orities, 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).

In 1845, while still lieutenant, Charles Jenkin acted as Admiral Pigot's
flag-captain in the Cove of Cork, where there were some thirty pennants;
and about the same time closed his career by an act of personal bravery.
He had proceeded with his boats to the help of a merchant vessel, whose
cargo of combustibles had taken fire and was smouldering under hatches;
his sailors were in the hold, where the fumes were already heavy, and
Jenkin was on deck directing operations, when he found his orders were
no longer answered from below: he jumped down without hesitation and
slung up several insensible men with his own hand. For this act he
received a letter from the Lords of the Admiralty expressing a sense of
his gallantry; and pretty soon after was promoted Commander, superseded,
and could never again obtain employment.

In 1828 or 1829 Charles Jenkin was in the same watch with another
midshipman, Robert Colin Campbell-Jackson, who introduced him to his
family in Jamaica. The father, the Honourable Robert Jackson, Custos
Rotulorum of Kingston, came of a Yorkshire family, said to be originally
Scottish; and on the mother's side, counted kinship with some of the
Forbeses. The mother was Susan Campbell, one of the Campbells of
Auchenbreck. Her father, Colin, a merchant in Greenock, is said to have
been the heir to both the estate and the baronetcy; he claimed neither,
which casts a doubt upon the fact; but he had pride enough himself, and
taught enough pride to his family, for any station or descent in
Christendom. He had four daughters. One married an Edinburgh writer, as
I have it on a first account--a minister, according to another--a