He must have been a man of resource and some considerable daring, for when he was promised the rack by the Earl of Dorset if he did not disclose the names of his supposed accomplices, he successfully put an end to the possibility of his being racked by declaring that if put to the torture the first name he would mention would be that of the Earl of Dorset himself! Viewed in the light of the present day, another crime, though a judicial one, committed at Portsmouth was the execution of Admiral Byng “for not having done his utmost to take, seize and destroy the ships of the enemy” during an engagement with the French off Minorca on May 20, 1756. Latter day historians appear agreed that at most his was an error of judgement; but in those times the nation generally was subject to what modern writers term “nerves,” and just then popular feeling would scarcely brook the news, let alone the fact, of a defeat or a drawn battle. Be that as it may, the Admiral was brought to trial, condemned, and on a bleak March morning in 1757, “when the sea and sky were grey as though in dudgeon at the crime,” he knelt blindfolded upon the deck of the _Monarque_ at Spithead, and, after letting fall his handkerchief, fell pierced by five bullets. He was less a criminal than one of those periodic scapegoats sacrificed to veil the errors of greater and more powerful men. Voltaire gives a cynical account of the episode in his _Candide_, remarking, amongst other things, that if Byng did not approach near enough the French, neither did they draw near him, adding that in England it was thought advisable to shoot an Admiral now and then to encourage the rest! Less than twenty years later the dockyard had a narrow escape from destruction by fire. In the year 1776 James Aitken, known as “Jack the Painter,” set alight to one of the sheds, happily with little result as regards damage done. Arson in those days, in fact until the middle of the last century, was a capital crime, and Aitken was condemned and duly hanged by being strung up to the masthead of the _Arethusa_ sixty feet in the air, and afterwards was hung in chains near the mouth of the harbour. A lurid sidelight upon the doings and morals of those times is afforded by the circumstance that the skeleton was ultimately stolen by some sailors and pledged in satisfaction on a drink bill at one of the Gosport inns. “Truly,” says a somewhat censorious writer of the period, “these sailormen being neither better nor worse than the soldier men neither fear God nor man.”