but a friend purchased the family's books and returned them to Hamilton. Hamilton became a clerk at Beekman and Cruger, a local import-export firm that traded with New York and New England. He and James Jr. were briefly taken in by their cousin Peter Lytton. However, Lytton took his own life in July 1769, leaving his property to his mistress and their son, and the Hamilton brothers were subsequently separated. James Jr. apprenticed with a local carpenter, while Alexander was given a home by Thomas Stevens, a merchant from Nevis. Hamilton, despite being only in his teenage years, proved capable enough as a trader to be left in charge of the firm for five months in 1771 while the owner was at sea. He remained an avid reader and later developed an interest in writing. He began to desire a life outside the island where he lived. He wrote a letter to his father that was a detailed account of a hurricane that had devastated Christiansted on August 30, 1772. The Presbyterian Reverend Hugh Knox, a tutor and mentor to Hamilton, submitted the letter for publication in the Royal Danish-American Gazette. Biographer Ron Chernow found the letter astounding because "for all its bombastic excesses, it does seem wondrous [that a] self-educated clerk could write with such verve and gusto" and that a teenage boy produced an apocalyptic "fire-and-brimstone sermon" viewing the hurricane as a "divine rebuke to human vanity and pomposity." The essay impressed community leaders, who collected a fund to send Hamilton to the North American colonies for his education. In October 1772, Hamilton arrived by ship in Boston and proceeded from there to New York City. He took lodgings with the Irish-born Hercules Mulligan who, as the brother of a trader known to Hamilton's benefactors, assisted Hamilton in selling cargo that was to pay for his education and support. Later that year, in preparation for college work, Hamilton began to fill gaps in his education at the Elizabethtown Academy, a preparatory school run by Francis Barber in Elizabethtown, New Jersey. He there came under the influence of William Livingston, a local leading intellectual and revolutionary, with whom he lived for a time. Hamilton entered Mulligan's alma mater King's College in New York City in the autumn of 1773 as a private student, again boarding with Mulligan until officially matriculating in May 1774. His college roommate and lifelong friend