 In the 1830s an acquaintance, Captain Henry Curling, found him as a worker in a cobblers and bootmakers in the city and persuaded him to relate his war experiences, which Curling collected into a manuscript.Harris disappears from the historical record not long after this, but it is known that he owned his own cobbling shop in London between 1836 and 1839 and was alive to see his manuscript published in 1848, because in that year he received the Military General Service Medal with the two clasps for "Roleia" and "Vimiera" in 1808.Nothing more is known of Harris' life or death, and his memoirs were not well known at the time, only becoming well read much later by historians of the twentieth century.