In Leghorn, Jack Claxton was running towards the harbour, unburdened of his load. But moments before, he had been carrying the precious effects that the wife of an Italian captain had gathered up to flee with the mate of the vessel upon which the young sailor served. The captain’s brother had just locked the woman away. Claxton had set down the goods and taken to his heels; reaching the ship, he warned the master, who ordered the anchor weighed without delay. In the annals of his life, this first passage precedes the misdeeds that were repeatedly to bring him within the walls of Newgate.
His father was a mariner of Sunderland, a man whose modest means denied the son any extensive schooling. The chronicle relates that the boy, showing little diligence in his studies, dreamed above all of voyages and remote shores. He went to sea before he had acquired any great stock of learning. His first voyage carried him through the Straits of Gibraltar, and thence to Leghorn. There he attended the mate ashore. This officer had formed an attachment with an Irishwoman, the wife of an Italian captain then absent in Sicily; she proposed to carry off her husband’s jewels and other worldly goods, valued at several thousand crowns, and quit Italy in the company of her paramour.
The mate passed himself off as her cousin, multiplying his visits over the space of three days. Sundry neighbours took alarm and sent word to Stefano di Calvo, brother to the absent captain. Stefano hastened to Leghorn. Within the house, he discovered the valuables already parcelled up; the woman had loaded them upon Claxton, who stood ready to follow her down to the vessel. Stefano forced her back into an inner chamber, turned the key upon her, and barred the outer doors. The young sailor, perceiving the design utterly ruined, abandoned his burden. He ran all the way to the quayside and recounted to the master what had just transpired. The ship put out to sea at once, for the master feared the consequences of the affair and the injury it might bring upon his owners.
The chronicler observes that at this date Claxton had as yet committed no crime within the cognisance of the law. He was nevertheless prone, we are told, to mischievous turns during his voyages. Upon his return to England, the ship put in at Yarmouth. There Claxton took to wife a young woman possessed of some money. He possessed himself of the greater part of this sum and took the road for London, alleging his purpose was to find another berth. The record preserves neither the wife’s name nor the particulars of their compact. It records merely that he soon abandoned her, casting aside the maritime purpose that had served as his pretext.
In London, Claxton fell in with a company of thieves, enticed, according to the narrative, by certain women and their companions. The first robbery circumstantially related was directed against the house of a timber merchant, whence the confederates hoped to carry off a considerable booty in plate. A material obstacle defended the premises: every evening, the housemaid carried the keys to her master after locking the yard gate. It was therefore requisite to prevent the gate from being secured, or to devise some means of ingress.
The accomplices pitched upon Claxton to address the maid. The chronicle portrays him as a young man of low stature and clean, neat appearance. He was furnished with handsome apparel and brought into the acquaintance of Mrs Anne at a neighbouring chandler’s shop. He took lodgings in the vicinity. Within about a fortnight, he prevailed upon her to slip out at midnight to meet him. She was instructed, after surrendering the key to her master, to leave the great yard gate upon the latch merely. While she sat drinking punch with Claxton, the other men made their entrance.
They carried away plate to the value of fourscore pounds, leaving the rooms in seemly order. The maid, who had likewise indulged in the bowl, perceived nothing of the theft that night. When the loss was discovered, she ran in haste to warn her lover; but Claxton’s lodging was already deserted. He had departed with the others and their booty ere the merchant and his wife were stirring. Mrs Anne kept her own counsel touching her part in the business, knowing full well the peril she ran should her master discover that she had unlatched the gate. She heard no further tidings of Claxton until his apprehension and commitment to Newgate for another matter. This robbery of the plate, though minutely detailed in the chronicle, is distinct from the subsequent affair that procured Claxton his first conviction and sentence of transportation.
Shipped aboard the transport with other felons, he soon obtained the captain’s leave to remain on deck. His strength and seamanship earned him, by this account, treatment little differing from that of the ship’s company. The vessel was compelled by foul weather to put in at the Canaries. There a quarrel flared up between her commander and the captain of a Jamaica ship bound home for England. The two commanders engaged in a duel with sword and pistol. The master of the transport had taken Claxton ashore as his attendant; the young man’s conduct during this encounter won him a promise of his liberty upon their arrival in America. The captain proved as good as his word.
Claxton thereafter bent all his endeavours toward returning to England, and reached London six weeks before his benefactor’s return. He sought out his former associates, but was apprehended before he had, according to the text, engaged in any fresh depredations with them. He was arraigned at the ensuing sessions for returning from transportation, and received sentence. The captain, having at length arrived home, learned of his plight and interposed on his behalf. The capital sentence was commuted to a second term of transportation.
In New England, the captain procured Claxton an easy service with a planter. But no sooner was the master’s back turned than Claxton made his escape. Nine months later, he was once more in London. The chronicle cannot say whether he intended to resume his former trade; it notes only that he had been in England but a few weeks when a man whose business it was to ferret out returned transports seized him in his old lodgings near Newgate. He was brought to trial and convicted a third time. The record does not specify the exact nature of this final charge; the capital judgment pronounced against him rested upon his unlawful return.
Following this third doom, Claxton abandoned all hope of life. Since his marriage at Yarmouth, he had never once inquired after his wife. The chronicle explains that he would not bring upon her and her kin the disgrace of his condition by making his misfortune publicly known in their town. It does not appear that he ever wrote to her, or that she received intelligence of his fate before his death.
While in prison, he hearkened to the readings of Thomas Smith, who read works of devotion to the inmates. The chronicler affirms that he thereby attained a sufficient sense of repentance and Christian faith. At the place of execution, Claxton exhibited, according to the same witness, no extraordinary tokens of fear. He joined in the prayers of the prison Ordinary, spent a short space in private devotion, and died alongside his fellow malefactors, Smith and Reynolds, being then about twenty-eight years of age.
Claxton’s history presents no orderly descent into crime. It shifts from the sea to an aborted elopement, from a Yarmouth wedding to a burglary compassed through a maidservant’s favour, and thence from banishment to two clandestine returns. The patronage of a sea captain procured his first reprieve; an easy place in New England had no greater power to stay him. That which the chronicler ultimately presents as a spiritual return belongs only to his final days in the condemned hold, after three capital sentences. Between the two, his path was pre-eminently that of a man whom no voyage could ever long divide from London, nor from the companions to whom he invariably returned.