New Year’s Day, Boston, 1722

Boston_1722The year that forever altered Philip Ashton’s life started with a blaze of destruction in Boston Harbor. The first week of January 1722 was bitterly cold in Boston, and just after noon on Monday, January 1, a huge fire tore through a sailmaker’s warehouse on Long Wharf, the massive pier at the center of Boston’s large inner harbor. The fire completely destroyed at least two of the warehouses that lined one side of Long Wharf and damaged several others nearby. A large quantity of sailcloth that had been in the buildings was burned before the roaring flames could be put out. The fire was caused, it was discovered several days later, by a chimney in disrepair.

Long Wharf and the crowded layout of Boston — at the time America’s busiest seaport, with more than fifty wharves reaching into the harbor — are clearly evident in John Bonner’s 1722 Map of Boston. Boston was, in many ways, still a young city in the year 1722. Massachusetts Bay was a British colony, and the men and women who lived there thought of themselves as British subjects. New England vessels flew the British flag. The colonists’ rebellious Boston Tea Party, the first battles of the American Revolution, and the Declaration of Independence were still half a century away. But in the hundred years since its founding, Boston had also grown into a noteworthy and spreading city. Cramped blocks of brick and wooden houses now lined the streets, home to some twelve thousand people, more than lived in either New York or Philadelphia at the time. Many of the main streets running through the city were paved with cobblestone, though they were often covered with a layer of dirt and dust and, in the springtime, with nearly ankle-deep mud. The streets were crowded from sunup to sundown with horse-drawn carts, peddlers, pedestrians, and stray dogs. Anyone walking along Cornhill, King Street, or Boston’s other main roadways would pass dozens of signs advertising the shops, coffee houses, and taverns that sold merchandise, food, and drink.

Long Wharf, where the fire broke out on New Year’s Day 1722, reached some 1,600 feet out into the harbor and was lined with a row of warehouses on its northern edge, each facing the water on one side and, on the other, the wharf’s thirty-foot-wide roadway that ran directly into King Street. The warehouses along Long Wharf were packed with sails, rope, and a sea of wooden casks filled with merchandise. Carts and wagons rumbled up and down the wharf and onto the cobblestoned way of King Street, which ran directly into the heart of Boston. Fourteen shipyards in Boston produced several hundred new ships every year. At least half a dozen merchant ships arrived or sailed out of Boston every week, and the harbor was crowded with vessels—the “masts of ships here, and at the proper seasons of the year,” one observer wrote, “make a kind of wood of trees like that which we see upon the River of Thames.”

What was particularly ominous about that first week of January 1722 is that one of the vessels that set sail from Boston Harbor was a ninety-ton brigantine called the Rebecca. It would be an unforgettable journey. The Rebecca would safely reach its destination, the small sugar-producing island of St. Kitts in the British West Indies, without serious incident. But the journey home would be different, for on May 28, 1722, the Rebecca would be taken by a pirate crew under the command of Edward Low, who would sail the brigantine north to the Canadian coastline and capture Philip Ashton.

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