After Spriggs and Shipton made their captures in the Bay of Honduras on Dec. 23, 1724, but little is known as to their later movements. In April, 1725, a captain arriving at New York brought the report that Spriggs was yet roving and had five vessels in his fleet. Early in May, 1725, Captain MacKarty reached Boston from Jamaica, and reported that not long before he had spoken a pink off the South Carolina coast that had been taken by Spriggs, who was in a ship mounting twelve guns with a crew of thirty-five men. Several vessels had been captured and burned or sunk and the crews had been put aboard the pink and sent away. The master of the pink told Captain MacKarty that Spriggs was using his prisoners barbarously and that he threatened to be on the New England coast very soon after.[150] The threatened raid did not materialize and Spriggs and Shipton both dropped out of sight and we now have no information as to what became of them save the rumor that reached Boston a year later that they both had been marooned by their men and “were got among the Musketoo Indians.”[151] And this may have been their fate, for Spriggs’ quartermaster, one Philip Lyne, was in command of a pirate sloop mounting ten carriage guns and sixteen swivels and carrying forty men which was making captures on the banks off the Newfoundland coast in the summer of 1725. This sloop had been one of Spriggs’ consorts on the South Carolina coast earlier in the year and appears to have deserted him. On June 30th, Lyne took the ship “Thomasine,” Capt. Samuel Thorogood, bound for London from Boston, on which were four passengers and after plundering and destroying most of the ship’s lading and forcing five of the crew to sign his Articles, he allowed the ship to go free with only a small store of stinking provisions and a little water.[152] Lyne also took a Rhode Island sloop, Captain Casey, which was burned and the master and men were forced to go aboard the pirate vessel which then headed for the Cape Verde islands. Lyne probably followed the example of Low and Lowther and from there set a course for the Guiana coast, for in October, 1725 he was captured by two sloops fitted out at Curacao. During the engagement a number of the pirates were killed but Lyne and four others were “hanged by the neck until dead,” by the Dutch authorities on the island, to the great satisfaction of all who had ever met them on the high seas.[153]
FOOTNOTES
[136] See chapter on Philip Ashton.
[137] A short sword. Sometimes a rapier is called a tuck.
[138] “Sweating” generally was used to force information as to the location of concealed valuables.
[139] Boston Gazette, Apr. 20, 1724.
[140] Johnson, History of the Pirates, London, 1726.
[141] Boston News-Letter, July 23, 1724.
[142] Boston News-Letter, May 21, 1724.
[143] Boston News-Letter, Apr. 15, 1725.