14.
second trip to Japan is August 12, 1857, when his vessel is reported to have been at Fow-chow, China. Since the Portsmouth, under the command of Captain A. H. Foote, left Shanghai on August 22, and arrived at Shimoda on September 8, 1857,[1] it may have been that Cornwallis was on this vessel. But there is no record, so far as I have been able to find, of stops having been made either in the Lewchews or at Nagasaki. Cornwallis attained sufficient prominence in later life to warrant inclusion in the Dictionary of American Biography, but the details of his life as there given fail to confirm the statement made in his Two Journeys that he had had experience in the dissecting room of a school of medicine (I, iii, 101). He is even amusing when he writes of his "harum-scarum days" (II, ix, 180), because even in 1859, when he was writing his book, he had barely reached the age of twenty! The book written by Cornwallis in 1860 entitled My Life and Adventures carries a preface in which Cornwallis states that "The writer of this autobiography deems it almost unnecessary to state that (descriptions of places excepted) the same is entirely fictitious." Furthermore, he says that "beyond the mere travels, there is not a single personal experience of the Author given in the book." Perhaps it is
- ↑ See J. M. Hoppin, Life of Andrew Hull Foote, rear-admiral United States Navy (New York, 1874), xi, 129, and M. E. Cosenza, ed., The complete journal of Townsend Harris (1930), 387.
