hile 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, wit