Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison: Fifteen Years in SolitudeBidwell, Austin
General
Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison: Fifteen Years in Solitude
Bidwell, Austin
Bank fraud -- England; Bank of England; Bidwell, Austin; Criminals -- Biography
One of the funniest of these came out in one of the New York comics,
which appeared after the mail arrived from London with the particulars
of the simplicity of the bank officials in their dealings with the
mysterious F. A. Warren. This full-page cartoon represented a young dude,
seated on a mule, riding down a steep declivity.
At the bottom the devil stood, holding in the fingers of his extended
hands a quantity of thousand-pound bank notes tempting Warren, and John
Bull stood behind the mule, belaboring it with an umbrella and driving
Warren down to the devil.
I tried to keep the papers from my wife, but one day she came home from
a visit with a flushed face and eager to talk, and began telling me
about some daring countryman of mine "who had the audacity to rob the
Bank of England," and "who ought to have a whipping." On several
occasions Americans there asked my opinion as to who the party could be.
I always told them he was some clever young scamp, with plenty of money
of his own, who did it for the excitement of the thing and from a wish
to take a rise out of John Bull.
The next French steamer for Mexico was advertised to land at Havana for
passengers and mails for Vera Cruz in a few days, and I determined to
sail by her. Soon after my arrival I had formed the acquaintance of a
wealthy young countryman of mine from Savannah by the name of Gray. We
soon became fast friends, and I had him out to dinner nearly every day.
He had a warm friend in Senor Andrez, a rich young Cuban planter, and
had accepted an invitation to visit his coffee plantation in the Isle of
Pines, the largest of all that immense body of islets and keys of the
south coast of Cuba in the Carribean Sea, one of the loveliest tropical
isles imaginable, and Gray insisted upon my making one of the party.
It was proposed to spend a week on the island, and to take three days in
going and coming. But if I went then I would be unable to sail on the
steamer of the 25th, and would have to wait another week.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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