Wednesday, January 25, 2012 With the ill treatment by his mistress “burning and broyling in [his] Breast,” Thomas Hellier, an indentured servant on a Virginia plantation, knew he had to escape. In 1677, Hellier was tricked into signing an indentured servant contract back in England with the promise that he would not be forced to perform physical labor and [...]
Wednesday, January 11, 2012 Daniel Wilson was confident he could escape from prison one more time. He was being held in the Providence jail after committing a rape back in December 1773 in Smithfield, RI. He had escaped from the jail twice before, although both times he was caught and returned. But he vowed to himself on this early [...]
Wednesday, December 21, 2011 It was love at first sight for Samuel Bellamy and Mary Hallett. According to local lore, when the two met on a spring evening in 1715 in a tavern in Eastham, MA on Cape Cod, they began to talk about marriage. But when Hallett’s wealthy parents put a stop to the plan when they learned [...]
Thursday, October 20, 2011 After one week, hunger finally drove Owen Syllavan out of his hiding place in the Connecticut woods and forced him to seek refuge with an acquaintance. Syllavan cut open a plank in the floor of his friend’s house, dug a large cavity that went under the hearth of the fireplace, and rigged a vent so [...]
Also filed in | Tagged Branding, Connecticut, Counterfeiting, Ear cropping, Execution, Forgery, Imprisonment, Maine, Massachusetts, New England, New Hampshire, New York, Pillory, Punishment, Whipping | Wednesday, September 21, 2011 As soon as Joseph Andrews read the newspaper article in the St. Christopher’s Gazette, which reproduced the deposition William Harris gave to the authorities, he knew he had to leave the Caribbean island of St. Eustatia immediately. The decision was a wise one, because as soon as Governor John De Windt read the same story [...]
Wednesday, September 7, 2011 The merchants and planters in and around Bath, North Carolina had had enough of Edward Teach, a.k.a. Blackbeard. The pirate had been living–and carousing–in town, and had been pillaging ships up and down the inlets and rivers of the colony. But the citizens knew that they could not complain to Governor Charles Eden of North [...]
In the fall of 1703, the owners of the 80-ton brigantine, the Charles, desperately wrote to various West Indies ports in an attempt to discover any information on the whereabouts of their new ship, but without success. This leading group of Boston merchants—Charles Hobby, Col. Nicholas Paige, William Clarke, Benjamin Gallop, and John Colman—built the [...]
Joseph Lightly relates in his Last Words and Dying Speech that when his mother learned he had enlisted in the British army, “she told me she hoped she should hear of my being hanged, for my Cruelty of going to leave her against her Will.” Lightly’s mother may simply have been reacting to the moment, [...]
George Burns made one last desperate attempt to save himself: he wrote to the Attorney-General and named Ephraim Jones and Arthur Sykes as accomplices in a robbery that he had actually helped to pull off with three different men on July 29, 1766. The victim of the robbery, John “Ready Money” Scott, had mistakenly fingered [...]
Wednesday, March 23, 2011 The Native-American servant Patience Boston developed, in her words, “some groundless Prejudice” against her new master, so she tried to come up with ways to take action against him. She thought about poisoning his food, but she did not have access to a toxin that would kill him. She tried to burn down his barn, [...]
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