PRISONERS OF WAR IN BRITAIN
1756 - 1815
A record of their lives, their romance, and their struggles.

Two influences have urged me to make a study of the subject of the prisoners of war in Britain.

First: the hope that I might be able to vindicate our country against the charge so insistently brought against her that she treated the prisoners of war in her custody with exceptional inhumanity.

Second: a desire to rescue from oblivion a not unimportant and a most interesting chapter of our national history.

Whether my researches show the foregoing charge to be proven or not proven remains for my readers to judge. I can only say that I have striven to the utmost to prevent the entrance of any national bias into the presentation of the picture.

As to the second influence. It is difficult to account for the fact that so interesting a page of our history should have remained unwritten. Even authors of fiction, who have pressed every department of history into their service, have, with about half a dozen exceptions, neglected it as a source of inspiration, whilst historical accounts are limited to Mr. Basil Thomson’s Story of Dartmoor Prison, Dr. T. J. Walker’s Norman Cross, and Mr. W. Sievwright’s Perth Depôt, all of which I have been permitted to make use of, and local handbooks.

Yet the sojourn among us of thousands of war ivprisoners between the years 1756 and 1815 must have been an important feature of our national life—especially that of officers on parole in our country towns; despite which, during my quest in many counties of England, Scotland, and Wales, I have been surprised to find how rapidly and completely the memory of this sojourn has faded; how faintly even it lingers in local tradition; how much haziness there is, even in the minds of educated people, as to who or what prisoners of war were; and how the process of gathering information has been one of almost literal excavation and disinterment. But the task has been a great delight. It has introduced me to all sorts and conditions of interesting people; it has taken me to all sorts of odd nooks and corners of the country; and it has drawn my attention to a literature which is not less valuable because it is merely local. I need not say that but for the interest and enthusiasm of private individuals I could never have accomplished the task, and to them I hope I have made sufficient acknowledgement in the proper places, although it is possible that, from their very multitude, I may have been guilty of omissions, for which I can only apologize.

He who, with the object of dealing fairly and squarely with that interesting and unaccountably neglected footnote to British history, the subject of prisoners of war in Britain, has sifted to the best of his ability all available sources of information both at home and abroad, as the present writer has done, feels bound to make answer to the questions:

1. Did we of Britain treat our prisoners of war with the brutality alleged by foreign writers almost without exception?

2. Did our Government sin in this respect more than did other Governments in their treatment of the prisoners taken from us?

As an Englishman I much regret to say in reply to the first question, that, after a very rigorous examination of authorities and weighing of evidence, and making allowance for the not unnatural exaggeration and embellishment by men smarting under deprivation of liberty, I find that foreigners have not unduly emphasized the brutality with which we treated a large proportion of our prisoners of war, and I am fairly confident that after a study of the following pages my readers will agree with me.

Between our treatment of prisoners on parole and in confinement on land, and foreign treatment of our countrymen similarly situated, the difference, if any, is very slight, but nothing comparable with the English prison-ship system existed anywhere else, except at Cadiz after the battle of Baylen in 1808, and to the end of time this abominable, useless, and indefensible system will remain a stain upon our national record.

In reply to the second question, the balance appears to be fairly even between the behaviour of our own and foreign Governments—at any rate, between ours and that of France—for Britain and France practically monopolize the consideration of our subject; the number of prisoners taken by and from the 2United States, Spain, Holland, Denmark, and other countries, is comparatively insignificant.

Each Government accused the other. Each Government defended itself. Each Government could bring forward sufficient evidence to condemn the other. Each Government, judging by the numerous official documents which may be examined, seems really to have aimed at treating its prisoners as humanely and as liberally as circumstances would allow. Each Government was badly served by just those sections of its subordinates which were in the closest and most constant contact with the prisoners. It is impossible to read the printed and written regulations of the two Governments with regard to the treatment of war-prisoners without being impressed by their justness, fairness, and even kindness. The French rules published in 1792, for instance, are models of humane consideration; they emphatically provided that foreign prisoners were to be treated exactly as French soldiers in the matter of sustenance, lodging, and care when sick.

All this was nullified by the behaviour of subordinates. It is equally impossible to read the personal narratives of British prisoners in France and of French prisoners in Britain without being convinced that the good wills of the two Governments availed little against the brutality, the avarice, and the dishonesty of the officials charged with the carrying out of the benevolent instructions.

It may be urged that Governments which really intended to act fairly would have taken care that they were suitably served. So we think to-day. But it must always be borne in mind that the period covered in this book—from 1756 to 1815—cannot be judged by the light of to-day. It was an age of corruption from the top to the bottom of society, and it is not to be wondered at that, if Ministers and Members of Parliament, and officers of every kind—naval, military, and civil—were as essentially objects of sale and purchase as legs of mutton and suits of clothes, the lower orders of men in authority, those who were in most direct touch with the prisoners of war, should not have been immune from the contagion.

Most exactly, too, must it be remembered by the commentator of to-day that the age was not only corrupt, but hard and 3brutal; that beneath the veneer of formal politeness of manner there was an indifference to human suffering, and a general rudeness of tastes and inclinations, which make the gulf separating us from the age of Trafalgar wider than that which separated the age of Trafalgar from that of the Tudors.

It is hard to realize that less than a century ago certain human beings—free-born Britons—were treated in a fashion which to-day if it was applied to animals would raise a storm of protest from John o’ Groats to the Land’s End: that the fathers of some of us who would warmly resent the aspersion of senility were subject to rules and restrictions such as we only apply to children and idiots; that at the date of Waterloo the efforts of Howard and Mrs. Fry had borne but little fruit in our prisons; and that thirty years were yet to pass ere the last British slave became a free man. Unfortunates were regarded as criminals, and treated accordingly, and the man whose only crime was that he had fought for his country, received much the same consideration as the idiot gibbering on the straw of Bedlam.

It could not be expected that an age which held forgery and linen-stealing to be capital offences; which treated freely-enlisted sailors and soldiers as animals, civil offenders as lunatics, and lunatics as dangerous criminals; of which the social life is fairly reflected in the caricatures of Gillray and Rowlandson; which extolled much conduct which to-day we regard as base and contemptible as actually deserving of praise and admiration, should be tenderly disposed towards thousands of foreigners whose enforced detention in the land added millions to taxation, and caused a constant menace to life and property.

So, clearly bearing in mind the vast differences between our age and that covered in these pages, let us examine some of the recriminations between Britain and France, chiefly on the question of the treatment of prisoners of war, as a preparation for a more minute survey of the life of these unfortunates among us, and an equitable judgement thereon.

In Britain, prisoners of war were attended to by ‘The Commissioners for taking care of sick and wounded seamen and for exchanging Prisoners of War’, colloquially known as ‘The Sick 4and Hurt’ Office, whose business was, ‘To see the sick and wounded seamen and prisoners were well cared for, to keep exact accounts of money issued to the receiver, to disburse in the most husbandly manner, and in all things to act as their judgements and the necessities of the service should require.’ John Evelyn, Samuel Pepys, and Home, the author of Douglas, had been Commissioners. On December 22, 1799, the care of prisoners of war was transferred to the Transport Office, and so remained until 1817. In 1819 the Victualling Office took over the duty.

Throughout the period of the Seven Years’ War—that is, from 1756 to 1763—there was a constant interchange of letters upon the subject of the treatment of prisoners of war. The French king had made it a rule to distribute monthly, from his private purse, money for the benefit of his subjects who were prisoners in Britain; this was called the Royal Bounty. It was applied not merely to the relief and comfort of the prisoners while in confinement, but also to the payment of their homeward passages when exchanged, and of certain dues levied on them by the British Government upon entering and leaving the country. The payment was made on a graduated scale, according to rank, by regularly appointed French agents in England, whose exact and beautifully kept accounts may be examined at the Archives Nationales in Paris.

This Royal Bounty, the French Government asserted, had been inspired by the continual complaints about the bad treatment of their countrymen, prisoners of war in England. To this it was replied that when the French prisoners arrived it was determined and arranged that they should have exactly the same victualling both in quality and quantity as British seamen, and this was actually increased by half a pound of bread per man per diem over the original allowance. It was asserted that all the provisions issued were good, although the bread was not always fresh baked. This should be remedied. The meat was the same in quality as that served out to British seamen—indeed it was better, for orders were issued that the prisoners should have fresh meat every meat day (six in the week) whereas British seamen had it only twice a week, and sometimes not so often.

5The Commissioners of the Admiralty expressed their difficulty in believing that the French prisoners were really in need of aid from France, but said that if such aid was forthcoming it should be justly distributed by appointed agents.

They appended a Table d’Avitaillement to this effect:

Every day except Saturday every man received one and a half pounds of bread, three-quarters of a pound of beef, and one quart of beer. On Saturday instead of the beef he got four ounces of butter or six ounces of cheese. Four times a week each man was allowed in addition half a pint of peas.

For money allowance officers of men-of-war received one shilling a day, officers of privateers and merchant ships sixpence. These officers were on parole, and in drawing up their report the Admiralty officials remark that, although they have to regret very frequent breaches of parole, their standard of allowances remains unchanged.

With regard to the prison accommodation for the rank and file, at Portchester Castle, Forton Prison (Portsmouth), Millbay Prison (Plymouth), the men slept on guard-beds, two feet six inches in breadth, six feet in length, provided with a canvas case filled with straw and a coverlid. Sick prisoners were treated precisely as were British.

At Exeter, Liverpool, and Sissinghurst—‘a mansion house in Kent lately fitted up for prisoners’—the men slept in hammocks, each with a flock bed, a blanket, and a coverlid.

All this reads excellently, but from the numberless complaints made by prisoners, after due allowance has been made for exaggeration, I very much doubt if the poor fellows received their full allowance or were lodged as represented.

This was in 1757. As a counterblast to the French remonstrances, our Admiralty complained bitterly of the treatment accorded to British prisoners in French prisons, especially that at Dinan. We quote the reply of De Moras, the French Administrator, for comparison. The French scale of provisioning prisoners was as follows:

On Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday each prisoner received one and a half pounds of bread, one pint of beer at least, one pound of good, fresh meat, well cooked, consisting of beef, mutton, or veal, ‘without heads and feet’, soup, salt, and 6vinegar. On Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, and ‘maigre’ days, half a pound of beans or peas well cooked and seasoned, and two ounces of butter. The same allowance was made in all prisons, except that in some wine took the place of beer.

The Administrator complained that he had great difficulty in getting contractors for provisioning prisoners—a fact not without significance when we note how eagerly the position of contractor for prisoners of war was competed for in England.

De Moras further stated that prisoners when sick were sent to the regular Service Hospitals, where they received the same attention as Frenchmen. Each officer prisoner received a money allowance of thirty sous—one shilling and threepence—a day, and renewed clothing when needed.

The following remonstrance, dated 1758, is one of many relating to alleged British peculation in the matter of the French Royal Bounty.

Commenting upon this De Moras adds:

7In 1758, as a reply to complaints made to the British Government about the treatment of prisoners at Portchester, a report to the following effect was made by De Kergan, an officer of the French East India Company on parole.

1. The chief punishment is the cachot, which is wholesomely situated above ground near the entrance gate. It is untrue that prisoners are placed there in irons.

2. Prisoners recaptured after escape are put in the cachot upon half-rations until the expenses of recapture and the reward paid for the same are made up, but prisoners are never deprived of the French King’s Bounty or debarred the market.

3. Only three men have lost everything as a result of recapture: one was a lieutenant who had broken parole from Petersfield; the others were two sailors who defended themselves against Hambledon people who tried to capture them, and killed one.

4. It is utterly untrue that 150 prisoners have been flogged.

5. The biscuit sent to M. de Moras as a specimen of the prison food did not come from Portchester.

6. He reports well upon the food served out to the prisoners.

7. All complaints are listened to.

From the fact that De Kergan was shortly afterwards allowed to go home to France with his servant, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that it had been ‘arranged’ by the British authorities that he should have been selected to make the above report under promise of reward.

De Moras adds that although the number of English prisoners multiplies continually, it is owing to the slackness of exchange. On the part of France, he declares that they are all well treated, and asserts that the balance of prisoners due to France is 800. Complaints from France about the non-distribution of the King’s Bounty are continued during the year 1758 and the following years, and a proposal is made that agents should be stationed in each county to attend solely to the proper arrangement and distribution of all charitable contributions, for the benefit of the prisoners.

More complaints from our side brought an answer in which lay the kernel of the whole matter: ‘L’exactitude des inférieurs demande à estre souvent réveillée.’

In 1759 the care of the French prisoners in England practically devolved entirely upon us, as their Government unaccountably withdrew all support. The natural consequence was that their condition became pitiable in the extreme—so much so that public subscriptions were opened on behalf of the poor fellows. A London Committee sat at the Crown and Anchor in the Strand, and the sum of £7,000 was collected. With this sum were sent to different prisons 3,131 great coats, 2,034 waistcoats, 3,185 pairs of shoes, 3,054 pairs of breeches, 6,146 shirts, 3,006 caps, and 3,134 pairs of stockings. Letters of grateful acknowledgement and thanks were received from most of the dépôts. The following will serve as a specimen.

The letter of thanks from Sissinghurst contains excuses for some men who had sold the clothes thus supplied for urgent necessaries, such as tobacco and the postage of letters, and praying for the remission of their punishment by being put on half-rations. From Helston, the collector, W. Sandys, wrote that ‘in spite of vulgar prejudices which were opposed to this charity, and the violent clamours raised against it by the author of a letter who threw on its promoters the accumulated reproach of Traitors, Jacobites and Enemies to their country,’ he sent £32.

