Robert Perkins was on the very point of quitting England when the law laid hands upon him at Gravesend. His design had been to reach the East Indies; justice consigned him once more to Newgate. For nearly two years, he had plied his trade as a baker in the very realm from which his sentence of transportation barred him. The felony that had originally cast him out to Jamaica was the theft of a marked coin, found within his pocket in the depths of a Whitechapel tavern. Upon his return, it was his mere presence on English soil that sealed his condemnation to death.
His father had kept an inn of considerable note, at or near Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire. So long as the first wife lived, the chronicler portrays Perkins as an infant reared with tenderness, sent to school under a master of good repute, and promised a liberal education. Upon the mother’s death, the order of the household was subverted. The father married again; the boy was at first recalled home, where he met, for an interval, with a kindly reception. Yet he soon fancied he discerned the subordinate place reserved for him, and gave utterance, perchance too freely, to his misgivings. According to the chronicle, his new stepmother prevailed upon his father to cast him out and forbid him the threshold. The author observes that it remains unknown whether young Perkins had, by that hour, committed any dishonest act.
One night, pressed by bitter cold and anxious for his sister’s welfare, he took a ladder and climbed through a window into the dwelling. This entry was construed as a design upon the life of his stepmother. The chronicle does not record that Perkins committed any theft on that occasion; it notes merely that the incident was magnified into a capital accusation, and that he was thereafter wholly cast off by his father. The latter’s death followed shortly after. He left an estate worth several thousand pounds, yet not a penny devolved upon his son: the youth was bound apprentice to a baker and abandoned, as the account relates, without further countenance or support.
The craft proved irksome to him. He preferred drinking, gaming, and idling away his hours with companions who drew him into their dissolute pleasures. The constant thought of the inheritance wrested from him fed, in the author’s estimation, his appetite for living beyond his condition. Perkins, it is said, affected to live as though his father’s fortune were at his command, though his slender earnings compelled him to the strictest frugality. Such expenditures and pastimes agreed neither with his apprenticeship nor with his true fortunes. The chronicler lays great stress upon the cruelty of his kinsfolk and the alacrity with which the world condemns such fallen youths; these strictures, however, belong to his own moral commentary. The demonstrable facts remain narrower: a domestic rupture, an apprenticeship, and reckless company that estranged him from his trade.
One day, Perkins set out with several youths of the neighborhood to carouse and seek diversion. They made for Whitechapel and entered a small tavern. While the company drank, sang lewd catches, and made merry, the house discovered the loss of a five-shilling piece bearing distinctive marks. A constable and a watch were summoned, and the young men were searched apart. The coin was discovered in Perkins’s pocket. He was straightway carried before a magistrate and committed to Newgate.
At the ensuing sessions, the proof was held sufficient to convict him of the felony, and he was sentenced to transportation. The interval preceding his departure afforded him, says the chronicler, occasion to weigh his wretched state and consider his course. His thoughts ran first upon the ill-usage he laid at his family’s door; then, as the hour of embarkation drew near, he set himself to win the favor of the ship’s captain, hoping thereby to mitigate the rigors of the voyage. Perkins thus bent his mind to that which yet lay within his power: unlike his paternal home, the vessel held a master whose goodwill might alleviate the hardships of his passage.
His obliging demeanor earned him a measure of liberty aboard and such indulgences as the commander could grant without neglecting his duty. Upon arrival in Jamaica, his condition altered abruptly: he was sold to a planter for ten pounds. The labor demanded on the plantations proved far beyond his strength; the chronicle states that the master worked him alongside his slaves, and that his constitution broke beneath the fatigue. His baker’s craft availed him nothing. The planter presently parted with him to another master, who caused an oven to be built in order to employ him at his former trade. This second engagement restored Perkins to the calling he had learned in England, yet he did not long abide with his new employer. The account leaves open the question whether this second master was genuinely cruel, or whether Perkins accounted all labor harsh that thwarted his penchant for idleness.
He fled from this master and crept secretly aboard a vessel bound for Carolina. Thence, by his own account, he reached Maryland, where he took service upon a ship bound for England. He had thus pursued no direct course back to the port of his exile, but had reached home through a circuit of varied berths and voyages. The passage was further interrupted by his capture at the hands of the Spaniards; he weathered yet other hazards before regaining his native shores, as the chronicler briefly traces. The text affords neither dates nor details of this captivity, leaving this arduous return devoid of further circumstance. Yet this homecoming could not efface the sentence that had banished him beyond the seas. He had regained his country, but under a judgment the breach of which was capital.
For nearly two years following his return, Perkins worked as a baker. The chronicler attributes to him a firm resolve to lead an honest life and forsake his former vices. Yet the perpetual dread of discovery kept him, it is said, in such unrest that he was unable to pursue this quiet design in peace. He resolved at last to make for the East Indies. It was at Gravesend, whither he had gone to take ship, that he was apprehended.
Arraigned for returning from transportation, he was found guilty and condemned to die. The record discloses neither the identity of the person who denounced him nor the arguments of his trial. It dwells rather upon the spiritual transformation said to have occurred beneath the shadow of the gallows: the principles of a virtuous education, long stifled, resumed their sway over his soul and moved him to throw himself upon the mercy of Christ. The author affirms that this inward peace endured until the very day of his suffering, and was neither brief nor fleeting. Perkins himself is reported to have said that he faced death with less reluctance knowing that his ruin touched none but himself: he left no children behind him, and his young wife was capable of earning an honest livelihood.
On July 5, 1721, Robert Perkins was executed at Tyburn. Thus the innkeeper’s son, cut off without a portion from his father’s wealth, ended his days after enduring an apprenticeship, the theft of a coin, the bonded labor of the plantations, and a clandestine return to England. He had resumed his honest trade for nearly two years, yet the dread of exposure drove him toward another flight, and arrest overtook him ere he could clear Gravesend. The chronicle closes upon his religious resignation and his solace at leaving no offspring to inherit his disgrace. The return that had allowed him to resume his oven was the very path that brought him to the tree.