At Chatham, an innkeeper believed he recognized his long-lost brother in a traveler newly stepped ashore. The missing man had gone to sea many years prior. The stranger standing before him, one John Richardson, did nothing to dispel the delusion: he welcomed it as one welcomes unexpected fortune. Rejoicings were held. The supposed kinsman went about making the acquaintance of his new circle and presently pocketed an inheritance bequeathed by those he now consented to call his parents. A family had recovered its prodigal; Richardson had replenished his purse.
This scene belongs to the shifting, turbulent life Camden Pelham attributes to him in his criminal chronicles. The compiler heaps fraud upon gallant adventure without ever furnishing the documentary evidence that might permit us to verify them one by one. Yet he steers his subject steadily toward one singular crime: the murder of Captain Benjamin Hartley during a passage from Turkey to Livorno. This time, there would be no question of merely shedding an identity in some distant roadstead. A man was to be cast into the sea, and two boys would slip from the vessel to recount what had transpired upon her deck.
Richardson had been born in New York and first took ship at the age of fourteen aboard his uncle’s vessel. A single voyage was enough to disgust him with the trade. He apprenticed himself to a carpenter, remaining five years, but returned to the sea following an intrigue with his master’s daughter. Departure soon became, in Pelham’s telling, his habitual remedy for every difficulty. Impressed at Jamaica onto a man-of-war and carried home to England, he ended as boatswain in the Baltic trade. A forged bill of exchange is said to have procured him a hundred rix-dollars from a merchant in Riga. He promptly made for Amsterdam.
There, eight months spent in the company of a mariner’s wife came to an abrupt close upon tidings of the husband’s return. Richardson departed laden with goods and money, passed through Rotterdam, and made his way back to New England. There he played the merchant, then the prospective son-in-law of a magistrate. Upon the second calling of the banns, no fewer than seven women appeared to lodge their objections to the match. The episode reads like a moral fable of retribution; Pelham prolongs it with yet another flight, a parley struck with the bride’s father, the nuptials finally solemnized, and the dowry carried off without delay. In this prosecution-minded biography, scandal never overtakes him swiftly enough to cut off his next retreat.
Following further voyages and a shipwreck in the West Indies, we find him at Chatham, the newfound brother of the innkeeper Ballard. This convenient kinship opened further doors. Introduced to the sisters Knowlding, he so thoroughly won the confidence of one of them as to obtain the title deeds to her modest estate. These he mortgaged at Gravesend for eight hundred pounds, straightway embarking for Venice with the gold. The land remained behind; its worth traveled in his pockets. In Venice, having squandered the fruits of this villainy, he made his way to Ancona.
Captain Hartley had just put in there to discharge a cargo of pilchards. Bound once more for Turkey, he stood in need of a carpenter. Richardson understood timber as thoroughly as he knew the ways of the sea: Hartley engaged him. One Richard Coyle served as chief mate aboard the selfsame vessel. The ship made her Turkish port, took on a lading of grain, and weighed anchor for Livorno. It was at the very outset of this homeward passage, when scarcely a few leagues had been run, that the plot was unmasked.
Pelham names Coyle as the ringleader. He is alleged to have secured the aid of Richardson and a third man, one Larson, to dispatch the captain and seize the craft. Toward midnight, on the first night out, the three entered the cabin where Hartley lay sleeping in his hammock. Their presence roused him in time. Leaping to the deck, he sprang into the shrouds. Richardson and Larson clambered up in pursuit. Below him lay the deck and the waiting Coyle; behind him pressed his two pursuers.
Hartley cast himself down from a great height. Surviving the fall, he turned upon Coyle, who had leveled a blunderbuss at his breast. Dodging the blast, the captain lunged at his adversary, wrenched the piece from his grasp, and hurled it into the sea. The din brought hands tumbling up through the fore-hatch. Their appearance might well have turned the tide. Yet, according to the chronicle, Hartley saw in their eyes that they would raise no hand in his defense. Coyle dealt him a blow that stunned him. The captain was instantly flung overboard. The chronicle records neither his dying words nor the least attempt to save him.
Coyle assumed command; Richardson became his mate. A lengthy deliberation determined them to put into an island roadstead to replenish their water and provisions. Yet, while riding at anchor, two boys slipped over the side under cover of darkness and fled to the shore authorities. Pelham omits their names. Their deposition was enough to render the anchorage fatal to those who had just seized command. The crew abandoned the ship and stood out for Tunis in the longboat.
Before the English consul, the fugitives gave themselves out as castaways from a wreck off Sardinia. They received relief. But Coyle took to the bottle, and presently babbed of their exploits with a drunken freedom that shattered their tale. He was seized. Richardson, by contrast, contrived to slip away: Tripoli, Malta, and thence to Sicily. At Messina, an acquaintance of the murdered master brought about his arrest. The sea knits together safe harbors, but it also knits together men who remember a name or recognize a ship’s timber.
Nine months of confinement did not exhaust his resourcefulness. Richardson represented to the King of Naples that he had once served his father; the claim, according to Pelham, procured him his freedom. He reached Rome, then Civitavecchia. There he was arrested anew and sent back under guard to England. Coyle had already arrived in London. The two confederates were brought together to face the selfsame indictment: the murder of their commander upon the high seas.
The chronicle accords the testimony of the two cabin boys the principal weight in their conviction, though it neither preserves their depositions nor the detailed answers of the prisoners at the bar. Both were found guilty and sentenced to die. Pelham contrasts Coyle’s penitence with Richardson’s brazen indifference, placing their execution at Execution Dock on the 25th of January, 1738. After so many havens where a fresh departure had served to wipe away an old life, Richardson was brought back to face men who demanded an account of a single night: that night when Hartley dropped living from the rigging, disarmed his mate, and looked about his own deck to find not a soul to take his part.