Crime & Punishment In Early Bermuda

The stocks, pillory and ducking stool in King’s Square in St. George are baroque tourist attractions now but few people realise what a gamble it was to live in the days of the Puritan ascendency in Bermuda in the mid-17th century.

As historian Elaine Forman Crane has said, if Bermuda was a “moderate Puritan colony in its youth, by the 1640s … [clerics] were unwavering in their dedication” to the religious faction’s zealous ideals concerning morality purity.

Bermuda’s secular leaders in attempts to placate the radical clerics and their congregations, began to interpret the island’s laws in an increasingly harsh manner during this period — and even for a number of years after the majority of local Puritans were exiled to the Bahamian island of Eleuthera in 1650.

Historical accounts indicate that sentences handed down in Bermuda during this period include:

• John Wood was hanged for telling the congregation in church just exactly what he thought of the Governor.

• Martin Wetherall received 60 lashes on his bare back for having an affair with his 15-year-old maidservant; but as the maid continued to go about her work “according to her accustomed manner, “merry and pleasant”, she also received 40 lashes.

• Paul Dean was hanged for stealing a cheese valued at 20 pennies.

• William Hinson was somewhat luckier; found guilty of stealing two-and-a-half loaves of bread, a small quantity of butter and some cheese was lucky the Governor “inclining to mercy saved his life, and commanded him to be burned in the hand, which was performed on the 6th July, 1626.”

• Robert Hall had his left ear cut off close to his head for perjury.

• Matthew, a slave boy who had broken into a house but took nothing and later escaped from jail, was executed in August, 1664, and “his hedd, by the Governor’s order, [was] severed from his bodie and fixed upon a pole’s end” at Stoke’s Point to deter others.

• A black servant named Black Moll was condemned to death for stealing some safety pins. At the same assizes, William Worth was sentenced to be hanged for falling in love with a pig, but “the country being destitute of an executioner Governor Josiah Forester thought fitt to make ‘Black Moll’ the executioner and reprieved her …” Her first official duty was to execute the unfortunate William Worth.

• Francis Welman was found guilty of blasphemy and sentenced to stand in the pillory with his offense written on paper in capital letters and pinned over his head. He was indeed lucky, because there was much discussion in the court as to whether it would not be better to brand the letter “B” [for blasphemer] on his forehead, have his tongue cut out or preferably have a two-pound weight hung by a hole through his tongue.

But as author and journalist William Drysdale, writing in “The New York Times” in 1890, observed: ” … These harsh sentences do not [actually] show that the Bermudians of that age were any more savage than the rest of mankind.

“Indeed the balance is a little in their favour: for while they were only ducking and flogging, we Americans were burning witches wholesale.”

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Category: All, Crime, History