The True Story of Thomas Veale: Pirate, Fugitive, and Cordwainer of Lynn Woods
On a cool, moonlit night in 1658, residents of the Puritan-led, developing town of Lynn, Massachusetts Bay Colony gathered by lapping coastal waters and watched a ship anchor off the beach. Four men and one woman disembarked and slowly rowed their way up the Saugus River, disappearing from sight.
No word of their arrival had been sent in advance, and their ultimate destination would remain a mystery to the residents. The woods were vast and untouched by man, making it the perfect place for people with a reason to disappear, and that’s exactly what they wanted.
One of these shadowy men, Thomas Veale, would reach across centuries to change the lives of two men in the 1800s. He would also change the landscape of the woods in ways that can still be seen and explored today, 368 years after that night. This is the story of:
Thomas Veale: The Cordwainer Pirate of Lynn Woods
Veale is said to have been born near Salem, but details are scarce. In fact, there’s no way to tell if we’re talking about Salem Village or Salem Towne. Given his choice of career, it’s a pretty safe bet to say it was the bustling port settlement of Salem Towne.
He took the life of a mariner very early on and answered the call of the sea throughout his formative years. He loved it so much, in fact, that he decided to sweep its surface clean of pesky ships that just happened to have lots of money and goods inside them.
Tommy fell in with pirates and set sail for the West Indies. That’s where he made a lifetime’s worth of loot by attacking any vessel dumb enough to cross his path and that of his pirate buddies. It wasn’t a bad life by any means, especially if you hate bathing and love the feeling of scurvy.
Anyway, it wasn’t long before he and four buddies, plus one buddy’s wife, decided they had enough wealth to retire on and did just that. You have to remember that this was before the stock market, so there was no chance of losing a treasure chest full of silver and gold. Well, at least its value would stay the same, no matter where it ended up.
That was when the whole “sneakily anchoring off the shore of Lynn and rowing up the Saugus River” thing happened. Some accounts tell of several locals watching the group carry a chest with them. Once they landed, whether or not anyone saw it, the four men and one woman had their treasure in tow while they searched for a suitable living space in the woods. So, like I said, not a bad life. I mean, I’d trade places with them, wouldn’t you? Camping and booty? Sign me up!
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| "My full name is Piratricia C. Glenderson." |
How Five Pirates Retired in Pirate's Glen
The story goes that the day after the pirates rowed up the river and disappeared, a group of proto-Lynners went into the woods and tried to find them. Leave it to Purtians to be all up in someone else’s business, right?
They didn’t find the group, but instead found a note. This note asked any curious gentlefolk to please head to the Saugus Iron Works and do their shopping for them. If they got everything on the list, they were asked to leave it at a specific location. Once that happened, they could return to that spot the following day and find a pile of silver to cover the costs and give them a little something for the effort.
This list included things like manacles, chains, digging tools, and other supplies, and the proto-Lynners were more than happy to fill it for them. They left the supplies at the location, returned the following day, and were greeted with the silver they were promised. These were some pretty trustworthy pirates, and that’s what it’s really all about. Pay your stolen booty forward, that’s what I always say.
So, now these four men and one woman were alone in the woods with manacles and chains. Damn, that's kinky, right? Those trustworthy pirates were also freaky as all hell, and there ain’t nothin’ wrong with that!
They also used the remaining supplies to build a lovely house and set down their roots. They most likely stuck to the same schedule anyone would, with housekeeping and cooking during the day and manacles and chains at night. Once again, not a bad life.
As an aside, the area where the exchange took place, and the house was built, is now called Pirate’s Glen, and you can hike to it right now. You really should. I’ve been there a bunch of times, and it’s more than worth it. Just don’t touch any rusty, old manacles you find. You never know what they were used for.
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| "E'en Methinks thou art a tattle tale!" |
Puritan Accusations and the Hunt for the Lynn Woods Pirates
Everything was going fine and dandy for this quintuple, but that wouldn’t last long. It turns out that you can leave the piratin’ life, but the piratin’ life can’t leave you.