9It was in allusion to the above act of public benevolence that Goldsmith wrote in the twenty-third letter of the Citizen of the World: ‘When I cast my eye over the list of those who contributed on this occasion, I find the names almost entirely English; scarce one foreigner appears among the number.... I am particularly struck with one who writes these words upon the paper enclosing his benefaction: “The mite of an Englishman, a citizen of the world, to Frenchmen, prisoners of war, and naked.”’

Even abroad this kindly spirit was appreciated, as appears from the following extract from a contemporary Brussels gazette:

In 1760 the French Government thus replied to complaints on our side about the ill-treatment of British prisoners at Brest.

Here it is clear that the Frenchman did exactly as the Englishman had done. Having to give a reply to a complaint he copied out the Regulation and sent it, a formal piece of humbug which perhaps deceived and satisfied such men in the street as bothered their heads about the fate of their countrymen, but which left the latter in exactly the same plight as before.

10At any rate, with or without foundation, the general impression in England at this time, about 1760, was that such Englishmen as were unfortunate enough to fall into French hands were very badly treated. Beatson in his Naval and Military Memoirs^[1] says:

11The American prisoners conveyed to England during the War of Independence, seem to have been regarded quite as unworthy of proper treatment. On April 2, 1777, Benjamin Franklin and Silas Deane wrote from Paris to Lord Stormont, British Ambassador in Paris, on the subject of the ill-treatment of American prisoners in England, and said that severe reprisals would be justifiable. On this a writer in the Gentleman’s Magazine, October 1777, commented:

The letter referred to, sent on by Stormont to Lord North, contained the chief grievance that ‘stripes had been inflicted on some to make them commit the deepest of all crimes—the fighting against the liberties of their country’. The reply to this was the stereotyped one ‘that all possible was done for the prisoners: that they were permitted to receive charitable donations, and that complaints were attended to promptly’. A contemporary number of the London Packet contains a list of subscriptions for the benefit of the American prisoners amounting to £4,600. The Committee for the collection and administration of this money, who sat at the King’s Arms at Cornhill, seem to have occupied themselves further, for in 1778 they call attention to the fact that one Ebenezer Smith Platt, a Georgia merchant, had been put in Newgate, and ironed, and placed in that part of the prison occupied by thieves, highwaymen, housebreakers, and murderers, without any allowance for food or clothes, and must have perished but for private benevolence.

12The most absurd reports of the brutal treatment of French prisoners in England were circulated in France. It was gravely reported to the Directory that English doctors felt the pulses of French prisoner patients with the ends of their canes; that prisoners were killed en masse when subsistence became difficult; that large numbers were punished for the faults of individuals; and that the mortality among them was appalling. The result was that the Directory sent over M. Vochez to inquire into matters. The gross calumnies were exposed to him; he was allowed free access to prisons and prison ships; it was proved to him that out of an average total of 4,500 prisoners on the hulks at Portsmouth only six had died during the past quarter, and, expressing himself as convinced, he returned, promising to report to the French minister the ‘gross misrepresentations which had been made to him’.

A good specimen of the sort of report which sent M. Vochez over to England is the address of M. Riou to the Council of Five Hundred of the 5th of Pluviôse of the year 6—that is January 25, 1798.

After a violent tirade against England and her evil sway in the world, he goes into details. He says that when his Government complained of the promiscuous herding together of officers and men as prisoners of war, the English reply was: ‘You are republicans. You want equality, therefore we treat you here equally.’ Alluding to the harsh treatment of privateersmen taken prisoners, he declares it is because they do more harm to England by striking at her commerce than any fleets or armies. He brings up the usual complaints about bad and insanitary prisons, insufficient food, and the shameful treatment of officers on parole by the country people. One hundred Nantes captains and officers had told him that prisoners were confined in parties of seventy-two in huts seventeen feet long and ten feet high, some of them being merely cellars in the hillside; that the water soaked through hammocks, straw, and bread; that there was no air, that all this was light suffering compared with the treatment they received daily from agents, officers, soldiers, and jailors, who on the slightest pretext fired upon the prisoners. ‘Un jour, à Plymouth même, un prisonnier ajusté par un soldat fut tué. On envoie chercher le commissaire. 13Il vient: soulève le cadavre: on lui demande justice; il répond: “C’est un Français,” et se retire!’

Alluding to the precautionary order which had been recently given in England that all parole should cease, and that all officers on parole should be sent to prisons and prison ships, he says: ‘There is now no parole for officers. All are pell-mell together, of all ranks and of both sexes. A woman was delivered of a child, she was left forty-eight hours without attention, and even a glass of water was denied her. Even the body of a dead dog was fought for by the famished prisoners.’

He then describes in glowing terms the treatment of English prisoners in France; he suggests a tax for the relief of the French prisoners of war, a ‘taxe d’humanité,’ being one-third of the ordinary sumptuary tax, and winds up his attack:

The Times of January 8, 1798, comments severely upon the frequent tirades of the Directory, ridiculing the attitude of a Government remarkable above all others for its despotic character and its wholesale violation of the common rights of man, as a champion of philanthropy, of morals, and of humanity, and its appeal to all nations to unite against the only country which protects the victims of Directorial anarchy. After declaring that the prisoners in England are treated better than prisoners of war ever were treated before, a fact admitted by all reasonable Frenchmen, the writer says:

In February 1798 the French Directory announced through Barras, the president, that it would undertake the subsistence of the French prisoners in England, meaning by subsistence, provisions, clothing, medical attendance, and to make good all depredations by prisoners.

The Times of February 27 said:

Directly the French Government took over the task of feeding and clothing the prisoners in England, they reduced the daily rations by one quarter. This irritated the prisoners extremely, and it was said by them that they preferred the ‘atrocious cruelty of the despot of London to the humanity and measures of the Five Directors of Paris’. A correspondent of The Times of March 16, 1798, signing himself ‘Director’, said that under the previous British victualling régime, a prisoner on his release showed the sum of four guineas which he had made by the sale of superfluous provisions, and the same writer declared that it had come to his knowledge that the new French provision agent had made overtures to the old British contractor to supply inferior meat.

In 1798 it was resolved in the House of Commons that an inquiry should be made to establish the truth or the reverse of the French complaints about the treatment of French prisoners in England. It was stated that the reports spread about in France were purposely exaggerated in order to inflame national feeling against Britain. Mr. Huskisson confirmed this and alluded to the abominable treatment of Sir Sydney Smith.

Colonel Stanley affirmed that the prisoners were generally 15well treated: he had lately been in Liverpool where 6,000 were confined, and found the officers had every indulgence, three billiard tables, and that they often performed plays.

In May 1798 the Report was drawn up. After hearing evidence and making every inquiry it was found that the French complaints were gross exaggerations; the Commissioners observed that ‘our prisoners in France were treated with a degree of inhumanity and rigour unknown in any former war, and unprecedented in the annals of civilized nations’, and reiterated the complaint that all British proposals for the exchange of prisoners were rejected.

The Report stated that there was good medical attendance given to prisoners in Britain; that there were constant checks on fraud by contractors and officials; that the prisoners appointed their own inspector of rations; that fraudulent contractors were proceeded against, and punished, giving as a recent example, a Plymouth contractor who, having failed in his engagements to supply the prisons with good provisions of full weight, was imprisoned for six months and fined £300.

The Report stated that the daily scale of provisions for prisoners in health was: one and a half pounds of bread, three-quarters of a pound of beef, one-third of an ounce of salt, and one quart of beer, except on Saturdays, when four ounces of butter and six ounces of cheese were substituted; and on four days of the week half a pint of pease, or in lieu one pound of cabbage stripped from the stalk.

The prisoners selected their own surgeons if they chose, and the same diet was given to sick prisoners as to sick British seamen. Each man was provided with a hammock, a palliasse, a bolster and a blanket, the straw of bolsters and palliasses being frequently changed.

A letter written in 1793 to the Supplement of the Gentleman’s Magazine, holds good for 1798, as to the belief of the man in the street that the foregoing liberal and humane regulations were worth more than the paper they were written on:

On December 22, 1799, the French Government—now the Consulate—repudiated the arrangement made by the Directory for the subsistence of French war-prisoners in England, and the British Government was obliged to undertake the task, the Transport Office now replacing the old ‘Sick and Hurt’ Office. So the prisoner committees in the dépôts and prisons were abolished, and all persons who, under the previous arrangement, were under the French agents and contractors, and as such had been allowed passports, returned to their original prisoner status.

The Duke of Portland wrote thus to the Admiralty:

(Not clothing, as this had always been supplied by the French Government.)

Previous to this repudiatory act of France, the British Government made a similar proposal to Holland, accompanying it with the following remarks, which certainly seem to point to a desire to do the best possible to minimize the misery of the unfortunate men.

However, the Dutch Government, no doubt acting under orders from without, replied that it was impossible to comply. So Dutch prisoners became also the objects of our national charity.

The Moniteur thus defended the Act of Repudiation:

The results of repudiation by France of the care of French prisoners in England were not long in showing themselves.

The agent at Portchester Castle wrote to the Transport Office:

And again, later on:

These were written in consequence of letters of complaint from prisoners. The Agent in France for prisoners of war in England, Niou, was communicated with, but no reply came. 19Otto, the Commissioner of the Republic in England, however, said that as the French Government clothed British prisoners, although they were not exactly British prisoners but allies, it was our duty to clothe French prisoners. The British Government denied this, saying that we clothed our allies when prisoners abroad, and ascribed much of the misery among the French prisoners to their irrepressible gambling habits. Dundas wrote a long letter to the French Commissioners about the neglect of their Government, but added that out of sheer compassion the British Government would supply the French prisoners with sufficient clothing. Lord Malmesbury hinted that the prisoners were refused the chance of redress by the difficulty of gaining access to their Commissary, which Grenville stated was absolutely untrue, and that the commonest soldier or sailor had entire freedom of access to his representative.

On October 29, 1800, Otto, the French Commissioner in England, wrote:

In this account Otto admits that the prisoners’ ‘imprudence’ has largely brought about the state of affairs. Rupert George, Ambrose Serle, and John Schenck, the Transport Office Commissioners who had been sent to inquire, report confirming the misery, and re-affirm its chief cause. About Stapleton Prison they say:

The Commissioners sent to Otto an extract of a letter from Forton, near Gosport. Griffin, the prison surgeon, says that ‘several prisoners have been received into the Hospital in a state of great debility owing to their having disposed of their ration of provisions for a week, a fortnight, and in some instances for a month at a time. We have felt it our duty to direct that such persons as may be discovered to have been concerned in purchasing any article of provision, clothing or bedding, of another prisoner, should be confined in the Black Hole and kept on short allowance for ten days and also be marked as having forfeited their turn of exchange.’

Callous, almost brutal, according to our modern standards, as was the general character of the period covered by this history, it must not be inferred therefrom that all sympathy was withheld from the unfortunate men condemned to be prisoners on our shores. We have seen how generously the British public responded to the call for aid in the cases of the French prisoners of 1759, and of the Americans of 1778; we shall see in the progress of this history how very largely the heart of the country people of Britain went out to the prisoners living on parole amongst them, and I think my readers may accept a letter which I am about to put before them as evidence that a considerable section of the British public was of opinion that the theory and practice of our system with regard to prisoners of war was not merely wrong, but wicked, and that very drastic reform was most urgently needed.

Some readers may share the opinion of the French General Pillet, which I append to the letter, that the whole matter—the writing of the anonymous letter, and the prosecution and punishment of the newspaper editor who published it, was a trick of the Government to blind the public eye to facts, and that the fact that the Government should have been driven to have recourse to it, pointed to their suspicion that the public had more than an inkling that it was being hoodwinked.

21In the Statesman newspaper of March 19, 1812, appeared the following article:

(The writer then describes the two classes of prisoners of war in England.)

The writer goes on to say that

The Transport Office deemed the plain-speaking on the part of an influential journal so serious that the opinion of the Attorney-General was asked, and he pronounced it to be ‘a most scandalous libel and ought to be prosecuted’. So the proprietor was proceeded against, found guilty, fined £500, imprisoned in Newgate for eighteen months, and had to find security for future good behaviour, himself in £1,000, and two sureties in £500 each.

I add the remarks of General Pillet, a prisoner on a Chatham hulk, upon this matter. They are from his book L’Angleterre, vue à Londres et dans ses provinces, pendant un séjour de dix années, dont six comme prisonnier de guerre—a book utterly worthless as a record of facts, and infected throughout with the most violent spirit of Anglophobism, but not without value for reference concerning many details which could only come under the notice of a prisoner.

The General, after some remarks about the very different way in which such an affair would have been conducted in France, appends a note quoting the case of General Virion, who, on being accused of cruelty and rapacity towards the English prisoners in Verdun, blew his brains out rather than face the disgrace of a trial.

