Such were the people young Thomas Dunckerley left behind when he ran away in 1737. That much of the narrative is truthful – he really did run away, and he eventually made his way into the Royal Navy. The rest of his maritime career, not surprisingly, is less straightforward than one might hope. Some of this is due to Dunckerley's own obfuscation – after he manufactured the little fib about his birth, he was deliberately misleading about other dates as well. If they even noticed this coyness, it may have amused his contemporaries, who might have taken it for braggadocio, or absent-mindedness. For his nineteenth-century biographers this trait was maddening – they wanted to chart Dunckerley's naval and Masonic careers precisely, and the arithmetic just did not work. Finally, what appeared to be Dunckerley's carelessness with dates was a hint to the current author that entirely aside from his bogus royal pedigree, he was not being as frank about other essential elements of his biography as one would have hoped. The result is that we are presented with contradictory statements from Dunckerley and his contemporaries about just how long he was in the navy, with terms of service ranging from sixteen to twenty-six years – and then there is an apparent gap in the early 1740s that no one acknowledges, but which appears clearly in the trail of documents.