was a death mask made from a living man. Such a mask reveals the features as if for the first time—nose and eyes, forehead, cheekbones and jaw all so close together—look how small the real estate a human face actually occupies! Beethoven, Napoleon, Disraeli, James Dean, Robert E. Lee. You get the same sense from every famous death mask.

  Is that all there is?

  When the plaster was removed, Hicks would have seen himself as a fossil, as if spied from the future. It was the face that would outlive him. The mold was carried back to Barnum’s American Museum at Ann Street, where, in a few days, it would be filled with wax. When the wax cooled and the plaster was stripped away, you would have Albert Hicks all over again. Then the body would be built—it would be shown in action, wielding an ax. It would be better, Barnum told Hicks, if the clothes worn by the figure were genuine. Barnum proposed a trade: new store-bought clothes for the rags Hicks had on his back. Prison clothes were not issued until after sentencing, and in the case of Hicks, who would never make it to prison, they would not be issued at all. If not in court, he’d be wearing the same clothes in which he’d been arrested—pants, shirt, jacket. He happily made the trade with Barnum, believing he—Hicks—had got the better of the deal. He soon changed his mind. Just look at this shoddy stitching, he complained, how the coat comes apart at the seams—how it itches! His own clothes had been of a higher quality. Hicks had an innate sense of style—see the monkey coat and the Kossuth hat, see the silk shirts picked up everywhere from New Orleans to Buenos Aires.

  Barnum would have his Hicks on display within a week of the execution. The figure would be exhibited alongside Ned the Learned Seal and Crowley the Man Horse. The placard beneath it read: “Life-Size Wax Figure of A.W. Hicks, attired in the very clothes worn by him when he butchered his victims with an ax. Acknowledged by all to be a wonderful likeness of the infamous pirate!”

  THE EXECUTION

  Albert Hicks turned talkative near the end. He spoke to reporters and politicians, to dignitaries, to anyone who would listen. He would scratch the rash left by his carny clothes and run a finger through his beard. His grin was terrifying. You never knew what such a man found funny. He struck up a friendship with the kid in the next cell, Mortimer Shay, who was at the center of his own infamous trial. Just twenty-one, Shay had killed a man named John Leary at Crown’s Corner, a grogshop in the Five Points. Shay had joined in a fight involving a friend, hitting the friend’s attacker with the blunt end of a knife. He believed he had done the right thing—protecting a friend—but now was no longer certain. He had not expected the man to die. Hicks had followed the case closely. In some of the things he said to Shay—the imminence of his own death gave Hicks freedom to speak plainly—you glimpse a code: You saved your friend. There can be no wrong in that.

  One afternoon Hicks sent word that he wanted to talk to the press. A few reporters were always hanging around the Tombs. When these men gathered outside Cell 8, Hicks told them he’d composed a song and wanted to perform it. He’d committed the verses to memory and sang in a high, wavering voice:

  My own, my dear loved mother!

  If I could see thy face,

  I’d kiss thy lips in tenderness,

  And take my last embrace.

  I’d bathe thee in my awful grief,

  Before my fatal hour,

  I’d then submit myself to God—

  His holy will and power.

  Near the town of Foster,

  Is the place where I was born,

  But here in New-York City

  I’ll end my days in scorn.

  I shipped on board the Saladin,

 
As you may understand,

  Bound to South America,

  Captain Kenzie in command.

  We arrived in that country

  Without undue delay,

  When Fielding came on board,

  Ah! cursed be that day!

  He first persuaded us

  To do that horrid crime

  We could then have prevented it,

  If we’d begun in time.

  I stained my hands in human blood,

  Which I do not deny.

  I shed the blood of innocence,

  For which I have to die.

  They led them up the plank,

  Unto the fatal stand,

  And there they viewed the ocean

  Also the pleasant land.

  A cord adjusted through the ring

  Then stopped their mortal breath;

  Forthwith the whole were launched

  Into the jaws of death.