Pillet wrote to Lovel, the editor, thus:

Pillet adds in a note:

From first to last the question of the Exchange of Prisoners was a burning one between Great Britain and her enemies, and, despite all efforts to arrange it upon an equitable basis and to establish its practice, it was never satisfactorily settled. It is difficult for an Englishman, reviewing the evidence as a whole and in as impartial a spirit as possible, to arrive at any other conclusion than that we were not so fairly dealt with by others as we dealt with them. We allowed French, Danish, and Dutch officers to go on parole to their own countries, which meant that they were on their honour to return to England if they were not exchanged by a certain date, and we continued to do so in face of the fact that violation of this pledge was the rule and not the exception, and that prominent officers of the army and navy were not ashamed thus to sin. Or we sent over shiploads of foreigners, each of whom had been previously arranged for as exchanged, but so often did the cartel ships, as they were called, return empty or without equivalent numbers from the French ports that the balance of exchange was invariably heavily against Britain. The transport of prisoners for whom exchanges had been arranged, and of invalids and boys, was by means of cartel ships which were hired, or contracted for, by Government for this particular service, and were subject to the strictest regulation and supervision. The early cartel ports were Dover, Poole, and Falmouth on this side; Calais, St. Malo, Havre, and Morlaix in France, but during the Napoleonic wars Morlaix was the French port, Plymouth, Lynn, Dartmouth, and Portsmouth being those of England. The French ports were selected with the idea of rendering the marches of exchanged prisoners to their districts as easy as possible.

A cartel ship was not allowed to carry guns or arms, nor any merchandise; if it did the vessel was liable to be seized. The 26national flag of the port of destination was to be flown at the fore-top-gallant mast, and the ship’s flag on the ensign staff, and both were to be kept continually flying. Passengers were not allowed to carry letters, nor, if from England, gold coin; the latter restriction being imposed so as partially to check the lucrative trade of guinea-running, as, during the early nineteenth century, on account of the scarcity of gold in France, there was such a premium upon British guineas that the smuggling of them engaged a large section of the English coast community, who were frequently backed up by London houses of repute. Passengers going to France on their own account paid £5 5s. each, with a deposit against demurrage on account of possible detention in the French port at one guinea per day, the demurrage being deducted from the deposit and the balance returned to the passenger.

The early cartel rates were, from Dover to Calais, 6s. per head; between all the Channel ports 10s. 6d., and to ports out of the Channel, £1 1s. For this the allowance of food was one and a half pounds of bread, three-quarters of a pound of meat, and two quarts of beer or one quart of wine, except between Dover and Calais, where for the meat was substituted four ounces of butter or six ounces of cheese. Commanding officers had separate cabins; a surgeon was compulsorily carried; officers and surgeon messed at the captain’s table. It was necessary that the ship should be provisioned sufficiently for an emergency, and it was especially ruled that if a ship should be delayed beyond sailing time owing to weather or incomplete number of passengers, nobody upon any pretence was to leave the ship.

In 1808, on account of the discomforts and even the dangers of the cartel service, as well as the abuse of it by parole-breakers and others, a request was made that a naval officer should accompany each cartel ship, but this was refused by the Admiralty upon the ground that as such he might be arrested upon reaching a French port. As it became suspected that between the cartel shipowners and captains and the escape agents a very close business understanding existed, it was ordered in this same year, 1808, that all foreigners found about sea-port towns on the plea that they were exchanged prisoners waiting for 27cartel ships, should be arrested, and that the batches of exchanged prisoners should be timed to reach the ports so that they should not have to wait.

Later, when practically Plymouth and Morlaix had a monopoly of the cartel traffic, the cartel owner received uniformly half a guinea per man if his carriage-rate was one man per ton of his burthen; and seven shillings and sixpence if at the more usual rate of three men to two tons, and for victualling was allowed fourteen pence per caput per diem.

In 1757 much correspondence between the two Governments took place upon the subjects of the treatment and exchange of prisoners, which may be seen at the Archives Nationales in Paris, resulting in a conference between M. de Marmontel and M. de Moras, Minister of Marine and Controller-General of Finances, and Vanneck & Co., agents in England for French affairs. Nothing came of it except an admission by the French that in one respect their countrymen in England were better treated than were the English prisoners in France, in that whereas the French prisoners were provided with mattresses and coverlids, the English were only given straw. England claimed the right of monopolizing the sea-carriage of prisoners; and this France very naturally refused, but agreed to the other clauses that king’s officers should be preferred to all other in exchange, that women and children under twelve should be sent without exchange, and that in hospitals patients should have separate beds and coverlids. But after a long exchange of requests and replies, complaints and accusations, England ceased to reply, and matters were at a standstill.

In 1758 there was a correspondence between M. de Moras and M. de Marmontel which shows that in these early days the principle of the exchange of prisoners possessed honourable features which were remarkably wanting on the French side during the later struggles between the two countries. Three French ‘broke-paroles’ who in accordance with the custom of the time should, when discovered, have been sent back to England, could not be found. M. de Moras suggested that in this case they should imitate the action of the British authorities in Jersey, who, unable to find nine English prisoners who had escaped from Dinan, stolen a fishing-boat, 28and got over to Jersey, had sent back the stolen vessel and nine French prisoners as an equivalent.

The following was the passport form for French prisoners whose exchange had been effected.

In 1758 the complaints of the French Government about the unsatisfactory state of the prisoner exchange system occupy many long letters. ‘Il est trop important de laisser subsister une pareille inaction dans les échanges; elle est préjudiciable aux deux Puissances, et fâcheuse aux familles’, is one remark. On the other hand, the complaint went from our side that we sent over on one occasion 219 French prisoners, and only got back 143 British, to which the French replied: ‘Yes: but your 143 were all sound men, whereas the 219 you sent us were invalids, boys, and strangers to this Department.’ By way of postscript the French official described how not long since a Dover boat, having captured two fishing-smacks of Boulogne and St. Valéry, made each boat pay twenty-five guineas ransom, beat the men with swords, and wounded the St. Valéry captain, remarking: ‘le procédé est d’autant plus inhumain qu’il a eu lieu de sang-froid et qu’il a été exercé contre des gens qui achetoient leur liberté au prix de toute leur fortune’.

This and other similar outrages on both sides led to the mutual agreement that fishing-boats were to be allowed to pursue their avocation unmolested—an arrangement which in 29later times, when the business of helping prisoners to escape was in full swing, proved to be a mixed blessing.

I do not think that the above-quoted argument of the French, that in return for sound men we were in the habit of sending the useless and invalids, and that this largely compensated for the apparent disproportion in the numbers exchanged—an argument which they used to the end of the wars between the two nations—is to be too summarily dismissed as absurd. Nor does it seem that our treatment of the poor wretches erred on the side of indulgence, for many letters of complaint are extant, of which the following from a French cartel-ship captain of 1780 is a specimen:

It would seem that during the Seven Years’ War British merchant-ship and privateer officers were only allowed to be on parole in France if they could find a local person of standing to guarantee the payment of a sum of money to the Government in the case of a breach of parole.

The parole rules in France, so far as regarded the limits assigned to prisoners at their towns of confinement, were not nearly so strict as in England, but, on the other hand, no system of guarantee money like that just mentioned existed in England.

On March 12, 1780, a table of exchange of prisoners of war, with the equivalent ransom rates, was agreed to, ranging from £60 or sixty men for an admiral or field-marshal to £1 or one man for a common sailor or soldier in the regular services, and from £4 or four men for a captain to £1 or one man of privateers and merchantmen.

In 1793 the French Government ordained a sweeping change by abolishing all equivalents in men or money to officers, and decreed that henceforth the exchange should be strictly of grade for grade, and man for man, and that no non-combatants 30or surgeons should be retained as prisoners of war. How the two last provisions came to be habitually violated is history.

On February 4, 1795, the Admiralty authorized the ‘Sick and Hurt’ Office to send a representative to France, to settle, if possible, the vexed question of prisoner exchange, and on March 22 Mr. F. M. Eden started for Brest, but was taken on to Roscoff. A week later a French naval officer called on him and informed him that only the Committee of Public Safety could deal with this matter, and asked him to go to Paris. He declined; so the purport of his errand was sent to Paris. A reply invited him to go to Dieppe. Here he met Comeyras, who said that the Committee of Public Safety would not agree to his cartel, there being, they said, a manifest difference between the two countries in that Great Britain carried on the war with the two professions—the navy and the army—and that restoring prisoners to her would clearly be of greater advantage to her than would be the returning of an equal number of men to France, who carried on war with the mass of the people. Moreover, Great Britain notoriously wanted men to replace those she had lost, whilst France had quite enough to enable her to defeat all her enemies.

So Eden returned to Brighthelmstone. Later, a meeting at the Fountain, Canterbury, between Otway and Marsh for Britain, and Monnerson for France, was equally fruitless, and it became quite evident that although France was glad enough to get general officers back, she had no particular solicitude for the rank and file, her not illogical argument being that every fighting man, officer or private, was of more value to Britain than were three times their number of Frenchmen to France.

In 1796 many complaints were made by the British cartel-ship masters that upon landing French prisoners at Morlaix their boats were taken from them, they were not allowed to go ashore, soldiers were placed on board to watch them; that directly the prisoners were landed, the ships were ordered to sea, irrespective of the weather; and that they were always informed that there were no British prisoners to take back.

In this year we had much occasion to complain of the one-sided character of the system of prisoner exchange with France, the balance due to Britain in 1796 being no less than 5,000. 31Cartel after cartel went to France full and came back empty; in one instance only seventy-one British prisoners were returned for 201 French sent over; in another instance 150 were sent and nine were returned, and in another 450 were sent without return.

From the regularity with which our authorities seem to have been content to give without receiving, one cannot help wondering if, after all, there might not have been some foundation for the frequent French retort that while we received sound men, we only sent the diseased, and aged, or boys. Yet the correspondence from our side so regularly and emphatically repudiates this that we can only think that the burden of the prisoners was galling the national back, and that the grumble was becoming audible which later broke out in the articles of the Statesman, the Examiner, and the Independent Whig.

From January 1, 1796, to March 14, 1798, the balance between Britain and Holland stood thus:

Just at this time there were a great many war-prisoners in England. Norman Cross and Yarmouth were full, and new prison ships were being fitted out at Chatham. The correspondence of the ‘Sick and Hurt’ Office consisted very largely of refusals to applicants to be allowed to go to France on parole, so that evidently the prisoner exchange was in so unsatisfactory a condition that even the passage of cartel loads of invalids was suspended.

In 1798 an arrangement about the exchange of prisoners was come to between England and France. France was to send a vessel with British prisoners, 5 per cent of whom were to be officers, and England was to do the same. The agents on each side were to select the prisoners. It was also ruled that the prisoners in each country were to be supported by their own country, and that those who were sick, wounded, incapacitated, or boys, should be surrendered without equivalent.

But in 1799 the French Republican Government refused to clothe or support its prisoners in Britain, so that all exchanges 32of prisoners ceased. Pending the interchange of correspondence which followed the declaration of this inhuman policy, the French prisoners suffered terribly, especially as it was winter, so that in January 1801, on account of the fearful mortality among them, it was resolved that they should be supplied with warm clothing at the public expense, and this was done, the cost being very largely defrayed by voluntary subscriptions in all parts of the Kingdom.

This was not the first or second time that British benevolence had stepped in to stave off the results of French inhumanity towards Frenchmen.

The letter before quoted from the agent at Portchester (p. 18) and the report on Stapleton (p. 19) in the chapter on International Recriminations have reference to this period.

This state of matters continued; the number of French prisoners in Britain increased enormously, for the French Government would return no answers to the continued representations from this side as to the unsatisfactory character of the Exchange question. Yet in 1803 it was stated that although not one British prisoner of war, and only five British subjects, had been returned, no less than 400 French prisoners actually taken at sea had been sent to France.

In 1804 Boyer, an officer at Belfast, wrote to his brother the general, on parole at Montgomery, that the Emperor would not entertain any proposal for the exchange of prisoners unless the Hanoverian army were recognized as prisoners of war. This was a sore topic with Bonaparte. In 1803 the British Government had refused to ratify the condition of the Treaty of Sublingen which demanded that the Hanoverian army, helpless in the face of Bonaparte’s sudden invasion of the country, should retire behind the Elbe and engage not to serve against France or her Allies during the war, in other words to agree to their being considered prisoners of war. Bonaparte insisted that as Britain was intimately linked with Hanover through her king she should ratify this condition. Our Government repudiated all interest in Hanover’s own affairs: Hanover was forced to yield, but Britain retaliated by blockading the Elbe and the Weser, with the result that Hamburg and Bremen were half ruined.

33A form of exchange at sea was long practised of which the following is a specimen:

As might be supposed, this easy method of procuring liberty led to much parole breaking on both sides, but it was not until 1812 that such contracts were declared to be illegal.

During 1805 the British Government persisted in its efforts to bring about an arrangement for the exchange of prisoners, but to these efforts the extraordinary reply was:

The Transport Board thus commented upon this:

In the same year the Transport Office posted as a circular the Declaration of the French Government not to exchange even aged and infirm British prisoners in France.

In 1806 the Transport Office replied as follows to the request for liberation of a French officer on parole at Tiverton, who cited the release of Mr. Cockburn from France in support of his petition:

(A similar reply was given to many other applicants.)

Denmark, like Holland, made no replies to the British Government’s request for an arrangement of the exchange of prisoners, and of course, both took their cue from France. In the year 1808 the balance due from Denmark to Britain was 3,807. There were 1,796 Danish prisoners in England. Between 1808 and 1813 the balance due to us was 2,697. As another result of the French policy, the Transport Office requested the Duke of Wellington in Spain to arrange for the exchange of prisoners on the spot, as, under present circumstances, once a man became a prisoner in France, his services were probably lost to his country for ever. Yet another result was that the prisoners in confinement all over Britain in 1810, finding that the exchange system was practically suspended, became turbulent and disorderly to such an extent, and made such desperate attempts to break out, notably at Portchester and Dartmoor, that it was found necessary to double the number of sentries.

