Sir Henry Torrens was born at Londonderry in 1779, and having been educated at the military academy in Dublin, he was appointed to an Ensigncy in the Fifty-second Regiment on the 2nd of November, 1793, at the age of fourteen years; he was promoted to a Lieutenancy in the Ninety-second Regiment on the 14th of June, 1794; and on the 11th of December, 1795, was removed to the Sixty-third Regiment, then under orders for the West Indies. At the attack of Morne Fortuné in the island of St. Lucie, on the 1st of May, 1796, while serving with the army under Major-General Sir Ralph Abercrombie, he was severely wounded in the right thigh: after taking a prominent part in storming three French redoubts, he was employed for the space of seven months at an outpost in the woods against the Charibs: on the conquest of those people he was promoted to a company in the Sixth West India Regiment on the 28th of March, 1797. In 1798 he returned to England, and was appointed Aide-de-camp to Lieutenant-General Whitelocke, then acting as second in command under Earl Moira at Portsmouth; in November of the same year he went to Portugal as Aide-de-camp to General Cuyler, who commanded a body of auxiliary troops, sent thither by the British government, to repel the threatened invasion of that country by the Spaniards. While on service at Lisbon, he was removed to the Twentieth Regiment, on the 8th of August, 1799, and immediately relinquished the advantages of his Staff situation in order to join his Regiment, which was a part of the force then destined for the liberation of the United Provinces from the yoke of France. Throughout the short but arduous campaign in Holland, the Twentieth Regiment distinguished itself on every occasion, particularly at the battle of Alcmaar on the 2nd of October, 1799: on the retreat of the British and Russian troops upon the two villages of Egmont, and after a most severe conflict with the enemy from morning till night of the 6th of October, Captain Torrens received a severe wound from a musket-ball, which, passing through the right thigh, entered the left, where it lodged so deeply as to baffle all surgical efforts to extract it.