the novelist Jane Austen. He was appointed to raise and organise a corps of Sea Fencibles to defend a strip of the Kentish coast. His base was the Royal Harbour of Ramsgate. In September 1803, it was reported that all the seafaring men of the city of Gloucester were to enlist in the Sea Fencibles in order to obtain protection from the impress (press gang). Active duty On 13 November 1798, a French privateer appeared off Hastings. Captain E.H. Columbine of the Sea Fencibles put a number of his men on the cutter Lion, offered by a Mr. Wexham, and set out after the French vessel. They caught up with their quarry after a chase and captured her after "a little firing" that resulted in the death of one Frenchman. The privateer was the Success, of Cherbourg, Nicholas Dubois, master, with four guns and 24 men. She had been out four days without making any captures. Captain Columbine remarked on the "zeal and readiness" of the Hastings men. A second case occurred on 9 January 1799. The next day Captain Edward Buller, commander of the Sea Fencibles along the coast of Devon, reported that on the previous day, the brig Susannah had left Dartmouth only to fall prey to the French 14-gun privateer Heureux Speculateur. The Brixham Sea Fencibles seeing this take place, took a boat, and armed only with muskets and pikes, succeeded in recapturing the Susannah and her prize crew. Lieutenant Nicholas, with the assistance of Revenue Collector Brooking, who provided small arms and a boat, took another detachment of Sea Fencibles and, accompanied by a boat from the cutter , set off, unsuccessfully, to capture the privateer. On 11 March of the same year, the Margate Sea Fencibles were somewhat more successful. When a small cutter was observed boarding two brigs eight or nine miles from the North Foreland, 40 or 50 Sea Fencibles pushed off in three boats and recaptured the two brigs, the privateer having made off. Another case occurred on 13 June 1804. HM hired armed cutter Princess Augusta, under the command of Lieutenant John Tracey, encountered a 14-gun French privateer off Huntcliff. During the engagement, which lasted nearly four hours, the Princess Augusta took several shot near the water line and sustained extensive damage to her rigging. Still, she suffered only three men wounded, though one desperately. The French vessel sheered off on