Dress by candle-light, and our whole party proceeded to Port Royal where the Admiral gave us a grand breakfast on board the _Hercules_.... The _lion_ for the morning for the gentlemen was a large cannon, taken from the French, but I own it did not interest me much. This was probably one of those cannons which were removed to the present King’s House on the shutting up of the dockyard. In 1806, Port Royal saw the victorious Duckworth bring in three French ships taken off Santo Domingo after what was called, before the days of Togo, “one of the completest victories on record.” In the memorable year 1805, Dacres was commander-in-chief of Jamaica, and he detained at Port Royal for the protection of the island four of the six ships (of Cochrane’s squadron), which had come out in chase of Missiessy, and Nelson had hoped would reach him at Barbados, when he sailed in pursuit of the French fleet under Villeneuve, immediately before Trafalgar. With Trafalgar, Port Royal’s chief importance as a naval station may be said to have ended. Nothing of great moment, except the almost complete destruction of the town by fire in 1815, occurred afterwards, although Jamaica remained as a separate station for some twenty years more. Monk Lewis writes in February 1816: The Jamaica canoes are hollowed cotton-trees. We embarked in one of them at six in the morning, and visited the ruins of Port Royal, which, last year, was destroyed by fire: some of the houses were rebuilding; but it was a melancholy sight, not only from the look of the half-burnt buildings, but the dejected countenances of the ruined inhabitants. Bleby records in his “Scenes in the Caribbean Sea” (1854) having seen as he entered the harbour in 1831, several slavers captured by British cruisers and sent in here to be condemned and broken up. In “The Wanderings of a Marine,” a series of letters to a friend comprising descriptive sketches at sea and on shore, at home and abroad, written in 1831—a manuscript volume in the West India Library of the Institute of Jamaica, we read: