Folklore
Nix's Mate
The black, pyramidal beacon, called Nix's Mate, is well known to yachtsmen, sailors, and excursionists in Boston harbor. It rises above a shoal,--all that is left of a fair, green island which long ago disappeared in the sea. In 1636 it had an extent of twelve acres, and on its…
The black, pyramidal beacon, called Nix's Mate, is well known to yachtsmen, sailors, and excursionists in Boston harbor. It rises above a shoal,--all that is left of a fair, green island which long ago disappeared in the sea. In 1636 it had an extent of twelve acres, and on its…
Work
- Type
- folk narrative
- Creator
- Charles M. Skinner
- Created, as stated
- 1896
The tale
The black, pyramidal beacon, called Nix's Mate, is well known to yachtsmen, sailors, and excursionists in Boston harbor. It rises above a shoal,--all that is left of a fair, green island which long ago disappeared in the sea. In 1636 it had an extent of twelve acres, and on its highest point was a gallows where pirates were hanged in chains. One night cries were heard on board of a ship that lay at anchor a little way off shore, and when the watch put off, to see what might be amiss, the captain, named Nix, was found murdered in his bed. There was no direct evidence in the case, and no motive could be assigned for the deed, unless it was the expectancy of promotion on the part of the mate, in case of his commander's death. It was found, however, that this possibility gave significance to certain acts and sayings of that officer during the voyage, and on circumstantial evidence so slight as this he was convicted and sentenced to death. As he was led to execution he swore that he was not guilty, as he had done before, and from the scaffold he cried aloud, “God, show that I am innocent. Let this island sink and prove to these people that I have never stained my hands with human…
- Narrative type
- place legend
- Set at
- Boston and eastern Massachusetts
- First attestation in print
- Charles M. Skinner, Myths and Legends of Our Own Land (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1896) (1896)
Tellings
A tale told several ways is one record and several tellings. Each is given whole, with its teller named — or recorded as unattributed where the collector left them unnamed, which is itself a fact about the collection.
As printed in Charles M. Skinner (1896)
Told by unattributed — the collector names no informant · collected by Charles M. Skinner · 1896 · Boston and eastern Massachusetts
The black, pyramidal beacon, called Nix's Mate, is well known to yachtsmen, sailors, and excursionists in Boston harbor. It rises above a shoal,--all that is left of a fair, green island which long ago disappeared in the sea. In 1636 it had an extent of twelve acres, and on its highest point was a gallows where pirates were hanged in chains. One night cries were heard on board of a ship that lay at anchor a little way off shore, and when the watch put off, to see what might be amiss, the captain, named Nix, was found murdered in his bed. There was no direct evidence in the case, and no motive could be assigned for the deed, unless it was the expectancy of promotion on the part of the mate, in case of his commander's death. It was found, however, that this possibility gave significance to certain acts and sayings of that officer during the voyage, and on circumstantial evidence so slight as this he was convicted and sentenced to death. As he was led to execution he swore that he was not guilty, as he had done before, and from the scaffold he cried aloud, “God, show that I am innocent. Let this island sink and prove to these people that I have never stained my hands with human blood.” Soon after the execution of his sentence it was noticed that the surf was going higher on the shore, that certain rocks were no longer uncovered at low tide, and in time the island wasted away. The colonists looked with awe on this manifestation and confessed that God had shown their wrong.
