The Sun.
London, England, 1829-09-12 00:00:00

the judgment of tlAimtrtlbt:§4ny Ap)lliin
them, will not, I ray, fail of their due influence on
this occasion; and, brought as I am before this
honourable Court, under all the circumstance I have

adverted to, and on imputations the very contrary of
that which the Vice-Admiral's public despatches,
his general order, and his personal acknowledgments
had imported, whilst I most anxiously court your
decision, I am confident that any prejudice which
even may have been excited in his mind, and so
long as it should seem latent there, must now be
dispelled, and my own character be completely yin-
(heated by this investigation. But let me now, Sir,
approach to the Vice-Admiral's charges, and the evi-
dence by which their affirmative is sought.
" The negative, by every rule controlling the prac-
tice of all our Courts of Justice, civil and military,
as an immutable principle, 1, the party accused,
am not, in any respect, bound first to establish. The
affirmative must be proved by the party making the
charge, or of course he fails in establishing it; and
if he does so fail, then, wholly or proportionably,
the charges are not proved. And the Court will
bear in mind that the whole which has at present

been adduced is, on the part of the prosecution,
called by the Judge-Advocate as the prosecutor, or
by the Court itself, to establish an affirmative of the
charges. And here, if we look at its nature, we
shall presently see that it abounds with discrepancies
and contradictions throughout, in many instances so
conflicting and contradictory as actually proving the
very reverse of every proposition contained in the
charges, and an absolute negative to each and every
one of them.

" The Court examined the witnesses frequently,
wholly anticipating what had occurred to me, so that
little remained for myself to do on cross-examina•

tion ; and although even under those restraints
which your Courts always impose on legal advocates
on these occasions, I might have. offered objections
to a very great part of what is entered on your mi-
nutes, which, as hearsay, matters of inference, or
opinion, or conversation with others, at which I
was not present, and the like, not being such as in
our civil courts could be received as evidence, I felt

it was better for me not to object to. Twice, only,
during the whole case of the prosecution, have
presumed to interpose with the course the Court
adopted, feeling, as I most unfeignedly do, in what
honourable hands all that is so dear to me is placed.
" The Vice-Admiral, as soon us he was called as
a witness, was most anxious to explain to the Court
that it was not his wish nor desire to have made
any of the charges with a view to the assembling of
a Court-martial,•—that he would have avoided it,
and had wholly refused being concerned as pro-
secutor, but that the Admiralty having themselves
ordered a Court-martial, and required him to attend
and give evidence on what he had written to them,
it remained for him only to bow with deference to
their superior authority ; but when he was called
again on Monday, the 31st of August, the sth day,
to give further evidence, he wished to offer obser-
vations to the Court which they could not receive,
and made a request with which they could not com-
ply; and before he was examined, notwithstanding
what he had already urged, he could not refrain
expressing rather his regret that lie was not the
prosecutor, saying that if he had been so, from
having seen the evidence in the public newspapers,
lie should, by cross-examination, have shaken the
whole or some of the evidence out of Court (I
notice this without any comment of my own.)—
And on his subsequently, at another day, pressing
the Court to receive the letters and correspondence
which had passed between the Admiralty and himself
in relation to his charges, which, as they were not
evidence of facts I could but submit to the Court

they were not so, leaving it to your judgment to
receive them or not, and you decided they could not
be received ; but I certainly have nothing to do with
them, or either with his reluctance or willingness to
be a prosecutor; it is not for me to interfere at all
en the occasion, but enough for me to know that I
am here the accused party, having only to rebut the
question before the Court, which is, whether I am
guilty or not guilty of the charges imputed to me;
and it is only for me to repel the imputation ; but,
from the production of the correspondence between
the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty and Sir
Edward Codrington, I feel called upon to express
my gratitude to their Lordships for the decision
they have been pleased to come to on this matter.
Truly have they shown themselves the fathers of the
service and the guardians of the honour of its offi-
cers. The protection which in the outset they have
extended to me, by affording me the opportunity of
a fair trial, must be felt through the whole of the
service as the highest boon which their Lordships
could confer on its members, and the surest gua-
rantee of future justice. And it is therefore a con-
solation to all of us to know that accusations like
these do not come to the Admiralty without their
directing the best means in their power for ascer-
taining their true grounds, and affording the accused
an opportunity of exculpation. But here, whether
the Admiralty or the Vice-Admiral prosecutes, it is
no difficult problem to solve that the charges ema-
nate solely from the Vice-Admiral himself,—that
they spring from his own mind, and that his letters
are alone the source and the foundation whence their
Lordships, seeing how grave they were, felt it their
duty to direct this Court-martial.
" The Court, for facilitating its proceeding, had
adopted the suggestion of the Judge-Advocate, ar-
ranging under different heads the charges as he found
them in the letters; and, no doubt reflecting on the
imputations arising.out of them with a feeling ho-
nourable to himself, he designated them in the milder
term of allegations,' and called the evidence ap-
plying to each distinctly ; but as the letters convey
the charges of the Vice-Admiral's own words and
connexion, and they form his own text of them and
cannot be thoroughly understood without connect-
ing one with the other, it is best, I humbly feel, that
I should take the liberty of adverting to them in the
connexion as they so came from himself. I am
therefore again and again obliged to advert to those
letters, and corning now as I am about to do, to
the great mass of evidence which has been adduced
during ten days' examining of witnesses, that I may
not weary you with scanning over the whole, I
shall only recur to a few of the prominent instances,
and attempt to show as I go along not only its own
discrepancy and its establishing in itself a complete
negative to the charges, and also how the evidence
and the letters bear on each other.
" The Vice-Admiral and Captains Ommanney,
Curzon, Baynes, Dral%e, and the others who did not
belong to the Genoa, could only speak of the occur-
rence as it regards the Genoa as spectators : their
observations of her when alluding to the period of
the battle were both at times wholly interrupted
and obscured by the great density of smoke in
which all were then involved, and this for the most
part of the battle; and their accurate recollection is
too much impaired by the lapse of time intervening :
and called, as they were, accurately to speak to oc-
currences of 20 months, without having made par-
ticular observations at the time, it was impossible
any one could speak with precision, and all were ho-
nourably anxious to qualify their evidence accord-
ingly; so that their evidence is reduced to belief and
conjecture, or infvrence at most ; and, it may be,
such is founded on wrong premises, and a misap-
prehension of occurrences; whilst they ;limit, for
the most part, that those who were in the Genoa
are the best competent to speak with certainty -of
what was done on board of her; and the Vice-Ad-
miral admitted at length, on Friday last, that the
course of this investigation has thrown a doubt on
his own memory as to time.
" The Vice-Admiral first said that, from the posi-
tion in which he observed the Genoa, it did not ap-
pear to him that she made any use whatever of her
springs, and that her broadside consequently was not
directed to her proper opponent ; and Capt. Curzon
was under the same impression, although he admit-
ted that not being on board the Genoa, he could not
tell, and that the extreme density of the smoke was
such that they could not tell friends from Turks;
and though he had at first thought his ship, the
Asia, was receiving some shot from the Genoa, his
opinion was altered, unless she had bred her ha--