Rachel Wall: Isles of Shoals Shipwreck Decoy Hanged in Boston Over a Bonnet

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Rachel Wall was born Rachel Schmidt around 1760 in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, to a strict Presbyterian farm family. She escaped to the waterfront whenever she could, and after George Wall rescued her from an attack by a group of girls on the docks, she married him and moved to Boston, where he worked on a fishing schooner. After George, five fellow sailors and their partners spent all their money in a single week, George proposed piracy, and the group borrowed a schooner from a friend. From 1781 to 1782 they worked out of the Isles of Shoals off New Hampshire.

After storms Rachel stood on deck screaming as if shipwrecked, and when rescuers boarded, the hidden crew killed them and took the cargo. The scheme ended when a storm washed George and the crew overboard and only Rachel survived. Back in Boston she worked as a domestic servant but kept stealing from boats in the harbor. She attacked Margaret Bender on the street for her bonnet and tried to tear out her tongue. Tried for robbery on September 10, 1789, she denied killing anyone but asked to be tried as a pirate. She was hanged on October 8, 1789, the last woman executed in Massachusetts.

In one year the crew captured 12 boats, killed 24 sailors and took $6,000 in cash plus goods.
The crew left no survivors, so missing ships were assumed lost to the weather.
The court ignored her request for a piracy trial and convicted her of robbery.
Her reported last words said she was dying an unworthy member of the Presbyterian Church in her 29th year.
Printers sold gallows literature, broadsides with criminals' lives and confessions, in the crowd at executions like hers.

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