Edward Bancroft

Edward Bancroft
Born	Edward Bartholomew Bancroft January 20, 1745 Westfield, Massachusetts
Died	September 7, 1821 Margate, Kent, United Kingdom
Nationality	American, British
Occupation	Scientist, writer, doctor, and spy (double agent) during the American Revolutionary War
Spouse(s)	Penelope Fellows (m. 1771; d. 1784)
Children	Edward Nathaniel Bancroft

Edward Bartholomew Bancroft (January 20, 1745 [O.S. January 9, 1744] – September 7, 1821) was a Massachusetts born physician and chemist who became a double-agent, spying for both the United States and Britain while serving as secretary to the American Commission in Paris during the American Revolution.

Bancroft was born on January 20, 1745 in Westfield, Massachusetts. His father died of an epileptic seizure when Bancroft was two years old, and his mother remarried five years later to David Bull of Connecticut.

There Bancroft studied under Silas Deane, a schoolmaster who later became an important politician and diplomat, with whom he would work in Paris. At the age of sixteen, Bancroft was apprenticed to a physician in Killingworth, Connecticut, but after a few years ran away. (Bancroft returned and repaid his debt to his former master in 1766.)

On July 14, 1763, after fleeing his apprenticeship, Bancroft left New England for the sugar-producing slave colonies of Dutch Guiana, where he became a plantation doctor. He soon expanded his practice to multiple plantations and wrote a study of the local environment. Based on observations of experiments already being performed on live eels by Dutch colonists in and around Surinam and Essequibo, Bancroft concluded that American eels and torpedo fish discharged electricity to stun their prey, rather than by imperceptibly swift mechanical action, as had previously been argued. Although he left South America in 1766, he published An Essay on the Natural History of Guiana, in South America in London 1769, where with the encouragement of Benjamin Franklin, he embarked on a career as a man of letters. Bancroft later wrote extensively about the chemistry of dyes, based in part on his work in Dutch Guiana, contrasting non-European dyeing techniques unfavorably with the learned "philosophical chemistry" of natural philosophers like himself.

In London, Bancroft's Natural History of Guiana (1769) attracted the attention of Paul Wentworth, New Hampshire's colonial agent in London, who hired Bancroft to survey Wentworth's plantation in Surinam and make recommendations for more efficient operation. Bancroft spent two months there before returning to London. While in Surinam, Bancroft wrote a three-volume, semi-autobiographical novel, The History of Charles Wentworth, Esq. The epistolary novel, which follows the life of a plantation owner (with the same surname as his friend and employer), imitates Voltaire's Candide and reflects Bancroft's deistic beliefs, ridiculing passages in the Bible and criticizing Christianity for its "detestable spirit of intolerance and persecution."

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