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later period than that with which we must now deal, but for the sake of completeness the remaining facts may be told here. He proceeded with Sir Henry Middleton's fleet to Bantam and there embarked for home in the Peppercorn, commanded by Nicholas Downton. The voyage proved a very unhealthy one, and more than half the company on board died, the victims including Hawkins. His wife went on to London in the Peppercorn, and not long afterwards contracted a marriage with Gabriel Towerson, a prominent commander in the Company's service, who subsequently became famous as the central victim in the massacre of Amboina. We shall meet him again, but Mrs. Hawkins, or Towerson as she must now be called, fades from the scene shortly after this. She distinguished herself in London by some transactions relative to a very valuable diamond which she had brought with her, probably as part of her first husband's spoils of office. The last glimpse of her is later on at Surat, where on her return to India, she, with one or two other ladies, gave the local representatives of the English Company an infinite amount of trouble by her demands on their resources. She must have been a woman of above the ordinary degree of ability and seems to have had over Hawkins a remarkable influence. Hawkins himself was an exceptionally clever man—tactful, resourceful and endowed to a marked degree with that masterfulness which, when combined with the afore-mentioned qualities, is so sure a passport to success with Orientals. His cannot, perhaps, be regarded as a great name in the list of seventeenth century adventurers in the East, but it is emphatically an interesting one.