“This Sanguinary Monster”*: The Pirate Gibbs, pt. 2

The recent high-profile acts of piracy in Somalia have highlighted the divide between the reality of piracy and our romanticized notions of it. But the desire to glamorize the swashbuckling while ignoring the blood and guts is nothing new**. A New York Times article of 1892 cataloging various famous pirates begins, “It cannot but be a source of regret to every true lover of the picturesque that pirates are no more and piracy has lost its popularity. What tremendous fellows they must have been!” The article includes a paragraph on Charles Gibbs, who is described as having a “soft spot for the fair sex” and being “remarkable for quoting the Bible with great frequency and fluency.” Describing Gibbs’ conversion from grocer to pirate, the author asks “who wouldn’t rather be a gallant pirate with a smart vessel and a picked crew than a grocer in Ann Street, near the Tin Pot?”

The previous post offered an overview of Gibbs’ career as offered in a single one of many published accounts of his life and death, Mutiny and Murder: Confession of Charles Gibbs. This post will highlight a few of the other versions of this popular tale that were offered to the public.***

In The Annals of Murder Thomas McDade lists 13 individual editions prior to 1900 offering an account of Gibbs’ life (Although one particular item makes the count a little difficult.). All those that are dated were published in 1831 or 1832. The Historical Society holds seven of those listed as well as two that are not recorded in Annals of Murder. The latter two imprints**** are apparently unique to the Historical Society; no other copies are listed either in OCLC or a number of international library catalogs.

While not unique, one item—Confessions and Execution of the Pirates, Gibbs & Wansley—is by far the most graphically and bibliographically unusual. This is how McDade describes the book’s physical construction*****:

1 p.l., [2]-32 [i.e. 8] p.; 16, 32 [i.e. 8] p.: total 32p.

“I.e.” usually indicates something out of the ordinary, and this publication offers plenty of that. The item appears to be a sammelband made up of three separate publications, as indicated in the collational formula above, but even that is uncertain.

The first eight pages offer a blow-by-blow account of the execution itself, with a strong emphasis on the penitent attitude of the pirates as they faced their death. Thomas Wansley, Gibbs companion and clearly described and depicted as a black pirate in this publication, had apparently been writing poetry in his cell:

On the verso of the poem is the following illustration, just in case we’ve begun to sympathize with the penitent and poetic buccaneers:

These eight pages function as a self-contained, coherent unit, and this is echoed in their physical makeup: they are a single four-leaf gathering.

The next gathering begins with the image used at the beginning of this post, a title page with vertical text and a full-length portrait of Gibbs. As you can see from the image, this copy was published after the execution, as it describes Gibbs as the pirate “who was executed on the 22nd of April”. Another variant state of the work also in the Library’s holdings is composed of a nearly identical text (the first and last words of each page match) and a slightly, but significantly, different title page. Rather than “Who was executed,” this title page reads “To be Executed.” The only other significant difference is that the publisher’s name is misspelled as “Christitn Brown” rather than “Christian Brown,” possibly providing evidence that the pre-execution version was offered with a hastily put-together title page. In either case, the two variants bracket the moment of execution in a concrete way (Gibbs is alive for the first and not for the second.).

The third and final gathering is a work titled “A Visit to the Condemned Criminals, Gibbs and Wansley, By a Layman.” (It’s unclear whether “layman” in this context indicates that the author is not a professional pirate or not a professional jail-visitor.). Like the first gathering, it is of 4 leaves, and like the first gathering it includes poetry and an image on a page incorrectly numbered “32″:******

And on the preceding page, this illustration of the ultimate end for pirates (or, perhaps, vampires):

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* The description of Gibbs used at the beginning of the narration of his execution in Horrible Confessions of the Pirate and Murderer.

** A recent New Yorker article reviews the legitimate economic and political aspects behind a favorable view of piracy: Caleb Crain, “Bootylicious: What Do the Pirates of Yore Tell Us about Their Modern Counterparts?”  The New Yorker, 2 September 2009.

