South Carolinians came to see the dashing Stede Bonnet's execution in 1718. He begged for a reprieve, but the governor refused. After death, pirates' corpses were displayed to discourage others from considering a life of crime. Blackbeard's head hung from a sloop's bowsprit. The tide washed Captain Kidd's chained corpse three times, before it was taken down, covered with tar, and displayed in an iron gibbet at Tilbury Point on the Thames.
British Admiralty courts tried maritime cases, including those involving pirates. Most pirate trials were held at Old Bailey's. Before and after their trials, pirates in London were imprisoned in Marshalsea Prison, but a few, including Kidd, spent their final days in Newgate Prison. A mile downstream from the Tower of London at Wapping on the north bank of the Thames stood England's Execution Dock. Makeshift gallows on the shore identified the low-tide mark. Here Kidd and other pirates were hanged and afterwards, a cycle of three tides flowed over their corpses before being removed. This stressed that the crimes they committed fell under the Admiralty's jurisdiction. Later, the bodies were either buried in unmarked graves or dissected. The more notorious, however, were tarred and hung in a custom-made gibbet to warn other seafarers of the fate that awaited them if they chose to turn pirate.
When the Admiralty changed its laws to allow for the prosecution of pirates in any British port, hangings occurred at Port Royal, Charleston, Williamsburg, Newport, and Boston, among other places. Between 1716 and 1726 over four hundred pirates were hanged. In 1723, at the height of the war against piracy, eighty-two died. In the 1600s, some believed the only pirates executed were captains and other ringleaders of the crew. During the first twenty-eight years of the Eighteenth Century, however, that changed.
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