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about a hundred miles from home before meeting a rich man riding along the road. The teenage runaway made up a tearful story about being the orphan of poor Dubliners, and the performance was so convincing that the gentleman, affected bythe tale, brought Sullivan back to his estate to work as an errand boy. He ended up staying six years, enjoying what must have been a life of relative comfort. But as he grew older he began to feel homesick, and vowed to visit his parents at the next opportunity.
    He soon had his chance. One day the gentleman gave him a letter to deliver, and after riding twenty miles to drop off the message, Sullivan continued for another fifty at breakneck speed, arriving at Waterford, a port town near his home, at four o’clock in the afternoon. Flushed and sweaty after a full day of travel, he ducked into a tavern to drink a tumbler of wine. But instead of cooling him down, the wine made him sick, and he had to lie down. Sprawled on a bed waiting to feel better, he was only thirty miles from his parents’ house—he had traveled more than twice that distance in a day but couldn’t finish the last leg of the journey. During his convalescence people asked Sullivan who he was, where he was headed; but he refused to reveal his true identity, perhaps fearing that news of his presence might reach his parents.
    Once he had recovered, he unaccountably lost all interest in returning home. “After I got well I went down to the Wharf,” Sullivan reports, “where I saw several Passengers going on Board of a Vessel bound for Boston, in New-England.” Finding the captain, he negotiated to pay his passage with an indenture of service for four years, and after a few days, the ship set sail. Perhaps Sullivan couldn’t face seeing his parents after all those years, or was suddenly tempted by the promise of the New World; his motivations are unclear, but his destination was New England, three thousand miles across the ocean. By Sullivan’s own account, the most important decision of his life—his emigration to America—appears to have been completely spontaneous.
    Within the first few pages of the counterfeiter’s tale, a personality emerges whose outlines are immediately recognizable from later accounts: impulsive and impatient, marked by a hustler’s itch for a better angle and resentment of anyone who stands in the way. Sullivan’s hostility towardauthority of any kind would only increase in the coming years, as the early tyranny of his well-intentioned parents became the tyranny of a government trying to capture and kill him. He followed his instincts, and often appeared to act without thinking, yet his resourcefulness rarely failed him, and he seemed to know intuitively how to get what he wanted. Sullivan was the kind of man it would have been easy to underestimate. He was a drunken Irishman who, in the language of the period, fell victim to vice; but he was also indisputably ambitious, driven first across the Irish countryside and then across the ocean by something greater than just pleasure-seeking.
    IN THE FALL OF 1741, a sloop named the
Sea-Flower
floated off the coast of Massachusetts. Its mast had split in a gale, and the boat drifted helplessly with the current. On deck, emaciated men and women, tongues swollen from thirst, sat staring at the horizon with bloodshot eyes. Many of their companions had died of starvation and sickness. The corpses that hadn’t been thrown overboard or left decomposing in the hold were sitting half-digested in the stomachs of the survivors: chunks of putrid muscle and brittle bone, carved in desperation from the withered bodies of former friends and relatives. The passengers ate six carcasses altogether. While cutting into the seventh, a vessel appeared, a British warship under the command of Captain Thompson Commander. Commander boarded the
Sea-Flower
and found that the ship had departed Belfast for Philadelphia months earlier.
    Fifteen days into the voyage,