On the seventh of December, 1776, a destructive fire laid waste to the rope-house of the royal dockyard at Portsmouth. At first, the calamity was attributed to mere mischance. An investigation was set in motion only when workmen discovered, within the adjoining hemp-store, a tin canister and a wooden box laden with combustible materials. These contrivances transformed a blackened ruin into an apparatus of design; they did not, however, immediately disclose the hand that had placed them.
Suspicion presently fastened upon an itinerant painter recently returned from America, who had been observed loitering within the precincts of the yard. He was known simply as John the Painter, the officers charged with his pursuit being initially ignorant of his true surname. He had previously been employed by a master painter named Golding at Titchfield. Advertisements inserted in the public prints offered a reward of fifty pounds for his apprehension. He was eventually taken into custody at Odiham and, on the seventh of February, conducted before Sir John Fielding at the Bow Street public office.
The authorities thereupon arranged an encounter with John Baldwyn, a painter who had plied his trade in sundry parts of North America, Lord Temple surmising that the two men might recognize one another. Baldwyn disclaimed any previous acquaintance with the prisoner. The stranger nevertheless bowed to him, subsequently entreating him to pay a visit to his cell in the New Prison. Baldwyn returned thither on several occasions. Their early discourse turned upon the general course of American affairs. From the fifteenth of February onward, according to Borrow’s narrative, the prisoner began to unfold a tale which the Crown prosecutors would later marshal alongside the material proof.
He inquired of Baldwyn whether he was acquainted with a Mr. Dean. Upon Baldwyn answering in the negative, Hill made mention of Silas Deane, representative of the American Congress, speaking of him in terms of high praise. He asserted that he had reconnoitred English dockyards and fortifications, counted the shipping, recorded their armaments and complements, and crossed over to France on two or three occasions to deliver his intelligence to Deane. He maintained that Deane had advanced him three hundred pounds in bills of exchange and provided letters of introduction to a London merchant. Apprehensive of discovery, he added, he had committed the papers to the flames. Borrow here merely recites Hill’s private declarations to Baldwyn; the text does not independently establish that Deane ever commissioned or suborned him to fire the dockyards.
In the course of these same interviews, Hill detailed his preparations at Portsmouth. He recounted having engaged an apprentice in Canterbury to manufacture a tin case, taking up lodgings at the house of Mrs. Boxall. The implements recovered from the dockyard and the remnants retrieved from his quarters were destined to undergo scrutiny at his trial. Hill stated that he had first laid his combustibles within the hemp-house, before placing a second contrivance amidst the loose hemp of the rope-house. His recital supplied the investigators with an unbroken sequence: the fabricated canister, the hired lodging, the two storehouses, and the blaze that broke out on the following day.
He professed to have contemplated setting fire to two private houses as well, intending to draw the fire-engines and dockyard hands away from the yard. On the morning following, he repaired to the hemp-house; however, the common matches he had purchased were damp and refused to ignite. Balked in this endeavour, he made his way to the rope-house and fired the combustibles prepared there. His design fell short of his ambitions: a single building was consumed, while the hemp-house and the dwellings were spared.
He maintained that he was unable to return to his lodgings to recover a bundle containing books, a pistol, and a French passport bearing his true name. Upon quitting Portsmouth, he reportedly lamented the failure of the second fire, and even thought to discharge his piece into the windows of the woman who had sold him the faulty matches. He refrained from doing so. Handing sixpence to a woman driving a cart to quicken her pace, he cleared the sentry posts, looked back, and observed the flames spreading with alarming rapidity. He reached Kingston on the following morning, waited for dusk, and completed his journey to London by stage-coach.
The London merchant to whom Hill claimed to have been recommended received him with visible coldness. When Hill explained that he had burnt both the letters and the bills received from Deane, the merchant appeared incredulous, though he consented to meet him subsequently in a coffee-house. Hill departed in high dudgeon; upon reaching Hammersmith, he wrote back to announce that he was setting out for Bristol, where the deeds he purposed to accomplish would soon be universally known. His letter contained neither plea for pardon nor request for succour; it announced another attempt.
At Bristol, Hill set fire to several dwellings; Borrow relates that they burned simultaneously, causing damages amounting to fifteen thousand pounds. A further attempt to ignite combustibles upon the quay miscarried. These outrages extended the scope of the inquiry far beyond the dockyard walls of Portsmouth. Yet the notion of a coordinated campaign instigated from America continued to rest exclusively on the declarations Hill was alleged to have made in his cell. The physical exhibits and the sworn testimonies presented a far narrower and more direct chain of circumstance.
James Russel produced in court the tin canister and the wooden box found in the hemp-store. William Tench, an apprentice to a Canterbury tinsmith, testified that he had fashioned the canister a month or six weeks before Christmas, at the prisoner’s direction and under his immediate inspection. John Fisher, a journeyman in the same shop, recalled that Hill had ordered two such canisters; neither had been completed at the appointed hour, and both had remained behind in the shop. Fisher produced one of them, which the court observed to correspond precisely with the apparatus found within the yard.
Mrs. Boxall testified that Hill had lodged under her roof on the night preceding the fire. In the morning, sensible of an odour of brimstone, she had entered his room and told him of her apprehension that he would set her dwelling ablaze. Hill left a bundle behind him. Upon untying it, she discovered a tin case which she believed to be identical to the one exhibited in court. Mrs. Cole, another lodging-house keeper, stated that Hill had lodged with her and left behind a bundle of books and other effects, which she had delivered over to the clerk of the dockyard commissioner. These domestic remnants enabled the bench to weigh the prisoner’s tale of a lost parcel against material exhibits and witnesses wholly independent of the prison conversations with Baldwyn.
William Baldy and William Weston swore to having seen and addressed Hill in the Portsmouth hemp-house on the seventh of December. John Dobby, the officer who took him into custody, inventoried the articles found upon his person: tinder, gunpowder, an improvised strike-a-light, spirits of turpentine, matches, and sundry other items. Thomas Mason, a painter of Bristol, recounted that on the day following Christmas, Hill had come to his shop to grind a small lump of charcoal, labouring at the task for some two hours. Each deposition chained the prisoner to a specific locality or implement. Borrow notes that the learned judge summed up the evidence with great perspicuity, and the jury returned a verdict of guilty.
The judge then addressed the prisoner on the enormity of his crime and the impossibility of any mitigation of sentence. Hill replied that he looked for no mercy and would rather suffer death than live. Borrow places the trial at Winchester Castle on the sixth of March, 1777, recording that Hill was executed at Portsmouth on the tenth of March. The catalogue entry for a contemporary pamphlet of 1777 assigns a different day to the proceedings; the precise date of the trial thus remains open to question. The Portsmouth Royal Dockyard Historical Trust confirms an execution in March; the date of the tenth rests here upon Borrow’s authority.
The canisters from Canterbury, the abandoned bundles, and the dockyard witnesses had, before the jury, converged with the confidences whispered in prison. The court convicted Hill of felony arson. Yet the credentials he claimed to have received from Deane had, by his own admission, perished in the fire before any human eye could inspect them. Thus, the man who boasted of an American commission left in his wake abundant material traces of his fires, but a foreign patron whom those traces could by no means establish.