Silas Deane Or Bancroft Analysis

Silas Deane died from consuming laudanum laced with poison by Edward Bancroft, who thought Deane had to be silenced from knowing something he shouldn’t have. Benjamin Franklin had shared a lodge with both Deane and Bancroft during their business in Paris. The documents received by Franklin had been somehow leaked into the public since “Lord Stormont and the British newspapers made embarrassingly accurate accusations about French aid” (9). It was either Deane or Bancroft that relayed what those important papers stated to the English. Deane had no reason to divulge to the enemy for his priority was to gather arms for the American Revolution and wouldn’t want the English to be in the know. He must have deduced that Bancroft was the one that …show more content…
On September 22, during the voyage, Deane complained about being dizzy and having stomach pains, and a few hours later, died. He would have taken laudanum to ease the pain, the one Bancroft had assisted him with during packing. Bancroft could have easily slipped the poison in the laudanum since it’s a liquid and needs only a small amount of it to kill someone, and told Deane to take it when he feels pain along with other advices for the voyage. As stated in the text, Bancroft was a surgeon and observed how poisons were made and administered to those that use them from the people of Suriname. Surinamers prepare a type of poison that “given in the smallest quantity, [it] produce[s] a very slow but inevitable death,” a substance that has “a composition which resembles a wheat-flour,” for which they “secretly [drop] the poison…into the drink” of those they seek retribution for (11). Deane becomes a huge liability for Bancroft being across the sea since he had an inkling, at the least, that Bancroft was a spy for the