IN THE WEST INDIES 17 



* 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 com- 

 manded the Romney lying in the inner harbour of 

 Havannah. The Romney 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 Com- 

 mission should decide upon their case and either 

 set them free or bind them to apprenticeship. 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 lieu- 

 tenant) returned the man to shore and took the 

 Captain-General's receipt. Lord Palmerston ap- 

 proved 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). 



