Personal journal kept by Captain Colin Campbell, as a passenger on board the GENERAL HEWITT, for a voyage from China to England.

GENERAL HEWITT, China to England. Though catalogued as a log, this is in fact a personal journal (including some navigational information) kept by Captain, later Rear-Admiral, Colin Campbell, when a passenger on the East Indiaman commanded by his elder brother, Captain Walter Campbell, in 1816-17. This had taken out gifts for the Emperor of China as part of the abortive Amherst mission and Colin Campbell's journal only covers the return voyage from the Pei Ho or White River in the Gulf of Pechili (Sunday 11 August 1816) to Ascension Island, the last dated entry being Sunday 23 March 1817 after leaving there. As this last entry states, Campbell's principal reason for writing it was for the later pleasure of his father Walter Campbell (1741-1816) who was sometime Rector of Glasgow University and 'of Shawfield and Woodhall, both of the same shire, and of the island of Islay, co. Argyle' (cf. under Colin Campbell in O'Byrne, 'Naval Biography'). News of Walter's death reached his sons on the ship's earlier arrival at St Helena. Colin therefore discontinued the journal, concluding with a brief account written at sea on or after 23 March of his visit to that island - where Napoleon was then in exile - and of the subsequent stop at Ascension (on 22 March). This section was published by David Baird Smith as ‘St Helena in 1817’ in the 'Scottish Historical Review', vol. 19, no. 76 (1922) pp. 273-82, when the journal was still in possession of Colin's grandson, Admiral Sir Henry Hervey Campbell.