town of Arniston, South Africa. As a captain, he was very critical of the fact that this ship did not have a marine chronometer with which to calculate longitude, and attributed the great loss of life directly to this false economy. In 1817 he also took the opportunity to interview Napoleon (who had been an acquaintance of his father) on St. Helena. Hall took command of in May 1820 and in August he sailed her to the west coast of South America. He returned to England in spring 1823 and Conway was paid off. His journals of this period became the book, Extracts from a Journal Written on the Coasts of Chile, Peru and Mexico (1823). Following his retirement from the navy in 1823, Hall was married on 1 March 1825 to Margaret Congalton (d. 1876), the youngest daughter of Sir John Hunter, Consul-General in Spain by his spouse Elizabeth Barbara, sister to Sir William Arbuthnot, 1st Baronet. Hall and Congalton also had daughter, Eliza, who married Admiral William Charles Chamberlain. In 1826, when Sir Walter Scott was sunk in depression following his wife's death and financial ruin, it was Hall who organised a trip to Naples for Scott, managing to persuade the government to place a ship at his disposal. In 1828 he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Honorary Academician. Also that year, Hall and his wife embarked on a two-year tour of North America. In 1828, part of their route saw them travel over land from Charleston, South Carolina, then along the Savannah River by canoe from the ferry landing. They stayed at City Hotel in Savannah, Georgia, a city that Hall found "showy". He "liked the view of the city from the river, the plentiful trees, but did not approve of the wide streets that afforded so little shade". In 1829 Hall published Travels in North America, which caused some offence due to his criticisms of American society. His best-known work was The Fragments of Voyages and Travels (9 volumes, 1831–1840), originally released as three yearly series of eight volumes each. He also contributed to the Encyclopædia Britannica and wrote scientific papers on subjects as varied as trade winds, the geology of Table Mountain and a comet he observed in Chile. In 1834, Hall apparently accepted an invitation from Jane Cranstoun, the Countess of Purgstall, to visit her estates in Styria, which