Note 9 — THE PIRATES OF THE WHIDAH.

Here this fragmentary record of the trial ends. On Oct. 22 Van Vorst, Brown, Quintor, Hoof, Shuan, and Baker were condemned and sentenced to death. Cotton Mather records in his Diary, II. 483, that on Nov. 2 he had obtained a reprieve, perhaps a pardon, for one who was more penitent and less guilty than the others (South or Davis? but both had been acquitted). On Nov. 15 he records, II. 488, "Six pirates executed. I took a long and sad Walk with them, from the Prison to the Place of Execution", instructed them, and prayed with them. Before the end of the year he published Instructions to the Living, from the Condition of the Dead, A Brief Relation of Remarkables in the Shipwreck of above One Hundred Pirates, Who were Cast away in the Ship Whido, on the Coast of New-England, April 26, 1717, And in the Death of Six, who after a Fair Trial at Boston, were Convicted and Condemned, Octob. 22, And Executed, Novemb. 15, 1717, With some Account of the Discourse had with them on the way to their Execution, And a Sermon preached on their Occasion (Boston, 1717). In the pamphlet The Trials of Eight Persons we see Van Vorst and Baker, properly repentant, singing a Dutch psalm on their way to execution.