The Virginia Gazette

Extract of a letter from Plymouth, dated July 12.

"Perhaps you will be surprised at a rumour which has been spread here for two or three days, and now begins to be in credit, that the late supposed catastrophe has turned out to be a water bubble, and has proved equally successful with the celebrated land bubble of the bottle conjurer. It is whispered that a facetious nobleman laid this trap for the members of the jockey club, with whom nothing is impossible, nothing absurd, nothing not fit for a wager. The wag was fortunate in the choice of his agent; the simplicity of the projector, whatever doubt it might have occasioned about his philosophical knowledge, prevented suspicion of any intended imposition.

The received notion of Mr. Blake's talents in the art of betting, which consists in taking either side of the question on, readily induced our men of spirit to think seriously on the subject; that is, to engage deeply some on the one side, and some on the other, which those few of these days, who consider the use of money at all, will allow to be thinking seriously on the subject. However, the fact is, the members of the sporting calendar took the bait, a vessel was built at the expence of fifteen hundred pounds, thousands betted upon the event, the supposed conjurer put into the wooden bottle, corked down, and seen sinking to a considerable depth, but now it is said, the vessel was so contrived that the man with ease released himself by a trap door before she got to any dangerous depth, and being a skilful swimmer, and a very duck in the water, contrived to rise unperceived at a considerable distance from the place where the vessel went down, which was the less difficult, as the intention of every person present, except two, who are said to have been in a small boat at a proper distance, and in the secret, was fixed upon the spot where the vessel sunk. There is, indeed, some reason to believe the vessel was open soon after it went down, from the agitation of the water, which was very great, occasioned probably by the water expelling the air which was in the vessel, and driving it to the surface. The story goes, that the man was taken in unperceived by the attentive spectators to a boat prepared to receive him, and that he was afterwards among the wondering crowd at the end of twelve hours, when, according to the project, the vessel was to rise, and heard doubtless with great pleasure every person around him pronounce him a dead man. I heartily hope, for the sake of the poor man, that the whole is a jest, and that our late noble visitor has made fools of the knowing ones."