For eight days, in fact, Jeffery had wandered over the hump of rock and sand that constituted the islet of Sombrero, and lived on limpets and eggs, and drunk the water collected in fissures of the rock. He does not seem to have been given flint and steel, and the means of making a fire, so that he could not feast on turtle and puffins; but, indeed, there were no trees, consequently hardly any fuel available for cooking a dinner. He saw several vessels pass, and indeed Sombrero was in the track of merchant vessels, but he failed to make them observe his signals. At length, on the morning of the ninth day, the schooner _Adams_, of Marblehead, Massachusetts, John Dennis master, came to the island and took the fellow off, and landed him at Marblehead, where he worked at a forge. Little conscious that he was like to be made political capital of and to become of consequence, he did not even trouble to write home to Polperro to announce his safety and his whereabouts. Sir A. Cochrane was satisfied that the man could not have died on Sombrero, as his body was not discovered, nor was he likely to die on an island abounding in turtles and eggs; he concluded that he had been carried away by one of the many ships that passed. He convinced himself that Captain Lake had been guilty of an illegal act, but had not desired to do one that was cruel, and he hoped that the matter would be forgotten after he had administered a reprimand. But the story got about. It reached England. A busybody, Charles M. Thomas, who had been purser on board H.M. sloop _Demarara_, but had been imprisoned on suspicion that he had defrauded the Government, wrote home to Mr. C. Bathurst, brother of the M.P. for Bristol, to this effect: "I deem it a duty I owe to humanity, to inform you that Captain Lake, when commander of the _Recruit_, set a man belonging to that vessel on shore at Sombrero, an uninhabited island in the Atlantic Archipelago, where he died through hunger, or otherwise, for more was never heard of him. This was known to Sir A. Cochrane, who suffered this _titled murderer_ to escape, and he is now in command of the _Ulysses_." The letter was dated March 24th, 1809, more than a year after Jeffery had been left on Sombrero. Its purport was obvious enough. Thomas wanted to be revenged on Cochrane for looking into the matter of his alleged frauds. The fat was now in the fire. Sir Francis Burdett took the matter up, the Radicals throughout the country made immense capital out of the starving to death of a poor seaman by a member of a noble family. The case was kept perseveringly before the public, so that the Government was constrained to issue orders for a strict inquiry to be made as to whether Jeffery was still alive or dead.