discovery and capture in such a situation.…Yet…I wish to be useful, and every kind of service, necessary to the public good, becomes honourable by being necessary. If the exigencies of my country demand a peculiar service, its claims to perform that service are imperious.”

•Sergeant Stephen Hempstead of New London accompanied him as he set out on his mission from Norwalk, Connecticut:
Capt. Hale had a general order to all armed vessels, to take him to any place he should designate: he was set across the Sound…at Huntington (Long-Island)…Capt. Hale had changed his uniform for a plain suit of citizens brown clothes, with a round broad-brimmed hat, assuming the character of a Dutch school-master, leaving all his other clothes, commission, public and private papers, with me, and also his silver shoe buckles, saying they would not cornport with his character of school-master, and retaining nothing but his College diploma, as an introduction to his assumed calling. Thus equipped, we parted…

•Hale’s servant, Asher Wright, who had remained behind, told what happened next:
He passed all their guards on Long Island, went over to New York in a ferryboat & got by all the guards but the last. They stopped him, searched & found drawings of the works, with descriptions in Latin, under the inner sole of the pumps which he wore. Some say his cousin, Samuel Hale, a tory, betrayed him. I don’t know; guess he did.

•“Betrayed” is probably too strong; “identified” is closer to the truth. A surviving letter from Samuel, a Harvard man (1766), seems to deny any misdeed, or at least any guilt, as the story was spread in a Newburyport newspaper—but he thereafter fled to England and never returned to America, even after the war, for his wife and son.

The next day a kind-hearted British officer, Captain John Montresor, approached the American lines under a flag of truce to report the inevitable denouement. Captain Hull recorded Montresor’s words:
…Hale at once declared his name, his rank in the American army, and his object in coming within the British lines.
Sir William Howe, without the form of a trial, gave orders for his execution the following morning. He was placed in the custody of the Provost Marshal, who was…hardened to human suffering and every softening sentiment of the heart. Captain Hale, alone, without sympathy or support, save that from above, on the near approach of death asked for a clergyman to attend him. It was refused. He then requested a Bible; that too was refused by his inhuman jailer.
On the morning of his execution…my station was near the fatal spot, and I requested the Provost Marshal to permit the prisoner to sit in my marquee, while he was making the necessary preparations. Captain Hale entered: he was calm, and bore himself with gentle dignity, in the consciousness of rectitude and high intentions. He asked for writing materials, which I furnished him: he wrote two letters…He was

shortly after summoned to the gallows. But a few persons were around him, yet his characteristic dying words were remembered. He said, “I only regret, that I have but one life to lose for my country.”

•A brief excerpt from a letter written at Coventry, Connecticut, the following spring by Nathan Hale’s father, Richard, who had six sons altogether in the Revolution, betrays the deep grief of this unlettered man:
…you desired me to inform you about my son Nathan…he was executed about the 22 nd of September Last by the Aconts we have had. A Child I sot much by but he is gone…

•This letter, addressed to Richard Hale’s brother, Major Samuel Hale, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on March 28, 1777, was put away in a secret drawer of the Major’s desk. In 1908, the old desk was sold at auction as an antique, and three years later the new owner, the Honorable Frank L. Howe of Barrington, New Hampshire, chanced upon it. Such is the thrill of historical discovery.