It was Captain John Montresor, who, only hours afterward, under a white flag, brought word of Hale’s fate to the Americans and described what had happened to Hale to his friend Captain Hull. And it was Hull, later, who reported Montresor’s account of Hale’s last words as he was about to be executed: “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country,” which was a variation on another then-famous line from the play Cato. (One imagines that in delivering the line to his British executioners, Hale, knowing that it was as familiar to them as to him, put the emphasis on the
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