fic charges of unofficer-like conduct. The
court, of which Colonel Baldock, 29th Bengal Native Infantry, was
president, assembled at Fort William on July 14, 1823, and after
thirteen days' sitting found Shipp guilty of both the charges of
unofficer-like conduct preferred against him, and sentenced him to be
"discharged" from the service; but, at the same time, strongly
recommended him to mercy in consideration of his past services and
wounds, and the high character as an officer and a gentleman that he had
previously borne. The proceedings of the court were sent home for
confirmation, and eighteen months later were returned with the
notification that Shipp was to be permitted to retire from the service.
He accordingly returned home, and sold out of the regiment on November
3, 1825, about a month after his arrival in England. With their
customary generosity, the Court of Directors of the late East India
Company settled upon him a life pension of L50 a year, in consideration
of his Indian services.

Disappointed again and again in his hopes of obtaining civil employment,
Shipp tried his hand at authorship, and wrote a work entitled the
"Military Bijou," and other things. In 1829 he published "Memoirs of the
Extraordinary Military Career of John Shipp." The book was brought out
by the late Mr. Hurst, of Great Marlborough Street, and proved a
literary success. As a military critic observed at the time, "that a
friendless farmer's boy, ignorant, by his own admission, of the simplest
rudiments of education, and following the engrossing profession of a
soldier from an age scarcely beyond the pale of childhood, should have
qualified himself to be at once the hero and the author of so remarkable
a work argues no ordinary qualities in the individual." A no less
creditable feature, we may be permitted to add, is the fine, soldierly
sense of duty, which led Shipp to bow to his fate (p. 317), and to
abstain from making his autobiography a vehicle for either
self-exculpation or recrimination in regard of the matters that proved
the ruin of his professional life. Two years after the publication of
his memoirs, Shipp wrote a pamphlet entitled, "Flogging and its
Substitutes--A Voice from the Ranks." It was in the form of a letter to
the late Sir Francis Burdett, Bart., M.P., who in return sent the author
a douceur of L60. Shipp's views did not find general acceptance in
military circles at the time; but the substitutes for corporal
pun