There came into my hands last year a packet of old letters written in the latter end of the eighteenth and the first quarter of the nineteenth century mostly by members of the Irish family of Purefoy whose home was at Woodfield, near Eyrecourt, in the Co. Galway. Apart from those of purely domestic interest, there are a number written from India by James Purefoy who spent most of his life in the East as a merchant-ship-officer and trader. He went out to India in 1792 and did not return home for twenty-seven years. His extant letters were written either to his sister Mary or to her husband Robert Turbett, a Dublin merchant. Few as they are, they give a realistic if prosaic picture of the ups and downs of a merchant seaman's life during his inevitable long years of exile from his native land.