  The meaning of the first lines seems clear—they follow the pirate’s biography. It was the second half that confused reporters. It was about a hanging that seemed to come as a punishment for a terrible crime committed aboard a mysterious ship, the Saladin. None of them knew the story. Was it an actual crime or a figment of a condemned man’s imagination?

  Soon after the poem was published, though, letters began arriving from Nova Scotia that confirmed the truth of the lyric. According to the Times,

  the mysterious allusions by [Hicks] to his agency in the piracy and murders on board of the Saladin…have led to a discovery of all the facts concerning those events, which have been volunteered by several persons who were cognizant of the circumstances of the case, and who have called at our office, or sent us communications on the subject….Among these is a gentleman who was a magistrate of the County of Guysboro, Nova Scotia, in the year 1844, and who was one of the persons who boarded the wreck of the Saladin, as she lay bilged among the rocks, some twenty-five miles east of Halifax, her piratical crew being at the time carousing on shore with their ill-gotten plunder. He states that, as near as he can recollect, the vessel was run on shore in a clear day in the month of June; that the crew had thrown overboard [the] Capt….After sinking all the boats but one, by loading them with copper bars, they escaped to the shore, carrying with them some $80,000, mostly in Mexican silver, which had been divided amongst themselves, and which they had in bags, kegs, &c. It was two or three days before anybody, except the fishermen, had any knowledge of the wreck, and it was wholly owing to the extraordinary conduct of the pirates on shore that they came to be suspected, and were finally arrested and conveyed to Halifax for trial. On boarding the bark, her decks, cabin and railings presented every appearance of a recent and sanguinary struggle. Everything was in disorder; fragments of clothing and other articles bestrewed the decks, indicating that the crew had plundered the cargo before taking to the boats. A Government vessel carried the crew to Halifax, where they were arraigned, convicted, and several of them hung.

  As this account suggests, nineteenth-century pirate culture in North America was less like that depicted by Robert Louis Stevenson than like the rough-and-ready society described by Hunter S. Thompson in Hell’s Angels or by Nicholas Pileggi in Wise Guy. We tend to set pirates behind a kind of veil, in a fantastic past. We separate old-time American pirates from the modern variety working off the Horn of Africa, say. The world inhabited by Albert Hicks in Rhode Island, New Orleans, and New York seems as unreal as a costume drama—villains out of Peter Pan, in puffy shirts, who, at any moment, might break into song. In truth, the life led by Hicks and his cohorts was more like that led by modern gangsters and outlaw bikers—the conveyance and the road were different, but the marauding spirit was the same. It was a life of hardship and danger, thrill and escape. They lived that way because they were sick and demented but also because they could not stand to live any other way. Only they knew pure freedom, the pleasure of utterly sating the basest appetite.

  You sense the pleasures of pirate life in the fate of the Saladin. Hicks would have been around twenty-four at the time, not long out of Norwich prison, still new to the wild world of portside taverns and open sea. In his depiction of the mutiny, you recognize the joy of the young gangster blazing through his first days, before the sin accumulated and the whole thing turned to ash. It was about overcoming the captain and getting into the booze, drinking till the mermaids surfaced on the wine-dark sea. It’s telling that, in his last hours, when he should’ve been getting right with God, Hicks was singing not about heaven and hell but about an early act of infamy. In the end, his mind returned to the beginning and to the crime that started the years-long spree.

  * * *

  —

  The date and place of execution had been set by Judge Smalley: Friday, July 13, 1860, Bedloe’s Island. Some say it was this hanging, New York City’s last public execution, that forever cursed “Friday the 13th.”

  The day before, Isaiah Rynders went out to take a look at the island, which is really just a big rock between the Upper and Lower bays. Named for its first European owner, Dutch merchant Isaac Bedloe, the island had been the site of several earlier pirate hangings. It was one of those haunted places where pirates lived and died. (Part of Captain Kidd’s treasure is said to be buried on Bedloe’s, though no one has ever found it.) Rynders walked the perimeter, chose the best spot for an execution, then oversaw the construction of the gallows, which he’d carried on the cutter.

