ON ea 
JANUARY. 
Te day, a little before 
Ist. : ; 
twelve o’clock, two 
houses at the powder mills belong- 
ing to Viessrs. Pigou and Andrews, 
at Dartford, blew up, by which 
accident eleven men, employed in 
the same, unfortunately lost their 
lives. The explosion was so great, 
thar it shook most of the buildings 
in the town, and the concussion 
was sensibly felt in many parts of 
the county of Suffolk. The scene 
on the spot was shocking beyond 
description, as the adjoining ficlds 
were covered with fragments of the 
‘buildings, consisting of large beams 
of timber shivered into thousands 
of splinters, sprinkled with blood, 
and interspersed with the mangled 
limbs of the unfortunate sufferers, 
many of which have been gathered 
up for interment, but not one of 
their heads has been yet found. 
How the accident happen-d, is at 
present, and probably ever wili re- 
main, unknown. ‘The explosion 
took place a fiw minutes before 
twelve o’clock, when providential- 
ly the overseer and two boys had 
just left the works, and one of them 
was ringing the bel! for dinner, or 
they could not have escaped the 
untimely fate of their companions. 
Mrs. Wilkes, the wife of the ma- 
nagets standing at her own door, . 
or. XXXVII. 
about two hundred yards distance, 
was knocked down, but happily 
rot materially hurt. 
6th. , Captain Telford arrived at 
* the Sierra Leone House, with 
dispatches from that colony, ‘dated 
the 28th of November, by which 
it appears, that a French squadron, 
consisting of |’Experiment, a 50 
gun ship, two frigates, two armed 
brigs, one of 18, the other of 12 
guns, and two Guineamen (prizes), 
also stoutly armed, had, on the 28th 
of September, appeared off the set- 
tlement, which, as all resistance 
was thought likely to be ineffec-_ 
tual, immediately surrendered. 
The French, however, fired seve- 
ra] suots into the town after the flag 
was struck, by which a woman and 
a girl were killed, and a.man and - 
three women wounded. The 
French force having landed, pro- 
cecd:d to pillage the town, and 
then destroyed all the public build- 
ings, as well as the company’s 
small vessels, the Thornton, Do- 
mingo, Venus, James, and Anna, 
then lying in the river, the na- 
tives and some of the settlers being 
encouraged to partake of the plun.. 
der. ‘The company’s ship the Har. 
py, of 490 tons, happening to arrive 
while the French squadron was in 
the river, was capturédd. Two 
other small vessels belonging to the 
company were afterwards captured 
on 
