The commandant received the reply of the commander in chief on the 25th ult., and I am directed to take my departure from the coast of Guiana by the earliest opportunity. This may, therefore, be the last letter I shall address to you, from the continent of South America.

Anticipating these instructions I had prepared cases for my collection of Indian specimens; which I have now packed up, and embarked on board the ship Homer, for London, hoping some day to meet them again in the neighbourhood of Bedford Square. Fortunately after long expectation, the model of an Indian house, which the friendly Bercheych had promised to procure me, from the inhabitants of the forest, arrived just in time to be enclosed: as it is complete in furniture and utensils, I shall look forward, with much pleasure, to the period, when I may have the opportunity of explaining to you, in England, the appropriate uses of all the little apparatus which you will find attached to it.

I am also indebted to the commandant, Col. Hislop, for the model of an Indian house, brought to him by the Bucks, which you will likewise find in the collection embarked on board the Homer.

It has happened, for some weeks past, that we have again been very particularly indebted to the king, for our allowance of daily food. Unable to procure fresh provisions in the colony, and none having been imported, the hospital mess has been wholly fed with the salt rations issued from his Majesty’s stores; and, no alternative remaining, we have been compelled to satisfy ourselves with a diet of salt beef and pease-soup, improved with only the occasional variety of pease-soup and saltpork.

I should stand accused of neglecting our contract, were I to omit telling you that, in a late provision-hunting excursion, our party met two Dutch ladies upon the road, travelling, with great state, in a chaise drawn by six naked slaves, instead of horses. This was a scene of novelty, it being one of the toils of slavery which we had not before chanced to witness; nor indeed had we heard that it was practised.

It is matter of much concern to me not to be able to improve the report of our surgical patients, before I quit the hospitals, which have been so long the objects of my anxious care, but, so far from this being the case, it is deemed necessary to embark another body of these unfortunate sufferers on board the ships now going to England.

Next to fever, ulcers have been the severest scourge of the troops, and in both of these maladies we have noticed multitudes of instances, in sad proof of the fatal influence of climate upon our patients: while an European has been cut off in a few hours, by the yellow fever, a colonist has experienced a slight attack of the bilious remittent, and a negro had to support the simple paroxysm of an ague: or, while an English soldier has lingered, and died, from only a slight scratch or excoriation, the African, and the creole, have rapidly recovered from the widest and most perilous ulcers.

If I state to you the result of twelve months experience, as it now appears before me, in a return which I have prepared for the commander in chief, it is not with a view of increasing your terrors, respecting the fatality of this climate, but rather of counteracting, in your mind, a prejudice which I have said prevails too extensively, regarding the insalubrity of Demarara, and indeed of the whole coast of Guiana.

I observed before, that the commonly accepted opinion, that these settlements were more unhealthy than the West India islands, seemed to be incorrect; and, if I now remark that in the course of a year our loss has amounted to nearly 350 men, the returns from even the most favored of the islands, I have much reason to suspect, will sanction me in considering the assertion as decidedly erroneous: for we are taught to believe that few, if any, of the detachments of the very numerous army, under the command of Sir Ralph Abercromby, have escaped with so little loss, as the division serving in these colonies. In some of the islands we know that the mortality has been frightfully greater: in few—perhaps in none, has it been less. Yet, alas! it is, at best, but a melancholy consolation, that we should find cause to rejoice in having lost only one-fourth of our number!

In the course of last week, and particularly on the 26th and 27th of the late month of April, we had many heavy showers of rain, accompanied with much thunder and lightning, also with the loud croakings of hosts of enormous frogs, and the distressful visitings of thick clouds of musquitoes; all of which are regarded as strong indications of a returning wet season. That the thunder and lightning have been less frequent, the musquitoes fewer, the breeze stronger, and the loud bellowings of the frogs less annoying, during the dry season, than they had been during the wet weather that preceded it, is a fact, to which the eyes and ears of all here can bear testimony: but how far these circumstances recurring with the showers of a lunar period, may be indicative of the returning invasion of the long wet season, I am not able to pronounce with equal certainty. Probability might seem to favor the opinion: yet the rains have again diminished, and the best observers do not positively declare our pleasant dry season to be at an end; therefore, as the wet season is commonly later in the islands, than upon this coast, I do not altogether despair of reaching Martinique in time to see that island during the continuance of fine weather.