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mate. Making off with the money on board, they grounded the ship off the coast of Long Island and headed ashore. Three of the conspirators drowned before making it to land. Gibbs and Walmsley were soon arrested and fingered as the ringleaders by one of their colleagues who seemed unhappy with his share of the stolen loot.
    At the trial, Walmsley, who had been the ship’s steward, seemed to make the case for his innocence, pointing to racial prejudice. “I have often understood that there is a great deal of difference in respect of color, and I have seen it in this Court,” he testified. Nevertheless, on April 22, 1831, Gibbs and Walmsley, according to one account, “paid the forfeit which the laws demand from those who perpetrate such crimes as they have been convicted of.” Speaking to the gathered crowd at Gibbet Island, Gibbs addressed the crowd from the gallows for nearly a half hour. Both men acknowledged the justice of their death sentences. Rather than being dropped from a scaffold, the two men were killed by being slung up on a rope, on whose other end was tied heavy weights. While Walmsley died almost immediately, Gibbs suffered a much slower and more painful death because the knot on his neck had not been properly placed.
    Their dead bodies swung on the gallows for nearly an hour, after which they were handed over to surgeons for autopsies. Before the surgeons took the bodies, a sculptor took a cast of Gibbs’s head so that phrenologists could “examine minutely the skull of one of the greatest murderers ever known.” Phrenologists believed that measuring the size and shape of skulls would reveal the character and mental capacity of the individual.
    The island’s last execution occurred on June 21, 1839, when New Yorkers watched a pirate named Cornelius Wilhelms die. It would be their last chance to witness such a horrific spectacle at Gibbet Island, although two decades later some ten thousand New Yorkers, most in boats, would come to nearby Bedloe’s Island to watch the hanging of pirate Albert Hicks.
    By the end of the nineteenth century, pirate hangings were a thing of the past and both Bedloe’s Island and Gibbet Island would be transformed from their earlier dubious history into America’s mythic historical pantheon. By then, on the site of the gallows from which Albert Hicks was hanged, would stand the base of the Statue of Liberty. Gibbet Island would shed its notorious name and history and revert back to a previous name: Ellis Island. By the late 1800s, it would attract many more people than had ever come to witness a pirate execution.
    N EW Y ORK C ITY IS an archipelago, a Philippines on the Hudson River, the handiwork of a glacier thousands of years ago. It is an island empire consisting of nearly six hundred miles of shoreline. Only one borough—the Bronx—is actually attached to the mainland. There are some forty islands in addition to Manhattan, Staten Island, and Long Island. These minor islands are nestled in the bays, rivers, harbor, and other waterways that encase the city. One of the largest, Roosevelt Island, is a city within a city, 2 miles long and 800 feet wide, with a population of over eight thousand. Just south of its tip is one of the city’s smallest islands, measuring just 100 feet by 200 feet and named for former secretary of the United Nations U Thant.
    Many of the city’s islands once served important social functions and some still do. As the city grew northward up the island of Manhattan, along with it came the pesky social problems that afflict any budding metropolis. Under such circumstances, these islands became cordons sanitaires , in the words of writer Phillip Lopate, “where the criminal, the insane, the syphilitic, the tubercular, the orphaned, the destitute . . . were quarantined.” It is no surprise that they were also handy places for pirate hangings.
    Among these exile islands were Hart Island, which became the city’s largest potter’s field, the last