November 17th, or five days after she had sailed, which showed 446 persons, of whom 20 had been put on board a prize. The presence of this large number of supernumeraries on board is explained by the fact that the _Java_ was carrying out Lieutenant-General Hislop, the newly appointed Governor of Bombay, and his suite, together with part of the crews of the _Cornwallis_ 74, and gun sloops _Chameleon_ and _Icarus_, she also contained stores for those two ships. “Besides conflicting with the American reports, the British statements contradict one another. The official published report gives but two midshipmen as killed, while one of the volumes of the “Naval Chronicle” (vol. xxix., p. 452), contains a letter from one of the _Java’s_ lieutenants, in which he states that there were five. Finally, Commodore Bainbridge found on board the _Constitution_, after the prisoners had left, a letter from Lieutenant H. D. Cornick, dated January 1, 1813, and addressed to Lieutenant Peter V. Wood, Twenty-second Regiment, foot, in which he states that sixty-five of their men were killed. James (“Naval Occurrences”) gets around this by stating that it was probably a forgery; but, aside from the improbability of Commodore Bainbridge being a forger, this could not be so, for nothing would have been easier than for the British lieutenant to have denied having written it, which he never did. “Taking all these facts into consideration, we find 446 men on board the _Java_ by her own muster-list; 378 of these were paroled by Commodore Bainbridge at San Salvador; 24 men were acknowledged by the enemy to be killed or mortally wounded; 20 were absent in a prize, leaving 24 unaccounted for, who were undoubtedly slain. “The British loss was thus 48 men killed and mortally wounded, and 102 wounded severely and slightly.” Maclay, who was entirely familiar with Roosevelt’s account, gives good reasons for believing that Bainbridge’s estimate of the enemy’s loss was accurate--60 killed and 101 wounded. In a footnote, Mr. Roosevelt refers to Lord Dundonald’s “Autobiography of a Seaman” for “an account of the shameless corruption then existing in the Naval Administration of Great Britain.” Losses, according to this British writer, were often “much greater than were ever acknowledged.” Brenton, the British naval historian, also tells how the letters of the commanders were garbled. The charge that an American commodore committed forgery is but a mild exhibit of the British temper of the early part of the century.