xii 



efforts to put down the Slave Trade, which secretly existed under the name 

 of " apprenticeship," marked the man who ever after stuck " closer than a 

 brother" to the dark-skinned races of the earth. " There was no time for 

 hesitation" (he wrote long afterwards). " Of two things he must do one, 

 either withdraw under the pressure of the acknowledged danger of meddling 

 with a dishonest system, or push forward for the present abatement of the 

 mischief, with the almost certainty of being abandoned by the government 

 at home." He chose the latter, and was recalled. When the official 

 documents connected with his proceedings were subsequently required for 

 discussion in Parliament, reply was made that they could not be found. 



After marrying, in 1811, Anne Elizabeth, daughter of the Rev. Thomas 

 Barker, of York, he joined the 14th Light Dragoons in Spain as Lieu- 

 tenant, and was present at the actions of Xivelle, Xive, Orthes, and Tou- 

 louse, for which he received the Peninsular War-medal with four clasps. 

 During the campaign of 1814 he was taken off regimental duty and attached 

 to the staff of General (afterwards Sir Henry) Fane, of whose kindness 

 and ability be preserved a grateful recollection. " Some old dragoons, dis- 

 charged on eightpence a day," he writes of himself, " may remember that 

 he was a careful leader of a patrol, a good look-out on picquet, could 

 feel a retiring enemy, and carry off a sentry for proof, as well as another, a 

 great hater of punishment, and a man of very small baggage, consisting of 

 something like a spare shirt and an Arabic grammar." 



His youngest brother, Charles, B.A. and Travelling Bachelor of Queen's, 

 and Lieutenant and Captain in the 1st Foot Guards, was killed in action 

 at Biarritz, in the South of France, on the 12th December, 1813 ; and the 

 survivor, in the irresistible desire of seeing his face once more, had him 

 taken up a few days after and reinterred in the garden of the Mayor of 

 Biarritz, where he rests among the strawberry beds with two other officers 

 of the same regiment, over whose graves the gallant Frenchman has placed 

 a stone with an appropriate French inscription. This striking incident 

 was commemorated by the muse of Amelia Opie, who on this occasion felt 

 as a friend, a relative, and a poet. 



Promoted at the peace ot 1814, Captain Thompson exchanged into the 

 1 7th Light Dragoons, serving in India, where he improved his knowledge 

 of Arabic, which he had begun to study as a subaltern of dragoons in 

 Spain. Arriving at Bombay in 1815, he soon after served in the Pindarry 

 campaign, and had charge of the outposts of the force under Sir William 

 Grant Keir, whom he accompanied in 1819 as Arabic interpreter to the 

 expedition against the Wahabees of the Persian Gulf. In this capacity he 

 assisted at the reduction of Ras al Khyma and other places on the coast, 

 and had a prominent part in negotiating the treaty with the defeated 

 tribes, the most remarkable article in which was the declaring the Slave 

 Trade to be piracy ; the earliest declaration to that effect in point of time, 

 though the American one reached England first (see u Exercises," vol. iv. 

 p. 29). 



