IN THE WEST INDIES 



xxi 



in the West Indies, he carried aid to Guadeloupe after the 

 earthquake, and twice earned the thanks of Government : once 

 for an expedition to Nicaragua to extort, under threat of a 

 blockade, proper apologies and a sum of money due to certain 

 British merchants ; and once during an insurrection in San 

 Domingo, for the rescue of certain others from a perilous im- 

 prisonment and the recovery of a ( chest of money ' of which 

 they had been robbed. Once, on the other hand, he earned his 

 share of public censure. This was in 1837, when he commanded 

 the Romney lying in the inner harbour of Havannah. The 

 Homney was in no proper sense a man-of-war ; she was a slave- 

 hulk, the bonded warehouse of the Mixed Slave Commission ; 

 where negroes, captured out of slavers under Spanish colours, 

 were detained provisionally, till the Commission should decide 

 upon their case and either set them free or bind them to ap- 

 prenticeship. To this ship, already an eyesore to the authorities, 

 a Cuban slave made his escape. The position was invidious ; 

 on one side were the tradition of the British flag and the state 

 of public sentiment at home ; on the other, the certainty that 

 if the slave were kept, the Romney would be ordered at once 

 out of the harbour, and the object of the Mixed Commission 

 compromised. Without consultation with any other officer, 

 Captain Jenkin (then lieutenant) returned the man to shore and 

 took the Captain-General's receipt. Lord Palmerston approved 

 his course ; but the zealots of the anti-slave trade movement 

 (never to be named without respect) were much dissatisfied; 

 and thirty-nine years later, the matter was again canvassed in 

 Parliament, and Lord Palmerston and Captain Jenkin defended 

 by Admiral Erskine in a letter to the Times (March 13, 1876). 



In 1845, while still lieutenant, Charles Jenkin acted as End of his 

 Admiral Pigot's flag captain in the Cove of Cork, where there career - 

 were some thirty pennants ; and about the same time, closed his 

 career by an act of personal bravery. He had proceeded with 

 his boats to the help of a merchant vessel, whose cargo of com- 

 bustibles had taken fire and was smouldering under hatches ; 

 his sailors were in the hold, where the fumes were already heavy, 

 and Jenkin was on deck directing operations, when he found 



