=False Sale.= "Soon after this (1785) they removed to Campobello, which had been purchased by Mr. Butler and Captain Storrow. There were two houses on the Island, one for each family, and here they lived very happily and pleasantly. There was always a garrison at St. Andrews, and a ship of war stationed near Campobello; so Captain Storrow had congenial society, and they had many pleasant lady friends, and, as their hospitality was unbounded, they were seldom without company at one or the other of the houses.... All was bright and prosperous. But a change came. In 1790 or 1791 the Butlers and Captain Storrow had gone to Halifax on business, and Mrs. Storrow was left alone with her children on the Island, when a notice was served to her that she must quit the Island immediately, as it had been sold to them under a false title, and the real owner had come to take possession. The Island had been granted by William Pitt to his former tutor, David Owen, a hard man who would not move from the position he had taken. Mrs. Storrow sent to my father, who was her husband's lawyer, and he, with some other gentlemen, chartered a sloop and brought the family to St. Andrews, where a house was already prepared for them. Here they remained a year or more. But Capt. Storrow's finances were so crippled by the loss of Campobello that he and his family sailed for Jamaica, where he had a small estate."
=William Owen.= David Owen, to whom this manuscript referred, was a cousin of William Owen, through whom the Island became connected by royal gift and by romance with the fortunes of his immediate descendants. As naval officer William Owen had been "in all the service and enterprise where ships, boats, and seamen were employed," had labored at Bengal for the re-establishment of the affairs of the East India Company, and had fought under Clive. At the blockade of Pondicherry he lost his right arm, and the Sunderland, to which he belonged, having foundered, he was ordered to England. Broken in spirit and weak in body, the copy of what was presumably his memorial to the Admiralty in 1761 has a piteous sound. It begins:--
=His Petition.= "My Lord, permit me, with the most profound respect, to lay by your Lordship a true State of my past service, with the accidents that happened to me during the same, praying your Lordship not to judge hard of me, in being reduced to the disagreeable necessity of doing that myself which would appear in a much more favorable light were any of my Friends in Town who could take the Liberty of Introducing me to your Lordship." After recounting the services he rendered, and the injuries he received, he ends with these words: "I beg you will be pleased to represent to the Right Honorable the Lords of the Admiralty that I am the person mentioned in Admiral Steuen's [the spelling is illegible] Letter to have lost my Right Arm, when I had the Honor of Commanding one of the Divisions of Boats ordered by him to cut out the Two French Ships, La Baline and Hermione, from under the Guns of Pondicherry, on the 7th of October last, and that I had been wounded before in that country with a Musket Ball, which lodged in my Body above three years and a half. My long service in the East Indies, together with the Wounds I received, having greatly impaired my health, lays me under a necessity to be the more urgent with you on this occasion, that I may the sooner go into the Country to endeavor to re-establish the same, as well as to see my Friends, from whom I have been above nine years absent. Let me, therefore, Sir, entreat you to move their Lordships in my behalf, humbly praying that they will be pleased to direct something to be done for me, either by Gratuity, Pension, or Preferment, such as their Lordships may deem me to deserve."
