Add a description of the contents of your gallery, so it will be more visible for other users. Remember that you can also add descriptions to each image.
Saving...
Description saved
Margaret Croke in 1809 became a pirate not on purpose. She was on a ship with her three young daughters. And her husband thought that the family was going to be sent to a debtors' prison. So he killed two crewmen and threw the Captain overboard, then commandeering the vessel. The Captain survived and was able to testify that Margaret hit him when her husband was fighting the Captain. Another crew member testified that Margaret was actually afraid of her husband and attempted to escape. But unfortunately both were accused of piracy. Margaret shouted desperately to the judge, “The lord have mercy on me! What will my poor children do!?” When she refused to enter a plea in court, the judge used an old English legal precedent and locked her in heavy stocks in order to coerce her into talking. In extreme agony and suffering, it didn’t take long for the wretched woman to confess. The authority subjected her to the worst possible punishment for an unrepentant murderess. Margaret was sent to the gallows on a beach near Freshwater Bridge on November 23rd 1809. Nearly paralyzed with fear, she squatted herself down in front of a massive crowd, waiting for her final fate. The crowd shouted, she felt humiliated as they insulted her. The executioner put the noose around the dying woman's neck, she took the last deep breath, then followed by the strong burning and choking sensation, slowly, slowly tighten, then suffocated... According to the Murder Act 1751, which stipulated that "in no case whatsoever shall the body of any murderer be suffered to be buried"; the cadaver was either to be publicly dissected or left "hanging in chains". After a slow and painful hanging, the convict’s body was then hung in an iron cage on Halifax provincial prison at Point Pleasant for nearly three decades. When the carrion finally deteriorated, what was left of the body was never taken down. None of her daughters were willing to collect her remains. They were sent to workhouse after her execution. The public display of Margaret's corpse subjected her daughters to public ridicule. The girls spent their difficult childhood in shame and abomination of their unfit mother. People seldom heard the three daughters mention Margaret under anything other than "our bitch mom“. Finally, in a storm her skeleton blew to pieces and washed into the sea. Many years later, her skull was picked up at the tide line and preserved in the Halifax museum 1844. Today the gruesome artifact still draws visitors who morbidly want to see the skull of the first female criminal convicted of privacy in Canada. 25 years after Margaret's execution, the use of gibbeting it was formally repealed by statute in 1834. Because no other woman had been sentenced to piracy since her case. She is also notoriously remembered as the only convicted female pirate in Canadian history, although she never intended to be one.
Saving...
Send this link to a friend
