CAPTAIN JAMES HIND, THE "PRINCE OF PRIGS"
By a general consensus of the opinions current in his age, Captain James Hind was incomparable among his fellow-highwaymen for courage, for resource, and for courtesy, and succeeding ages, although prolific in highwaymen, failed to produce the like of him.
James Hind was born in 1616 at Chipping Norton, the son of a saddler, and began life as apprentice to a butcher of that town. The lives of celebrated men, as told in popular biographies, afford many contradictions, and the career of Hind, set forth in the innumerable chapbooks of his own period, of the era of the Catnach press, and in a robustious kind of juvenile gutter-literature, that has survived even to our own day, is told in a variety of ways. His course was sufficiently adventurous, but his biographers have not condescended to the critical attitude; and thus, among the tales of wonder in which he moves, there are doubtless many that have simply accrued, just as the house-flies of summer are attracted to fly-papers. Indeed, as the highwaymen have ever been something (and generally a good deal) of heroes, so legends inevitably have gathered round them. If their exploits have not found a Homer to do for them what the Greek poet performed for the heroes of the Iliad, that is merely their misfortune, and they have had to be content with a Smith, a Johnson, and the trivial production of scribblers fortunate in anonymity.
Among the earliest of the chapbooks dealing with the short life and merry of Captain Hind is that scarce and curious print entitled No Jest like a True Jest, which presents us with what is quaintly styled "the true Protracture" of him, reproduced here. Observe his gallant bearing, the bravery of his dress, his winning smile, his lady-like feet! He carries a formidable pistol, it is true, but as you note him standing so debonair beside his gallant charger, you perceive, as it were, the courtesy and consideration that unfailingly accompanied his actions, shining out behind the rude methods of the old wood-engraver who seems to have hewed the portrait out of the wood with a billhook.
THE "TRUE PROTRACTURE" OF CAPTAIN HIND.
According to No Jest like a True Jest, which is but indifferently truthful in many of its details, and does not strike one as being a jest-book, Hind's father, before apprenticing him to a butcher, "put him to school, intending to make him a Scholar, but he minded his wagish Pastimes more than his Book," and so all ideas of a liberal education were cut off. Nor was the apprenticeship to the butchering more successful, for he, "having a Running Pate, soon grew weary of that also, and in conclusion ran away from his Master." Excusing himself, by complaining of the rough and quarrelsome character of the master, he borrowed two pounds from his mother, and fled to London. He was fifteen years of age at this time, and, if we may believe the biographers—a difficult enough exercise—"he soon contracted a relish for the pleasures of the town. A bottle and a female companion became his principal delight, and occupied the greater part of his time. So precocious were the 'prentice-boys of the early seventeenth century, and so far did forty shillings go!"
Ere long this youthful adventurer found his way into the society of highwaymen. It was in the Poultry Compter, whither he had been consigned for his part in a drunken riot, that he first made the acquaintance of Robert Allen, who was expert in most thievish arts. Over a bottle they struck up a friendship, and Allen presently introduced him to the gang he himself captained. They were mounted men, and the first test of the young recruit was the choice of a horse. He chose, with the unerring judgment in horseflesh that was one of his distinguishing characteristics through life, the best animal in the stable. Taken then to Shooter's Hill, and set to bid the first traveller "Stand and deliver!" he acquitted himself in so finished a manner as to win the respect of his new comrades, who, witnessing the exploit from the leafy coverts beside the road, could not withhold their admiration.