Ix INTRODUCTION. 
have been handsome ; but his long residence in India had 
broken down his constitution, and, at the age of thirty, his 
hair was gray, and his head nearly bald; his countenance 
was pleasing, but wore rather a pensive cast; but he was 
at all times gentle and kind in his manners, cheerful in 
conversation, and indulgent to every one placed under his 
command. In him it may fairly be said, the profession has 
lost an ornament, his country has been deprived of an able, 
enterprising, and experienced officer, and his widow and 
children have sustained an irreparable loss. 
Linutenant Hawkey was another of those officers, 
whose prospect of rising in his profession was blasted by 
the system of refusal to exchange prisoners of war; a most 
inhuman system, which doomed young officers to a hope- 
less captivity, limited only by the duration of the war, or 
rather, viewing the character of that war, limited by no 
visible. bounds; with the additional cruelty of an indefi- 
nite separation from their country and their friends. They 
had, moreover, in this hopeless situation constantly be- 
fore them the melancholy reflection, that, after having spent 
the first and best years of their lives in the active service 
of their country, and the middle part of them in a horrid 
captivity, even when the time of their liberation should 
arrive, they would have to begin the world again; and, 
without a chance of employment in their own profession, as 
the war would then have ceased, painfully to seek out new 
means for the support of themselves and their families. 
Under this unfeeling system, Lieutenant Hawkey suffered 
an imprisonment of eleven years. A few months after the 
renewal of the war, in 1803, when serving as a midship- 
