Time-honored custom, and the Act of Parliament as well, required that the gallows should be erected "in such place upon the sea, or within the ebbing or flowing thereof, as the President of the Court ... shall appoint," and this necessitated the construction of a scaffold or platform suspended from the framework of the gallows by means of ropes and blocks. When an execution took place on land, that is to say, on solid ground easily approached, it was the custom at that time to carry the condemned in a cart under the crossarm of the gallows and after the hangman's rope had been adjusted around the neck and the signal had been given, the cart would be driven away and the condemned person left dangling in the air. In theory, the proper adjustment of the knot in the rope and the short fall from the body of the cart when it was driven away, would be sufficient to break the bones of the neck and also cause strangulation; but in practice this did not always occur. When pirates were executed on a gallows placed between "the ebb and flow of the tide," the scaffold on which they stood was allowed to fall by releasing the ropes holding it suspended in mid-air. This was always the climax of the spectacle for which thousands of spectators had gathered from far and near. Not infrequently the judges of a Court of Admiralty had brought before them for trial a pirate whose career had been more infamous than the rest. A cruel and bloody-minded fellow fit only for a halter,--and then the sentence to be hanged by the neck until dead would be followed by another judgment, dooming the lifeless body of the pirate to be hanged in chains from a gibbet placed on some island or jutting point near a ship channel, there to hang "a sun drying" as a warning to other sailormen of evil intent. In Boston harbor there were formerly two islands--Bird Island and Nix's Mate--on which pirates were gibbeted.[94] Bird Island long since disappeared and ships now anchor where the gibbet formerly stood. Nix's Mate was of such size that early in the eighteenth century the selectmen of Boston advertised its rental for the pasturage of cattle. Today every foot of its soil has been washed away and the point of a granite monument alone marks the site of the island where formerly a pirate hung in chains beside the swiftly flowing tides. [94] On Tuesday the 12th Instant, about 3 p.m. were executed for Piracy, Murder, etc., three of the Condemned Persons mentioned in our Last viz. _William Fly_, Capt., _Samuel Cole_, Quarter-Master, and _Henry Greenville_.... _Fly_ behaved himself very unbecoming even to the last; ... Their Bodies were carried in a Boat to a small Island call'd Nicks's-Mate, about 2 Leagues from the Town, where the above said _Fly_ was hung up in Irons, as a spectacle for the warning of others, especially sea-faring men; the other Two were buried there.--_Boston News-Letter_, July 7-14, 1726.