Note 84 — Chapter VII · John Quelch and his Crew who were Hanged in Boston and their Gold Distributed

In the summer of 1755, two negro servants of Capt. John Codman of Charlestown, poisoned their master. Phillis, the woman servant and the principal in the murder, was burned at the stake at Cambridge and Mark, her accessory, was hanged and then gibbetted on Charlestown Neck. Three years later Dr. Caleb Rea of Wenham, while on his way to Ticonderoga, rode by and stopped to inspect the body of Mark. He recorded in his diary that “the skin was but little broken altho’ he had been hanging there near three or four years.”