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 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 Commission should decide upon their case and either set
them free or bind them to apprenticeship. To this ship, already an
eye-sore 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).
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