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Island two years later. But the Hill case was decidedly different from that of Jones. Both men were black, but while Jones was a freeman and a sailor, Hill was a twenty-four-year-old Maryland slave arrested after an unsuccessful escape attempt. Frederick Douglass, once a Baltimore slave, described what happened to Maryland slaves who misbehaved: “If a slave was convicted of any high misdemeanor, became unmanageable, or evinced a determination to run away, he was brought immediately here, severely whipped, put on board the sloop, carried to Baltimore, and sold to Austin Woolfolk, or some other slave-trader, as a warning to the slaves remaining.” That is what happened to William Hill.
    On the night of April 20, 1826, Austin Woolfolk placed Hill and thirty other slaves bound in chains on the Decatur . From Baltimore, the ship would sail for New Orleans, where the slaves would be sold off to work on the large plantations of the Deep South. Rather than accept their fate, Jones and a number of other slaves managed to free themselves, take control of the ship, and throw the ship’s captain and first mate overboard. It is a tale familiar to readers of Herman Melville’s story “Benito Cereno” or viewers of the movie Amistad .
    The slave mutineers were captured, but only Hill was convicted for the crime. He felt no malice toward the murdered captain, but said he and his fellow mutineers were only seeking their freedom. In fact, he felt so bad about his role in the captain’s death that he wished that he had jumped overboard himself rather than kill another man.
    On December 15, 1826, Hill was sent to Gibbet Island to face death. According to one account, “All the way in the Steam Boat, to his place of Execution, he appeared to be perfectly resigned to God; and continually praying and singing—On his arriving at the island, he was showed his Coffin; he said that was only for my body not for my Soul; that has gone to GLORY, with my beloved Saviour.”
    Present at the execution was Austin Woolfolk. While on the gallows, Hill spied the slave trader and in his final words on Earth forgave Woolfolk and said he hoped they would meet again in heaven. In response, Woolfolk cursed the doomed man saying he was going to get what he deserved. Members of the crowd, shocked at Woolfolk’s outburst, quieted him down. Then, the slave-turned-pirate was “launched into eternity.”
    More executions followed. The most famous were the dual hangings of pirates Charles Gibbs and Thomas Walmsley in 1831. On a spring day in April, the harbor was again filled with boats whose passengers badly wanted to witness the executions. Gibbet Island was “crowded with men and women and children—and on the waters around, were innumerable boats, laden with passengers, from the steamboat and schooner, down to the yawl and canoe.” In the chaos of the crowded harbor, a few boats were overturned.
    Confusion reigned. The Commercial Advertiser noted that it had received a call from a man who had given one of his clerks the day off to watch the execution and that clerk had not been heard from since. The Workingman’s Advocate also ran a notice about the mysterious disappearance of a thirty-six-year-old man who left his house the day of the hangings and never returned. His friends assumed that he went to the harbor to witness the executions and drowned. It is unclear whether either man actually drowned or whether they were just playing hooky from work, but an unidentified dead body was found the following day floating up to the Coffee House Slip at the foot of Wall Street.
    Gibbs was a white man in his midthirties, reputedly from a respectable Rhode Island family. By one exaggerated account, Gibbs and his men were responsible for capturing more than twenty ships and murdering almost four hundred people. Gibbs, Walmsley, a twenty-threeyear-old stout mulatto, and their accomplices took control of the ship Vineyard in November 1830, killing the captain and first