At length in 1810, soon after the marriage of Bonaparte with Marie Louise, an attempt was made at Morlaix to arrange matters, and the Comte du Moustier met Mr. Mackenzie there. Nothing came of it, because of the exorbitant demands of Bonaparte. He insisted that all prisoners—English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italians—should be exchanged, man for man, rank for rank, on the same footing as the principal power under whom they fought; in other words, that for 50,000 Frenchmen, only 10,000 British would be returned, the balance being made up of Spanish and Portuguese more or less raw levies, who were not to be compared in fighting value with Englishmen or Frenchmen.

The second section of the fourth article of Mr. Mackenzie’s note was:

As neither party would yield, the negotiations were broken off. The Moniteur complained that some one of higher rank than Mr. Mackenzie had not been sent as British representative, and the British paper The Statesman commented strongly upon our non-acceptance of Bonaparte’s terms, although endorsing our refusal to accede to the particular article about the proportion of the exchange.

General Pillet, before quoted, criticizes the British action in his usual vitriolic fashion. After alluding bitterly to the conduct of the British Government in the matters of San Domingo and the Hanoverian army—both of which are still regarded by French writers as eminent instances of British bad faith, he describes the Morlaix meeting as an ‘infamous trap’ on the part of our Government.

Las Cases quotes Bonaparte’s comments in this matter:

Want of space prevents me from quoting the long conversation which was held upon the subject of the Exchange of Prisoners of War between Bonaparte and Las Cases at St. Helena, although it is well worth the study.

As the object of this work is confined to prisoners of war in Britain, it is manifestly beyond its province to discuss at length the vexed questions of the comparative treatment of prisoners in the two countries. I may reiterate that on the whole the balance is fairly even, and that much depended upon local surroundings. Much evidence could be cited to show that in certain French seaports and in certain inland towns set apart for the residence of Bonaparte’s détenus quite as much brutality was exercised upon British subjects as was exercised upon French prisoners in England. Much depended upon the character of the local commandant; much depended upon the behaviour of the prisoners; much depended upon local sentiment. Bitche, for instance, became known as ‘the place of tears’ from the misery of the captives there; Verdun, on the other hand, after the tyrannical commandant Virion had made away with himself, was to all appearances a gay, happy, fashionable watering-place. Bitche had a severe commandant, and the class of prisoner there was generally rough and low. Beauchêne was a genial jailer at Verdun, and the mass of the prisoners were well-to-do. So in Britain. Woodriff was disliked at Norman Cross, and all was unhappiness. Draper was beloved, and Norman Cross became quite a place of captivity to be sought after.

The foreign prisoner of war in Britain, if an ordinary sailor or soldier, was confined either on board a prison ship or in prison ashore. Officers of certain exactly defined ranks were allowed to be upon parole if they chose, in specified towns. Some officers refused to be bound by the parole requirements, and preferred the hulk or the prison with the chance of being able to escape.

Each of these—the Hulks, the Prisons, Parole—will be dealt with separately, as each has its particular characteristics and interesting features.

The prison ship as a British institution for the storage and maintenance of men whose sole crime was that of fighting against us, must for ever be a reproach to us. There is nothing to be urged in its favour. It was not a necessity; it was far from being a convenience; it was not economical; it was not sanitary. Man took one of the most beautiful objects of his handiwork and deformed it into a hideous monstrosity. The line-of-battle ship was a thing of beauty, but when masts and rigging and sails were shorn away, when the symmetrical sweep of her lines was deformed by all sorts of excrescences and superstructures, when her white, black-dotted belts were smudged out, it lay, rather than floated, like a gigantic black, shapeless coffin. Sunshine, which can give a touch of picturesqueness, if not of beauty, to so much that is bare and featureless, only brought out into greater prominence the dirt, the shabbiness, the patchiness of the thing. In fog it was weird. In moonlight it was spectral. The very prison and cemetery architects of to-day strive to lead the eye by their art away from what the mind pictures, but when the British Government brought the prison ship on to the scene they 38appear to have aimed as much as possible at making the outside reflect the life within.

No amount of investigation, not the most careful sifting of evidence, can blind our eyes to the fact that the British prison hulks were hells upon water. It is not that the mortality upon them was abnormal: it was greater than in the shore prisons, but it never exceeded 3 per cent upon an average, although there were periods of epidemic when it rose much higher. It is that the lives of those condemned to them were lives of long, unbroken suffering. The writer, as an Englishman, would gladly record otherwise, but he is bound to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. True it is that our evidence is almost entirely that of prisoners themselves, but what is not, is that of English officers, and theirs is of condemnation. It should be borne in mind that the experiences we shall quote are those of officers and gentlemen, or at any rate educated men, and the agreement is so remarkable that it would be opening the way to an accusation of national partiality if we were to refuse to accept it.

The only palliating consideration in this sad confession is that the prisoners brought upon themselves much of the misery. The passion for gambling, fomented by long, weary hours of enforced idleness, wrought far more mischief among the foreign prisoners in England, than did the corresponding northern passion for drink among the British prisoners abroad, if only from the fact that whereas the former, ashore and afloat, could gamble when and where they chose, drink was not readily procurable by the latter. The report of a French official doctor upon prison-ship diseases will be quoted in its proper place, but the two chief causes of disease named by him—insufficient food and insufficient clothing—were very largely the result of the passion for gambling among the prisoners.

A correspondent of The Times, December 16, 1807, writes:

For the chief cause of suffering, medical neglect, there is, unhappily, but little defence, for, if the complaints of neglect, inefficacy, and of actual cruelty, which did manage to reach the august sanctum of the Transport Office were numerous, how many more must there have been which were adroitly prevented from getting there.

Again, a great deal depended upon the prison-ship commander. French writers are accustomed to say that the lieutenants in charge of the British prison ships were the scum of the service—disappointed men, men without interest, men under official clouds which checked their advance; and it must be admitted that at first sight it seems strange that in a time of war all over the world, when promotion must have been rapid, and the chances of distinction frequent, officers should easily be found ready, for the remuneration of seven shillings per diem, plus eighteenpence servant allowance, to take up such a position as the charge of seven or eight hundred desperate foreigners.

But that this particular service was attractive is evident from the constant applications for it from naval men with good credentials, and from the frequent reply of the authorities that the waiting list was full. If we may judge this branch of the service by others, and reading the matter by the light of the times, we can only infer that the Commander of a prison hulk was in the way of getting a good many ‘pickings’, and that as, according to regulation, no lieutenant of less than ten years’ service in that rank could apply for appointment, the berth was regarded as a sort of reward or solatium.

40Be that as it may have been, the condition of a prison ship, like the condition of a man-of-war to-day, depended very largely upon the character of her commander. It is curious to note that most of the few testimonies extant from prisoners in favour of prison-ship captains date from that period of the great wars when the ill-feeling between the two countries was most rancorous, and the poor fellows on parole in English inland towns were having a very rough time.

In 1803 the Commandant at Portsmouth was Captain Miller, a good and humane man who took very much to heart the sufferings of the war prisoners under his supervision. He happened to meet among the French naval officers on parole a M. Haguelin of Havre, who spoke English perfectly, and with whom he often conversed on the subject of the hard lot of the prisoners on the hulks. He offered Haguelin a place in his office, which the poor officer gladly accepted, made him his chief interpreter, and then employed him to visit the prison ships twice a week to hear and note complaints with the view of remedying them.

Haguelin held this position for some years. In 1808 an English frigate captured twenty-four Honfleur fishing-boats and brought them and their crews into Portsmouth. Miller regarded this act as a gross violation of the laws of humanity, and determined to undo it. Haguelin was employed in the correspondence which followed between Captain Miller and the Transport Office, the result being that the fishermen were well treated, and finally sent back to Honfleur in an English frigate. Then ensued the episode of the Flotte en jupons, described in a pamphlet by one Thomas, when the women of Honfleur came out, boarded the English frigate, and amidst a memorable scene of enthusiasm brought their husbands and brothers and lovers safe to land. When Haguelin was exchanged and was leaving for France, Miller wrote:

In 1816, Captain (afterwards Baron) Charles Dupin, of the 41French Corps of Naval Engineers, placed on record a very scathing report upon the treatment of his countrymen upon the hulks at Chatham. He wrote:

The translator of Captain Dupin’s report^[2] comments thus upon this part of it:

About Dupin’s severe remarks concerning the bad treatment of the prisoners, their scanty subsistence, their neglect during sickness and the consequent high rate of mortality among them, the translator says:

43Dupin wrote:

to which the reply was:

As to the sickness on board the hulks, in reply to Dupin’s assertions the Government had the following table drawn up relative to the hulks at Portsmouth in a month of 1813:

Dupin also published tables of prison mortality in England in confirmation of the belief among his countrymen that it was part of England’s diabolic policy to make prisoners of war or to kill or incapacitate them by neglect or ill-treatment. Between 1803 and 1814, the total number of prisoners brought to England was 122,440. Of these, says M. Dupin,

leaving a balance of 26,767, who presumably were tough enough to resist all attempts to kill or wreck them.

To this our authorities replied with the following schedule:

leaving a balance of at least 94,492 sound men; for, not only, as has been said above, were a large proportion of the 17,607 sound men, but no allowance was made in this report for the great number of prisoners who arrived sick or wounded.

The rate of mortality, of course, varied. At Portsmouth in 1812 the mortality on the hulks was about 4 per cent. At Dartmoor in six years and seven months there were 1,455 deaths, which, taking the average number of prisoners at 5,000, works out at a little over 4 per cent annually. But during six months of the years 1809–1810 there were 500 deaths out of 5,000 prisoners at Dartmoor, due to an unusual epidemic and to exceptionally severe weather. With the extraordinary healthiness of the Perth dépôt I shall deal in its proper place.

I have to thank Mr. Neves, editor of the Chatham News, for the following particulars relative to Chatham.

‘The memorial bore the following inscription, which was written by the late Sir Stafford Northcote, afterwards Lord Iddesleigh:

‘The Government of the French Republic was deeply moved by the action of the Admiralty, and its Ambassador in London wrote:

‘In 1904 it became necessary again to move the bones of the prisoners of war and they were then interred in the grounds of the new naval barracks, a site being set apart for the purpose near the chapel, where the monument was re-erected. It occupies a position where it can be seen by passers-by. The number of skulls was 506. Quite recently (1910) two skeletons were dug up by excavators of the Gas Company’s new wharf at Gillingham, and, there being every reason to believe that they were the remains of French prisoners of war, they were returned to the little cemetery above mentioned.’

47That a vast system of jobbery and corruption prevailed among the contractors for the food, clothing, and bedding of the prisoners, and, consequently, among those in office who had the power of selection and appointment; and more, that not a tithe of what existed was expressed, is not the least among the many indictments against our nation at this period which bring a flush of shame to the cheek. As has been before remarked, all that printed regulations and ordinance could do to keep matters in proper order was done. What could read better, for instance, than the following official Contracting Obligations for 1797:

As if there was really some wish on the part of the authorities to have things in order, the custom began in 1804 for the Transport Board to send to its prison agents and prison-ship commanders this notice:

In so many cases was the specimen bread sent pronounced ‘not fit to be eaten’, that circulars were sent that all prisons and ships would receive a model loaf of the bread to be served out to prisoners, ‘made of whole wheaten meal actually and bona fide dressed through an eleven shilling cloth’.

Nor was the regulation quantity less satisfactory than the nominal quality. In 1812 the scale of victualling on prison ships according to the advertisement to contractors was:

In the year 1778 there were 924 American prisoners of war in England. It has been shown before (p. 11) how the fact of their ill-treatment was forcibly taken up by their own Government, but the following extract from a London newspaper further shows that the real cause of their ill-treatment was no secret:

On April 13, 1778, a Contractors’ Bill was brought in to Parliament by Sir Philip Jenning Clarke ‘for the restraining of any person being a Member of the House of Commons, from being concerned himself or any person in trust for him, in any contract made by the Commissioners of H.M.’s Navy or Treasury, 49the Board of Ordnance, or by any other person or persons for the public service, unless the said contract shall be made at a public bidding’.

The first reading of the Bill was carried by seventy-one to fifty, the second reading by seventy-two to sixty-one. Success in the Lords was therefore regarded as certain. Yet it was actually lost by two votes upon the question of commitment, and the exertion of Government influence in the Bill was taken to mean a censure on certain Treasury officials.

So things went on in the old way. Between 1804 and 1808 the evil state of matters was either so flagrant that it commanded attention, or some fearless official new broom was doing his duty, for the records of these years abound with complaints, exposures, trials, and judgements.

We read of arrangements being discussed between contractors and the stewards of prison ships by which part of the statutory provisions was withheld from the prisoners; of hundreds of suits of clothing sent of one size, of boots supposed to last eighteen months which fell to pieces during the first wet weather; of rotten hammocks, of blankets so thin that they were transparent; of hundreds of sets of handcuffs being returned as useless; of contractors using salt water in the manufacture of bread instead of salt, and further, of these last offenders being prosecuted, not for making unwholesome bread, but for defrauding the Revenue! Out of 1,200 suits of clothes ordered to be at Plymouth by October 1807, as provision for the winter, by March 1808 only 300 had been delivered!