***Call numbers and titles:

• Vault F 2162 .G44 H8: Horrible Confessions of the Pirate and Murderer; Charles Gibbs, alias James Jeffreys. [s.l.]: Printed for the Purchasers, April 1831.
• Vault F 2161 .G44 C74:  Confession of Charles Gibbs the Pirate. To Be Executed the 22d of April, 1831. New York: Printed and Sold by Christitn [Christian] Brown, n.d.
• Vault F 2161 .G44 L34: The Confessions of Charles Gibbs, the Pirate, Who Acknowledges that He Has Assisted in the Murder of Four Hundred Human Beings! [s.l.]: Printed for the Purchasers, 1831.
  bound with:
  Last Dying Words and Confession of Charles Gibbs, The Pirate. [s.l.]: [s.n.], 1831.
• Vault F 2161 .G44 C748: Confessions and Execution of the Pirates, Gibbs & Wansley. New York: Printed and Sold by Christian Brown, [n.d.]. Includes McDade nos. 337, 342 / 345.

**** Horrible Confessions and The Confession of Charles Gibbs, the Pirate, Who Acknowledges . . . are the unique copies. Oddly, both copies’ imprints state, “Printed for the Purchasers,” a curious attribution that seems, based on searches in WorldCat and the ESTC, to have been used solely in the US during a period from 1775-1831.

***** McDade’s response: “This kind of publication taxes the resources of the bibliographer.”

****** For the numerologico-bibliographers out there, yes, this is a 32-page (16 leaf) item with a central gathering of 8 leaves surrounded by two 4 leaf gatherings, pages 8 and 32 both marked “32″, even though the preceding pages are “5″ and “7″.

“400 Human Beings!”: The Pirate Gibbs, pt. 1

This, the second of the summer’s pirate-themed blog posts, centers on the brutal pirate, Charles Gibbs. A Rhode Island native, Gibbs started out on a life of crime early (he “became addicted to vices uncommon to youths of his age”) and then never let up. After an impressive career with the US Navy (or so claimed Gibbs; doubt has been cast on much of his story), Gibbs tried his hand at the grocery business in Boston. After failing at that occupation, he returned to the sea and soon found himself engaged in a mutiny, which led without much delay into a life of piracy. Eventually captured, Gibbs was hung in New York on 22 April 1831.*

The story was a popular one from the outset: OCLC lists dozens of editions of Gibbs’ narrative published within a few years of the hanging, most following a similar pattern and reprinting practically identical texts. Many now survive in only a few copies; some are unique. The RIHS Library holds a number of these imprints, some of which will be discussed in the next post, but this post centers on Mutiny and Murder: Confession of Charles Gibbs, published by Israel Smith in 1831.** The first image below is of the book’s title page and frontispiece (disposing of a body overboard):

The lengthy subtitle offers a convenient overview of Gibbs’ story–which included an interlude of marriage and  living “like a gentleman”–and rises to the crescendo of “the murder of nearly 400 human beings!”

Below is a depiction of one of the more barbarous moments in a barbarous life: the pirates dropping a woman who had been treated brutally over the rail:

This image has a lot to recommend it: the stylized, scalloped waves set against the patterns of the sky and sails; the nautically- and perspectivally-challenged depiction of the ship; and the pathos of the (apparently foot-less) victim of the “horrid transaction”. But its greatest virtue might be the faces of the villains. First, a man who seems—if it’s not reading too much into a dozen or so lines cut into a woodblock to depict a face—hardened to the life of killing women and dropping them overboard:

His partner, on the other hand, doesn’t display the same sangfroid about the deed. (Gibbs himself claimed to have interceded on the woman’s behalf; perhaps the illustrator is attempting to capture that ambivalence.):

Mutiny and Murder, as is the case with many of the accounts, is clear to offer a moral to the story, which is made explicit in this case through an “Address to Youth,” which is dramatically placed between the account of Gibbs’ sentencing and his execution. (Another edition*** features an “Addenda, by a Lady,” which does the same job.) The book traces the seeds of Gibbs’ development to his youth (“he was refractory, ungovernable, and disobedient to his parents!”) and finds him penitent in his final moments. Considering his sins Gibbs says “I thought of my good and affectionate parents and of their Godlike advice” (p. 10). Though the narrative is made up mostly of violence and various other forms of anti-social behavior, it’s also scattered with notes of remorse, much in the manner of Hollywood gangster movies that end with the bad guys dead or in jail. Under the guise of “learning from their mistakes” we’re allowed to enjoy the violence and bad behavior.

