ABSTRACT
Hazard wrote from Portsmouth, ten miles downriver from Dover; he apologized for not being able to visit his friend: ‘for however great my friendship for you is, as well as my anxiety for an interview with you, I cannot reconcile it with my conscience to go to Dover now’. Hazard was trying to drum up takers of tickets for a lottery sponsored by unnamed persons from the south involved in an unnamed scheme that Hazard was willing to term simply (and vaguely) ‘admiralty business’. Belknap (and others since then) had hardly a clue to what Hazard was referring; Belknap le well enough alone, and so shall we.1
