Who Was the First Convicted Murderer in America?
John Billington had developed a reputation as a 'knave' among his fellow Plymouth colonists before his notorious conviction.
The first execution in N... View MoreWho Was the First Convicted Murderer in America?
John Billington had developed a reputation as a 'knave' among his fellow Plymouth colonists before his notorious conviction.
The first execution in New England, North America, of John Billington in 1630.
Of the 102 passengers aboard the historic 1620 voyage of the Mayflower, one family became synonymous with trouble. The Billington—John Billington and his wife, Eleanor (or Ellen), along with their two teenage boys, John and Francis—were described by William Bradford, the governor of Plymouth, as “one of the profanest families” in the English colony.
The Billingtons weren’t Separatists; the religious refugees also known as the Pilgrims. They were one of the many “strangers,” as Bradford called them, who were recruited for the Mayflower voyage by its London investors.
While it was common for non-Separatists to disagree with and even criticize the Pilgrim leadership in Plymouth, John Billington’s behavior repeatedly crossed the line.
“The level of anger that’s hinted at in [the records of Plymouth] is serious and significant,” says Donna Curtin, executive director of the Pilgrim Hall Museum in Plymouth, Massachusetts. “In John Billington, we have someone who publicly expresses rage and discontent and mutinous speeches, and who ultimately commits the greatest act of violence by murdering a fellow colonist.”
In 1630, Billington was “found guilty of willful murder; by plain and notorious evidence,” wrote Bradford in Of Plymouth Colony, and was hanged for his crime. With that heinous act, Billington entered history as the first English colonist to be executed for murder.
An Explosive Start
The Mayflower was originally supposed to land in Northern Virginia (which extended up to modern-day New York), but was blown off course. On November 11, 1620, the storm-tossed ship set anchor in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, prompting “discontented and mutinous speeches” from non-Separatists like Billington.
Because they weren’t in Virginia, the non-Separatists wanted to void their harsh work contracts—which required toiling six days a week for the “Virginia Company,”—and have the freedom to settle the new land on their own.
Ultimately, Bradford and the Separatists narrowly avoided a mutiny and convinced all of the adult men onboard, Separatists and “strangers” alike, to sign the Mayflower Compact, a pledge of loyalty to the leadership of the new English colony.
But before the colonists had even settled in Plymouth, the whole enterprise almost went up in smoke. And the culprit, unsurprisingly, was a Billington.
Young Francis Billington, 14 years old, was playing around with “squibs”—homemade fireworks made from gunpowder and paper—and his father’s musket, when he managed to ignite a half-empty barrel of gunpowder. The room caught fire and threatened to spread to the rest of the ship, but “by God’s mercy, no harm [was] done,” wrote Bradford in Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth.
“Bradford paints a picture of the teenage Billington boys as absolutely out of control,” says Curtin. “If the fire spread, it would have done some very significant damage. That might have been the end of the Plymouth story right there.”
'The First Offense'
During that first dreadful winter in Plymouth, more than half of the Mayflower passengers died from disease and malnourishment. By March of 1621, the harsh weather began to break, and the starving English colonists struck their first peace treaty with the Wampanoag, the local indigenous tribe.
But just when the Plymouth Colony was finding its footing, Bradford reported a shocking act of insubordination by none other than John Billington. At the time, Miles Standish was Plymouth’s military leader, but Billington refused to follow orders. Even worse, he mouthed off to Standish in public (Bradford called it “opprobrious speeches”).
“It’s dangerous that Billington would be so brazen as to articulate in public his disagreement with Standish,” says Curtin. “Billington was extraordinarily outspoken for this period, especially in this context and in this place.”
Billington’s rude behavior prompted the very first legal action in Plymouth Colony. A judge found Billington guilty of “contempt of the captain’s lawful command” and sentenced him “to have his neck and heels tied together.”
“Punishing someone by tying their neck and heels together and leaving them like that for a time was pretty common in the English-speaking world,” says Frank Bremer, an historian of the New England colonies, “particularly in a situation like this, when you didn’t have any jail or prison in which to incarcerate someone.”
In the end, Billington skirted the painful punishment by “humbling himself and craving pardon,” but his crime was reported as the “first offense” since the colonists had arrived in Plymouth. It wouldn’t be his last.
Young John Gets Lost
Not long after John Billington’s brush with the law, his 16-year-old son, also named John, caused a different kind of trouble. The teenager “got lost” in the woods and disappeared for five days. He was found 20 miles away by a Wampanoag settlement at Nauset.
