| Summary: | Execution Dock at Wapping was a performative space on the Thames River in London where pirates and other sea criminals were publicly executed by hanging. Wapping was the place where nautical justice was seen and put on display, in order to warn others of the omnipotence of the English Admiralty. A representative of the Lord Admiral led the condemned to the gallows at low tide and their bodies remained on public display.This paper looks at the representation of such pirate justice in a number of the literary and non-literary texts of the early modern period in England; when piracy itself was a very fluid and inexact term. A pirate’s career could end in a number of ways: imprisonment, fines, torture, execution by hanging, a negotiated release, a royal pardon, escape, exile or respectable retirement. Such an end result could well depend on gender and class, but it could also depend on political expediency, foreign policy and economic factors. We also find huge divergences between historical truth and the literary representations of pirates. Villain or hero the pirate of the XVIth and XVIIth centuries was both adroit and ambiguous.
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