Henry Browne Mason: PRISONER OF WAR

In October 1807 HMS Amphion was assigned to convoy duty bound for Malta. Once in Malta, she was ordered back to Sicily, then back again to French waters off Toulon. She severely damaged the French armed storeship Baleine, anchored under the protection of the guns of Fort Bouton. There were more successes teamed up with HMS Unite, harrassing sea trade and shore batteries in the Adriatic, then controlled by the French. Amphion took 38 merchant vessels and burned six. It looks well on paper, wrote Captain Hoste, but it has not put much cash in our pockets.

It was an attempt to send back two prizes which caused Henry Browne Mason to be captured by the French. HMS Amphion captured two vessels, an armed brig and a trabaccolo, off the Dalmation coast, and sent them back to Malta as prizes, virtually unarmed. The trabaccolo was under the command of Midshipman Browne. Both it and the

Brig were recaptured by two French privateers, and the British crews taken prisoner.

The prisoners were landed at Zara in Dalmatia. A month later they were transferred across the Adriatic to Ancona, from where they were marched to imprisonment at Briançon, an ancient walled town 4,000 feet up in the Alps. Henry had all his money stolen by a fellow prisoner.

Before the onset of winter Henry and his friends successfully petitioned to be transferred to the main depot at Verdun, in northeastern France. There they made themselves comfortable on parole, financing their amusements by drawing bills of exchange at 25% discount.

Back in Bath, news of Henry's imprisonment must have been a severe blow to his mother. She had just received news that her husband and eldest son had drowned at sea. John and Elizabeth Mason, her in-laws, had died, as had one of her sisters-in-law. The family in Bath therefore consisted of Henry's mother, his three unmarried aunts including Georgiana, and all the younger children, including the four year-old George Mason, who was later to play such an important role in the life of Yateley.

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