All four men were well-known to the English authorities, and they wanted their blood. They may have done the only reasonable thing that people with warrants do by moving to Lynn, but it had to catch up with them at some point. Just because everyone else in a city has warrants doesn’t mean you’re going to get away with anything.
Oof, that one was rough. I apologize. I’m just kidding, Lynn, you know I love you. I used to work in you, do you remember? Some of my best friends live in Lynn, and only most of them have warrants.
Damn, sorry again. I apologize to all Lynners. It’s a very fine city. Is that wine bar still open downtown? Let me know in the comments! Would it make you feel better if I made fun of dead Puritans instead? Let’s do that.
It turned out that some fine colonists got wise to who was living the good life in Pirate’s Glen and dropped the dime on them. There’s just something about Puritans and tattling. Here they were, thirty-four years before the Salem Witch Trials, and residents of Lynn were pointing the finger and accusing people just trying to mind their own business before Salem Village made it cool. There must be something in the water. Damn tattle tales.
It’s a good thing no one actually bothers to read anything I write. I’d have both Lynners and Puritans coming after me right now. Phew, failure pays off!
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| "Shackles and chains? Oh, yeah, hang me harder, daddy!" |
The Escape of Thomas Veale Into the Cave
Once the English were made aware of the pirates’ location, they tore ass into Lynn Woods and raided their lovely home. It was then that it was learned the wife of the quintuple had died from fever a couple of months earlier and was buried in the area. That means right now, there’s a skeleton in Pirate’s Glen, and that’s even more reason to hike to it!
The English were able to arrest three of the four pirates and immediately shipped them back to England to be hanged. After all, what were the colonists supposed to do, ruin three of their five ropes by getting them all covered in dead guy? Hell no! Much like the youth of today, they just let their parents take care of it. They had more than enough rope, anyway.
So, that means one pirate got away by fleeing deeper into the woods, and you can probably guess who it was. He’s the guy in the title.
Now, Thomas Veale, with the home he built gone, his friends about to be dead, and his quintuple eradicated, had to find a way to stay alive. Luckily for him, there happened to be a sweet cave nearby.
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| One bedroom, no amenities, but great view! Contact the listing agent while you can! |
Cave Life and Cordwaining
Alone and on the lam, Tommy V found a lovely little cave that was just out of the way of the busy downtown area and had a great school system. He spent some time excavating and tidying up, then moved in full-time.
This is where he’d spend the majority of his time, save for the occasional trip into town to buy supplies. It was also where he’d make his money.
Even though he still had a treasure buried close by, he couldn’t exactly trade stolen trinkets or foreign coins with the heat on him. It had to remain a secret until enough time had passed for him to truly enjoy his retirement, so he needed a job.
This is where the cordwaining comes in. If you don’t know what that word means, it simply translates to “to cordwain”. I hope that clears things up.
Okay, fine. The archaic definition of cordwainer is “a worker in cordovan leather”. The definition of cordovan happens to be “of or relating to Córdoba and especially Córdoba, Spain”. Since it’s doubtful that a bunch of Puritans living in the middle of nowhere had Spanish leather lying around, we’ll go with the second definition of cordwainer, which simply means “shoemaker”.
That means this wanted pirate living out of a cave in Lynn Woods made his living making shoes for the people of the surrounding communities. His work must have been pretty good since no one thought to turn him in to the authorities. In fact, a local guy by the name of Joel Dunn even found his cave after getting caught in a storm while cutting down trees in the woods, so he wasn’t super hidden, either.
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| "Ah, I finally got it how I like it!" |
Inside Veale’s Cave: Joel Dunn’s 1658 Eyewitness Account
Dunn’s account of what happened on December 14, 1658, was published in the Kimball Graphic in 1883, and he described the cave thusly:
“The walls were grim with smoke, and the floor quite rough in places. In the main part there was a large table of rude workmanship, two or three scraggy tree stumps used for seats, and rough shoemaker’s bench, illy supplied with tools. In one corner stood an old Spanish musket, and near the blackened fireplace were a few broken and otherwise dilapidated cooking utensils. Upon the large table previously mentioned, was a broken earthen dish, a rusty knife, a wooden spoon, a pistol, a dirk, a hatchet, a shoemaker’s hammer, and a few other articles.”
