so that in a week after it was again obliged to be broken, by the advice of the surgeon.' For his exertions in quelling a mutiny which broke out in the Suffolk, bearing the flag of Rear-Admiral Rainier, that officer appointed him acting lieutenant. While at Madras in a prize, he volunteered into the Sybille, on intelligence being received of the French frigate La Forte cruizing in the Bay of Bengal; and in the gallant action which ensued, Lieutenant Tuckey commanded on the forecastle.

In 1799 he was sent with dispatches for Admiral Blankett, then commanding in the Red Sea. Here the excessive heat seems to have laid the foundation of a complaint which never left him. It may surprize you' (he writes from Bombay) to hear me complain of heat, after six years broiling between the tropics; but the hottest day I ever felt, either in the East or the West Indies, was winter to the coolest one we had in the Red Sea. The whole coast of "Araby the Blest," from Babelmandel to Suez, for forty miles inland, is an arid sand, producing not a single blade of grass nor affording one drop of fresh water; that which we drank for nine months, on being analyzed, was found to contain a very considerable portion of sea salt. In the Red Sea, the thermometer at midnight was never lower than 94°, at sun-rise 104°, and at noon 112°. In India the medium is 82°, the highest 94°. On a second visit to this inland sea, he experienced so violent an attack of the liver, and was so much debilitated, that a return to Europe was the only chance of saving his life.

His native climate had the desired effect, and in 1802 he was appointed first lieutenant of the Calcutta, when sent to form an establishment in New South Wales. Here he made several surveys, and particularly one of Port Philip, and on reaching England in 1804, published an account of the voyage. The following year the Calcutta, in bringing home a valuable convoy from St. Helena, was met by the Rochefort squadron, consisting of five sail of the line and two frigates. For the preservation of this convoy, Captain Woodriff determined to engage the whole squadron, and maintained a sort of running fight in a direction opposite to the course of the convoy, till he saw it out of danger, and the Calcutta became perfectly unmanageable, and was compelled to surrender. Captain Woodriff, after an imprisonment of eighteen months, was exchanged for a French officer of equal rank; but Lieutenant Tuckey was kept in confinement till the termination of the war. The Court Martial having most honourably acquitted Captain Woodriff, his officers, and ship's company,' the Captain delivered a paper to the court to the following effect:-I cannot, Mr. President, and members of this honourable Court, omit to express to you how much I regret that the captivity of Lieutenant Tuckey, late first lieutenant of his Majesty's

VOL. XVIII. NO. XXXVI.

Majesty's ship Calcutta, should be a bar to the promotion he so highly merits; his courage, cool intrepidity, and superior abilities as a seaman and an officer, entitle him to my warmest gratitude, and render him most worthy of the attention of the Right Honourable the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty.'

In 1806, Mr. Tuckey married a fellow-prisoner, Miss Margaret Stuart, daughter of the commander of a ship in the East India Company's service at Bengal. She also had been taken by the Rochefort squadron on her passage, to join her father in India. In vain Mr. Tuckey and his friends exerted themselves in procuring his release, by exchange or otherwise; and it was not till after repeated refusals that he even obtained permission, in 1810, for his wife to visit England to look after his concerns. Her object accomplished, she procured passports to return to France by way of Morlaix here she was detained, and after six weeks sent back to England.

:

On the advance of the allied armies into France in 1814, Mr. Tuckey was ordered to Blois, and, with his two little boys, obliged to travel in the most severe weather, he says, that he ever experienced. His youngest son fell a victim to fatigue and sickness. 'I had indeed,' says the father, 'a hard trial with my little boy, for after attending him day and night for three weeks, (he had no mother, no servant, no friend but me to watch over hin,) I received his last breath, and then had not only to direct his interment, but also to follow him to the grave, and recommend his innocent soul to his God: this was indeed a severe trial, but it was a duty, and I did not shrink from it.' But one still more severe awaited him shortly after his arrival in England: he had the misfortune to lose a fine child, a girl of seven years of age, in consequence of her clothes taking fire, after lingering several days in excruciating agony.

On account of Mr. Tuckey's meritorious services in the Calcutta, and his sufferings and long imprisonment in France, Lord Melville promoted him, in the year 1814, to the rank of commander; and in the following year, on hearing of the intention of sending an expedition to explore the Zaire, he applied, among several others, to be appointed to that service. His abilities were unquestionable: he was an excellent surveyor, spoke several languages, and during his confinement he had stored his mind with such various knowledge, and had turned his attention so particularly to the subject of nautical discovery and river navigation, that he appeared to be in every respect eligible for the service, and accordingly was entrusted with the command, of which his narrative is the best proof that he was not undeserving. His zeal to accomplish the objects of the expedition appears to have been without bounds, and his unwearied exertions evidently brought on his old disorder. He returned to the ships

from

from his river excursion in a state of extreme exhaustion; he had no fever, however, nor pain during the whole of his illness, from the 17th of September, when he reached the Congo, till the 4th of October, when he expired. We insert with pleasure the following testimony of his merits.

The few survivors of this ill-fated expedition will long cherish the memory of Captain Tuckey, of whom Mr. Fitzmaurice, the master, who succeeded to the command, observes, in reporting his death, "in him the navy has lost an ornament, and its seamen a father." But his benevolence was not confined to the profession of which he was so distinguished a member. A poor black of South Africa, who, in his youth, had been kidnapped by a slave-dealer, was put on board the Congo, while in the Thames, with a view of restoring him to his friends and country, neither of which turned out to be in the neighbourhood of the Zaire, and he was brought back to England. This black was publicly baptized at Deptford church, by the name of Benjamin Peters, having learned to read on the passage out by Captain Tuckey's instructions, of whom he speaks in the strongest terms of gratitude and affection. He was generous to a fault. A near relation has observed," that a want of sufficient economy, and an incapability of refusal to open his purse to the necessities of others, have been the cause of many of the difficulties which clouded the prospects of his after life;"-that "he knew nothing of the value of money, except as it enabled him to gratify the feelings of a benevolent heart."

