On 17 December 1740, fourteen-year-old Hugh Gaine was taken by his father to the print shop at the sign of the Crown and Bible in Belfast's Beaver Street, where he was apprenticed to the printers Samuel Wilson and James Magee. For young Gaine, born in 1726 near Belfast in Portlonone in the parish of Ahogkill, the articles of apprenticeship that were signed that day would serve as a passport to a long career as a printer and editor in America, to a measure of wealth, and to a place in history as a turncoat printer of the American Revolution.

Under the terms of his indenture, Gaine was apprenticed for six years; but Wilson and Magee dissolved their partnership in 1744, and Gaine soon after sailed for America. He settled in New York and was hired as a journeyman in the shop of James Parker, printer-editor of the New York Weekly Post-Boy, with...