He also went on to say that Thomas Veale’s cave had two sections, separated by a large leather curtain. The entrance had the workbench and kitchen, while the back section was used as a bedroom and for making TikTok videos. Hey, if you’re a cave guy hiding out from the law and just trying to make your way as a cordwainer, this wasn’t a bad life at all.
Veale had spent almost a year in the woods, built a house, moved into a cave, saw his friends buried or captured, and completely turned his life of piracy on the high seas into a quiet existence of shoemaking. Then, it just so happened that Joel Dunn would be right there with him to witness his end at the hands of Mother Nature.
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| "Aww, I finally got it the way I like it!" |
The Collapse of Veale’s Cave: Earthquake, Death, and Buried Treasure
After a night of hanging out and having the kind of fun that only cave people can have, Joel Dunn went outside to collect some water to really bring the party to the next level. That was when the entire world seemed like it was ending.
A bright, severe flash of lightning roared down from the sky and hit the ground right by Dunn. This happened just as the Earth started shaking and trembling under his feet. The men were in the middle of a major earthquake, and it would spell the end of Thomas Veale, the pirate cordainer of Lynn Woods.
Dunn heard a massive crash behind him and made his way back to the cave. He found the mouth completely collapsed with Veale still inside. Whether he was crushed by the falling ceiling and crumbling walls or trapped for days is completely unknown, but he would never leave it again. It took a whole earthquake to make it happen, but the pirate Thomas Veale died on December 14, 1658, sealed off in his cave, and possibly with the plunder for which he had such high hopes. The treasure part, at least, is what Hiram Marble believed, two hundred years later.
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| "'Sup." |
Hiram Marble: The Obsessed Massachusetts Spiritualist
Hiram Marble was a spiritualist from Charlton, Massachusetts, with much more than a passing fancy for the story of Thomas Veale. If you don’t know what a spiritualist is, or just have a vague knowledge of what they believe, never fear! I’m here to provide you with all the details, at least until I run out of coffee and crash.
The whole basis of spiritualism revolves around the ability of the dead to speak to the living. The afterlife isn’t a distant place or up in the sky, but like, all around us, man. There could be a spirit sitting next to you right now, and you wouldn’t even know it!
Well, you could know it if you enlisted the help of a medium to talk to the spirit for you. Mediums are central to the spiritualist movement, facilitating seances and summoning circles for practitioners of the faith.
By the way, I feel really weird about pluralizing “medium” as “mediums”. I don’t like it. From this point forward, if I have to talk about more than one medium, I’m going to refer to them as “media”. Come at me, bro, I don’t care. I gotta stand up for what’s right.
Anyway, Hiram Marble was deeply into spiritualism when he learned about Thomas Veale, and he knew exactly what he had to do. He bought the demolished cave that Thomas Veale used to call home, which was now named Dungeon Rock. Then, he uprooted and moved his entire family there, built a whole-ass house and some outbuildings, and hired a medium in 1852. So, you know, normal things.
Luckily for him, the long-dispatched Tommy V was more than willing to talk through his medium, and he gave Hiram the exact location of his treasure. What a nice guy! Now all he had to do was dig it up and live a life of luxury. Nothing could be easier! What could possibly go wrong?
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| "Hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to a seance I go!" |
Spiritualism, Seances, and the Search for Pirate Gold
Hiram had a pretty big fortune at his disposal, so he got right to work drilling and dynamiting the spot Veale told him about through the medium. Every inch of the original cave had collapsed, and a whole mess of granite had fallen on top of it, so it wasn’t an easy prospect. He had an outcropping of stone to start working with and worked his way down as well as he could.
He also held seances inside his man-made cave to talk with Thomas Veale and get directions for each day’s work. This resulted in a cave that curves left to right as it descends into the black abyss. No matter what Thomas Veale told him in the seance, Marble would carry out. Sometimes it was left, sometimes it was down, but he continued, just blasting his way through hard rock in his search for treasure.