  This particular scaffold had been in use at the Tombs for over a dozen years. According to a press account:

  It consists of two upright posts supported by timbers, into which they are framed and braced at the bottom, and surmounted by the cross-beam at the top. The condemned person is stationed immediately beneath, and at the given signal is lifted suddenly from the ground, by the fall of heavy weights, to a height of several feet. If the cord has not been carefully adjusted with due regard to the compression and rupture of the spinal cord, death takes place by the tedious process of suffocation, the person often apparently conscious for many minutes.

  Rynders chose a gentle hill a few dozen yards from the beach on the east side of the island. From there, the condemned would be able to see the entire theater of his monstrosity: Manhattan, New Jersey, Brooklyn, and the harbor. The fact that this same island, under a new name, has for decades been the home of the Statue of Liberty, needs no additional comment.

  By the end of the day, the marshal was back at his desk, greeting a stream of visitors who’d come for tickets to the hanging. He traded some, sold others, and gifted a few to patrons.

  * * *

  —

  July 12, 1860. The last morning, the last afternoon, and the last night. Long shadows fell over Manhattan. Number eight, like all cells on the Murderers’ Corridor, was without windows or vents. Hicks’s final hours were given over to prison sounds and prison smells, a narrow barred view, a slice of corridor, visitors going past. It’s an oddity of perception: the less you are shown, the more you see and hear. In the distance, so far off that it fades to white, is the hum of the city, horses and wheels, the cacophony of the market, the world as it will be after you are gone.

  Hicks was somber at the end. Thinking and praying, eyes like saucers, he hardly ate. He was an ascetic. His focus was on the next life. His wife, who had been angry, seemed either to forgive or simply to forget. He was her only friend, the father of her child, the author of her problems, her great love. She was allowed to sit with him inside the cell. They huddled together whispering. Some of their exchanges were overheard and reported. They spoke about the future—she had one, he did not. They spoke about money and the child. She would get cash from the confession, which would be published the next morning. Some believed Hicks had hidden additional money, a pirate treasure. He seemed to hint at it. Asked about the situation of his wife, he told a policeman not t
o worry, that she would be “all snug.”

  At five-thirty P.M. Father Duranquet arrived. The final hours, the crisis in the shadow of the rope—this was the priest’s specialty. He was a kind of escort. He led you to the threshold of the next world. He nodded at Mrs. Hicks, then told her it was time to leave. The cell was filled with people: the priest, deputy marshals, prison officials. It did not allow for intimate last words between husband and wife. There was no crying or cursing. Hicks gave her two small books—one was a Bible—took her hand, looked her in the face, and said, “Goodbye.”

  Then again: “Goodbye.”

  She said, “Goodbye, Willie. Willie, goodbye,” turned and left.

  Unescorted, without baby or other family, she went into the street and was quickly swallowed up by the city.

  Hicks spent the rest of the evening with the priest. He asked questions, and Father Duranquet answered honestly. There are some things we know but many more that we do not. He read from Scripture. He was like a holy man in an old movie, long and lean, with thick veiny hands and a pocked face.

  Hicks’s last meal was brought in at eleven P.M., though no one called it that or made it any kind of big deal. No filet, no lobster, just tea and “light refreshment.” He ate and drank, then got onto his straw mattress. It amazed people how calmly he did all this on what had to be the most terrifying night of his life. According to the police, he lay down at midnight and within five minutes fell into “a sleep so sound that even the entrance of the keepers during the night did not wake him.”

  The moon rose and fell. The wind blew from the West, where Simon Hicks was raising a glass to a luckless brother. The stars turned around the sky. A guard woke Hicks at four A.M. Asked how he felt, the prisoner said he “never slept better in all [my] life.” The priest came in when Hicks was dressed. They prayed together. The deputy marshals, those who had experience with condemned men, were waiting for him to fall apart, but it did not happen. “When engaged in prayer with Father Duranquet, his face bore a meek and sorrowful expression,” one said later, “but as soon as the religious ceremonies were concluded his countenance resumed its natural expression of firm indifference.”