Let us take this last instance and consider what it meant.

It meant, firstly, that the contractor had never the smallest intention of delivering the full number of suits. Secondly, that he had, by means best known to himself and the officials, received payment for the whole. Thirdly, that hundreds of poor wretches had been compelled to face the rigour of an English winter on the hulks in a half naked condition, to relieve which very many of them had been driven to gambling and even worse crimes.

And all the time the correspondence of the Transport Office consists to a large extent of rules and regulations and provisions and safeguards against fraud and wrong-doing; moral 50precepts accompany inquiry about a missing guard-room poker, and sentimental exhortations wind up paragraphs about the letting of grazing land or the acquisition of new chimney-pots. Agents and officials are constantly being reminded and advised and lectured and reproved. Money matters of the most trifling significance are carefully and minutely dealt with. Yet we know that the war-prison contract business was a festering mass of jobbery and corruption, that large fortunes were made by contractors, that a whole army of small officials and not a few big ones throve on the ‘pickings’ to be had.

Occasionally, a fraudulent contractor was brought up, heavily fined and imprisoned; but such cases are so rare that it is hard to avoid the suspicion that their prominence was a matter of expediency and policy, and that many a rascal who should have been hanged for robbing defenceless foreigners of the commonest rights of man had means with which to defeat justice and to persist unchecked in his unholy calling. References to this evil will be made in the chapter dealing with prisons ashore, in connexion with which the misdeeds of contractors seem to have been more frequent and more serious than with the hulks.

If it is painful for an Englishman to be obliged to write thus upon the subject of fraudulent contractors, their aiders and abettors, still more so is it to have to confess that a profession even more closely associated with the cause of humanity seems to have been far too often unworthily represented.

Allusion has been made to the unanimity of foreign officer-prisoners about the utter misery of prison-ship life, but in nothing is their agreement more marked than their condemnation, not merely of our methods of treatment of the sick and wounded, but of the character of the prison-ship doctors. Always bearing in mind that Britain treated her own sailors and soldiers as if they were vicious animals, and that the sickbay and the cockpit of a man-of-war of Nelson’s day were probably not very much better than those described by Smollett in Roderick Random, which was written in 1748, there seems to have been an amount of gratuitous callousness and cruelty practised by the medical officers attached to the hulks which we cannot believe would have been permitted upon the national ships.

51And here again the Government Regulations were admirable on paper: the one point which was most strongly insisted upon being that the doctors should live on board the vessels, and devote the whole of their time to their duties, whereas there is abundant evidence to show that most of the doctors of the Portsmouth, Plymouth, and Chatham hulks carried on private practices ashore and in consequence lived ashore.

More will be found upon this unhappy topic in the next chapter of records of life on the hulks, but we may fittingly close the present with the report upon hulk diseases by Dr. Fontana, French Officer of Health to the Army of Portugal, written upon the Brunswick prison ship at Chatham in 1812, and published as an appendix to Colonel Lebertre’s book upon English war-prison life.

He divides the diseases into three heads:

(1) External, arising from utter want of exercise, from damp, from insufficient food—especially upon the ‘maigre’ days of the week—and from lack of clothing. Wounds on the legs, which were generally bare, made bad ulcers which the ‘bourreaux’ of English doctors treated with quack remedies such as the unguent basilicon. He describes the doctor of the Fyen prison hospital-ship as a type of the English ignorant and brutal medical man.

(2) Scorbutic diathesis, arising from the ulcers and tumours on the lower limbs, caused by the breathing of foul air from twelve to sixteen hours a day, by overcrowding, salt food, lack of vegetables, and deprivation of all alcohol.

(3) Chest troubles—naturally the most prevalent, largely owing to moral despair caused by humiliations and cruelties, and deprivations inflicted by low-born, uneducated brutes, miserable accommodation, the foul exhalations from the mud shores at low water, and the cruel treatment by doctors, who practised severe bleedings, prescribed no dieting except an occasional mixture, the result being extreme weakness. When the patient was far gone in disease he was sent to hospital, where more bleeding was performed, a most injudicious use of mercury made, and his end hastened.

The great expense of the hulks, together with the comparative ease with which escape could be made from them, and the annually increasing number of prisoners brought to England, 52led to the development of the Land Prison System. It was shown that the annual expense of a seventy-four, fitted to hold 700 prisoners, was £5,869. Dartmoor Prison, built to hold 6,000 prisoners, cost £135,000, and the annual expense of it was £2,862: in other words, it would require eight seventy-fours at an annual expense of £46,952 to accommodate this number of prisoners.

The hulks were retained until the end of the great wars, and that they were recognized by the authorities as particular objects of aversion and dread seems to be evident from the fact that incorrigible offenders from the land prisons were sent there, as in the case of the wholesale transfer to them in 1812 of the terrible ‘Romans’ from Dartmoor, and from the many letters written by prisoners on board the hulks praying to be sent to prison on land, of which the following, from a French officer on a Gillingham hulk to Lady Pigott, is a specimen:

This letter was accompanied by a certificate from the doctor of the Trusty hospital ship, and the supplicant was noted to be sent to France with the first batch of invalids.

53Many of the aforementioned letters are of the most touching description, and if some of them were shown to be the clever concoctions of desperate men, there is a genuine ring about most which cannot fail to move our pity. Lady Pigott was one of the many admirable English women who interested themselves in the prisoners, and who, as usual, did so much of the good work which should have been done by those paid to do it. It is unfortunate for our national reputation that so many of the reminiscences of imprisonment in England which have come down to us have been those of angry, embittered men, and that so little written testimony exists to the many great and good and kindly deeds done by English men and women whose hearts went out to the unfortunate men on the prison ships, in the prisons, and on parole, whose only crime was having fought against us. But that there were such acts is a matter of history.

From a dozen accounts by British, American, and French writers I have selected the following, as giving as varied a view as possible of this phase of the War Prison system.

The first account is by the Baron de Bonnefoux, who was captured with the Belle Poule in the West Indies by the Ramillies, Captain Pickmore in 1806, was allowed on parole at Thame and at Odiham, whence he broke parole, was captured, and taken to the Bahama at Chatham.

When Bonnefoux was at Chatham, there were five prison ships moored under the lee of Sheppey between Chatham and Sheerness. He describes the interior arrangements of a hulk, but it resembles exactly that of the painter Garneray whose fuller account I give next.

Writing in 1835, the Baron says:

Very bitterly does the Baron complain of the bad and insufficient food, and of the ill-fitting, coarse, and rarely renewed clothing, and he is one of those who branded the commanders of the prison ships as the ‘rebuts’—the ‘cast-offs’ of the British navy.

The prisoners on the Bahama consisted largely of privateer captains, the most restless and desperate of all the prisoners of war, men who were socially above the common herd, yet who 55had not the cachet of the regular officers of the navy, who regarded themselves as independent of such laws and regulations as bound the latter, and who were also independent in the sense of being sometimes well-to-do and even rich men. At first there was an inclination among some of these to take Bonnefoux down as an ‘aristo’; they ‘tutoyer’d’ him, and tried to make him do the fagging and coolie work which, on prison ships as in schools, fell to the lot of the new-comer.

But the Baron from the first took up firmly the position of an officer and a gentleman, and showed the rough sea-dogs of the Channel ports that he meant it, with the result that they let him alone.

Attempted escapes were frequent. Although under constant fear of the lash, which was mercilessly used in the British army at this time, the soldiers of the guard were ready enough to sell to the prisoners provisions, maps, and instruments for effecting escape. One day in 1807 five of the prisoners attempted to get off in the empty water casks which the Chatham contractor took off to fill up. They got safely enough into the water boat, unknown of course to its occupants (so it seems, at any rate, in this case, although there was hardly a man who had dealings with the hulks who would not help the prisoners to escape for money), but at nightfall the boat anchored in mid-stream; one of the prisoners got stuck in his water-cask and called for aid; this was heard by the cabin-boy, who gave the alarm, the result being that the prisoners were hauled out of their hiding places, taken on board, and got ten days Black Hole. The Black Hole was a prison six feet square at the bottom of the hold, to which air only came through round holes not big enough for the passage of a mouse. Once and once only in the twenty-four hours was this cachot visited for the purpose of bringing food and taking away the latrine box. Small wonder that men often went mad and sometimes died during a lengthened confinement, and that those who came out looked like corpses.

The above-mentioned men were condemned to pay the cost of their capture, and, as they had no money, were put on half rations!

The time came round for the usual sending of aged and 56infirm prisoners to shore prisons. One poor chap sold his right to go to Bonnefoux, and he and his friend Rousseau resolved to escape en route. Bonnefoux, however, was prevented from going, as his trunk had arrived from Odiham and he was required to be present to verify its contents.

In December 1807, three Boulogne men cut a hole just above the water near the forward sentry box on the guard gallery which ran round the outside of the ship, and escaped. Others attempted to follow, but one of them cried out from the extreme cold, was fired at and hauled on board. Three managed to get off to Dover and Calais, one stuck in the mud and was drowned, and the Baron says that the captain of the Bahama allowed him to remain there until he rotted away, as a deterrent to would-be imitators.

Milne, captain of the Bahama, the Baron says, was a drunken brute who held orgies on board at which all sorts of loose and debased characters from the shore attended. Upon one occasion a fire was caused by these revels, and the captain, who was drunk, gave orders that the prisoners should be shot at should the fire approach them, rather than that they should escape.

A rough code of justice existed between the prisoners for the settlement of differences among themselves. One Mathieu, a privateersman, kept a small tobacco stall. A soldier, who already had a long bill running with him, wanted tobacco on credit. Mathieu refused; the soldier snatched some tobacco off the stall, Mathieu struck him with a knife and wounded him badly. Mathieu was a very popular character, but justice had to be done, even to a captive. Luckily the soldier recovered, and Mathieu got off with indemnification.

During the very bad weather of March 1808, the sentries ordinarily on the outer gallery were taken on board. To this gallery a boat was always made fast, and the Baron, Rousseau, and another resolved to escape by it. So they cut the painter and got off, using planks for oars, with holes in them for handhold. They reached land safely, and hid all day in a field, feeding on provisions they had brought from the Bahama. At nightfall they started, and, meeting a countryman, asked the way to Chatham. ‘Don’t go there,’ he replied, ‘the bridge 57is guarded, and you will be arrested.’ One of the prisoners, not knowing English, only caught the last word, and, thinking it was ‘arrêtez’, drew a piece of fencing foil, with which each was armed, and threatened the man. The others saved him, and in recognition he directed them to a village whence they could cross the Medway. They walked for a long time until they were tired, and reaching a cottage, knocked for admission. A big man came to the door. They asked hospitality, and threatened him in case of refusal. ‘My name is Cole,’ said the man, ‘I serve God, I love my neighbour, I can help you. Depend on me.’ They entered and were well entertained by Cole’s wife and daughter, and enjoyed the luxury of a night’s rest in a decent bed. Next morning, Cole showed them how to reach the Dover road across the river, and with much difficulty was persuaded to accept a guinea for his services.

Such instances of pity and kindness of our country people for escaped prisoners are happily not rare, and go far to counterbalance the sordid and brutal treatment which in other cases they received.

That evening the fugitives reached Canterbury, and, after buying provisions, proceeded towards Dover, and slept in a barn. Freedom seemed at hand when from Dover they had a glimpse of the French coast, but fortune still mocked them, for they sought in vain along the beach for a boat to carry them over. Boats indeed were there, but all oars, sails, and tackle had been removed from them in accordance with Government advice circulated in consequence of the frequent escapes of French officers on parole by stealing long-shore boats.

So they went on to Deal, and then to Folkestone. Here they were recognized as escaping prisoners and were pursued, but they ran and got safely away. They held a consultation and decided to go to Odiham in Hampshire, where all of them had friends among the officers on parole there, who would help them with money. The writer here describes the great sufferings they underwent by reason of the continuous bad weather, their poor clothing, their footsoreness, and their poverty. By day they sheltered in ditches, woods, and under hedges, and journeyed by night, hungry, wet to the skin, and in constant dread of being recognized and arrested. For some unknown 58reason, instead of pushing westward for their destination they went back to Canterbury, thence to London, then via Hounslow Heath to Odiham, where they arrived more dead than alive, shoeless, their clothing in rags, and penniless. At Odiham they went to one of the little houses on the outskirts of the town, built especially for French prisoners. This house belonged to a Mr. R——, and here the three men remained hidden for eight days. Suddenly the house was surrounded by armed men, the Baron and his companions were arrested and put into the lock-up. Céré, a friend of the Baron’s, believed that R—— had betrayed them, and challenged him. A duel was fought in which R—— was badly wounded, and when he recovered he found that feeling among the Frenchmen in Odiham was so strong, that the Agent sent him away to Scotland under a false name. At Odiham lock-up, Sarah Cooper, an old friend of the Baron’s when he was on parole there, who had helped him to get away, came to see him and left him a note in which she said she would help him to escape, and would not leave him until she had taken him to France. The escape was planned, Sarah contrived to get him a rope ladder and had a conveyance ready to take him away, but just as his foot was on the ladder the police got the alarm, he was arrested, chained, and shut up in the cachot.