Retrieving the lost Billington boy was anything but certain. Just a few years earlier, in 1614, another English voyage led by the notorious Captain Thomas Hunt had kidnapped several Nauset youth and sold them into slavery in Spain. The wounds were still fresh. The Plymouth leaders humbled themselves before the Nauset and apologized for the past crimes of their countrymen.
The Nauset returned the Billington boy “behung with beads,” wrote Bradford, an act that Curtin calls “a very magnanimous gesture on their part.”
Once and Always a 'Knave'
In 1624, the Plymouth church leadership was shaken by what’s known as the “Oldham-Lyford scandal.” The London investors sent a Puritan clergyman named John Lyford to Plymouth. But instead of serving the Pilgrims’ spiritual needs, he acted as a spy. Bradford intercepted letters from both Lyford and another non-Separatist colonist named John Oldham badmouthing the Pilgrims to their investors back in England.
When Lyford and Oldham were put on trial, they claimed to only be relaying complaints told to them by colonists like John Billington. Lyford and Oldham were banished from Plymouth, but Billington protested his innocence and was allowed to stay.
Still, Bradford was seething. In a letter to a friend in England, Bradford had this to say about Billington: “[H]e is a knave, and so will live and die.”
To call someone a “knave” was no small insult in the 17th century.
“‘Knave’ was a very strong word,” says Curtin. “It meant unscrupulous, disrespectful, hostile. A knave is a bad deal. You don’t want to do business with a knave.”
'And the Land Be Purged from Blood'
By 1630, the Plymouth colonists had been settled for a decade. In that time, Plymouth had grown into a stable colony and the Billingtons had been allotted a parcel of land and cattle to raise. Sadly, the records show that young John, the son, died in 1627 from unknown causes.
The elder Billington was still a quick-tempered, angry man. He got in a quarrel with a neighbor, and some time later he decided to settle it. He “waylaid a young man, one John Newcomen,” wrote Bradford, “and shot him with a gun, whereof he died.”
According to the records, Billington would have been nearly 50 at the time while his victim was just 17. There are no details about the nature of the dispute.
“A 50-year-old man and a kid?” asks Curtin. “What kind of disagreement could this be?”
Under English law, Billington was given a full trial—arraigned by a grand jury and tried by a “petty jury” of Plymouth magistrates, including Bradford. When Billington was found guilty “by plain and notorious evidence,” the Plymouth leaders wrestled with whether to impose the death penalty. They even consulted with the newly arrived Puritans in Boston, who agreed that Billington “ought to die, and the land to be purged from blood.”
Billington was hanged. “[A]s it was the first execution amongst them, so was it a matter of great sadness unto them,” wrote Bradford of the dark mood among the Plymouth colonists. But even in his account of Billington’s death, Bradford couldn’t resist making a final comment on Billington’s questionable character and background.
“He and some of his had been often punished for miscarriages before, being one of the profanest families amongst them,” wrote Bradford. “[T]hey came from London, and I know not by what friends shuffled into their company.”
Was Billington the “first murderer in America,” as he’s often called? Many Indigenous people were murdered by earlier colonists, but never received justice. And Curtin notes that Native Americans had their own systems of justice and punishment for centuries before the Europeans arrived.
“We can say for sure that Billington committed the first homicide by gun in English America,” says Bremer. “And it is the first execution for a crime in the Plymouth Colony.”
Alamo Treasure: Treasure hunters dig for gold and silver supposedly buried under the Alamo.
... View MoreAlamo Treasure: Treasure hunters dig for gold and silver supposedly buried under the Alamo.
“Remember the Alamo!” The famous battle cry was immortalized in history. But for some, the full story of the Alamo has yet to be told. Legend has it that in the shadow of the Alamo’s old mission, a treasure remains buried, a secret which dates back to 1836, the year of the famous battle. That January, a group of rugged frontiersmen made their way across southern Texas. By some accounts, they were loaded down with a fortune in silver and gold. It was called the “San Saba Treasure,” and it’s said to be worth millions of dollars.
The men, led by Colonel Jim Bowie, were headed for the Alamo. The treasure was intended to finance the Texas Revolution for independence from Mexico. Two months later, Bowie and 188 other men, including Davy Crockett, made a courageous stand at the Alamo against 6,000 well-trained Mexican troops. Not one of the defenders survived to tell the tale, but the legend of the treasure lived on.
Professional fortune hunter and historical researcher Frank Buschbacher, along with a team of archaeologists and researchers, excavated the street in front of the Alamo. Frank first heard about the mysterious treasure at the Alamo during a trip to Mexico. There, he was introduced to Maria Gomez, a respected museum curator who also had a reputation as a psychic. Bushbacker says it was she who first informed him of the treasure:
“I’d never heard of any treasure surrounding the Battle of the Alamo. It was just a valiant battle that was lost. Then she went on to describe the treasure as gold coins, silver, religious artifacts is what she described them as.”
