“Promised on receiving a bribe, to let a person bring out £240”

Along with the other reports on life inside besieged Boston that I discussed yesterday, on 17 Dec 1775 Capt. Richard Dodge reported this dastardly deed:

Morson Scotch menster took Bribe of A Sertain Genttelmen of 36/ Starling to Gett Out of Boston and 72/ to Let him Bring Out A trunk of £240 Pound in Cash Wich when he Had it in his Power sezd the Holl and Carreed it to Boston A Gain.

In more familiar spelling, the Rev. John Morrison, a Presbyterian minister from Peterborough, New Hampshire, who had come to the siege lines as a chaplain and then defected to the British, charged a man more than £5 to slip out of Boston with cash, but then confiscated the cash.

That story soon got to printer Benjamin Edes, as reported in his next issue of the Boston Gazette on 25 December:

That one Morrison, who officiates as a Presbyterian minister, being appointed searcher of those people who were permitted to leave the town, promised on receiving a bribe, to let a person bring out £240 sterling in cash and plate: but afterwards basely deprived him of the whole of it:—

That article was reprinted in the Pennsylvania Packet on 1 Jan 1776, and here on Boston 1775 in 2008.

One of Capt. Dodge’s informants, a ship captain named Nowell, then went home to Newburyport and told the same story for the 22 December Essex Journal:

That one Morrison a Scotch minister, was appointed to search the inhabitants upon their leaving the town, who received a bribe of two Johanneses to let a small trunk pass unmolested, yet notwithstanding his engagements, he opened the trunk and took out 2400 pounds in cash and a quantity of plate, which was all the trunk contained; what we suppose induced him to this, was, because the informer is intitled to one half of the plunder.

But this time, the numbers got bigger.

(Shown above: Two Portoguese Johannes coins from the mid-1700s, courtesy of BrianRxm.)