Where New York City and New Jersey's Pirates Went to Die: The Story Behind Gibbet Island

 In the late 17th century,  when New York City was still known to many as Neue Amsterdam, having only recently fallen under British control in 1664; when the Hudson River was still called the North River and the Delaware River was still referred to as the South River, there was a settlement known as Communipaw, on the New Jersey side of the harbor then referred to as the colony of Bergen.

Even today, in what is modern day Jersey City, there’s still a neighborhood along the waterfront near Liberty Island sitting in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty that is known as Communipaw.   It is considered to be Jersey City’s oldest neighborhood.

In 1896 American author and folklorist Charles M. Skinner, a native New Yorker himself, published a work entitled Myths and Legends of Our Own Land.  In this work he recounted a story called “The Party from Gibbet Island”.  This story centered around the colonial community of Communipaw in present day New Jersey.  

The historical truth behind the story of the “Party from Gibbet Island” is definitely a subject matter that is open for much debate, but one thing is certain.  

Before Ellis Island became known as the way station for tens of millions of immigrants journeying to America from Europe in search of a better life in the latter half of the 19th and early part of the 20th centuries, it was known across New York and New Jersey as Gibbet Island for the countless number of pirates and mutineers who were hanged there in chains and whose lifeless corpses were left to rot away to nothing more than skeletons in the salty sea breeze of New York Harbor.

During its infamous time as Gibbet Island, so the folktale as recorded by Charles M. Skinner goes there stood in Communipaw a tavern known as the Wild Goose.

The Wild Goose Tavern was a place where old Dutch men, well-to-do pillars of the New Amsterdam community, and smugglers, pirates and other maritime ne’er-do-wells who prowled the coasts of the Jersey Shore looking for easy money and easy victims, went nightly to rub elbows and to smoke and drink.

As the story goes, one of the most infamous patrons of the Wild Goose Tavern was a young man of Dutch descent named Yost Vanderscamp who is said to have been a nephew of the owner himself.   Vanderscamp is reported to have kept company with a drunken low-life named Pluto, who hung about the tavern doing odd jobs and drinking himself into oblivion.

 When Vanderscamp’s uncle died unexpectedly ownership of the Wild Goose Tavern passed into his hands and he recruited his friend Pluto to help him run the place and to take part in his offshore pirate activities.

While the tavern was under Vanderscamp’s ownership he, “Fitted it up with plunder and at intervals had his gang ashore--such a crew of singing, swearing, drinking, gaming devils as Communipaw had never seen the like of; yet the residents could not summon activity enough to stop the goings on that made the Wild Goose a disgrace to their village.”

Typical tavern ca. 1700

But then, sometime around the year 1665 after New Amsterdam had officially become New York City, the British caught three members of Vanderscamp’s gang engaged in some sort of piracy (probably smuggling) and they promptly strung up the three criminals on the gallows of Gibbet Island to rot within sight of Communipaw and the Wild Goose Tavern.

Still engaged in smuggling, one night soon after, as Vanderscamp was returning to Communpaw and his home base at the Wild Goose Tavern a fierce squall broke out and cast his ship aground on Gibbet Island. Vanderscamp, hearing the creak of rusty chains, looked up and saw the skeletons of his three former comrades clothed in rags and swaying in the wind.

His old drunk friend Pluto, thinking he saw fear in Vanderscamp’s face said, “Don’t you want to see your friends?  You are never afraid of living men, what do you fear from the dead?”

“Nothing.  I fear nothing,” replied Vanderscamp.  Then he took a bottle of rum from his pocket took a long a drink and held the bottle up to the skeletons of his dead hanging friends and said, “Here’s fair weather to you, my lads in the wind, and if you should be walking the rounds tonight, come in to supper.”

The wind howled and the chains creaked in the night as if someone laughed.  At midnight, Vanderscamp, Pluto and the rest of his pirate crew pulled into port in Communipaw on the New Jersey side, and retired to the Wild Goose Tavern.

Upon entering Vanderscamp and his men heard the sound of revelry, and uproarious laughter coming from upstairs in the tavern.  He, along with the rest of his crew, quickly ran upstairs and threw open the door.  

Sitting there smoking their pipes, surrounded by jugs of beer and hogsheads of wine were the skeletons of his three old friends, laughing with the chains still around their necks and beckoning with their skeletal fingers for him to come forward and into the light of the fireplace…

The next morning Vanderscamp was found dead at the base of the steps.  The story says that his body was interred at the Old Dutch Churchyard in Bergen, which most likely refers to the Old Dutch Cemetery in present day Hackensack, New Jersey.

Folklore?  Simple ghost story designed to entertain?  Most likely, “The Party from Gibbet Island” is a tale that was told by residents of New York City and northern New Jersey for over two centuries to simply explain the morbid and macabre existence of the island just off shore where New York City’s pirates went to die.

Communipaw neighborhood New Jersey

What became known first as Gibbet Island, and then later Ellis Island, was originally purchased from Native Americans by the Dutch Colonial Governors of Neue Amsterdam in the year 1630.  The Dutch named the island Little Oyster Island because of the great number of apparently delicious oysters which could be gathered all along its beaches.

By the year 1665, around the time when Yost Vanderscamp and the rowdy happenings at the Wild Goose Tavern were in full swing, when the British took control of Neue Amsterdam from the Dutch and renamed it New York, control of Little Oyster Island also passed from the Dutch to the British Empire.  It is a fact, that almost from the instant that Britain took control of the island, they began to use Little Oyster Island, most likely due to its convenient location with easy access to the sea at the entranceway to New York Harbor as an ideal place to execute state criminals, convicted in New York City most often for crimes against His Majesty while at sea, via hanging.

Though many of the details have been lost to history it seems as if the place known as Gibbet Island roughly between the years 1670 to 1770 had only one gibbet or “hanging tree” located at the center of the island on a hill that was visible to all from both New York City and New Jersey.  The British authorities if they captured and convicted a suspected pirate or mutineer would hang him from this prominent gallows and only cut down his corpse after all the flesh had rotted away.

After the American Revolution, New York City merchant Samuel Ellis purchased the island and renamed it after, well, himself and Ellis Island was born.

Around this time Ellis built a tavern (apparently these places were wildly popular three hundred or so years ago) on top of the hill where the gibbet or hanging tree for pirates once stood.  Ellis’ tavern catered to men who worked in New York City’s burgeoning financial industry at the turn of the 19th century.  Quite possibly, it was at about this time that the tale of “The Party from Gibbet Island” began to be told, or at least re-told” in the form that was recounted earlier in this article.

The state of New York bought the island back from Ellis’ surviving relatives in 1808 for the price of $10,000.  During the War of 1812 and once again during the American Civil War in the 1860’s the federal government paid New York State for the right to build fortifications on Ellis Island and to use the location as a site to store munitions.

Interestingly, by the beginning of the 19th century, New York City had officially banned all public hangings including those of pirates, but since the federal government had not banned all public executions and because piracy was considered a federal offense the United States Navy continued to publicly hang pirates and mutineers on Ellis Island even after 1808, with the last such execution taking place in the year 1839!

It would not be until January 1, 1892 that Ellis Island welcomed its first immigrant to the United States of America.  Between 1892 and 1942 over twelve million people would pass through Ellis Island on their way to the United States.

No one knows, to this day, exactly how many pirates (and suspected pirates) were executed by both the United States and Great Britain in New York Harbor just off the New Jersey coast at the spot then known as Gibbet Island, though many historians speculate that the number could have been as high as ten-thousand.

Perhaps, those three hapless cohorts of Yost Vanderscamp who fell into British hands sometime around the year 1665 were the very first….