Frank was told that some of the treasure had been removed by Mexican soldiers, but that most of it still remained hidden at the Alamo. Maria would later draw him a map. The map claimed that the treasure would be found at the bottom of an old well. Even though Maria said she had never been to the Alamo, she had indicated the spot where a well was dug, just before the siege.
At the time, the chapel was located in the rear of the fort. The well was in the plaza, which was surrounded by 12-foot-tall stone walls. It was within these walls that the Texans held out for a full thirteen days. The defenders valiantly put down one advance after another, but in the end, 189 men could not hold off 6,000 Mexican soldiers. Frank believes that in a final desperate act, Jim Bowie ordered that the treasure be hidden at the bottom of the well:
“The only way they preserved was to all stick together and fight the battle out to whatever outcome it had. This really is the first bank of Texas, the first cache of precious metals that would have bought them the arms and uniforms they needed. The reason it’s remained there is that everybody died.”
Frank believes that this treasure is located beneath the road in front of the chapel. But to many native Texans, his theory doesn’t hold up. Gail Loving Barnes of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas doesn’t believe in the treasure:
“The people of the Alamo, I don’t think they were guarding a treasure. When your life is on the line, like it was in the Battle with Juno Santiana, I don’t think you’re thinking about silver or gold bullion. I think you’re thinking about your life. And I don’t think you would be polluting your water well, because you don’t know how long your siege is going to be.”
Despite the controversy, Frank was determined to prove his point. He obtained permission to survey the area with ground-penetrating radar, yielding some intriguing results. To their trained eyes, the radar display showed several irregularities beneath the surface. The largest, which Frank believed to be the site of the well, was in the exact location where Maria Gomez predicted the treasure would be found. Says Frank:
“It kind of brought all my research to fruition at that point, because I knew that with the map, her story, and then plugging it into Texas history, that I was on a hot trail and any dissention that I had within my own mind about whether I should follow this any further was gone.”
Gail Barnes has other theories:
“The anomalies could be caused by many things. I think it could be debris, equipment left by the Texans, I think it could be something several years later that was deposited there. You know, as time marches on, dust and dirt accumulate and cover very gradually, so that could be part of what they’re picking up out there.”
It took Frank three and a half years to acquire the necessary permits and financing to excavate the site. The Archaeology Department at St. Mary’s University agreed to oversee the project. For project director Thomas Guderjan, anything that turns up during the excavation will have historical value:
“Whether it’s treasure, as in gold and silver and that sort of thing, or whether it is materials that were thrown into the well during the battle, materials that were thrown into the well during the clean-up after the battle, it doesn’t make any difference to us what we’re looking at in a historical perspective. Whatever it is, it’s a time capsule.”
The plans called for excavating a 15 x 15 foot area directly above the well. A work crew needed to first remove three feet of flagstone and roadbed to reach the top of the filled-in well. Four feet beneath the surface of the courtyard, the team began to find artifacts … fragments of Native American pottery, the bones of butchered animals, and primitive cooking utensils. Each relic had to be carefully unearthed and properly catalogued. Even without the San Saba treasure, Guderjan’s excitement was obvious:
“While we haven’t been able to move as quickly as we originally intended to, the reason is that we found something no one expected to find here, and that’s intact 18th-century materials.”
The items are a valuable treasure in themselves, rare artifacts that help piece together a history of the Alamo from the 1750s right up to the final battle nearly a century later. One of the finds that most excited Guderjan was some ammunition used in canons, called grapeshot:
“We think it’s from the actual battle. We also have what looks like the headpiece to a Mexican soldier’s hat. This would signify his unit. And we found what may well be part of a saber from the battle.”
As the archaeologists inched closer and closer to the irregularities picked up by radar, the discoveries they‘d already made gave them hope. But optimism soon turned to disappointment: they found no sign of the treasure. Yet some remain convinced that the gold and silver still exist somewhere deep beneath the Alamo. And for them, the search will continue.
The 1781 Massacre That Exposed Britain's Slave Trade
The crew of the British slave ship Zong murdered 132 enslaved Africans by throwing them overboard to claim insurance money on November 29, 1781.
... View MoreThe 1781 Massacre That Exposed Britain's Slave Trade
The crew of the British slave ship Zong murdered 132 enslaved Africans by throwing them overboard to claim insurance money on November 29, 1781.
The Zong Massacre of 1781, when a ship’s crew murdered 132 enslaved Africans to claim insurance money. The decision was not made in chaos but in cold calculation. What does this atrocity reveal about the human heart when profit and people collide?
