James Hill, alias James Hinde, alias James Aiken, nicknamed "Jack the Painter", the son of a glasgow tailor, was born in Edinburgh and worked briefly as a painter in Portsmouth's naval dockyard under his Aiken alias. He sympathised with the colonists fighting for independence in America and, having visited several other naval dockyards and discovered that security was almost non-existent, he travelled to Paris, where he met the American minister. He was given £300, a French passport and instructions on making fireworks and larger explosive devices, together with the name of a London merchant, who was an American Republican agent in London. This agent proved to be a waste of time, but undeterred, Hill made plans for crippling the Royal Navy, which would hamper the British troops fighting on the other side of the Atlantic. When Hill first arrived back in Portsmouth, he took lodgings, as a safe place to make his firebombs and fuses, but the smells he created caused him to be thrown out and he was forced to find alternative accommodation. On 6 December 1776 he laid a gunpowder trail in the ropehouse in the dockyard, supplemented by a fuse made from soaking hemp in turpentine, but the matches he had taken with him were damp and refused to strike. Not to be thwarted, Hill/Aiken slipped out and bought new matches and this time he ignited the fuse, but, as it began to burn, he lost his nerve and fled. Looking back, he thought that the entire dockyard was on fire, but a combination of sailors, dockyard workers and townspeople managed to extinguish the fire, before it spread too far. A year later the ropehouse building was restore, but Jack the Painter wasn't finished just yet, for there were other key ports in the south. Leaving Portsmouth, he arrived in Plymouth, where he tried to repeat his arson escapade, but he failed; however, he was

more successful in Bristol, where the fire he set caused extensive damage to the docks. Back in Portsmouth, the remains of Aiken's incendiary device were discovered and when enquiries were made at his lodgings, the written instructions he had received from the Americans, together with his French passport. He might still never have been caught, but with a £50 reward offered for his capture, he was arrested at Odiham, near Farnham, under suspicion of housebreaking and his likeness to the description of the man wanted for the Portsmouth attack was noticed by a prison warder. Two dockyard workers were sent from Portsmouth and they confirmed the identity of "Jack the Painter" and he was transferred to Winchester, where he was tried for arson in 1777. At first, he challenged the court that there was insufficient evidence to connect him with the Portsmouth fire, but he was identified by a tinsmith and the lady who had sold him the turpentine and matches - later that day, he made a full confession. He was duly sentenced to death and the sixty four foot high mizzen mast of HMS Arethusa was erected as a gallows near the main gate of Portsmouth Dockyard from which Jack the Painter was hanged on 10 March 1777. An hour after the execution, his body was taken down and rowed across the harbour to Fort Blockhouse, where it was coated with tar and left hanging in chains for several years, as a warning to all who entered the harbour by sea. However, his story did not end there. A few years after his death, some hard-up sailorstook the body to a tavern in Gosport, to pay off a debt, after which it was buried on the foreshore, although the final resting place of Jack the Painter is unknown. Local folklore has it that his ghost still haunts the streets of Old Portsmouth on certain nights.