But strait quarters, overcrowding and all the other horrors we have described did not exhaust the sufferings endured by Irish emigrants in the eighteenth century. “About the 20th July ... we were stopped by three British frigates, the _Thetis_, Captain Lord Cochrane; the _Hussar_, Captain Rose, and the _Esperance_, Captain Wood, who boarded us, and after treating us with the greatest insolence, both officers and sailors, they _pressed_ every one of our hands, save one, and near fifty of my unfortunate fellow-passengers, who were most of them flying to America to avoid the tyranny of a bad government at home, and who thus, most unexpectedly, fell under the severest tyranny, one of them at least which exists. As I was in a jacket and trousers, one of the lieutenants ordered me into the boat, as a fit man to serve the king, and it was only the screams of my wife and sister which induced him to desist. It would have been a pretty termination to my adventure if I had been pressed and sent on board a man-of-war. The insolence of these tyrants, as well to myself as to my poor fellow-passengers, in whose fate a fellowship in misfortune had interested me, I have not since forgotten, and I never will.”[66] Footnote 66: “Autobiography,” p. 217. With such gracious sway did great Britannia “rule the waves” in the good old days! On August the 1st the Tones landed in Wilmington, their voyage having lasted from June the 13th. They found the principal tavern of the place kept by an Irishman, Captain O’Byrne O’Flynn, a veteran of the American War of Independence. Here they rested for a few days, and made a useful and agreeable acquaintance in the person of General Humpton, an old Englishman, of the best type (“a beautiful, hale, stout old man of near seventy, perfectly the soldier and the gentleman”) who had fought on the American side in the late war. He took a great liking to Tone, and his charming wife, and sister and pretty children, and showed himself very eager to serve them. The Tones left Wilmington, as soon as the ladies and children had recruited from the fatigue of the sea-voyage and reached Philadelphia on August the 8th. Here Tone met two old friends—Hamilton Rowan and Dr. Reynolds, both of whom had, like himself, got into trouble with the Irish Government over the “_affaire Jackson_.” They had a great time telling each other their adventures since they had last met in Hamilton Rowan’s cell in Newgate fourteen months previously. Reynolds and Rowan were athirst for news from Ireland, and eagerly listened to all Tone had to tell them.