The threat of piratical attack on the trading posts was soon spread abroad by men returning from the Penobscot and then “perils did abound as thick as thought could make them.” Late in November the authorities in the Massachusetts Bay sent out a pinnace with twenty armed men to join with four small pinnaces and shallops and about forty men already sent out from Piscataqua and the united expedition in time reached Pemaquid where it lay windbound for nearly three weeks. This was the first hostile fleet fitted out in New England and the first naval demonstration made in the colonies. Samuel Maverick who lived on Noddle’s Island, now East Boston, was the “husband and merchant of the pinnace sent out to take Dixie Bull.”
The pirate shallop was nowhere to be found and after two months of winter weather the hostile expedition returned home. Early in February, 1633, three men who had served under Bull and deserted, reached their homes. They claimed that he had sailed eastward and gone over to the French. Governor Winthrop, two years later, repeated this version of his disappearance, but Capt. Roger Clap of Dorchester, relates in his “Memoirs,” that Bull at last safely reached England. Whatever his fortune or fate he disappears from New England leaving behind him the badly earned fame of having been the first pirate captain in these waters.
Dixey Bull’s captures do not seem to have been followed by any other piratical venture in New England for some years. Shipping sailing to and from England was obliged to run the gauntlet of the Dutch and French privateers and the so-called pirates sailing out of Flushing and Ostend made several captures that effected the fortunes of the Boston traders. Nov. 12, 1644, the Great and General Court of Massachusetts granted a commission to Capt. Thomas Hawkins of Boston “to take any ship that shall assault him, or any other that hee shall have certeine knowledge to have taken either ship or ships of ours, or to take any ship that hath commission to make prize of any of ours.” Fourteen days later he sailed for Spain in the “Seafort,” of four hundred tons, a ship that he had just built and which was loaded with bolts, tobacco, etc. As he neared the Spanish coast very early one morning he thought he saw some Turkish vessels and preparing for attack stood towards them. Unhappily the ship soon went aground about two miles from the shore and nineteen were drowned. Captain Hawkins was a London shipbuilder who came to New England in 1632 and engaged in shipbuilding and commerce. It was his grandson Thomas, who was tried in Boston in 1690 for piracy as is told elsewhere in this volume.
At the Nov. 12, 1644 session of the General Court, a commission was also granted to Capt. Thomas Bredcake for twelve months, to take Turkish pirates, thereby meaning the Algerines who were a constant danger to shipping trading with Spain. John Hull, the Boston mint-master, records in his diary in 1671 that William Foster, one of his neighbors, had been taken by the Turks as he was going to Bilboa with fish. He afterwards was redeemed and reached home safely in November, 1673.
Capt. Thomas Cromwell of Boston, master of the ship “Separation,” obtained a commission in 1645 from the Earl of Warwick, the Lord Admiral of the Long Parliament, and after capturing several rich prizes in the West Indies, came into Massachusetts Bay and was forced by a strong northwest wind to take refuge in Plymouth Harbor where he remained for two weeks. There were about eighty men in his crew and they “did so distemper themselves with drink as they became like madd-men; ... they spente and scattered a great deale of money among the people, and yet more sine than money.”[23]
From Plymouth, he sailed for Boston where he presented Governor Winthrop with a sedan that he had captured. It had been sent by the Viceroy of Mexico as a present to his sister and by capture reached Puritan hands. Captain Cromwell had formerly been known about Boston as a common sailor and on his appearance possessed of a great fortune, the Governor offered him for his use one of the best houses in the town. But the captain refused and took lodgings in “a poor thatched house” saying that in his former “mean estate that poor man entertained him, when others would not, and therefore he would not leave him now, when he might do him good.” Governor Winthrop says of Cromwell:—“He was ripped out of his mother’s belly, and never sucked, nor saw father nor mother, nor they him.”[24] He died in Boston in 1649, and by will gave to the town “my six bells.”
Another Boston man who sailed under a commission from the Long Parliament was Capt. Edward Hull, the brother of John Hull, the mint-master who made the “pine tree shillings.” His vessel, the barque “Swallow frigott,” was owned by his father and brother and he had sent them word that he was engaged in a design for the good of the English nation and for the glory of God. He sailed from Boston in the spring of 1653, and captured several vessels from the French and the Dutch and while in Rhode Island waters sent some of his men to Block Island with orders to seize the trading stock in the house of Capt. Kempo Sebada, which afterwards was valued at nearly one hundred pounds. He then sold the bark and dividing the plunder went for England. Sebada afterwards brought suit for damages against the Hulls, the owners of the bark; but they claimed that the vessel was engaged in privateering wholly without their knowledge and consent and the court gave the verdict to them. It is interesting to note that Edward Hull is styled a “pirate” in the court records and that his father deposed that when he learned of his son’s exploits he did not protest for fear that he would never see him or the vessel again.
Rev. Cotton Mather, the pastor of the North Church, Boston, in his “History of Some Criminals Executed in this Land,” relates the story of the seizure of the ship “Antonio,” in 1672, off the Spanish coast. She was owned in England and her crew quarrelled with the master and at last rose and turned him adrift in the ship’s longboat with a small quantity of provisions. With him went some of the officers of the ship. The mutineers, or pirates as they were characterized at the time, then set sail for New England and on their arrival in Boston they were sheltered and for a time concealed by Major Nicholas Shapleigh, a merchant in Charlestown. He also was accused of aiding them in their attempt to get away. Meanwhile, “by a surprizing providence of God, the Master, with his Afflicted Company, in the Long-boat, also arrived; all, Except one who Dyed of the Barbarous Usage.
“The Countenance of the Master, was now become Terrible to the Rebellious Men, who, though they had Escaped the Sea, yet Vengeance would not suffer them to Live a Shore. At his Instance and Complaint, they were Apprehended; and the Ringleaders of this Murderous Pyracy, had sentence of Death Executed on them, in Boston.”
The three men who were executed were William Forrest, Alexander Wilson and John Smith. As for Major Shapleigh; he was fined five hundred pounds which amount was afterwards abated to three hundred pounds because “his estate not being able to beare it.”