Chapter I: Introduction

Why should I now write my life, or retrace the more adventurous part of it? I have no material to afford instruction or impart knowledge even to the humblest class of readers.

I have been an unobservant and an unintelligent traveller. The exclusive occupation of an arduous profession may indeed excuse this, but cannot obviate its sterilising consequences.

I have no new events, no unknown regions, no wonderful discoveries to unfold. Reader, there are a great many good reasons for not troubling thee with a book, and thou mayest well inquire why I have not attended to them.

The fact is, they have had considerable weight with me, and for these fourteen or fifteen years have served to keep my manuscripts quiet in my desk, and they would have kept them there for ever if, by reflection and consideration of the times, I had not conceived a hope that their publication might be useful to my countrymen.

Another motive I have, which I mention last, because it is the most serious, and this is, that I have found much of the writing and style of contemporaneous authors calculated to undervalue religion, to undermine it by sneers and insinuations, and to look down upon it with compassionate airs of superior illumination.

Hundreds who are startled, interested, and attracted by the audacity of assaults upon religion neither know nor care what has been the deliberate conclusion of Newton, of Locke, of Milton, or of Pope. Therefore, let the man who has through life felt religion to be as a guard and shield spread before him, becoming a more ample and secure protection as the exigency became more pressing and severe, let him oppose his sober experience to that of the scoffer, whose works and words give out that he has found some secret of happiness in throwing religion aside as a troublesome, childish, and unfashionable restraint.

Most indolently, most imperfectly have I served my God, but I have never in any part of life forgotten Him, never have ceased to love and fear Him.

The return He has made to me it is that I think worthy of remark.

In the depression before Him of conscious unworthiness, He has enabled me, in spite of my transgressions, to carry my heart serenely and lightly in my breast.

Whether my soul has conceived her danger from the wars of earth or the storms of ocean, the conflict of armies or of elements, if I have had courage, if I have had comfort, if I have had the tranquillity and firmness of a man, I know of no source from which I can have derived them, excepting only the kindness of God speaking to my soul through the promises of religion.

In sickness and in suffering, the friend and the nurse remove every object of external disquiet, and the faults of the strong are forgotten in the sufferings of the sick. But what friend, or what nurse is, or has ever been to me, so kind as the Spirit of God.

Silently then, (removing the far more disquieting subject of internal uneasiness), the mountain of recollected offences, and the anxious cloud of apprehended evils, are melted away before the steadfast beam of Christian hope, like snow before the sun of summer. Does it need, then, much learning or much study to contradict the sneer of the mocker or emancipate the spirit of his victim? I think not, and hope that in the book now offered to the public something like good fruit may be found. The seed indeed is small, but may God give the increase.

SUTTERTON, LINCOLNSHIRE,
1824.

NOTE

Captain Boothby’s design of publishing his journals was never carried out in his lifetime, and now, six-and-seventy years after he wrote the above introduction, they are brought out for the first time in book form. Incorporated with them are his letters to the various members of his family, which, having been written without any thought of reproduction, are perhaps even more vivid and natural than the journal itself. These carry on the narrative, and bridge over what might otherwise have been gaps in its continuity.

CONTENTS

PAGE
Expedition to Italy and Sicily under General Sir James Craig 9

General Sir James Craig’s Farewell 50

General Sir John Stuart in command 51

The Battle of Maida 69

The Siege of Scylla 85

General Sir John Moore arrives at Messina 98

Captain Boothby returns to England 112

Expedition to Sweden under General Sir John Moore 114

Departure of General Sir John Moore for England 120

Captain Boothby ordered to survey Isle of Sproe 123

Captain Boothby ordered to England to rejoin General Sir John
Moore 129

Expedition to Spain and Portugal under General Sir John Moore
130

Captain Boothby ordered to Elvas 144

Captain Boothby ordered to make Reconnaissance on Frontier 161

Captain Boothby ordered to make Reconnaissance towards Orense
202

The Battle of Corunna 211

Captain Boothby returns Home 228

Expedition to Portugal and Spain 232

Captain Boothby in General Sherbrooke’s Division, and attached
to the Brigades of Guards and Infantry under General Harry
Campbell and General A. Campbell 248