No one in the prison had anything to say about impossibilities that might have been heard or seen before the dawn.
An hour or so after that same dawn, upon one of those raw June british mornings suggestive of the month of March, a solemn procession left London’s Newgate Prison. At the heart of the grim train emerging from those iron gates there rolled a tall, heavy, open cart in which rode three doomed men, all standing erect with arms chained behind them. Their three sets of leg irons had been struck off only an hour ago, by the prison blacksmith. Once out of the prison gate, the cart, departing sharply from its customary route, turned east. These prisoners had been convicted by the Admiralty Court, and such did not at that time “go west” with the ordinary felons to hang on Tyburn Tree. Instead, a special fate awaited them.
Astride his horse at the very head of the procession was the Deputy Marshal of the Admiralty. Red-faced and grave, this functionary bore in prominent display the Silver Oar, almost big enough to row with, symbol of that court’s authority over human activity on the high seas, even to the most distant portions of the globe. Next came the elegant coach carrying the Marshal himself, resplendent in his traditional uniform, surrounded by his coachmen wearing their distinctive livery. After these, on horseback, rode a number of City officials, one or two of considerable prominence. but whatever their station, few amid the steadily growing throng of onlookers had eyes for them, or for anyone but the central figures in the morning’s drama.
The high ceremonial cart in the middle of the parade came lumbering along deliberately upon great wooden wheels, which, though freshly greased, squeaked mildly. The three prisoners standing more or less erect in the middle of the cart had their backs to one another, and with their arms still in irons had little choice but to lean on one another for mutual support. The executioner–Thomas Turlis in that year–and his assistant rode standing in the cart beside the prisoners, and a Newgate guard walked beside each of the great slowturning wheels.
The cart was followed immediately by a substantial force of marshal’s men and sheriff’s officers, mostly afoot. These walking men had no trouble keeping up; those who calculated the time of departure from the prison had assumed that only a modest pace would be possible. The narrow, cobbled streets made progress for a large vehicle slow at best, and today as usual the throng of onlookers grew great enough to stop the death-cart altogether several times before the place of execution could be reached.
All three of the men who were riding to be hanged today had been convicted of the same act of piracy. The tallest of the condemned, the only one with anything exceptional in his nature or his appearance, was Alexander Ilyich Kulakov, red-haired and green-eyed, rawboned but broad-shouldered and powerful, his red beard straggling over his scarred cheeks and jaw. Kulakov was Russian, but at the moment nationality did not matter. His britannic Majesty’s justice was about to claim all three lives impartially–none of them had any influential friends in London–quite the opposite.
The morning’s procession carried its victims east, as I have said. A little over two miles east of Newgate Prison, passing just north of the great dome of St. Paul’s, through Cornhill and Whitechapel, past Tower Hill and close past the pale gloomy bulk of the squat Tower itself, to Wapping, a district largely composed of docks and taverns, nestled into a broad curve formed by the north bank of the Thames.
And with every rod of progress achieved by the doomed men and their escort, it seemed that the crowds increased. Last night and this morning word had spread, as it always did, of a scheduled hanging. Hundreds went to London’s various scaffolds every year, but despite the relatively commonplace nature of the event the route of the procession was thickly lined with spectators. As often as not, when the high cart stalled in traffic, folk leaned from windows or trees to offer the condemned jugs or bottles or broken cups of liquor.
Kulakov’s usual craving for strong drink seemed to have deserted him. He stared past the reaching arms and what they offered, and ignored the excited faces; but his two fellow prisoners did their best, even with their arms bound, to take advantage of the gift. The executioners, with a practical eye to making their own job easier, assisted the pair to drink, now and again fortifying themselves from the same jug or bottle.
One of the Russian captain’s former shipmates was well-nigh insensible with drink before the ride was over.
It was the other of the two English prisoners who, in that age when death was so often a social function, had a small handful of relatives present; these–weeping, expostulating, or stony-faced according to their several temperaments–tagged after the cart, and were jostled to the rear by the sheriff’s men.
The authorities had long practice with such processions from Newgate; and this enabled them to time the arrival of the cart at Execution Dock to coincide almost precisely with the hour of low water in the tidal Thames, this being the only time when the gallows was readily accessible.
For hundreds of years, pirates and mutineers had been executed on this spot, while for occasional variety a captain or mate would be dispatched for murderous brutality directed at his own crew. On this morning, several of the fruits of last week’s executions were still to be seen, each hanging in chains on its own post. Gulls and weather had already reduced the dead faces to eyeless, discolored leather and protruding bone, raking the passing ships with empty stares. Their continued presence was intended to impress the thousands of seamen on those ships as examples of the Admiralty’s long arm and exact justice.
The posts displaying these veteran
