Cyprus mutiny and his last three companions arrived there. The mutineers were tried in London and two of them, George James Davis and William Watts, were hanged in that city at Execution Dock on 16 December 1830, the last men hanged for piracy in Britain. Swallow, and two others, were returned to Hobart, where another one named James Camm was hanged. Swallow died at the British maximum security facility of Port Arthur. The mutiny is the subject of the Australian folk song "Cyprus Brig". Simon Barnard’s book "Gaolbird: The True Story of William Swallow, Convict and Pirate", is a fictionalised account of
Hanged, drawn and quartered that for "rebellion, assassination or other violence ...we are of opinion that the extreme penalty must remain", although the most recent occasion (and ultimately, the last) on which anyone had been sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered was in November 1839, following the Chartist Newport Rising—and those men sentenced to death were instead transported. The report highlighted the changing public mood toward public executions (brought about in part by the growing prosperity created by the Industrial Revolution). Home Secretary Spencer Horatio Walpole told the commission that executions had "become so demoralizing that, instead of its having a good effect,