“Now in his majesty’s Goal in Boston” in January 1775

Yesterday I illustrated a posting that quoted Boston jailer Joseph Otis’s list of prisoners with a small image of such a list.

However, that picture didn’t show the list I quoted from 1777, which is reportedly at the Boston Public Library. I couldn’t find a digital image of that document.

Instead, I ran an image of Otis’s list of prisoners from 3 Jan 1775, in the collection of the Newberry Library in Chicago.

That list includes Samuel Dyer, whom I wrote about in these articles, so I was eager to see if this source said anything more about him. It says he was being held for assault and battery, though he had clearly tried to murder two British army officers. 

But before I got to Dyer my eye fell on the top of the list.

The first prisoner was “John Bell,” held for “Breach of Peace.” I’m taking that personally.

Gershom Spear “to all Appearance dead”

Last week I mentioned in passing the marriage of Gershom Spear (1755-1816) to Elizabeth Bradlee. The bridegroom almost didn’t make it. On 21 Nov 1762, young Gershom drowned in Boston harbor.

As Thomas and John Fleet’s Boston Evening-Post reported the next day:

Last Evening a Boy about 8 Years old, Son to Mr. Joseph Spear, fell from a Wharf near the South Battery, and was accidentally discovered under the Water ’tis tho’t about a Quarter of an Hour after he fell in; he was taken up motionless and to all Appearance dead…

Fortunately, earlier that month, on 1 November, the Evening-Post had reprinted an extract of a letter about drowning that had appeared in the London press the previous year.

That letter had been sent from Oporto, or the Portuguese port of Porto, by a sea captain named John Bell, master of the British ship Elizabeth. The letter was also reprinted in the 16 Apr 1762 New-Hampshire Gazette, and it said:

Since I have been here, a Dutchman fell into the River, and was taken up from the bottom about three quarters of an hour afterwards; he was carried on board the ship he belong’d to, and orders were actually given for sewing him up in a hamock, in order to bury him.

The British vice consul (Mr. Gabriel Hervey) who is a very humane man, hearing of the affair, took a boat, went on board, laid the fellow by the fire side, and kept rubbing him with common salt till life returned, and the man is now hearty and well.

Mr. Hervey has told me, he has known a dog kept under water two hours, and recovered by being covered with salt; and his lady told me she had recovered a cat.

Evidently the memory of that news article gave little Gershom’s father an idea.

TOMORROW: Can this child be saved?

[The engraving above was made by Robert Pollard in 1787 after a painting by Robert Smirke, and comes courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.]

Boston’s 1767 Non-Importation Pledge List Comes to Light

This week John Overholt at Harvard’s Houghton Library announced that Karen Nipps and her cataloguing team had discovered six copies of an October 1767 broadside with the signatures of over 650 Bostonians pledging not to import a long list of goods from Britain to protest the new Townshend duties. The library’s blog offers images of three of those sheets and snatches of others.

Bostonians had already made a public stand against importing what they said were unnecessary luxury goods, particularly ostentatious mourning garb. This takes a further step, expanding the list of goods that people promised to boycott. The selectmen publicized the town’s vote (though exactly who received this letter announcing it is unclear).

After another year, the 1768 merchants’ agreement covered every type of import except for a few things deemed necessary for local industry. As Sam Forman describes, in 1769 the Boston Whigs also asked people not to buy goods from shopkeepers who did import.

The 1767 pledge sheets are thus an early look at who in Boston was willing to put their names to a protest against Parliament’s new taxes. The signatories include some future Loyalists, such as Adino Paddock, Hopestill Capen, and (I think) Thomas Flucker. Dr. John Jeffries was among the few who pledged not to buy imports for only one year.

It looks like the signatures might be organized loosely by neighborhood. For example, one sheet includes John Ruddock, John Tudor, and Paul Revere, all prominent in the North End, near the top. I can imagine men carrying each sheet around a ward, asking folks to add their names.

One of the most surprising details of these sheets is the number of women who signed. They often decided on purchases of household goods, of course, and sometimes owned or managed shops. Some of the visible sheets have no female signatories, others several in a row. In the 1769 non-consumption agreement, only 6 of 111 signatories were women; I wonder what proportion of these names are female.

Other mysteries:

• Why did William Dawes, Jr., sign two sheets? (I don’t think there were two William Dawes, Jrs.)
  
• Why is the name under John Machett’s crossed out?
  
• Why does housewright John Bell’s name appear to be stamped instead of written?
• Catharine Thompson signed with her mark—was she really active in commerce or politics?

There’s a lot more data to be gleaned out of this document and comparing it to other records. I understand that it’s being fully digitized for widespread viewing soon.