Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences
History
Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences
Crime -- Great Britain; Criminals -- Great Britain -- Biography
Yet recollecting in the coach that by this means he might be discovered
by his relations, he called to the coachman before he reached there, and
remembering an inn in Holborn, which he had heard spoken of by the
Scotch merchant, where he had lodged in his last adventure, bid the
fellow drive thither, saying he was afraid to be out late, and if he
made haste he would give him a shilling. When he came thither and had
had his two portmanteaus carried into the inn, pretending to be very
sick he went immediately upstairs to bed, having first ordered a pint of
wine to be burnt and brought upstairs.
Reflecting in the night on the condition he was in and the consequence
of the measures he was taking, he resolved with himself to abandon his
ill-courses at once and try to live honestly in some plantation of the
West Indies. These meditations kept him pretty much awake, so that it
was late in the morning before he arose. Having ordered coffee for his
breakfast, he gave the chamberlain a shilling to go and fetch the
newspapers, where the first thing he saw was an account of his own cheat
in the body of the paper, and at the end of it an advertisement with a
reward for apprehending him. This made him very uneasy, and the rather
because he had no clothes but those which he had taken up as aforesaid;
so he ordered the chamberlain to send for a tailor, and pretended to be
so much indisposed that he could not get out. When the tailor came, he
directed him to make him a riding suit with all the expedition he could.
The tailor promised it in two days' time. The next day, pretending to be
still worse, he sent the chamberlain to take a place for him in the
Bristol coach, which being done, he removed himself and his things early
in the morning to the inn where it lay, and set out the next day
undiscovered for Bristol.
Three days after his arrival he met with a captain bound for the West
Indies, with whom having agreed for a passage, he set sail for Jamaica.
But a fresh gale at sea accidentally damaging their rudder, they were
obliged to come to an anchor in Cork, where the captain himself and
several other passengers went on shore. Anderson accompanied him to the
coffee-house, where calling for the papers that last came in, he had
like to have swooned at the table on finding himself to have been
discovered at Bristol, and to have sailed in such a ship the day before
the persons came down to apprehend him in order to his being carried
back to London.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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