In the early 1800s Henry More Smith charmed, stole and burgled his way across the British North American colonies of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick before extending his operations into the United States. Thrown in jail, he escaped. Convicted, he cheated the hangman. The possibly true and all-but-forgotten story of a one-man crime wave.
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During the summer of 1812 the homes of wealthy residents of the port city of Halifax were stripped of silver and other valuables in the night. Shops and offices were looted as well, and no one seemed immune from the crime wave. Even the chief justice of the British colony of Nova Scotia, Sampson Salter Blowers, had three law books swiped from his chambers.
Days after the judge offered a reward for the return of the missing volumes, a man named Henry More Smith came forward to claim the money. Although Smith swore he had purchased the books from a stranger, he became the prime suspect in the thefts. But he seemed an unlikely burglar. A well-dressed, polite man in his mid-twenties, Smith had arrived in Nova Scotia earlier that year. He said he was a tailor by trade, and had recently emigrated from England.
“He was perfectly inoffensive, gentle and obliging,” by one account, “used no intoxicating liquors, refrained from idle conversation and all improper language and was apparently free from every evil habit.” Smith claimed he was Cambridge educated, could speak five languages and had a small fortune stashed away in the Bank of England. One thing was certain: he had received some religious instruction. He usually toted a Bible, could recite whole chapters of scripture, and said he had conducted Methodist prayer meetings in England.
Smith’s apparent religious devotion impressed John Bond, who hired Smith to work on his farm near Windsor, a town northwest of Halifax. Bond was pleased when his hired man joined the family’s morning and evening prayers. Besides winning his employer’s trust, he won the heart of Bond’s daughter, Elizabeth. They were married in Windsor in 1813 and Smith went into business as a tailor and peddler.
Neighbors soon noticed that Smith travelled to Halifax often, always leaving early in the day and returning the next morning. He invariably brought back a variety of articles and, after one trip, a large sum of money. Suspicions raised when Smith returned the chief justice’s law books were soon confirmed. A Halifax man arrested for possession of a stolen coat swore he had purchased the garment from Smith. An arrest warrant was issued but by the time word reached Windsor, Smith had fled.
It was the beginning of the long criminal career of a brazen and proficient con man, horse thief, burglar, escape artist and all-round rogue. Smith cut a swath of crime across Nova Scotia and New Brunswick—British colonies on the Atlantic coast that are now Canadian provinces—before plying his trade in New England and possibly beyond. He stole horses, silverware, clothing, pocket watches—anything of value he could lay his hands on—and used a string of aliases: Frederick Henry More, Henry J. Moon, William Newman.
He was a North American incarnation of Jack Sheppard, the infamous eighteenth-century London burglar and thief whose many escapes from custody (he broke out of prison four times within a single year) embarrassed the authorities and made him a folk hero among the city’s poor. Sheppard’s brief career ended with his execution in 1724 but a flood of pamphlets, ballads, books and plays kept his exploits and memory alive. Almost a century later, Henry More Smith would pick up where Sheppard had left off.
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After fleeing Nova Scotia, Smith disappeared for almost two years. In 1814 he arrived in Saint John, New Brunswick, and soon won the trust of an officer of a local regiment, a Colonel Daniel. The colonel was in the market for a black horse—he wanted a matching team to draw his carriage—and Smith claimed he knew where to find one. Pocketing the money his new friend advanced to complete the deal, Smith once again vanished.
Rather than buy a horse, Smith decided to steal one belonging to Wills Frederick Knox, a magistrate who lived north of the city. The son of a British undersecretary of state, Knox turned out to be a relentless defender of his property. He pursued Smith for four days and caught him in Pictou, Nova Scotia, almost 300 miles away. Smith was arrested and, after several escape attempts, was brought back to New Brunswick for trial.
While imprisoned in Kingston, a village north of Saint John, Smith met the man who would soon cash in on his villainy by chronicling his life. Walter Bates, the fifty-four-year-old county sheriff, became obsessed with his prisoner. Smith, he later wrote, was “a character singular and unprecedented.”
He was also a jailer’s nightmare. Bates would have his hands full keeping Smith inside a cell at the Kingston Jail. As the date for trial approached, Smith complained of a severe pain in his side—the result, he said, of Knox striking him with a pistol butt during his arrest. His condition worsened and doctors were called in, but medicine failed to slow his decline. On September 24, barely able to raise his head, Smith dictated his will. “I fear we shall be disappointed in our expectations of the trial of the prisoner, More Smith, at the approaching court,” Bates wrote to Smith’s lawyer. “I presume from his appearance he will be removed by death before that time.”
The New Brunswick jail where Smith was locked up for theft in 1814 – until he engineered a daring escape. (Wikipedia Commons)
That afternoon, Smith cried out in agony and asked the guard to heat a brick and bring it to warm his feet. Unwilling to deny comfort to a man who seemed to be dying, the guard complied, leaving the cell door open. When he returned minutes later, Smith was gone. Bates and the guard were later indicted on charges of negligence for allowing their prisoner to escape.
New Brunswick’s attorney general, Thomas Wetmore, posted a reward for Smith’s capture. A trail of plundered houses made him easy to track. Smith stole a silver watch, cash and other articles from a nearby home, then headed west, toward the border with Maine. When he stopped at a tavern for breakfast, he stole a set of silver teaspoons. Near Fredericton, the colony’s capital, he raided a trunk in an inn and made off with expensive clothes.
