instead of complying with his motion, said, This is a dangerous thing to speak of; if it should come to the pirates’ ears we shall be all murdered, and therefore entreated the prisoner not to speak of it any more.  The mate denied every syllable of this, and so the prisoner’s assertions did not weigh at all with the jury.  After they had brought in their verdict, Mr. Upton said to those who swore against him, Lord!  What have you three done?

Under sentence of death he behaved himself with much courage, and yet with great penitence.  He denied part of the charge, viz., that he was willingly one of the pirates, but as to the other facts, he confessed them with very little alteration.  He averred that the course of his life had been very wicked and debauched, for which he expressed much sorrow, and to the day of his death behaved himself with all outward mark of true repentance.  At the place of execution, he was asked whether he had not advised the burning of the Perry galley, with Captain King and the chief mate on board.  He averred that he did not in any shape whatsoever either propose or agree to an act of such a sort.  Then, after some private devotions, he submitted to his sentence, and was turned off on the 16th day of May, 1729, being then about fifty years of age.

The Life of JEPTHAH BIGG, an Incendiary, and Writer of Threatening Letters

I have already taken notice in the life of Bryan Smith[85] of the Act of Parliament on which the proceedings against these letter-writers are grounded.  One would be surprised that after more examples than one of that kind, people should yet be found so foolish as well as wicked as to carry on so desperate an enterprise, in which there is scarce any probability of meeting with success; yet this unfortunate person of whom we are now to speak, who was descended of mean parents, careful however of giving him a very good education, fell upon this project, put into his head by being a little out of business, and so in one moment cancelled all his former honesty and industry, and hazarded a life which soon after became forfeited.

His friends had put him out apprentice to a gunstock maker, to which he served out his time honestly and with a good character.  Afterwards he continued to work at his business with several masters and tolerable reputation, until about a year before the time of his death, when he was out of work, by reason he had disobliged two or three persons for whom he had wrought, and had also been guilty of some extravagancies which had brought him into narrow circumstances.  These straits it is to be supposed put him upon the fatal project of writing a letter to Mr. Nathaniel Newman, senior, a man of a very good fortune, threatening him that unless he sent the sum of eighty-five guineas to such a place, he would murder him and his wife, with other bloody and barbarous expressions.