For three days the Baron remained in irons, and then was marched to Chatham, so closely watched by the guards that every night the prisoner’s clothes and boots were removed, and were not returned until the morning. They went to Chatham by way of London where they were confined in the Savoy prison, then used for British deserters. These men were friendly to the Frenchmen. All of them had been flogged, one had received 1,100 lashes, and was to receive 300 more.

On May 1, 1808, the unfortunate men found themselves once more on the Bahama, with a sentence of ten days in the Black Hole.

Captain Milne of the Bahama was exasperated at these escapes, and attempts to escape, and was brutal in his endeavours to get hold of the tools with which the prisoners had worked. He tried the effect of starvation, but this only fanned the spirit of revolt in the ship, the state of life in which became 59very bad, threats, disputes, quarrels and duels being of everyday occurrence. The climax came when bad weather prevented the delivery of bread, and the prisoners were put on biscuit. They assembled in the parc, the open space between the two batteries, forty feet square, and declared they would not disperse until other provisions were served out. Milne was mad with anger and drink, and ordered the soldiers to fire upon the prisoners, but the young officer in command would not respect the order, and, instead, counselled a more moderate action. Bonnefoux managed to calm the prisoners, and determined personally to interview Milne, and represented to him that to compel eight hundred desperate, hungry men to descend from the parc would mean bloodshed. The captain yielded, and peace was temporarily assured.

However, more hole-boring was discovered; Rousseau, the Baron’s friend, slipped overboard and swam away, but was captured just as he was landing; the result being that the watch kept was stricter than ever.

The Baron here dilates upon the frightful immorality of the life on the Bahama. He says:

There were three classes of prisoners.

(1) Les Raffalés. (2) Les Messieurs ou Bourgeois. (3) Les Officiers.

The Raffalés were the lowest, and lowest of the Raffalés were the ‘Manteaux impériaux.’ These had nothing in the world but one covering, which swarmed with lice, hence the facetious allusion in their name to the bees of the Imperial Mantle. These poor wretches eat nothing during the day, for their gambling left them nothing to eat, but at night they crept about picking up and devouring the refuse of the food. They slept packed closely side by side on the deck. At midnight the officer of the evening gave the word, ‘Par le flanc droit!’ and 60all turned on to their right sides. At 3 a.m. the word rang out ‘Pare à virer!’^[3] and all turned on to their left sides.

They gambled with dice for their rations, hammocks, clothes, anything, and the winners sold for two sous what often was worth a franc. They had a chief who was fantastically garbed, and a drummer with a wooden gamelle. Sometimes they were a terror to the other prisoners, but could always be appeased with something to gamble with.

Bonnefoux’s companions worked in wood and straw. The Bahama had been captured from the Spaniards and was built of cedar, and the wood extracted by the prisoners in making escape holes they worked into razor-boxes and toilette articles. Bonnefoux himself gave lessons in French, drawing, mathematics, and English, and published an English Grammar, a copy of which is at Paris, in the Bibliothèque Nationale.

Gradually the spread of the taste for education had a refining and civilizing effect on board the Bahama, and when Bonnefoux finally obtained parole leave, the condition of affairs was very much improved.

In June 1809 the Baron left the Bahama for Lichfield, and with him was allowed to go one Dubreuil, a rough typical privateer captain, who never had any money, but had a constant craving for tobacco. He had been kind to Colonel and Mrs. Campbell, whom he had taken prisoners, and who had promised to befriend him should luck turn against him. Bonnefoux had helped him pecuniarily, and in return Dubreuil promised to teach him how to smoke through his eyes!

The next relation is that of Louis Garneray, a marine painter of some note, specimens of whose work during his nine years’ captivity in England may still be found in Portsmouth and its neighbourhood, and one at least of whose later pictures is in the Marine Gallery of the Paris Louvre.

What follows is an analysis in brief of his book Mes Pontons (which is, so far as I am aware, the most complete picture of life on a prison ship yet published), and, being but a brief analysis, is incomplete as to numberless most interesting details, so that I would recommend any reader who wishes to be minutely informed upon the subject to read the original volume 61of 320 pages. It is caustically, even savagely written, but nine years cut out of a young man’s life cannot serve to sweeten his disposition.

In May 1806 Garneray, who had been captured in the West Indies, was taken on board the hulk Prothée at Portsmouth, stripped, plunged into a cold bath, and clothed in an ill-fitting orange-yellow suit, on the back of which the large letters T. O. proclaimed him as under the care of the Transport Office. He describes the Prothée,—as he is hustled into the mob of ‘dead people come out for a moment from their graves, hollow-eyed, earthy complexioned, round backed, unshaven, their frames barely covered with yellow rags, their bodies frightfully thin,’—as a black, shapeless sarcophagus, of which the only parts open to air was the space between the fo’c’sle and the poop and the fo’c’sle itself, which was unbearable from the smoke of the many chimneys on it. Each end of the ship was occupied by the garrison, the officers aft and the soldiers forward. A stout barrier divided the guard from the prisoners, which was so garnished with heavy-headed nails as to seem like iron, and was fitted with loop-holes for inspection, and, if needs be, for firing through. On the lower deck and in the lower battery were packed seven hundred human beings.

Only one ladder communicated between the lower deck and the lower battery. In the latter the only daylight came through port-holes, in the former through narrow scuttles, all of which had iron gratings.

All round the ship, just above the water-line, ran a gallery with open-work floor, and along this paced three sentries by day and seven by night. The ship was commanded by a lieutenant and a master, and was garrisoned by forty or fifty soldiers under a marine officer and about twenty sailors. The day guard consisted of three sentries on the gallery, one on the ladder communicating with the battery, one on the fo’c’sle, one on each gangway, and on the poop a dozen armed men ready for instant action. At night there were seven sentries on the gallery, one on the battery ladder; an officer, a sergeant, a corporal, and a dozen sailors were continually moving round, and every quarter of an hour the ‘All’s well’ rang out.

62The ship’s boats were slung ten feet above the water, and one was chained to the gallery aft.

At 6 a.m. in summer and 8 in winter, the port-holes were opened, and the air thus liberated was so foul that the men opening the port-holes invariably jumped back immediately. At 6 p.m. in summer and 2 p.m. in winter, every wall and grating was sounded with iron bars, and one hour later all the prisoners were driven on deck and counted.

The only furniture in the ship was a bench along each side and four in the middle, the prisoners squatting on deck at mess time. Each prisoner on arrival received a hammock, a thin coverlet, and a hair mattress weighing from two to three pounds. For a long time no distinction was made between 63officers and men, but latterly a special ship was allowed for officers. Some idea of the crowding on board may be gained from the facts that each battery, 130 feet long, 40 feet broad, and 6 feet high, held nearly 400 prisoners, and that the hammocks were so closely slung that there was no room to sleep on deck.

The alimentation of the prisoners, humane and ample as it looks on paper, seems to have been a gross sham. Not only did the contractors cheat in quality and quantity, but what with forfeitures on account of breaches of discipline, and observance of the law imposed by the prisoners on themselves, that, deductions or no deductions, no man should have a larger ration than another, and contributions to men planning to escape, it was impossible for all to touch full rations.

The prisoners elected their own cooks, and nominally a committee of fifteen prisoners was allowed to attend at the distribution to see that quality and quantity were just, but the guards rarely allowed them to do so. Six men formed a mess; no spoons, knives or forks were supplied, merely bowls and pannikins. The fish supplied on ‘maigre’ days—Wednesdays and Fridays—was usually uneatable, and the prisoners often sold the herrings at a penny each to the purveyors, who kept them for redistribution, so that it was said that some herrings had done duty for ten years! With the money thus made the prisoners bought butter or cheese. The cod they re-cooked; the bread was filthy and hard. Complaints were useless, and the result was constant hunger.

All but the Raffalés, the scum, occupied themselves with trades or professions. There were tobacco manufacturers, professors of dancing, fencing, and stick-play, who charged one sou for a lesson, which often lasted an hour. Mathematics and languages were taught at the same rate. Whilst these and many other occupations were busy, up and down the battery passed the ‘merchants’ crying their wares, hungry men who offered their rags for sale, menders of shoes, and the occupants of favourable positions in the battery inviting bids for them, so that despite the rags and the hunger and the general misery, there was plenty of sound and movement, and general evidence of that capability for adapting themselves to 64circumstance which so invariably distinguished the French prisoners in England from the British prisoners in France.

Garneray’s chief friend on board was a sturdy Breton privateer Captain named Bertaud. Bertaud hated the English fiercely, and, being somewhat of a bruiser, had won the esteem of his companions quite as much by his issue of the following challenge as by his personal qualities.

Garneray calls him a madman, and says that the ten blows alone will do for him. What is his game?

‘I shall pocket two pounds, and that will go into our escape fund,’ replied the Breton laughing.

Garneray and Bertaud had been saving up for some time for the escape they resolved to attempt, and, although Bertaud’s challenge was not taken up, they at last owned forty-five shillings, to which Garneray’s writing lessons at a shilling each to the little girl of the Prothée’s commander chiefly contributed. Each made himself a bag of tarred cloth to hold clothes and provisions, they had bored a hole through the ship’s side large enough to slip through, and only waited for a dark quiet night. As it was the month of July this soon came. Bertaud got through first, Garneray was on the point of following when a challenge rang out, followed by a musket-shot, and peeping through the hole, to his horror he saw poor Bertaud suspended over the water by the cord of his bag which had caught in an unnoticed nail in the ship’s side. Then was a terrible thing done. The soldiers hammered the helpless Frenchman 65with their musket butts, Garneray heard the fall of something heavy in the water; there was silence; then as if by magic the whole river was lit up, and boats from all the other vessels put off for the Prothée. Garneray slipped back to his hammock, but was presently turned out with all the other prisoners to be counted. His anxiety about the fate of his friend made him ask a sailor, who replied brutally, ‘Rascal, how should I know? So far as I am concerned I wish every Frenchman was at the bottom of the sea!’ For a consideration of a shilling, however, the man promised to find out, and told Garneray that the poor Breton had received three bayonet thrusts, a sabre-cut on the head, and musket-butt blows elsewhere, but that the dog still breathed! For twenty days the man gave his shilling bulletins, and then announced that the Breton was convalescent.

Garneray and Bertaud made another attempt some months later. Garneray had saved money he had earned by drawing designs for the straw-workers among the prisoners, who had hitherto not gone beyond birds and flowers, and who readily paid for his ships in full sail and other marine objects.

It was mid-winter and bitterly cold, so the two adventurers prepared themselves by rubbing themselves with oil saved from the little lamp by which Garneray taught his pupils. Without attracting notice they slipped overboard, and swam for the muddy shore of an island. This they crossed on patins which Bertaud had provided, and reached the river by Gosport. Only occasional pulls at the rum flask prevented them from perishing with cold, and their second swim nearly cost both of them their lives. Each in turn had to support the other, and they were on the point of giving up when they reached an anchored vessel. Here a watchdog greeted them, and kept up his barking until he aroused the crew, who hailed them in what they thankfully recognized to be broken English. Alas! Their joy was short-lived. The skipper of the vessel was a Dane, and so far from promising to help them declared he would send them back to the hulk, abusing them violently. This was too much for the fiery Breton, who, seizing a knife, sprang upon the Dane and bore him to the ground. They tied and gagged him, and, said Bertaud, ‘Now let us be off!’

66But Garneray declared himself too exhausted to attempt another swim, even for liberty, and said he would go back to the hulk. The prospect of this was too horrible for Bertaud. ‘Better be drowned and be done with it,’ said he, ‘than live to be killed by inches,’ and before Garneray could remonstrate, to the amazement of the Danish sailors, he sprang overboard.

At four the next morning the Danes brought Garneray back to the Prothée. Instantly, although he was wet through and half dead with cold, he was put into the cachot, and but for the fact that the carpenters had been working there and had left a pile of shavings, amongst which he nestled, he could not have lived through the night. Next day he was released and sent back to the battery, but no fresh clothes were issued to him, and but for the charity of his fellow prisoners he would have gone naked.

Seeing all the prisoners peering excitedly through the grated port-holes, Garneray, sick in his hammock, asked the reason: ‘See, the crows!’ was the reply.

He joined the onlookers, and describes his feelings when he saw stretched on the mud of the Portchester river the body of Bertaud, already an attraction for the crows. On the brutal scene which followed, the dragging of the body to the ship, and the utterly inhuman response made to Garneray’s prayer for the decent treatment of his friend’s remains, it is as unnecessary as it is distasteful to dwell.

Garneray was now changed from the Prothée to the Crown—a ship with a bad reputation among the prisoners.

Captain R—— of the Crown was a brute in every sense of the word, and the prisoners maddened him by winning for the Crown the reputation of being the most unmanageable, because the worst managed, hulk in Portchester River. Bully, sot, and coward as he was, he by no means had his own way. On one occasion five prisoners escaped. Although it was mid-winter and snowing, R—— had the muster of half-clad wretches made in the open. The number could never be made right, and count after count was made, during a space of three days. The whole affair was a cleverly concocted device to gain for the escaped men time to get safely away. A master-carpenter among the prisoners had cut a means of communication between 67two of the batteries, through which, unseen by the authorities, men could slip from one to the other, get on deck, and so swell or diminish the muster roll as arranged. The trick was not discovered, but that there was a trick was evident, and R—— was determined to be revenged. He summoned the floating fire-engines in harbour, and, although it was mid-winter, actually pumped icy water into the lower deck and batteries until they were drenched, as well as the prisoners, their hammocks, and their clothes.