He convinced some of the people he encountered he was a businessman and told others he was tracking an army deserter. At one point, he had the audacity to claim he was pursuing a notorious horse thief who had broken out of the Kingston Jail. Captured not far from the United States border, Smith was manacled and sent back to Kingston under guard. Yet he somehow managed to break free the night of his arrest and disappear into the darkness.
Returning to the Fredericton area, he stole a saddle, bridle and pony. Then he had the chutzpah to break into Wetmore’s home while the attorney general was entertaining guests. Smith opened the front door and made off with coats that were hanging in the hall. He was found a few days later holed up in a barn, with the stolen clothing hidden beneath the hay.
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Smith was returned to Kingston, where elaborate steps had been taken for his accommodation. He was searched and chained to the floor by one leg. Sheriff Bates could not risk another embarrassing escape.
The sound of filing was soon heard from the cell. Guards discovered Smith had cut his leg chain and was nearly through the bars on the window. Ordered to produce the tools he had managed to smuggle in, he handed over a file and crude saw made from a knife blade. The chain was replaced but the noise persisted. This time, Smith was told to remove all his clothes; a ten-inch saw blade was found tied tightly inside his thigh with a string. Drastic measures were in order. Bates commissioned a blacksmith to bind Smith in an iron collar and leg fetters, both bolted to the floor with chain to restrict his movements, and attached by chain to a set of handcuffs. The portable prison weighed forty-six pounds.
Smith took a new tack, shouting like a madman and loudly quoting the Bible. When he tried to hang himself with his chains, he was bound even tighter. He responded by beating his chains against the cell floor, sometimes managing to break them. He was often found with his wrists and ankles bloody and swollen from attempts to free himself.
Smith’s trial for stealing Knox’s horse opened in May 1815. In the prisoner’s dock he continued to play the role of the lunatic, loudly snapping his fingers and tearing at his shirt. He managed to kick a wooden railing to pieces before constables could restrain him. Smith’s lawyer mounted a strong defense, based mainly on the premise that possession had not been proven because Smith had not been riding the stolen horse when arrested. The jury deliberated two hours and found him guilty. The sentence was death by hanging.
Attorney General Wetmore, who conducted the prosecution even though he had been among Smith’s victims, ordered a report on the prisoner’s behavior before setting a date for execution. Bates went to Smith’s cell to try to explain the gravity of his situation. “He paid no attention,” the sheriff reported, “patted his hands, sang and acted the fool as usual.”
Smith had little trouble devising a way to fill his final days. Using straw from his bedding and his own clothes, he constructed about a dozen puppets he called his “family,” and put on shows for visitors. Then he claimed to be able to tell fortunes from tea leaves. In August, after diligent efforts by his lawyer, Smith was pardoned, based on his youth and, no doubt, his apparent insanity. Smith played the role to the hilt. When Bates told him the good news, he replied: “I wish you would bring me some new potatoes when you come again.”
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A condition of the pardon was that Smith leave New Brunswick. Bates, who had grown fond of his prisoner despite the grief he had caused during a year behind bars, gave Smith a new set of clothes and paid his passage on a ship bound for Nova Scotia. As soon as the boat docked, Smith dropped the insane act and returned to the job he knew best—stealing.
A few years later he was arrested for taking jewelry, money, and dozens of silver spoons from an innkeeper in New Haven, Connecticut. After trying the deathbed routine a second time, he sawed through his cell door but was recaptured. Convicted of burglary at trial, William Newman (as he now called himself) was sentenced to three years at hard labour. When Bates arrived from New Brunswick to confirm his old friend was once again in custody, Smith pretended he had never seen him before.
After Smith’s release, his career of crime becomes difficult to trace. Bates claimed he committed more crimes in Boston, New York, Connecticut and present-day Ontario. He also accused Smith of posing as a preacher named Henry Hopkins in the Southern States before he was arrested in 1827 and sentenced to seven years in prison. But Bates’ identification of Smith as the culprit is dubious, based on little more than second-hand reports of the methods used in the crimes. If any criminal showed extraordinary guile, Bates seemed convinced it had to be Smith.
The title page of an early edition of The Mysterious Stranger, a widely published account of Smith’s many crimes in present-day Atlantic Canada and New England. (OpenLibrary.org)
Bates soon immortalized his former prisoner in a rambling book entitled The Mysterious Stranger or Memoirs of the Noted Henry More Smith. First published in Connecticut, the book was republished in England and reached a wide audience. A Halifax newspaper, The Acadian Recorder, serialized it in 1817 and sold the book for a shilling a copy. The Mysterious Stranger was a commercial success, running to seven printings, with the last appearing in 1912, the centenary of Smith’s arrival in Nova Scotia. Combined sales, by one estimate, topped 40,000 copies. A new edition was published in 1979, bringing his crime spree to a modern audience. His remarkable story is celebrated in an exhibit at New Brunswick’s King’s County Museum, housed in the former jail building Smith so easily escaped. In Fredericton, the owners of a pub have drawn inspiration from one of his aliases, Henry J. Moon, and christened their establishment the Lunar Rogue.
Despite the swath of crime Smith left in his wake, he had one redeeming quality. “In all the adventures,” Bates wrote at the end of The Mysterious Stranger, “we are not called upon to witness any acts of violence and blood, and it is perhaps owing to the absence of this repulsive trait that we do not behold him in a more relentless light.” One of the book’s publishers, writing in the preface to the fifth edition when it appeared in 1887, was even more charitable. “Had Smith lived in our day,” he mused, “his genius would have earned for him a foremost place in the politics of the country.”
