Execution Dock

For four hundred years, this stretch of Thames waterfront was where London killed its pirates. Execution Dock operated from the early fifteenth century until eighteen thirty, and the method was designed for maximum cruelty and maximum spectacle.

The rope was deliberately shortened so the drop wouldn't break the neck. Pirates died slowly by strangulation, their limbs convulsing in what spectators called the Marshal's dance. It could take twenty minutes. The Admiralty wanted it to hurt, and they wanted everyone watching from the river to see it hurt.

After death, the body was left hanging until three tides had washed over it — a ritual that symbolised the Admiralty's jurisdiction over the waters. The most notorious pirates got an encore: their corpses were coated in tar to slow decomposition, locked in iron cages called gibbets, and hung along the Thames estuary for months or years as a warning to passing ships.

Captain William Kidd got the full treatment. Hanged here on the twenty-third of May seventeen oh-one, his tarred body was displayed in a gibbet at Tilbury Point for three years. The first rope broke during his execution and he had to be hanged twice.

The last executions at the dock were George Davis and William Watts in eighteen thirty, convicted of piracy and murder. After that, the Admiralty switched to hanging pirates at Newgate like common criminals.

The exact location of the dock is disputed. Three riverside pubs claim the spot: the Prospect of Whitby, which has replica gallows out the back, the Captain Kidd, and the Town of Ramsgate near Wapping Old Stairs. All three serve decent pints. None of them mention the exploding corpses.