One evening, in an alehouse near the Iron Gate, four young men drank in company with sailors belonging to a man-of-war. A squadron was fitting out for the Baltic and stood in sore need of hands. As the liquor flowed, the seamen spoke of sailing together for the North; John Hamp and two companions presently consented, and a fourth yielded after yet another bowl of punch. A lieutenant, apprised of this recruitment, undertook to defray the reckoning and promised each man a guinea. The recruits were too deep in drink to walk unassisted; sailors carried them down to the pinnace, laid them in the bottom of the boat, and covered them with coats. On the morrow, Hamp awoke aboard ship. Though astonished at his plight, he raised no protest, and—according to the chronicle—entered upon the voyage with cheerful humor.
Hamp was born in the parish of St. Giles-without-Cripplegate, of parents whom the record describes as honest and reputable. They had taken proper care of his education; being a brisk and lively youth, he asked to be bound apprentice to a lath-render. He did not, however, serve out his indentures. That encounter at the public house beneath the Tower of London tore him away from his calling before he had long practiced it. The chronicler thus turns his narrative seaward, where Hamp embarked without any deliberate design of life: an accident born of a drunken carouse became a voyage to Copenhagen and the frozen waters of the North.
The voyage proved harsh. No combat took place during the Baltic expedition, the chronicler affirms; the hardships endured were those of the sea and the piercing cold, which men bred to the English climate could ill sustain. The fleet came to anchor off Copenhagen. Among Hamp’s shipmates was one Scrimgeour, a jovial mariner who found favor with the crew and sometimes with the officers, and who was ever ready to share his money. One day, as he sought fresh provisions ashore to treat his messmates, a man caught sight of a dollar he held in his hand. Scrimgeour, wanting smaller currency, agreed to have it changed. He parted with the coin and was about to make for his boat when a Danish officer and a squad of soldiers came upon him to arrest him for uttering counterfeit money.
The man who had changed the dollar was in their company. Scrimgeour recognized him and fled toward the boat, which bore him swiftly back to his ship. He fancied himself beyond their reach; yet on the very next morning, three Danish commissioners waited upon the admiral. They represented that a seaman belonging to the fleet had put off false coin and escaped from the officer who would have apprehended him. The admiral declined to deliver the man into the hands of the Danes, but promised severe punishment should the proofs sustain the charge. He dispatched a lieutenant and twenty soldiers aboard Scrimgeour’s vessel, accompanied by the Dane who had witnessed the transaction. Scrimgeour was forthwith seized; in his chest were discovered nearly an hundred counterfeit dollars, so artfully executed that the seamen could scarce have distinguished them from true coin.
A court-martial sentenced him to be flogged from ship to ship. The chastisement was executed before the Danish commissioners with such severity that they, far from suspecting the English of shielding their countryman, besought the admiral to spare the culprit the last three vessels. Their petition was denied. Hamp was among the rowers appointed to transport Scrimgeour from one ship to another. The chronicle records that the sight of the mariner after the final stroke struck him with terror, even as it horrified all who beheld it. The author adds that, despite suspicions that others of the crew were privy to the business, no further counterfeit coin was uttered thereafter. Scrimgeour’s fate remained for Hamp an awful lesson in the rigor of the law, at the very hour when he little dreamed he was himself drifting toward the gallows.
Near five years elapsed before Hamp thought of returning home to resume his trade. His ship was recalled and subsequently paid off. Very little money remained to him: his propensity for strong drink had consumed nearly his entire wages before his arrival. The chronicle opines that he might have retrieved his fortunes by steady industry and the renunciation of his vices. On the eve of his death, Hamp himself reportedly ascribed his ruin solely to his love of liquor, disclaiming every other crime. This reflection reaches us from the condemned man himself, through the author, who accounts words spoken on the threshold of eternity to be worthy of credit.
Once returned, Hamp fell to drinking yet more heavily than at sea. One night, wandering the streets in liquor, he was plucked by the sleeve by a woman who invited him into her mother’s dwelling to share a pot of beer. He consented. He was not long in falling asleep within the house, in the presence of James Bird—who was later to hang beside him—the woman who had brought him thither, and an elderly woman whom she called her mother. Presently, officers entered and apprehended both Hamp and Bird for their presence in a house deemed disorderly. Being conveyed to the watch-house, both men were charged with having robbed and cruelly beaten an aged woman near Rag Fair.
At their trial before the Old Bailey in the following sessions, the woman’s testimony against them was positive, and they were found guilty. Hamp, however, preserved his composure under the sentence. He maintained that he had never set eyes on Bird before the night of their arrest, and that he had never come by so much as an halfpenny dishonestly, having ever earned his bread to defray his charges. Touching the assault, he protested he knew no more of it than the unborn babe. He believed the woman spoke the truth regarding the robbery itself, he added, save that she was mistaken in the persons; as for Bird, he refused to affirm whether he had borne any part in it. The narrative records neither the woman’s name nor the particulars of the stolen goods or the wounds inflicted.
An eminent divine visited Hamp in his cell and publicly exhorted him to confess his guilt. He represented that a jury had unanimously condemned him, that the law had appointed his death, and that no hope of pardon remained. To persist in denial, the divine urged, could avail him nothing in this world and ran the peril of sending his soul before God with a lie upon his lips. Hamp heard him with great attention, and replied that he was thankful for the visit, but that his monitor would surely not have him acknowledge what was untrue. He admitted having led a dissolute life and abandoned himself to vice, yet affirmed the present charge to be utterly unfounded. He would not, he explained, add to his transgressions the falsehood of a confession extorted by fear or persuasion.
The Ordinary of Newgate subsequently repaired to the condemned hold to examine Bird. The latter lay sick and in a deplorable condition. He confirmed, according to the chronicle, that he had never seen Hamp prior to the night of their apprehension. He reviled himself as a great sinner and a former thief, frequently taken up for other robberies, yet he too disclaimed any share in the crime at Rag Fair. The agreement between their denials availed them nothing against the sentence. Nor did it resolve the question of how two men arrested together in a house of ill repute had come to be condemned for a crime committed elsewhere, upon the positive deposition preserved in the text.
At Tyburn, Hamp appeared calm and of a cheerful demeanor, which the chronicler deemed uncommon in a man on the brink of eternity. Before the multitude, he confessed his sins, particularly his inclination toward women and, above all, his excessive drinking. He acknowledged the justice of the Almighty in bringing him to a shameful end for those offenses. Yet he once more denied having assaulted the woman at Rag Fair, and protested that he had never committed a robbery in his life. He desired the prayers of the spectators and spent a brief space in private devotion. He died on Wednesday, December 22, 1725, in the twenty-fifth year of his age, together with Bird. The latter, adds the chronicler, confirmed Hamp’s account as far as the distemper of his mind permitted. The account closes upon two convicts executed on the same day, leaving unresolved the conflict between their dying denials and the sworn testimony that brought them to the scaffold.