On another occasion when for counting purposes those on the Crown were transferred en masse on board the San Antonio, they returned to find that during their temporary absence R—— had actually, ‘as a measure of precaution,’ he said, destroyed 68all the tools and implements and books which the prisoners used in their poor little occupations and trades, and among them Garneray’s canvases, easels, brushes, and colours. The immediate result was a stupor of impotent rage; this gave way to open insubordination, insult, and such a universal paroxysm of indignation that even R—— was cowed, and actually made a show of leniency, offering terms of mediation which were scornfully rejected.

Garneray relates another boxing episode with great gusto. A certain Colonel S——, belonging to a well-known English family, came to visit Captain R—— accompanied by a colossal negro, gorgeously arrayed, called Little White, and a splendid Danish hound. His purpose was to match Little White against a French boxer for the entertainment of his fashionable friends ashore. At first sight there would seem to be very poor sport in the pitting of a well-fed, well-trained giant against even the fittest champion of a crowd of half-clad, half-starved, wholly untrained prisoners of war. Although the real object of the gallant Colonel was to show off his black pet, and to charm the beauty and fashion of Portsmouth with an exhibition of prowess, to prove that he was simply animated by a love of sport, he had the consent of R—— that the prisoner champion should be prepared in some way for the contest by extra feeding and so forth.

Robert Lange, a quiet, inoffensive Breton with a quenchless hatred of the English, and a reputed athlete, at once accepted the challenge, especially as the (to him) enormous prize of twenty guineas was being offered.

The day appointed for the contest came. Great preparations had been made on the poop of the Crown for the reception of the fashionable company invited to assist at the spectacle of Colonel S——‘s black knocking out in the first round, and probably killing, a Frenchman.

Colonel S—— arrived, and with him Little White and the big dog, and flotillas of boats brought out the company, largely consisting of ladies, ‘parées avec ce luxe éclatant et de mauvais goût si essentiellement britannique,’ who settled themselves on the stand rigged up for the occasion, in laughing and chattering anticipation of something funny.

69Robert Lange was playing cards below when he was told that the entertainment was only wanting him. Very coolly he sent word back that he would come as soon as he had finished his hand, and nothing would induce him to hurry. Captain R—— wanted to put Lange into the cachot at once for this impertinence, but Colonel S—— calmed him by assuring him that it was the custom in England to grant any indulgence to a man condemned to die.

Meanwhile Little White divested himself of his gorgeous flunkey dress, and the appearance of his magnificent physique caused a chorus of admiration for him, and of pity for the presumptuous Frenchman, to burst from the company.

In due course Robert Lange slouched up, his hands in his pockets, a pipe in his mouth, and his cotton cap on the back of his head. His appearance brought out a murmur of disappointment from the visitors, who considered they were being made the victims of one of Colonel S——‘s famous hoaxes. The murmurs turned to smiles when Robert confessed ignorance about seconds, and asked what a watch was wanted for. However, these things being explained to him, he chose Garneray and a fellow Breton as seconds, told Garneray to pocket the magnificent watch which the Colonel offered him, said he was ready for the dance to begin, and placed himself in a fighting position which occasioned roars of laughter from the polite crowd.

‘I’m beginning to lose my temper at the mockery of these fools,’ said Lange to Garneray; ‘what are they waiting for?’

‘Colonel,’ said Garneray, ‘my man is ready. May we begin?’

‘There is just one formality customary on these occasions,’ replied the Colonel. ‘The combatants ought to shake hands to show there is no ill-feeling between them.’

The big black thrust forward his hand saying, ‘Shake my hand with respect. It has bowled over many a Frenchman.’

At this gratuitous insult, which the English applauded, a thrill of indignation agitated the crowd of French prisoners.

‘What does this chap say?’ asked Lange of Garneray.

Garneray told him. Instantly there sprang into his face and into his eyes a light of anger very unusual to him, and what 70Garneray feared was that the furious Breton would violate the laws of combat and spring upon the negro before the latter had taken up his fighting position. But it was not so. Let me translate Garneray’s description of what followed: ‘At length Robert Lange seized the negro’s hand. Their hands entwined, their gaze fixed, their inflamed faces close together, the two combatants motionless, resembled a marble group. By degrees, it seemed to me that on the face of Little White there was a look of pain. I was not wrong. Suddenly with a cry of pain which he had been suppressing the negro bit his lip with passion, half closed his eyes, threw his head back as he raised his shoulder convulsively, and seemed to lose consciousness. All this time the Breton was as calm and motionless as a statue. What was going on was something so unforeseen, so extraordinary that we did not know what to think of it. Robert Lange solved the riddle.

‘“Wretch!” he cried with a resounding voice. “This hand which has done for so many Bretons shall not henceforth frighten a child!”

‘In fact, the hand of the Breton had gripped the negro’s with such force that the blood sprang from its fingers.

‘“Stop! stop!” cried the black in his agony. But Robert was pitiless, and did not loosen his grasp until the giant was on his knees before him.’

An enthusiastic burst of cheering rose from the French prisoner spectators, and, to cut the story short, the Colonel handed Robert Lange the twenty guineas, and was obliged to apologize to the gay company assembled to see the triumph of the negro, for the unexpected and brief character of the entertainment.

Then he called his big Danish hound and prepared to embark. But the dog did not appear and could not be found. Somebody said he had last been seen going into the battery. Captain R—— started, and his face reddened deeply. ‘Then—then,’ he stammered. ‘If your dog has got into the battery, you will never see him again!’

‘Never see him again! What do you mean?’ roared the Colonel.

‘I mean that by this time he represents two legs of mutton, 71several dishes of “ratatouille”, and any number of beeftaks! In other words, the prisoners have eaten him!’

It was even so. The vision of a large plump dog had been too much for the Raffalés, and as the irate Colonel was rowed shorewards from the ship, he saw the skin of his pet nailed on to the outer side of it.

Captain R—— revenged himself for the double fiasco by a series of brutal persecutions and punishments which culminated in open rebellion, severe fighting, much bloodshed, and at last in a proclamation by the Captain that unless the ringleaders were delivered up to him, imploring pardon for what had happened, he would have every man shot.

In the meanwhile the long duration and intensity of Captain R——‘s persecution had reached the ears of the authorities, and just at the expiration of the hour which he had given the prisoners for decision, the great folk of the Admiralty arrived, and the result of a court of inquiry which lasted the whole day, and which even Garneray admits was conducted with impartiality, was that he was removed.

A few weeks later Garneray observed two of the worst of the Raffalés seated on a bench playing ecarté very seriously, and surrounded by a silent and equally serious crowd. Suspecting that this was no ordinary gambling bout, he inquired, and was told that by a drawing of lots these two men had been left to decide who should kill the ship’s master, one Linch, the worst type of hulk tyrant. In vain Garneray exerted himself to prevent the committal of so terrible a crime. The game was played out, and five minutes later the master was stabbed to the heart as he stood on the upper deck.

Towards the end of 1811 the Vengeance, to which hulk Garneray had been shifted from the Crown, received her quota of the unfortunate Frenchmen who, after the capitulation of Baylen in 1808, had been imprisoned by the Spaniards on the island of Cabrera, where they had been submitted to the most terrible sufferings and hardships, and had died like flies. Garneray describes the appearance of thirty of these poor creatures who had been apportioned to the Vengeance, as they came alongside.

The doctor of the Vengeance refused to receive them on board, saying that by their infection they would in a fortnight’s time turn the ship into one great tomb, and they were ordered to be put on board the Pegasus hospital ship. While the arrangements for their reception were being made, the unfortunates were kept in their agony in the boat alongside, for the captain of the Vengeance said it was not worth while to disarrange his ship for such men, for so short a time.

More brutality followed. The captain of the Pegasus sent word that the poor wretches should be bathed before being sent to him, saying that his hospital was so full that he had no accommodation of this sort. And this was actually done; they 73were plunged into icy cold water, and then packed off to the Pegasus, the result being that many of them were hauled on board dying.

As the doctor of the Vengeance predicted, the infection brought by the survivors of Cabrera spread through the ship with terrible severity, and Garneray himself was seized with fever, and was sent on board the Pegasus. He tells how by the intervention of a fellow-countryman who was a hospital assistant, he contrived to avoid the horrors of the compulsory cold bath on entrance, and proceeds to relate a circumstance which, horrible as it is, I give for what it is worth.

A neighbour invalid had a diamond ring on his finger. He was a soldier of Spain, and the ring no doubt had been obtained, as Garneray says, ‘by the luck of war’. He was very far gone; indeed his death could only be a matter of a few hours. Garneray, rapidly becoming convalescent, heard two English attendants conspire to take the dying man away at once to the mortuary and there to relieve him of his ring. They carried him away; Garneray called for his French friend, and bid him go at once and prevent the brutal deed. He did so, and the man actually recovered, but he told Garneray that it was quite the rule in this crowded hospital ship for patients to be hurried away before they were dead into the mortuary in order to make room for others!

Garneray says:

When Garneray returned to the Vengeance he had news of the Baron de Bonnefoux—extracts from whose life upon the Chatham hulks have already been given,—and speaks of him as bent upon escaping, and fears he would be shot one of these days.

74Garneray later is allowed to go on parole to Bishop’s Waltham, about his sojourn at which place something will be said when the story of the Prisoners on Parole comes to be told. Suffice it therefore to say that Garneray got away from Bishop’s Waltham to Portsmouth, and well across the Channel on a smuggling vessel, when he was recaptured by a British cruiser, and once again found himself a prisoner on the Vengeance. After more sufferings, brutal treatment, and illness, Garneray was at length made free by the Treaty of Paris in 1814.

I next give the remarks of Colonel Lebertre, who, having broken his parole by escaping from Alresford, was captured, and put on the Canada hulk at Chatham. This was in 1811. He complains bitterly that officers in the hulks were placed on a level with common prisoners, and even with negroes, and says that even the Brunswick, which was considered a better hulk than the others, swarmed with vermin, and that although cleanliness was strongly enjoined by the authorities, no allowance for soap was made, no leave given to bathe even in summer, and that fresh clothing was very rarely issued.

But most strongly does he condemn the conduct of the idle curious who would come off from the shore to see the prisoners on the hulks.

In the House of Commons on December 26, 1812, during a debate upon the condition of the foreign prisoners of war in England, Croker, Secretary to the Admiralty, declared that he had inspected the hulks at Portsmouth, and had found the prisoners thereon ‘comfortable and happy and well provided with amusement’, and Sir George Warrender said much the same about Chatham.

Colonel Lebertre remarks on this:

He describes, as did the Baron de Bonnefoux, the Raffalés who sold all their clothes, and went naked in obedience to one of the laws of their camaraderie, who slept huddled together for warmth in ranks which changed position by words of command. He says that some of the prisoners were so utterly miserable that they accepted pay from the authorities to act as spies upon their fellows. He describes the rude courts of justice held, and instances how one man who stole five louis received thirty blows with a rope’s end; he refers to the terrible vice prevalent upon the prison ships, and remarks that ‘life on them is the touchstone of a man’s character’.

When he arrived on the Canada there was no vacant sleeping place, but for 120 francs he bought a spot in the middle of the battery, not near a port, ‘just big enough to hold his dead body’. Still, he admits that the officers treated him with as much consideration as their orders would allow.

On August 11, 1812, in response to many urgent remonstrances from influential prisoners against the custom of herding officers and men together, all the officers on the hulks at Chatham were transferred to the lower or thirty-six gun battery of the Brunswick, in number 460. Here they had to submit to the same tyranny as on the other ships, except that they were allowed to have wine if they could afford to pay six francs a bottle for it, which few of them could do. Later, General Pillet and other ‘broke paroles’, on account of the insulting letters they wrote on the subject of being allowed rum or other spirits, were confined to the regulation small beer. The Transport Office wrote: ‘Indeed, when the former unprincipled conduct of these officers is considered, with their present combination to break through the rules, obviously tending to insurrection and a consequent renewal of bloodshed, we think it proper that they should immediately be removed to separate prison ships.’

77We now come to the most rabid of the Frenchmen, General Pillet. Pillet was severely wounded and taken prisoner at Vimiero in 1808, and—in violation, he says, of the second article of the Convention of Cintra, which provided that no French should be considered prisoners of war, but should be taken out of Portugal with arms, &c., by British ships—was brought to England, with many other officers. He was at once allowed to be on parole at Alresford, but, not considering himself bound by any parole terms, attempted to escape with Paolucci, Captain of the Friedland captured in 1808 by the Standard and Active, but was recaptured and sent to the dépôt at Norman Cross. Here his conduct was so reprehensible that he was sent to the Brunswick at Chatham. From the Brunswick he tried to escape in a vegetable boat, but this attempt failed, and it is to the subsequent rigour of his treatment that must be attributed his vitriolic hatred of Britain.

General Pillet is of opinion that the particular branch of the Navy told off for duty on the prison ships was composed of the most miserable scum of English society; of men who have either been accomplices in or guilty of great crimes, and who had been given by the magistrates the alternative of being marines or of being hanged!

He speaks of the Chatham hulks as abominably situated near foul marshes—which is undeniably true. The quarters of the prisoners were in no place high enough for a man to stand upright; fourteen little ports, unglazed but barred, of seventeen inches square, on each side of the deck, gave all the light and air obtainable. When they were shut they were fast shut, so that during the winter months the prisoners breathed foul air for sixteen hours a day. Hence they went naked, and so, when the cold air was admitted the results were fatal. The overcrowding of the hulks, says Pillet, was part of the great Government design of killing the prisoners, and asserts that even a London newspaper, quoting the opinion of a medical board in London, said that the strongest of men, after six years’ life on the hulks, must be physically wrecked for life.