In its moralizing and publication of confession, this account of Gibbs’ life and death hearkens back to the earlier tradition of the published accounts of the Ordinary of Newgate in England in the 17th and 18th centuries (available through the fantastic Proceedings of the Old Bailey website****).

The next post will take a look at some of the many other publications of the story of Gibbs’ life.

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* Read the full narrative online at  http://books.google.com/books?id=BJQqAAAAMAAJ (or stop by the library to view a real copy).

** Vault F 2161 .G44 M99 c.2

*** Last Dying Words and Confession . . . (Vault F 2161 .G44 L34, item 2)

**** The advanced search, which allows one to search by crime or by punishment provides hours of entertainment. Ever wanted to find the stories of people branded on the cheek for the crime of pocket picking? Now you can. (Martha Bromley seems to have been the only one so unfortunate in that particular manner.) And for more true crime stories, see the Harvard Law School’s Dying Speeches & Bloody Murder website, which makes digital copies of crime broadsides available.

Robots in Providence

The item described here answers the age-old question of what to do on a Saturday afternoon. In this case, the Saturday afternoon in question is November 19, 1796 at 3:00 PM. And the entertainment is a demonstration of a “Chinese automaton figure”.

Depicted above is a broadside from our graphics collection (Broadsides, 1796)*, which advertises the exhibition. An automaton is essentially a robot, and people have been building automata for centuries, ranging from programmable robots of the 1st century BCE, through a medieval floating robot band to automata that are still produced today (including the Chuck E Cheese animatronic animals).

In this case, the automaton performed “feats on the rope”—which, judging from the woodcut illustration, included playing a triangle on a tightrope: seemingly an impressive accomplishment for a robot even today. All this would be exciting enough in its own right, but this performance gains extra intrigue by showcasing a “Chinese” automaton. In 1796, it’s likely that the average Rhode Islander would never have seen anyone from China before. In fact, Chinese settlement in Rhode Island wouldn’t begin in earnest until late in the nineteenth century: the 1865 census reported only a single Chinese resident in the entire state.** As Lena Reynoso points out, “the first ‘foreigners’ exhibited in America often had no pulse.”***

Pieces of ephemeral advertising like this also offer a unique view into the social anxieties of their time. Note, for instance, that four separate rooms were to be provided in Mr. Thurber’s Tavern, ensuring that “Ladies or select Companies will be less incommoded” and that a police officer will be in attendance “to keep good Order.” Apparently the promoter, “Mr. Cressin”—who also toured the country with a pair of monkeys named Gibonne and Coco—was forced to relocate his show from Newburyport’s rowdy wharf area.****

And what was the cost of this entertaining afternoon? There are a number of ways to measure the relative worth of a 1796 dollar to a 2009 dollar, and they give a range of values for what that $.25 would be worth today:

• $4.20: A little less than today’s matinée movie ticket, if measured by the most literal scale, the Consumer Price Index.
• $68.99: A discount ticket to a Broadway show, if measured as a portion of the typical wage of an unskilled worker.
• $8,601.29: Buying a plasma widescreen TV and home theater sound system, if measured as a relative share of the Gross Domestic Product.

Throwing out the high value, it’s clear that a visit to the automaton exhibition would have been an expensive, if not prohibitively so, afternoon or evening of entertainment. But probably worth every penny.

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* Alden, #1506

** See Patrick T. Conley, Rhode Island Ethnic Heritage Fact Sheets. Providence: Rhode Island Publications Society, 1980. pp. 34-6.

*** Lena Reynoso, “Tourism, Bodies and Display in America 1769-1900.”  Early America Review (Winter/Spring 2008). http://www.earlyamerica.com/review/2008_winter_spring/popular-american-amusements.html. (Part of Archiving Early America, an ad-supported website)

**** Scott C. Martin, Cultural change and the market revolution in America, 1789-1860. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005.