The big problem was that the hard rock he was blasting through was made up of solid metamorphic bedrock, deeply embedded with quartz and granite. That’s the really hard stuff, and he could only get through a single foot of it every thirty days. It required lots of dynamite and back-breaking labor; then things got even more difficult for him.
Dynamite and tools cost money, especially when your only job is digging a cave for free. He ran out of money in 1856 and had no option but to continue with much cheaper tools and any small amount of explosives he could get his hands on. Hiram kept on like this for the next eight years of his life, obsessed with finding the treasure and only having his seances with a long-dead shoemaking pirate to lead him in his endeavor.
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| "One bit a gander is a steal!" |
The Sunk Cost Fallacy of a Haunted Treasure Hunt
Fast forward eight years to 1864, and Marble managed to follow his obsession a full one hundred thirty-five feet into the granite. That was no small task at all, but his twisting tunnel kept growing with all the twists and turns you can imagine emerging from spectral directions given to a man gripped and taken over by the need to find treasure.
This is just my own interpretation, but I think a lot of this can come down to the sunk cost fallacy. That’s what happens when people keep working at something because they’ve already invested so much time and effort into it that they just can’t help but prioritize the things they’ll never be able to get back. They have to see it through because of what they’ve already put in.
Add in a little bit of gambling addiction mentality, though. When a gambler is down on his or her luck and hemorrhaging money, he or she always has to bet more because he or she needs just one more hand or one more pull of the slot machine arm, and they’ll win it big, and everything will be all right. That’s pretty much where I see Hiram Marble’s mental state to be during this whole thing, on top of his passion for spiritualism.
Anyway, this was also the year his son, Edwin Marble, decided to join in on the fun. Now he had someone to help him dig, and Hiram had a great idea. Now that word of his tunnelling had spread far and wide over the years, he decided that it made a lot of financial sense to open the cave up to tours. People could come from all over the country, explore his work for an admission fee, and he could use that money to finance yet more digging. Now that he had help from his son and a steady flow of much-needed cash, he was off and running to make the fastest progress of the previous twelve years.
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| "My cave was deeper." |
All Good Things
Well, all good things must come to an end, as they say. I don’t know who “they” are, but I know they say it. Let me know if you know who they are in the comments.
After some time working with his son and giving tours for much-needed money, the Mables managed to tunnel much deeper until November of 1868. That, unfortunately, was when Hiram Marble passed away.
Surprisingly enough, he didn’t die from chunks of granite falling on his head. He passed peacefully from natural causes, no doubt helped along by the back-breaking labor of his final sixteen years.
That was the end of his story of obsession and conversations with a two-hundred-year-old pirate. He’s buried next to his wife at Bay Path Cemetery in Charlton, Massachusetts. He, no doubt, had more than a few interesting conversations with Thomas Veale when he met him on the other side, am I right?
After Hiram’s passing, Edwin took over the family business and continued tunneling and giving tours to fund his progress. When all was said and done, Dungeon Rock ran between one hundred seventy-four and two hundred feet, which is quite an accomplishment by any standard, let alone when you’re going through granite and bedrock. He worked all the way up until 1880, when he followed his father into the great beyond.
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| Now cave-in free! |
The Legacy of Dungeon Rock: From Pirate Lore to Public Park
A few years earlier, Hiram Marble made a promise to the people of what was now called the City of Lynn, Massachusetts. He told them that, when he found the treasure, he would use it to buy the surrounding land of Dungeon Rock and turn it into a park for them. While he never got to do it, the city made it happen for him.
The city of Lynn purchased the land that Hiram and Edwin once owned in 1881. They turned the whole thing into a public park within Lynn Woods, and anyone can visit it anytime they want.
In fact, the very cave they built is open for people to explore on their own. It’s currently (as of this writing) open from May 1st to October 31st, 9:00 am to 2:30 pm, Tuesday through Saturday. It’s definitely something you should check out, and more than a few people like to perform their own rituals within the cave. As Ranger Dan Small once put it, “A lot of people still believe what’s going on up here.” That means you should feel free to head in with your shrines and trinkets and just have a good time. Just make sure you clean up after yourself. He’s found more than enough ritualistically sacrificed chickens in there. No, really.
