the unhappiness of serving the Stuart cause; this letter
might have been written by Mary, Queen of Scots, or by James II, or by
the Old Pretender, or by the Young Pretender; in all alike we find what
this letter shows, a certain gracious melancholy, a lack of moral
courage, a great self-pity, and a great selfishness.

Thomas Bushel gave up the island into the hands of Colonel Fiennes, a
Parliamentarian soldier, and the father of the intrepid young lady,
Celia Fiennes, who, a few years later, travelled through the length and
breadth of England on horseback, and wrote an account of her
journeyings. Lord Say and Sele, who claimed the island, was her
grandfather on the mother's side.

After the Restoration, and under the corrupt administration of Charles,
the Dutch ravaged the shipping of the Channel, as the French did in the
reign of William and Mary and Queen Anne, and as pirates did at all
times, whenever a body of desperate men could establish themselves on
Lundy, and from there make raids on the coastal traffic. The last and
worst pirate of all, the most inhuman, as the meanest, a trafficker in
human misery for the sake of gold, false even to the partners in his
base contract, was Benson, a rich man by inheritance, and belonging to
one of the oldest Bideford families, the leading citizen of Bideford
and Appledore, and a member of Parliament for Barnstaple.

In 1747 he entered into a contract with the Government for the
exportation of convicts, and gave bond to the Sheriff to transport them
to Virginia or Maryland, which was the horrible method of treating
criminals then in common use. But in 1748 he leased Lundy Island from
Lord Gower, and, transporting the convicts there, began building walls
and cultivating the island with this slave-labour. The great wall,
called the Quarter Wall, on Lundy was built by these unhappy convicts.
After a few years, however, Benson was discovered in smuggling, and a
large quantity of tobacco and other goods was found in caves and
chambers cut out of the rock. For this he was fined 5,000 pounds; but
when his importation of convicts was discovered, and he was taxed with
it, he excused himself by declaring that to send them to Lundy was the
same as sending them to America, so long as they were transported
anywhere out of England. The termination of his villainous career in
England was owing to a conspiracy to defraud an insurance company, a
vulgar and inglorious crime without the el