The hatch swung open and daylight carved a sharp line into the darkness below. The crew moved swiftly into the hold and returned with the first captive, guiding him onto the deck as he blinked at the sudden glare. Others followed in uneven steps, weakened by weeks of confinement, their skin rubbed raw where chains had pressed into it. Some steadied themselves against the rail while others sagged to the boards, breathing shallowly. The sailors moved with practiced speed, some restraints loosening, others dragging, the scrape of metal against wood echoing across the deck. For a moment their release from the hold hinted at mercy. Suddenly, two sailors grabbed the first captive and dragged him toward the rail. A ripple of fear passed through the group as the man struggled for footing on the wet planks. Cries rose from the deck when the sailors lifted the helpless prisoner and hurled him over the side, his piercing scream silenced quickly by the sea that swallowed him.
The ship known to history as the Zong was not originally British. She had been a Dutch vessel named the Zorg until British privateers captured her off the African coast in early 1781. British clerks misread the ship’s handwritten Dutch name, and the mistake transformed the Zorg into the Zong. A Liverpool syndicate led by merchant William Gregson purchased the prize and refitted her for the Atlantic slave trade. The new owners needed a captain. They chose Luke Collingwood, a former ship’s surgeon who had spent years aboard slave ships but had never commanded one. His instructions were simple: sail to the Gold Coast, fill the hold with captives, and deliver them to Jamaica.
Collingwood did exactly that. He purchased enslaved Africans at Cape Coast and Accra, crowding 442 people into a hold designed for roughly half that number. The crew numbered only 17, far too few to maintain discipline or sanitation. Yet Collingwood believed profit was inevitable. Even if a third of the captives died, the survivors would yield a return.
Conditions deteriorated almost immediately. Dysentery, fever, and malnutrition spread in the packed hold. Seven crew members died. More than 60 enslaved Africans died. Collingwood himself fell seriously ill and turned command over to Robert Stubbs, a passenger who had once captained slave ships but had not done so in decades. Internal conflict made matters worse. On November 14, Collingwood suspended his first mate, James Kelsall, after a dispute. By then, the ship was drifting through calm, windless stretches of ocean.
British law shaped every decision the Zong‘s officers made during this crisis. Enslaved Africans were treated as cargo under maritime regulations. Insurance policies allowed captains to jettison goods during emergencies to save the vessel, with insurers reimbursing the owners for property lost at sea. The law made no distinction between barrels, wood, or human beings. Liverpool merchants relied on these frameworks to finance more than one hundred slave voyages each year. Profit depended on insurance as much as on trade.
On November 18, the Zong reached the Caribbean but inexplicably sailed past Tobago without stopping for water. Nine days later, as the ship approached Jamaica, someone misidentified the island and mistook it for the French colony of Saint-Domingue. The ship passed its destination. When the officers discovered the error on November 29, the Zong was becalmed off Jamaica’s southwest coast with 380 enslaved Africans, 11 functional crew members, and dwindling water.
Stubbs, Collingwood, and the officers gathered to decide their next move. The disease was spreading. The water was low. They believed they faced two options. They could ration water and risk losing captives to illness before reaching Jamaica, or they could kill the weakest immediately and claim insurance compensation. Under the law, enslaved Africans who died of disease were a total loss. Enslaved Africans thrown overboard during an “emergency” were reimbursed.
What followed remains one of the most infamous atrocities of the Middle Passage. On November 29, the crew killed 54 people. On November 30, they killed 42 more. On December 1, after rain showers had replenished the ship’s water supply, they killed another 36. Ten captives leapt overboard rather than be taken to the rail. One person thrown overboard managed to climb back onto the ship and survive. The killings continued even after the rain made clear that water scarcity had never been the real issue. This was not desperation. It was a calculation.
The Zong reached Black River, Jamaica, on December 22, 1781. The 208 survivors were sold for an average price of £36 each. Collingwood died three days later. The ship’s log vanished. In Liverpool, William Gregson filed an insurance claim for the 132 people murdered at sea, demanding £30 for each lost “unit of cargo.” Thomas Gilbert, head of the insurance syndicate, refused to pay. He accused the ship’s officers of incompetence and fraud. Gregson sued.
The first trial took place in March 1783. Robert Stubbs testified that the crew had acted out of necessity. The jury accepted the argument. Because British law regarded enslaved Africans as property, the court ruled that the killings fell within a captain’s right to sacrifice cargo to save a ship. The verdict went to Gregson, who expected to collect payment.
