A version of this article originally appeared in Richmond magazine in August 2009.
An illustration of the Crawford pirates tossing their victims overboard (Image courtesy The Mariners’ Museum and Park)
Richmond may seem an unlikely venue for the trial of three pirates who, once convicted, were hanged — two of them twice — and then buried, exhumed and electrocuted.
Witnesses for the prosecution included two of the three survivors remaining from the 11 passengers and crew on the brig Crawford, which was seized by the brigands in the Caribbean. By the time of the trial, their ringleader, Alexander Tardy, was already dead and had been decapitated. His head was carried to Washington, D.C., where phrenologists sought to determine the cause of his villainy by examining the shape and contours of his skull.
The court convened at 10 a.m. on Monday, July 16, 1827, in the Virginia Capitol’s Old Hall of the House of Delegates. U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, sitting also on the federal circuit bench in Richmond, presided. The trial prompted crowds, making it difficult to maintain order.
The courtroom audience didn’t perceive the accused — Felix Barbeito, José “Courro” Morando and José "Pepe" Cesares — as ferocious enough for the indictments of piracy and the murders of Capt. Henry Brightman and most of his passengers and crew.
They blamed Tardy.
The appointed defense team included Richmond legal luminary Benjamin Watkins Leigh (as in Leigh Street), a state legislator and future U.S. senator. Robert Stanard, later a Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals judge, stood as the representative for the United States.
The Crawford's fair-haired and engaging first mate, Edmund Dobson, his arm in a sling, gave the four-day trial’s most compelling testimony. The fateful trip from Providence, Rhode Island, was the new ship’s third voyage, a run to Mantazas, Cuba, to pick up rum, coffee, sugar and molasses for New York City.
Tardy had a habit of posing as a physician and mixing arsenic into the sugar ration of passenger ships, after which he would steal from the ill and dying. He blamed the dastardly deeds on the ships’ African American cooks.
Tardy evaded pursuit by fleeing to Cuba, where he assembled a trio of Spanish cutthroats to hijack a ship to Europe. In Mantazas, they charmed their way on board the Crawford, with Tardy again impersonating a physician.
The Crawford’s Black cook, Stephen Gibbs, foiled the first poisoning attempt by scraping off Tardy’s "native pepper." The second effort caused vomiting fits resembling seasickness. Tardy’s Spanish companions favored the gruesome expedience of murder. They began at 1:40 a.m. on June 1 by cutting the captain’s throat and killing other crew members.
At daybreak, the survivors of this horror — Dobson, Gibbs and a Frenchman, Ferdinand Ginoulhiac — were forced to clean blood off the deck and sails. The drunken Spaniards celebrated.
Tardy demanded that Dobson navigate the Crawford to Hamburg, Germany — or die. They’d provision in Norfolk, Virginia, because Tardy’s infamy made it impossible to anchor at closer ports. The hijackers disguised the brig by removing its name and converting the U.S. flag into the Spanish ensign.
Tardy had a habit of posing as a physician and mixing arsenic into the sugar ration of passenger ships, after which he would steal from the ill and dying.
By evening on June 12, the Crawford was within 100 yards of Old Point Comfort on the Virginia coast. Dobson, under the guise of readying an away boat for Tardy, grabbed an oar and began paddling to shore. He reached the military contingent overseeing the construction of Fortress Monroe and told his story to veteran Capt. Nathaniel G. Dana, who dispatched nine men commanded by Lt. Robert Anderson. The young officer’s courage suited him well some years later when Anderson commanded Fort Sumter during its bombardment by Confederate artillery arrayed along the harbor of Charleston, S.C.
The Spaniards escaped using a boat somehow liberated from a nearby schooner. Tardy declared that he’d not be taken alive. According to accounts he was later found in his cabin with a slit throat.
Customs officials seized the vessel and took the jittery survivors ashore. A posse captured the fleeing Spaniards in Isle of Wight County.
Not providing testimony in Richmond was Gibbs, the cook, his absence scarcely noted.
Separate juries convicted the Spaniards to hang on Aug. 17. During incarceration, the pirates admitted their crimes.
They were transported from the Henrico County jail at Main and 22nd streets. Dressed in purple robes with hoods kept in place by nooses, they sat on coffins carried by wagons. The “Carnival of Death,” as the Richmond Enquirer described it, wended its way 3 miles to the prison (where today stands the Virginia Housing Development Authority). Some 5,000 people lined the route, and more crowded around the triple gallows. A minister sermonized on the wages of sin, and a Catholic priest, through an interpreter, whispered last rites.
When the trap doors sprung, the ropes suspending Cesares and Morando broke. While Barbeito breathed his last, the execution officers scrambled to the struggling and strangling Cesares and Morando, amid screams from the spectators. The undead Spaniards were returned to the gallows. Many of the crowd departed out of fear. The two were dropped again.
The three bodies swayed in the air for an hour.
The pirates were buried on the hill by the penitentiary. Later that day, however, it was thought they might provide scientific use by using galvanic or electric power to revive them — as in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” published in 1818. Likely in the armory at the Virginia Manufactory of Arms, the bodies received their post-mortem shocks.
The dead men told no tales — except for the head of Alexander Tardy.
Three copies of his skull were cast in plaster. One went to attorney George Combe, founder of the Edinburgh Phrenological Society. That cast found its way into the collections of the Anatomical Museum of the School of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
In 2015 the museum contacted Dundee University about creating a facial reconstruction and body cast from the Tardy pieces. Forensic art student Amy Thornton took on Tardy for her senior project. She laser scanned the jawbone-less skull, then 3D-printed the model. During the year, she fleshed out the details and dressed the finished figure as a physician. Before the exhibition, the imitation Tardy spent three months in her living room.
“A bit of a dark-eyed scoundrel, to say the least,” she described her subject to The Scotsman newspaper. “I’ve started thinking I’m seeing him in the street, so I’m more than happy to have finished with him.”
Flashback thanks Rick Hatcher, native Richmonder and historian at Fort Sumter National Monument; Haunts of Richmond’s Sandi Bergman; and Michael McCallum, curator of the Anatomical Museum, University of Edinburgh.
