Fletcher Christian was born on 25 September 1764 in Cumberland, England, decades before he would become one of history’s most infamous mutineers. In April 1789, as master’s mate aboard HMS Bounty, he led a revolt against Captain William Bligh, seizing the ship in the South Pacific after months of tension during the vessel’s breadfruit-collecting voyage.
Rather than kill Bligh, Christian set him adrift in a small open boat with eighteen loyal crew members and minimal supplies. Bligh went on to complete an extraordinary 3,618-mile voyage to safety in Timor, a feat of navigation still studied today.
Christian and his fellow mutineers eventually settled on remote Pitcairn Island with a group of Tahitian men and women, burning the Bounty to avoid detection. The fate of the settlement descended into violence within years, and the exact circumstances of Christian’s own death remain disputed, with some accounts claiming he was killed by fellow settlers and others suggesting he secretly returned to England.
Portrait of Friday Fletcher October Christian son of Bounty mutineer Christian Fletcher 1814 by John Shillibeer
On 25 September 1983, 38 IRA prisoners staged a mass breakout from the Maze Prison in County Antrim, Northern Ireland, the largest prison escape in British history. The men overpowered guards inside H-Block 7, some using smuggled handguns, and seized control of the wing before storming the front gate disguised in stolen prison officer uniforms.
In the chaos one prison officer was stabbed to death and twenty others were injured during the breakout. Several escapees hijacked a delivery lorry to get beyond the perimeter fences, and while a number were recaptured within days, others evaded capture for years, some fleeing abroad before eventually being caught or negotiating their return.
The escape became known among Irish republicans as the Great Escape, a name that stuck for decades and turned the breakout into one of the defining episodes of the Troubles.
William Colthouse is a well-educated Yorkshire man with firm religious principles and even firmer political convictions; it is these convictions that first drag him into the orbit of criminality. As recorded in Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, his outspoken Jacobite sympathies land him inside Newgate, where the company he keeps teaches him a new and darker set of skills.
What emerges from this true crime account is a figure caught between conscience and temptation: a man who knows the difference between right and wrong yet finds the lure of easy money irresistible once honest labour loses its shine. His story is shaped by political loyalties, family bonds, and a restlessness that refuses to be tamed by ordinary work.
The roads of Georgian England are waiting, and for a man like Colthouse, every choice narrows the path ahead. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals preserves his voice with startling clarity; settle in and hear it for yourself.
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Dark Lexicon: Old words. Dark meaning.
The past speaks its own dialect; here is what to listen for in this episode.
Hereditary rights: in the early eighteenth century this phrase was politically explosive. It referred to the belief that the crown passed by divine bloodline alone, and that Parliament had no authority to redirect the succession. For Jacobites like Colthouse, hereditary right meant the exiled Stuart line still held the only legitimate claim to the throne; to say so aloud under the new Hanoverian king was sedition.
Jacobite: from the Latin ‘Jacobus’ for James, a Jacobite was a supporter of the deposed Stuart dynasty, particularly James II and his descendants. In the reign of George I, professing Jacobite sympathies was not merely unfashionable; it was dangerous enough to land a man in prison.
Seditious words: today sedition feels like a term from dusty law textbooks, but in Georgian England it was a potent weapon. Speaking against the king or the Protestant succession could be prosecuted as a crime in itself; no riot or rebellion required. Words alone could put you in chains.
Journeyman: not a traveller, though the word hints at journeys. A journeyman was a skilled worker who had completed his apprenticeship but did not yet run his own shop. He worked for a master, hired by the day; the word comes from the French ‘journee,’ meaning a day’s work. In Colthouse’s case, he worked as a journeyman joiner: a qualified carpenter labouring for wages rather than profit.
Expeditions on the road: a polite euphemism for highway robbery. The phrase lends a gentleman’s gloss to what was in reality armed theft on the king’s highways. Authors of the period sometimes deployed this sort of language with a wink, as though robbing travellers were a kind of sporting venture.
Gridiron: a flat cooking grate made of iron bars set over a fire, used for grilling meat. That soldiers would press a man’s face onto one that was red-hot gives a visceral sense of the casual brutality of alehouse brawls in this era; the scar Colthouse carried from it would later be mistaken for evidence of an entirely different crime.
Condemnation: today we condemn ideas or behaviour, but in the criminal courts of the eighteenth century the word had a literal and lethal meaning. To lie under condemnation was to have received a death sentence and to be waiting, usually in the condemned cells of Newgate, for the appointed day.
Temporal concerns: in Colthouse’s farewell letter, temporal does not mean ‘temporary.’ It means worldly; of this earthly life as opposed to the spiritual. A man about to leave the world is expected to shed temporal concerns and fix his thoughts on the eternal; that Colthouse could not do so entirely makes his letter all the more human.
About This Series
Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals is one of the earliest works of true crime writing in the English language, nearly 300 years old, covering murderers, thieves, highwaymen, forgers, coiners and worse.
The book is entirely in the public domain and every word of it can be read today for free. But if you would rather listen, this podcast does exactly that: one criminal at a time, every week, read aloud.
True crime was not invented by podcasts or streaming services. Eighteenth century readers were just as fascinated by outlaws and killers as we are today. They just consumed their dark stories by candlelight.
The voice you hear is David Dark: crime researcher, theatre script writer, producer of live immersive experiences, and audiobook narrator and voice artist. This podcast uses an AI voice model trained on David’s own voice, built using the maximum available training data to faithfully represent how he actually sounds. To hear David’s real voice in human generated form, visit him on Audible, Online Stage, Voices of Today, Spoken Realms, and Internet Archive.
Jack the Ripper was a woman. That was the possibility London newspapers began to report: that the killer who had horrified the world for months was a woman disguised as a man, living and working unnoticed in Whitechapel. By the time the story spread, she had reportedly vanished. Police were confidently believed to be “at last on the track” of the murderer, and there was suddenly talk of “his or her crimes”.
Who, it was asked, could walk the streets at night without suspicion, possess the anatomical knowledge the mutilations suggested, and risk being found beside a body? One answer: a woman who was, or had been, a midwife. Discovered bending over a victim, she need only say she had been passing by and thought the woman required her medical attention. Though largely discounted, the Jill the Ripper theory has never completely gone away.
Victorian woman in London street with man in background
