His misery over this catastrophe was known, in his own family, to have been immense.

He wrote to his Brother Anthony: "I hear the sound of that musketry; it is as if the bullets were tearing my own brain." To figure in one's sick and excited imagination such a scene of fatal man-hunting, lost valor hopelessly captured and massacred; and to add to it, that the victims are not men merely, that they are noble and dear forms known lately as individual friends: what a Dance of the Furies and wild-pealing Dead-march is this, for the mind of a loving, generous and vivid man! Torrijos getting ashore at Fuengirola; Robert Boyd and others ranked to die on the esplanade at Malaga--Nay had not Sterling, too, been the innocent yet heedless means of Boyd's embarking in this enterprise?
By his own kinsman poor Boyd had been witlessly guided into the pitfalls.
"I hear the sound of that musketry; it is as if the bullets were tearing my own brain!".