Upon delivering the abdication document to a messenger, he said: "Here you have my act of abdication, I'm returning to Europe and leaving a country that I loved very much, and still love." At dawn on the morning of 7 April, Pedro, his wife, and others, including his daughter Maria II and his sister Ana de Jesus, were taken on board the British warship HMS "Warspite". The vessel remained at anchor off Rio de Janeiro, and, on 13 April, the former emperor transferred to and departed for Europe aboard HMS "Volage". He arrived in Cherbourg-Octeville, France, on 10 June. During the next few months, he shuttled between France and Great Britain. He was warmly welcomed, but received no actual support from either government to restore his daughter's throne. Finding himself in an awkward situation because he held no official status in either the Brazilian Imperial House or in the Portuguese Royal House, Pedro assumed the title of Duke of Braganza on 15 June, a position that once had been his as heir to Portugal's crown. Although the title should have belonged to Maria II's heir, which he certainly was not, his claim was met with general recognition. On 1 December, his only daughter by Amélie, Maria Amélia, was born in Paris. He did not forget his children left in Brazil. He wrote poignant letters to each of them, conveying how greatly he missed them and repeatedly asking them to seriously attend to their educations. Shortly before his abdication, Pedro had told his son and successor: "I intend that my brother Miguel and I will be the last badly educated of the Braganza family". Charles Napier, a naval commander who fought under Pedro's banner in the 1830s, remarked that "his good qualities were his own; his bad owing to want of education; and no man was more sensible of that defect than himself." His letters to Pedro II were often couched in language beyond the boy's reading level, and historians have assumed such passages were chiefly intended as advice that the young monarch might eventually consult upon reaching adulthood. While in Paris, the Duke of Braganza met and befriended Gilbert du Motier, Marquis of Lafayette, a veteran of the American Revolutionary War who became one of his staunchest supporters. With limited funds, Pedro organized a small army composed of Portuguese liberals, like Almeida Garrett and Alexandre Herculano, foreign mercenaries and volunteers such as Lafayette's grandson, Adrien Jules de Lasteyrie.