But Gilbert appealed, and in the weeks before the hearing, news of the massacre reached abolitionist circles. Olaudah Equiano, a formerly enslaved man living in London, had learned of the killings and told Granville Sharp, one of Britain’s most committed abolitionists. Shocked, Sharp began writing letters to newspapers, ministers, and political leaders, urging murder charges against the crew. No official responded, but the story spread.
By the time the appeal reached the Court of King’s Bench in May 1783, the case had become a public scandal. At the hearing, Solicitor General John Lee argued that the issue was strictly commercial, insisting the killings were no different than jettisoning a load of wood. Lawyers for the insurers countered that there had been enough water, that navigational errors had caused the crisis, and that what occurred was murder. Lord Chief Justice Mansfield ruled for the insurers on the grounds of mismanagement, deliberately avoiding the moral question. He ordered a new trial, but no further legal action followed. No officer from the Zong ever faced charges.
Even so, the story refused to fade. Sharp continued pushing for criminal prosecution. He appealed to the Admiralty courts, to bishops, to Parliament. The law would not budge. British legal structures could not recognize enslaved Africans as murder victims. But Sharp had succeeded in making the massacre widely known. Newspapers reported it. The London Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends condemned it in a petition to Parliament. Thomas Clarkson invoked it in his writings. Ottobah Cugoano, James Ramsay, and John Newton all cited the Zong as evidence of the slave trade’s cruelty. The image of 132 people thrown into the sea for insurance money etched itself into the public mind.
The massacre did not end the slave trade. British ships continued crossing the Atlantic for more than 25 years. Yet the Zong became a turning point. The outrage it generated helped galvanize the movement that Sharp and Clarkson later formalized in the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787. William Wilberforce carried their cause into Parliament. In 1807, Britain outlawed the slave trade. In 1833, the empire abolished slavery itself.
More than fifty years had passed since Collingwood gave the order to open the hold.
The crew of the slave ship Zong cast African captives into the sea in an effort to obtain insurance compensation. The image is an eighteenth-century engraving from 1782 with contemporary color added.
By the late eighteenth century, the transatlantic slave trade had become a highly organized global enterprise driven by expanding European empires, rising demand for sugar and cotton in the Americas, and rising capacity in shipping and finance. British ports such as Liverpool and London dominated the trade. Merchants and insurers together financed voyages that transported human beings as cargo in tightly packed ships. Insurance underwriters spread the financial risk of death, shipwreck, or other losses across networks of investors, making mass human transport more commercially viable and more profitable. With advances in shipbuilding and navigational reach, European powers pushed deeper into Africa to stock captives, fueling a brutal triangular trade that linked Africa, the Americas, and European markets.
Culturally and intellectually, Europe in the 1780s was also beginning to see a growing critique of slavery and increasing public awareness of the horrors endured by enslaved Africans. Abolitionist ideas circulated among religious groups, writers, and former captives living in Britain. Literacy and print culture allowed testimonies, court records, and sensational reports to reach a broad audience. The notion that people, even black Africans, were mere “cargo” faced mounting moral challenge. This shift in public sensibilities helped make atrocity such as the Zong massacre more than a private crime. It turned such events into symbols of systemic cruelty, galvanizing a movement that would eventually lead to legal reforms and abolition.
Slavers bringing captives on board a slave ship on Africa’s west coast.
J. M. W. Turner’s famous 1840 painting, Slave Ship, was directly inspired by the Zong massacre and became one of the most influential visual condemnations of the transatlantic slave trade. In the painting, Turner dramatized the event, setting the scene during a typhoon rather than in calm Caribbean waters. The painting premiered in London the same year abolitionists hosted the world’s first international anti-slavery convention, and its imagery intensified public reaction to the movement.
Before taking command of the Zong, Luke Collingwood spent years as a ship’s surgeon on slave vessels, a role in which the sick were often viewed as financial liabilities rather than patients.
Survivors of the Zong voyage landed in Jamaica under horrific conditions. The ship disembarked about 208 captives, many of whom were sold into brutal plantation labor, where newly arrived enslaved people faced extremely high mortality rates due to hard labor, disease, and maltreatment.
The legal fallout of the massacre prompted new restrictions in Britain that barred shipowners from claiming insurance payouts for enslaved people deliberately killed at sea.
Some of the public outrage that followed the Zong case came from ship captains and sailors who were not abolitionists but feared that the insurance dispute would damage their own claims. Their complaints unintentionally kept the story circulating in ports and coffeehouses.
How did a single road save Verdun from falling in WWI?
When German generals decided on a strategy of attrition to methodically wear down the French Army in the middle of the First World War (1914-18), the Battle of...
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