Oh, and you can also find remnants of some of the Marbles’ buildings in the area, as well as a pink rock that marks Edwin’s final resting place. If you’re ever unsure of whether Dungeon Rock is open, you can email the park Ranger to find out, or simply head to the cave and see what’s going on. If the massive, iron door at the entrance is closed, you’re not getting in. It tends to be open, though.
Sailing off into the Sunset
So that’s pretty much the story of Thomas Veale, the codswaining pirate of Lynn Woods. He lived a life of violence, then settled down to make shoes until an earthquake took his life. It’s also the story of Hiram Marble, who drew Veale across the centuries in an attempt to find his gold.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this whole thing, and I’m going to leave you with a poem. It was written by Nathan Ames and published in 1853. There’s a very high probability that Hiram would have read it when it came out. Enjoy!
Pirates’ Glen and Dungeon Rock
Canto III
I.
The summer sun is rolling high ;
The winds their still siesta take ;
No broad-wing’d clouds along the sky
Their cooling shadows make ;
The landscape faints ; all, save the plashy stream,
In breathless torpor, bear the barning beam.
II.
The birds awhile forget to sing ;
The eagle leaves the melting sky,
And on the hill-top folds his wing ;
The lazy butterfly
Scarce flaps along ; the wild deer pants ; the pines
Swear fragrant pitch ; the shrill-keyed locust whines.
III.
Meandering on with noiseless tread, –
Like good men to Eternity,
That boundless ocean of the dead,
Resigned, reluctantly, –
Divided , dark , perennial woods between,
Long-lingering Saugus laves his banks of green.
IV.
Still wending up that winding creek,
Sad Christopher pursues his way,
Nor heeds the heat ; his swift oars speak
Impatience of delay.
Startled, the Haleyon bird, the snipe, the crane,
Rise , as he passes , shriek , and light again.
=. . .
IX.
The smoky foundery heaves in view ;
A moment, on you opening plot,
Christopher paused––in haste withdrew,
Piercing that secret grot
Wherein, mysterious purchasers had told,
Fetters of iron should be met with gold.
X.
The gold was there; the fetters gone.
“Ah, me!” he cried , as light broke in
Upon the deed that he had done ;
“Ah, me ! and have I been
The dupe of desperate pirates––forged the chains
That bind sweet Arabel in captive pains !"
. . .
Canto IV
. . .
XLII.
Those lips––pale lips––see how they move!
Hark, hark ! I hear two serpents hiss !
The snake, within thee, greets his love
With one, long, soul-like kiss !––
Ah ! wretch, too long hast thou nurtured within
Thy breast––thy master now––that monster, Sin!
XLIII.
Ha ! dost thou now begin to feel,
No friendly spirit holds thee bound ?
The serpent’s coils are coils of steel !
Wilt tread him to the ground ?––
He craves thy pity now ; too mild, too late
Ye twain are one––fast fettered, fate to fate!
XLIV.
Hearest thou thy threat to Arabel ?
Clorinda’s supplicating cry ?––
Thou seest the snake––A fiend from hell,
Hath come to bid thee die !––
“Reptile, avaunt ! Back to thy flames again !
Like red-hot steel, those eyeballs burn my brain !”
. . .
XLVIII.
Prepare to go––but thou art gone !
Thy Guardian Angel takes his flight,
Weeping thy deeds of darkness done,
Alone––to realms of light !
Thou hast thy choice––the angel, or the snake––
No more.––One guide remains; him must thou take.
XLIX.
The charm advancing, soul with soul
Will soon embrace, and thou shalt see––
The fiend again !––His coils unroll !
His fangs are fixed in thee !––
The pirate falls. The rattle, groan, the gloom
L.
Coiled on his breast the serpent sleeps ;
His requiem sings the serpent’s hiss.
Nor friend, nor foe, his exit weeps,
Who leads a life like this.––
Thus fell, beneath the avenging earthquake shock,
The fiend of Pirates’ Glen in Dungeon Rock.
THE END.
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