favours, accompanied with such politeness and cordiality, that he became entirely easy under his misfortunes, the reflections on which grew every day less and less painful. "The commissary of the Spanish prisoners," says Ulloa, "was Mr. William Rickman, under whose care, consequently, I should have been, without the circumstance of having been taken in a French ship. Yet, my being a Spaniard recommended me to his kindness, which, I with gratitude own, he carried to a very great height; and I had a large share of those acts of goodness by which he had deserved the universal acknowledgment of the Spanish nation. For, from the beginning of the war, and the taking of the Princessa, he exerted all possible care for the comfort of the prisoners: and the chief officers he even lodged at his own seat, and many others at an adjacent farm-*house, called Perbrook, about a quarter of a league from Tichfield, on the London road, and about three miles from Fareham. He made public and private solicitations in their behalf: he treated all with affability, and used the greatest despatch in their several affairs; he raised charitable contributions, which were chiefly laid out in apparel for those of the lower class; and the officers he in the most genteel manner furnished with money, that they might live in tolerable decency."
Both Mr. Brookes, commissary for the French prisoners, to which Ulloa, as taken in a French ship, belonged, and Mr. Rickman, offered to unite their interests in procuring him his papers to be returned. For this purpose a petition was addressed to the Duke of Bedford, first commissioner of the Admiralty; and "the answer," says Ulloa, "was entirely becoming the generosity of the nation among which the chance of war had brought me." The Duke of Bedford, and the other lords of the Admiralty, "unanimously, and with pleasure, granted the contents of my memorial; nobly adding, that they were not at
