Ix IxXTRODUCTION. 



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 tmder his 

 command. In him it may fairly be said, the profession has 

 lost an ornament, his countr}'^ has been deprived of an able, 

 enterprising, and experienced officer, and his widow and 

 children have sustained an irreparable loss. 



Lieutenant 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 sj^stem, wdiich 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- 



