admiral declined that, but assured them that, upon due proof, he would punish him with the greatest severity on board; and having in the meanwhile dispatched a lieutenant and twenty men on board Scrimgeour’s ship, with the Dane who detected him in putting off false money, he was secured immediately.  Upon searching his trunk they found there near a hundred false dollars, so excellently made that none of the ship’s crew could have distinguished them from the true.

He was immediately carried on board the admiral, who ordered him to be confined.  Soon after a court-martial condemned him to be whipped from ship to ship, which was performed in the view of the Danish commissaries, with so much rigour that instead of expressing any notion of the Englishmen showing favour to their countryman upon any such occasion, they interposed to mitigate the fellow’s sufferings, and humbly besought the admiral to omit lashing him on board three of the last ships.  But in this request they were civilly refused, and the sentence which had been pronounced against him was executed upon him with the utmost severity; and it happening that Hamp was one of the persons who rowed him from ship to ship, it filled him with so much terror that he was scarce able to perform his duty; the wretch, himself, being made such a terrible spectacle of misery that not only Hamp, but all the rest who saw him after his last lashing, were shocked at the sight.  And though it was shrewdly suspected that some others had been concerned with him, yet this example had such an effect that there were no more instances of any false money uttered from that time.

It was near five years after Hamp went first to sea that he began to think of returning home and working at his trade again; and after this thought had once got into his head, as is usual with such fellows, he was never easy until he had accomplished it.  An opportunity offered soon after, the ship he belonged to being recalled and paid off.  John had, however, very little to receive, the great delight he took in drinking made him so constant a customer to a certain officer in the ship that all was near spent by the time he came home.  That, however, would have been no great misfortune had he stuck close to his employment and avoided those excesses of which he been formerly guilty.  But alas! this was by no means in his power; he drank rather harder after his return than he had done before, and if he might be credited at that time when the Law allows what is said to pass for evidence, viz., in the agony of death, it was this love of drink that brought him, without any other crime, to his shameful end.  The manner of which, I shall next fully relate.