In his person Captain Tuckey was tall, and must once 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.'-Intro. p.lix.lx.

LIEUTENANT HAWKEY had been a fellow prisoner with Captain Tuckey in France, where, under the inhuman system of Buonaparte, he had suffered an imprisonment of eleven years: every prospect of rising in his profession being clouded and lost in a hopeless captivity, limited only by the duration of the war, and aggravated by the cruel reflection, that, after having spent the early and best years of life in the active service of his country, and the middle part of it in a prison, he would have to begin the world anew, if ever the day of liberation should arrive-such was the condition to which a number of gallant officers in the navy and army were reduced by this malignant tyrant.

Lieutenant Hawkey was an excellent draughtsman; he sketched in a bold and artist-like manner; and, to a general knowledge of natural history, he united the talent of painting the minuter sea and land animals

z 2

mals with great spirit and accuracy, and in an exquisite style of colouring. A number of specimens of this kind were found in a small pocketbook, accompanied with some slight memoranda; but his papers, containing descriptions of those sketches and drawings, and other remarks made in the progress up the river, have unfortunately been lost. He proceeded with the captain to the farthest point of the journey, and, though employed in the most active manner, and exposed to the same weather and the same hardships as the rest of the party, he had no complaint whatever when he returned to the vessel on the 17th September; his case was therefore somewhat singular. He continued in good health, and without any complaint till the 3d October, when the ship was at sea; he then expressed a sense of lassitude about his loins, and irritability of stomach; but there was no apparent febrile action; the pulse being about the natural standard, which with him was only 65°, without the body undergoing any increase of temperature. The only symptoms were irritability of stomach, with extreme languor and debility; the next day, however, he was seized with vomiting; on the 6th became insensible, the pulse scarcely perceptible at the wrist, and the extremities cold; and he continued thus till 11 o'clock in the evening, when he expired without a struggle.'-Introd. p. lxi. Ixii.

MR. EYRE, the purser, was a young man of a corpulent and bloated habit; he had no illness while in the river; had not been on shore for three weeks, and never exposed himself either to the sun or fatigue during the whole voyage. He was attacked with fever after leaving the river, and, on the third day, breathed his last. His disease appears to have had all the symptoms of the Bulam

fever.

MR. CHRISTIAN SMITH, professor of botany, the son of a respectable landholder near Drammen in Norway, was born in October 1785; he studied botany under Professor Hornemann, and more particularly that branch of the science of which his native mountains afforded such ample stores-the mosses and lichens. Brought up to the profession of physic, and appointed physician to the great hospital at Copenhagen, he could not resist the temptation of accompanying his friends Hornemann and Wormskiold on a botanical tour into the mountains of Norway, in which he particularly distinguished himself. In 1812 he made a second excursion across the mountains of Tellemarck and Hallingdut, ascertained their heights, examined their productions, and in short traversed those solitary regions not only as a botanist but as a natural philosopher. He published a narrative of his observations, which, to use the words of his friend Von Buch, 'must always be considered as one of the most curious and instructive documents of physical geography.' In a third scientific expedition, on which he was engaged by the Patriotic Society of Norway, he extended his travels into remote regions untrod even by the hunters of the rein-deer. Here he assembled the scattered peasantry,

peasantry, explained to them the characters and the valuable properties of the lichens which covered their mountains, instructed them how to convert their mosses into bread pleasant to the taste, nourishing, and wholesome, and prevailed on them to adopt it instead of the miserable bark bread, which affords but little nourishment, and that little at the expense of health.'

After this he came to England, traversed its northern mountains and those of Scotland, visited North and South Wales, and scoured the mountains of Ireland. On his return to London, in 1814, he met, at the house of Sir Joseph Banks, the celebrated geologist Baron Von Buch, whose habits and feelings being congenial with his own, they soon formed an intimacy, and projected a voyage to Madeira and the Canaries. In this expedition Professor Smith was enraptured with the luxuriance of the vegetable world, which far surpassed any idea he could have possibly formed of it from the languid and stunted vegetation of his northern climate. He returned to England in December 1815; and when the expedition to explore the Zaire was mentioned to him by Sir Joseph Banks, he most readily and unconditionally accepted the offer of the appointment of botanist from a pure love of science, and the hope of being useful to mankind. The zeal and qualifications of Professor Smith are apparent from his journal, though it seems this interesting document had undergone no revision, but was found, as we before mentioned, as originally written, in a small pocket memorandum-book. He was first taken ill on returning with Captain Tuckey to the vessels, and pertinaciously refused all nutriment and medicine, except cold water. On the 21st of September, four days after they reached the ship, he became delirious, and died on the following day.

MR. CRANCH, collector of subjects in natural history, was one of those extraordinary self-taught characters, to whom particular branches of science and literature are sometimes more indebted, than to the efforts of those who have had the advantage of a regular education. He was born at Exeter, in the year 1785, of humble but respectable parents; having lost his father at eight years of age, he was turned over to an avaricious uncle, who scarcely allowed him a common education, aud, at fourteen, put him out as an apprentice to learn the art and mystery of shoe-making.' In this situation every moment that could be stolen from his labour was either devoted to the few books which he had been able to collect, or to the study of natural history, and particularly that branch of it which relates to entomology. At the expiration of his apprenticeship he repaired to London. That great mart of human knowledge inspired him with higher objects, and better hopes than those of advancement in the art of shoe-making.