Jem Belcher in a more formal moment. The pit bull, Trusty, was given to him by his patron Lord Camelford.
Always a fascination for almost everyone, these men. Yes, Kidd was a privateer. It was a masterpiece of being set up on his trial in England. A privateer being, as a Freeper has already informed us, the nudge, nudge, wink, wink of that era. To plunder ships of a less than friendly country. A safe return was guaranteed by the country issuing the letter of marque. The captain then had to share his spoils with the treasury.
In England the custom was in certain cases, after a man was hanged, to put the corpse in a gibbet. This was an iron cage, where his body rotted. Pirates hung there at Wapping Old Stairs, by the Thames River.
Jerry Abbershaw, highwayman was hanged (1799)and his gibbet was still there six years later. Jem Belcher beat Andrew Gamble for the bare knuckle championship, close by Abbershaw's gibbet. (1805)
Jem Belcher in a more formal moment. The pit bull, Trusty, was given to him by his patron Lord Camelford.
See my post 49 for an interesting book on Capt. Kidd. In reading portions of it he was hanged at the Wapping Stairs along with three others. Kidd’s rope broke and he fell to the ground while the other three dangled above him. He remounted the stairs and was hanged again!
After the lowered them down they were left on the beach to have three tides wash over the bodies. His “boated and pasty” body was then loaded into a small Admiralty boat and carried 25 miles downriver to Tillbury Point on the Thames.
His soggy body was placed in a custom-fit iron cage and hoisted in chains onto the oak gibbet at Tilbury. “For years afterward [people] could see him swaying in the breezes, the Admiralty’s stark warning to anyone contemplating the merry life of piracy.”
