[H]e was “not of any Business”, but had gone to the East-Indies and China as a servant to someone on board a ship, and had stayed there for four months while the ship was loaded with cargo. On his return to England he was paid over £/80 but he quickly spent it all and “took to vicious Courses”. He related that his mother “some Times told him, she fear’d he lived Dishonestly, and beg’d him not think of subsisting on the Ruins and Spoils of innocent People, for it would terminate in Misery and Destruction”. She would prove to be right.
-From the London Lives biography of John Trantum. (London Lives is digital database with “a wide range of primary sources about eighteenth-century London, with a particular focus on plebeian Londoners”; it’s kin to the oft-used-by-ExecutedToday bonanza of trial records at The Old Bailey Online, and friend of the site Tim Hitchcock is a co-director of both.) Click through to read the whole thing, and don’t forget to navigate onward to his brother Richard Trantum — part of the same gang of criminals, and destined come 1723 for the same fate as John.
On this day..
- 1908: Joe James, in the crucible of the Springfield Race Riot
- 1685: Elizabeth Gaunt, for refuge
- 1665: Gabriel de Beaufort-Canillac vicomte la Mothe, during the Grands Jours of Auvergne
- 1828: Charles French, York printer
- 1668: Two men and a woman, too early for Samuel Pepys
- 1947: Gyorgy Donath, Hungarian anti-communist
- 1698: 350 Streltsy by the boyars' own hands
- 1865: George William Gordon, Jamaican politician
- 2003: Two Palestinian collaborators
- 1895: Not Almighty Voice
- 1971: Ion Rimaru, the Vampire of Bucharest
- Feast Day of Boethius