Not all of the charges brought against Arnold were proven, but the censure and reprimand that resulted from his conviction on two charges – allowing a Loyalist vessel into a port without proper notification to the authorities and appropriating wagons for his personal use – doubtless contributed to his subsequent treason.
Only two copies of this account of Arnold’s trial have been seen at auction in the past 25 years – the Sang copy and this one, which in 1980 made $1700 at Sotheby’s. This time it sold for $9500 (£6785).
Diaries and journals included the 1854-55 diary of Jeb Dyer, who travelled from Maine right across America to Columbia, California, in pursuit of gold but devoted much to the descriptive text of his diary, which sold at $8500 (£6070), to robberies, shoot-outs, murders, executions and lynchings.
Relations with Mexicans and other Central or South Americans were particularly bad. After one raid by a band of Mexicans (led by an American called Potter) that left five men and a woman dead and a child severely wounded, nine Mexicans were lynched within just 48 hours and resolutions were drawn up to drive the rest from the region.
Sold for $20,000 (£14,285) in the New York sale was a battered, worn and stained volume containing the first 52 weekly issues of the Sandwich Island Gazette. Issued for the first time in Honolulu on July 30, 1836, this was the first English language newspaper to appear in Hawaii.
Court martial that led on to treason
ONE of only 50 copies of Proceedings of a General Court Martial.... for the Trial of Major General Arnold that came up for sale in a Swanns Americana sale of November 29 was ex-library, bound in later half morocco with assorted stamps and various defects, but this Philadelphia imprint of 1780 is an extremely rare and historically significant item and attracted a lot of interest.