Charles M. Skinner, Myths and Legends of Our Own Land (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1896)
As printed in Samuel Adams Drake (1884)
Told by unattributed — the collector names no informant · collected by Samuel Adams Drake · 1884 · Boston and eastern Massachusetts
THERE are two local legends, one of disaster and one of piracy, which, most unfortunately for the completeness of our collection, come either in whole or in part under the head of lost legends. The first is the account of the drowning of Captain George Worthylake, the keeper of the first lighthouse that was erected at the entrance to Boston Harbor. This sufficiently simple incident derives its chief interest from the curious fact that it Avas the subject xTn.''c Ti^Arri. of Franklin's earliest, and if we- are to believe him, misdirected, effort to court the Muses in a ballad. He says of it that his brother James, whose apprentice he then was, thinking that he might find his account in printing them, had encouraged him to write two ballads, one called the " Lighthouse Tragedy," containing an account of the loss of Captain Worthylake and his two daughters, the other a sailor's song on the capture of the noted pirate, Blackbeard. " They were," he ingenuously remarks, " wretched verses in point of style, mere blind-men'& ditties." When they were struck off, his brother despatched him to hawk them about the town. The first he assures us- had a prodigious run, because the event was recent and had made a great noise. ISTo copy of this ballad is known to exist, nor has tradition transmitted to us a single line of its verses. It is easily learned from contemporary records that Captain George Worthylake, who lived upon Lovell's Island, while on his way up the harbor, " took heaven by the way," as one writer piously puts it. His wife Ann and his daughter Faith, who NIXS MATE. 67 accompanied him, also perished with him by drowning, and the three unfortunates were all buried in one grave in the ancient cemetery of Copp's Hill. The gravestone records the fact that they died November 3, 1718; but it is exasperatingly silent concerning any incident that was likely to produce a commemo- rative ballad. The other legend is the true story of the origin of the name long ago given to the submerged islet called Nix's Mate, over which a lonely obelisk rises out of the flowing tides, not for a memorial of dark and bloody deeds, as some people suppose, but as a guiding landmark to warn ships to steer clear of the dangerous reef beneath. No spot within a wide range of the coast is the subject of more eager curiosity to sailors or lands- men, or of more exaggerated conjecture, precisely because to this day its true history remains an enigma. But such as it is the legend is given for what it may be worth. Following the repulsive custom of erecting the public gibbet at the entrance to a town or a village, where the stark bodies of condemned malefactors were the first objects seen by all who passed in or out, it was usual to hang in chains condemned pirates at the entrance to a port, to signal a like warning to those who followed the sea as their highway. Long custom had sanctioned this iMst-mortem sentence. The laws allowed it and the people approved it. It followed that the stranger who passed underneath one of these ensigns of terror could have no doubt that he had entered a Christian land, since the administration of justice according to its most civilized forms confronted him upon its very threshold. The sunken reef now known as Nix's Mate was once an islet containing several acres of land, and it was at a very early day the property of a certain John Gallup, from whom the adjacent island is named. The sea has destroyed everj'^ vestige of it, excepting only the blackened boulders that lie exposed at low tide, over which the monument stands guard. Yet not more certainly has the islet perished through the action of destroying currents than has the memory of Nix or his Mate been swept 68 NEW-ENGLAND LEGENDS. away into oblivion by the tides of time. Still the name is a fact entered upon the public records of the Colony as a thing of general knowledge ; and we therefore continue to call the reef Nix's Mate without in the least knowing why we do so. The only other fact giving authority to the tradition connected with the islet is the certainty that it was more or less used in times past as a place of execution for condemned pirates, several of whom finished here a career of crime, the bare recital of which makes one's blood run cold. The name of Nix only is wanted to complete the black calendar. Every trace of the soil to which the bones of the victims were consigned has disappeared, and only the solitary monument indicates this graveyard of the sea, which the waves have kindly levelled and blotted out forever. It has, however, been handed down from generation to gener- ation, — and we have yet to find the individual bold enough to dispute it, — that one of these freebooters persisted to the last in declaring his innocence of the crimes for which he was to sufi'er death at the hangman's hands ; and he protested with his latest breath, before giving up the ghost, that in proof of the truth of his dying assertion the island would be destroyed. In eifect, the Avaves having done their work unhindered by any artificial obstruction, the superstitious have always seen in this a decree of Fate, and Nix's Mate is supposed by them to have suffered unjustly. But knowing as we do that the disappear- ance of the island is due to natural causes, we are unable satis- factorily to establish the connection between the prediction and its fulfilment. In any case, the verification of innocence, if such it shall be accounted, came too late by a century to save Nix's Mate from the halter.
Samuel Adams Drake, A Book of New England Legends and Folk Lore in Prose and Poetry (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1884)
Related records
- documents — A Book of New England Legends and Folk Lore in Prose and Poetry
- documents — Myths and Legends of Our Own Land
Identity
- Identifier
- urn:lemay:boston:entity:nix-s-mate
- Canonical URL
- https://boston.fyi/work/nix-s-mate
- As JSON
- https://boston.fyi/work/nix-s-mate.json
- Version
- 1 · last changed 2 September 2026
Provenance
- Source
- Skinner, Myths and Legends of Our Own Land (1896) — source of record
- Licence
- Public domain — published before 1929 (public_domain)
- Retrieved
- 2 September 2026
- Source identifier
- NIX'S MATE
- Attribution
- Charles M. Skinner
- Rights as stated
- Published 1896 and in the public domain in the United States.
Transform ladder
| # | Operation | Description | Tool |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | fetch | retrieved the full text of the collection from its public-domain holding institution | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 2 | segment | split the volume into chapters at its own printed headings; the first occurrence of a heading opens the chapter and later occurrences are the running header, which is discarded | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 3 | corroborate | matched each heading against the book's own table of contents and took the index's spelling as the title; a heading the index does not carry was refused as a caption, a byline, or scanner noise | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 4 | filter | retained the chapters that name a Boston-area place, by the tale's own words | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 5 | normalize | collapsed the scan's line breaks; not one word of the telling was altered, added, or removed | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |