Before the gallows, James White turned to the minister attending him and asked what he ought to do. The divine instructed him; White clasped his hands and cried aloud: “Lord, receive my soul.” The chronicle records this final supplication after recounting a life it deemed long bereft of instruction and moral reflection. It tells of a lad cast into transportation for a theft of tobacco, an escape into the American woods, a clandestine return to England, and a second capital conviction for returning from exile contrary to law. On November 6, 1723, at approximately twenty-five years of age, White perished without ever having regained an unburdened existence.
He was the son of parents whom the account describes as honest, yet so impoverished that they could neither pay for his schooling nor secure his admission to a charity school. The chronicler seized upon this lack of education to explain the whole course of his conduct, attributing it to undisciplined appetites for food and carnal pleasure. Such theories belonged entirely to the chronicler. In more tangible terms, the record establishes that White led a precarious livelihood, stole a quantity of tobacco, and was sentenced by the court to be transported beyond the seas.
While still in his youth, he stole thirty pounds of tobacco belonging to one Mr. Perry, a Virginia merchant. Tried at the Old Bailey, he was committed to a transport vessel. The prisoners were allotted a daily ration of a pint and a half of fresh water and a small morsel of salt meat. The chronicle dwells upon their confinement beneath the hatches, where they lay chained two by two, kept under strict guard by the crew to forestall any bid for escape. It records neither the vessel’s name nor the precise length of the voyage, picturing only prisoners kept on meager fare, bound and immured for the shipmen’s security.
Upon reaching America, an unexpected turn altered their circumstances. The supercargo fell ill of an affliction that, according to the author, was wont to strike newcomers who failed to observe the rules of temperance. Having run heavily into debt with his physician, he departed precipitously. White and five fellow convicts thus found themselves without an immediate master. White took refuge in the wilderness, living in utter destitution. He encountered Native families who, the author writes, gave him food and assisted him to the best of their power. This charity preserved his life, but offered no path back to an ordinary civil existence.
White eventually fell in with some English indentured servants. He recounted his transportation and subsequent flight, and they took pity upon him. Having relieved his needs on several occasions, they found him employment with a local planter. There he laboured painfully, yet had enough to eat. He was subsequently ordered to carry heavy tubs of water across the rocks down to a ship riding at anchor in the bay. His feet were so grievously cut and lacerated that he became lame and could no longer perform his tasks. Weary of keeping an incapacitated servant, the planter’s household let him go. A ship’s captain then took him aboard to perform such light galley duties as he could manage, and conveyed him back to England.
Upon his return, White sought out his friends in the parish of Cripplegate. He recounted his misfortunes and told them he had been cast back upon his native shores almost as inevitably as he had been sent beyond the seas. They were too poor to harbor him. He was therefore compelled to earn his bread by crying fruit through the streets—a humble but honest calling, as the account observes. He persevered in this trade for several months, nor did the chronicler find trace of any new offense during that period. Yet the resumption of honest labour could not extinguish the legal reality of his return: the original sentence of transportation remained attached to his name. Months of honest toil could not shield him from apprehension.
Men who made it their business, or purported to do so, to track down returned convicts recognized and arrested him. At the following sessions of the Old Bailey, he was convicted under the statute that made returning from transportation a capital felony. White pleaded his youth and begged to be sent overseas once more, vowing to remain there for the rest of his days. The court, however, was resolved to show no mercy to those who ventured back to England, regarding them as desperate felons apt to commit further outrages once shorn of hope. White was duly placed upon the dead warrant.
The chronicle dwells at length upon his conduct while under sentence of death. Both before and after his condemnation, it alleges that he was slothful, intractable, and a grievous nuisance to his fellow prisoners. It reports that he accosted women who came to visit the inmates, even those of modest demeanour, assailing them with lewd and indecent language. He is further said to have indulged in acts of debauchery within the wards, to the utter astonishment of men whom the writer himself describes as thoroughly depraved. Fellow prisoners complained of his presence as an added torment in their misery. When rebuked by them, he pleaded his own ignorance, while declaring that he could not endure their curses, threats, and ill-treatment. These descriptions reflect both the moral censure of the writer and the strained relations White endured with his cellmates.
From that juncture onward, the narrative notes that he attended the ordinary’s ministrations with greater diligence. It treats this turn of mind with caution, attributing it to the modest limits of understanding the author ascribed to him. Before his death, however, White was said to have given several tokens of unfeigned penitence.
The ordinary declined to administer the sacrament to him, judging that White lacked sufficient comprehension of its nature and the preparation it required. At the place of execution, bewilderment came upon him. He gazed around him, asking what was expected of him. The minister directed his conduct; White then clasped his hands together and uttered the prayer that opens this final scene. The record mentions neither farewells to his family nor any dying speech addressed to the spectators.
His first sentence had been passed for the theft of tobacco; the second, for returning from transportation. Between the two lay the ocean crossing in irons, abandonment in the woods, the charity of Native families, servitude on a plantation cut short by crippled feet, and backbreaking toil in the streets of London. Nothing in the chronicle indicates that he committed a single theft after his return. Yet his unexpired sentence was sufficient to send him to the tree. White was executed on November 6, 1723. The chronicle framed his end as a lesson in ignorance and repentance; the facts it records delineate the material plight of a transported felon who returned from the New World only to be claimed by the gallows.