The hammock space allowed was six feet in length, but swinging reduced them to four and a half. Newcomers were often obliged to sleep on the bare deck, as there was no other vacant space, and there was no distinction of ranks. However, 78officers were generally able to buy spaces, upon which practice Pillet remarks:

He declares that the air is so foul when the decks are shut up that the candles will not burn, and he has heard even the guards call for help when they have opened the hatches and the air has escaped. The food he describes as execrable, so that the two boats which had the monopoly of coming alongside to sell butter, tea, coffee, sugar, potatoes, candles, and tobacco at a price one-third above that on land, did a roaring trade. The general reply to complaints was that any food was good enough for French dogs.

If they were badly fed, says Pillet, they were worse clothed. Nominally they received every eighteen months a coat, waistcoat, breeches, two pairs of stockings, two shirts, a pair of shoes, and a cap. He declares he can prove that the prisoners did not receive this complete rig-out once in four years, and that if a prisoner had any rags of his own, or received any money, he got no clothes! What clothes they did get were so badly made that they generally had to be re-made. He says that at Portsmouth, where the hulk agent Woodriff was at any rate conscientious enough to issue the clothes on the due dates, his secretary would buy back the shirts at one shilling each, and so, as Government paid three shillings each for them, and there were at Portsmouth, Forton, and Portchester some twelve thousand prisoners on the average, his ‘pickings’ must have been considerable!

In a note he gives the instance of the reply of Commander Mansell, who commanded the prison-ship police at Chatham in 1813, when the fact that not one quarter of the clothing due to the prisoners had been delivered to them, was proved clearly: ‘I am afraid it is too true, but I have nothing to do with it. I cannot help it.’

79From the Carnet d’Étapes du Sergt.-Maj. Beaudouin, 31^e demi-brigade de ligne, I take the following account of life on the hulks.

Beaudouin says:

Very soon the Bristol was condemned and its prisoners transferred to the Fyen, and at the same time the Rochester and Southwick were replaced by the Canada and Nassau. On the Fyen were 850 prisoners, but during 1810 and 1811 a great many Chatham prisoners were sent to Norman Cross and Scotland.

Beaudouin comments thus bitterly:

A short description of the terrible Sampson affair is given elsewhere (p. 93), but as Beaudouin was evidently close by at the time, his more detailed account is perhaps worth quoting.

Beaudouin wrote a poem of 514 alexandrines, entitled:

I give in the original the first and last ‘chants’ of this embittered production.

Speaking of the horrible moral effects of the bad treatment he says:

In 1812 it was reported that a batch of incurables would be sent home to France, and Beaudouin resolved to get off with them by making himself ill. He starved himself into such a condition that he was sent into hospital, but the doctor would not pass him as an incurable. He swallowed tobacco juice, and at last, in a miserable state, turned up with the candidates. Then it was announced that no privateersmen, but only regular seamen, would be sent. Beaudouin, being a soldier, and being among the privateersmen, was in despair. However, a kindly English doctor pitied him, cured him of his self-inflicted illness, and got him leave to go.

On June 2, 1812, he was ready to sail, but was searched first for letters. Luckily none were discovered, although he had sixty sewn between the soles of his shoes, and 200 in a box with a double bottom. He sailed on June 4, the king’s birthday—that day eight years previously he had arrived at Greenock amidst the Royal salutes—arrived at Morlaix, and so home 82to Boiscommun (Loiret), canton of Beaune-la-Rolande, arrondissement of Pithiviers.

The following experiences of an American prisoner of war are from The Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, (1816), who was a surgeon, by name Benjamin Waterhouse, captured at sea in May 1813, and confined on Melville Island, Halifax, whence he was transported to Chatham, and then to Dartmoor. The account is interesting as showing the very marked difference between the American and the French prisoners of war, and is otherwise remarkable for the hatred and contempt of the writer for Britons in general and for Scotsmen in particular, entire pages being devoted to their vilification. Waterhouse, with a hundred of his countrymen, was shipped to England on the Regulus, and his complaints are bitter about the shameful treatment on board—the filth, the semi-starvation, the vermin, the sleeping on stone ballast, the lack of air owing to the only opening to the lower deck being a hatchway two feet square, the brutal rule of allowing only two prisoners to go on deck at a time, and the presence in their midst of the only latrine. The captain, a Scotsman, would only yield to constant petitions and remonstrances so far as to sanction the substitution of iron bars for the hatchway.

After a miserable voyage the prisoners reached Portsmouth, and, starved, vermin-eaten, and in rags, were shipped off to the Crown Prince, Captain Hutchison, at Chatham, where were thirteen other prison ships and some 1,200 Americans. On this hulk, Waterhouse says, they fared ‘as well as could be expected ... not that we fared so well as British prisoners fare in America’, the daily allowance being half a pound of beef, one gill of barley, one and a half pounds of bread, on five days of the week, and on the others one pound cod fish, and one pound potatoes, or one pound smoked herring, porter and beer being purchasable. He dilates bitterly on the extraordinary lack of humanity in John Bull, as evidenced by the hard fare of soldiers and sailors, the scoundrelism of some officers, especially those of the provisioning departments, and, above all, the shockingly cruel punishments in the Army and Navy. During the daytime, he says, life on a prison ship was not so unpleasant, but at night the conditions were very bad—especially as 83American prisoners were more closely watched and guarded than were men of other nationalities. ‘The French were always busy in some little mechanical employ, or in gaming, or in playing the fool, but the Americans seemed to be on the rack of invention to escape.’

Amongst themselves, the Americans elected by voting, every four weeks, a President, and twelve Committee men, whose functions were to make wholesome laws, to define crimes and award punishments, and particularly to insist upon personal cleanliness. The punishments were fines, whippings, and in very extreme cases the Black Hole. The volubility and the eloquence of the orators at these Committee Meetings very much impressed the British officers. The Frenchmen, Waterhouse says, were almost to a man gamblers:

Very bitter were the complaints of the Americans about the supine and indifferent attitude towards them of Beasley, their agent, who was supposed to keep constant watch and ward over the interests of his unfortunate countrymen. He lived in London, thirty-two miles away, paid no attention to complaints forwarded to him, and was heartily hated and despised. Once he paid a visit to the hulks in Gillingham Creek, but seemed anxious to avoid all interviews and questionings, and left amidst a storm of hisses and jeers.

Waterhouse dwells severely on the fact that the majority of the Americans on the Crown Prince and the other hulks were not men who had been fairly taken in open combat on the high seas, but men who had been impressed into the British Navy from American merchant ships previous to the war between the two countries and who, upon the Declaration of War, had given themselves up as prisoners of war, being naturally unwilling to fight against their own country, but who had been kept prisoners 85instead of being exchanged. This had been the British practice since 1755, but after the War of Independence it had ceased. All the same the British authorities had insisted upon the right of search for British subjects on American ships, and to the arbitrary and forcible exercise of this ‘right’ was very largely owing the War of 1812.

Waterhouse admits that on the whole he was treated as well on the Crown Prince as were the British prisoners at Salem or Boston. Recruiting sergeants for the British service came on board and tried to tempt Americans with a bounty of sixteen guineas, but they were only chaffed and sent off.

Later on, 500 more prisoners arrived from America in a pitiable condition, mostly Maryland and Pennsylvania men—‘Colonel Boerstler’s men who had been deceived, decoyed and captured near Beaver Dams on January 23rd, 1813’. With their cruel treatment on board the Nemesis on their trans-Atlantic voyage, Waterhouse contrasts favourably the kind treatment of the prisoners brought by the Poictiers 74, Captain Beresford, after his capture of the American Wasp and her prize the Frolic.

The author gives a glaring instance of provision cheating. By the terms of his contract, if the bread purveyor failed to send off to the hulks fresh bread when the weather was favourable, he forfeited half a pound of bread to each man. For a long time the prisoners were kept in ignorance of this agreement, but they found it out, and on the next occasion when the forfeit was due, claimed it. Commodore Osmore refused it, and issued hard ship’s bread. The prisoners refused to take it. Osmore was furious, and ordered his marines to drive the prisoners, now in open mutiny, below. A disturbance was imminent, but the Americans remained firm, and the commodore gave way.

The American prisoners took in newspapers, as they were mostly intelligent and well-educated men, but paid dearly for them.

The papers were the Statesman, Star, Bell’s Weekly Messenger, and Whig. The Statesman cost 28s. a month, plus 16s. a month for conveyance on board.

As the weather grew milder, matters were more comfortable 86on board until small-pox broke out. Vaccination was extensively employed, but many prisoners refused to submit to it, not from unbelief in its efficacy, but from misery and unwillingness to live! Then came typhus, in April 1814. There were 800 prisoners and 100 British on the ship. The hospital ship being crowded, part of the Crown Prince was set apart for patients, with the result that the mortality was very high. Still Beasley, the American agent, never came near the ship to inquire into affairs.

The gambling evil had now assumed such proportions that the Americans determined to put it down. In spite of the vigorous opposition of the Frenchmen, the ‘wheels of fortune’ were abolished, but the billiard-tables remained, it being urged by the Frenchmen that the rate of a halfpenny per game was not gambling, and that the game afforded a certain amount of exercise. There remained, however, a strong pro-gambling party among the Americans, and these men insisted upon continuing, and the committee sent one of them to the Black Hole without a trial. This angered his mates; a meeting was held, violent speeches were made in which the names of Hampden, Sidney, and Wilkes were introduced, and he was brought out. He was no ordinary rough tar, but a respectable well-educated New England yeoman, with the ‘gift of the gab’; and the results of his harangue were that the committee admitted their error, and he was released.

Finally the billiard-tables were abolished; a great improvement was soon manifest among the captives, education was fostered, and classes formed, although a few rough characters still held aloof, and preferred skylarking, and the slanging and chaffing of passers-by in boats on the river.

In May 1814 four men went on deck and offered themselves for British service. Two got away, but two were caught by their mates, tried, and sentenced to be marked with indian ink on their foreheads with the letter T (= Traitor). The Frenchmen were now being shipped home. Some of them had been prisoners since 1803. Waterhouse comments upon the appalling ignorance among English people in the educated class of all matters American, and quotes the instance of the lady who, wishing to buy some of the articles made by the American 87prisoners, was confronted by the difficulty of ‘not knowing their language’!

Waterhouse describes the surroundings of the Crown Prince thus:

Waterhouse complains strongly of the immorality on board: ‘Such a sink of vice, I never saw, or ever dreamt of, as I have seen here,’ He relates a daring escape. A hole was cut through the ship’s side near the stern, the copper being removed all round except on one side so as to lap over and be opened or closed at will. Sixteen men escaped through this, and swam ashore one dark night, the sentry on duty close by being allured away by the singing of droll songs and the passing of a can of grog. At the numbering of the prisoners next morning, the correct tale was made up by the passing through a hole cut in the bulk-head of sixteen men who had been already counted. At another attempt two men slipped into the water; one of them got tired and benumbed with cold, and turned back. The sentry heard him breathing and said: ‘Ah! Here is a porpoise, and I’ll stick him with my bayonet,’ and only the crying out of the poor would-be refugee saved him. The ship’s officers on examining the hole were amazed, and one of them remarked that he did not believe that the Devil himself could keep these fellows in hell if they made up their minds to get out. The next day the other poor chap was seen lying dead on the beach, and to the disgust of the prisoners was allowed to remain there two days before he was buried.

Commodore Osmore was always the butt of the American 88prisoners. A yarn got about that he had procured a sheep from a farmer ashore without paying for it. Thereupon his appearance was the signal for a chorus of ‘Baa! Baa!’ He was mad with rage, and ordered the port through which the insulting chorus had been made to be closed. The Americans forced it open. The marines drove the prisoners from the fo’c’sle into the ‘Pound’. As more ‘Baa!’s resounded, they were driven below decks, and all market boats were stopped from approaching the ship, so that for two days the prisoners were without extra food. However, Captain Hutchison instituted an inquiry, and peace was arranged.

In June 1814 three men escaped in a water tank. Others would have followed, but one of the former party had stupidly written an ironical letter of thanks to Captain Hutchison, in which he described the method of escape.

A daring escape was made from the Irresistible in broad daylight. Four Americans saw a jolly-boat made fast to the accommodation-ladder under the charge of a sentry. One of them was a big, strong Indian of the Narragansett tribe from Rhode Island. The four men dashed down, seized the sentry, disarmed him, threw him into the boat, and pulled off. They were fired at from all sides, and boats put off from all the ships to chase them, but only one man was wounded. They reached shore and struck across the fields, which were soon covered by people in chase from the farms and brickfields, who soon ran all the prisoners down except the Indian, who out-distanced the prisoners, and would have got away had he not sprained his ankle in getting over a fence, and even then, as he was sitting down, none of the country folk would approach him, until the marines came up. The chase had been closely followed with great excitement on the ship, and on the arrival of the captured men alongside, they were loudly cheered, their healths drunk, and the Indian at once dubbed ‘Baron Trenck’. Said the boys: ‘If it took 350 British seamen and marines to capture four Yankees, how many British sailors and marines would it take to catch ten thousand of us?’

Two Scotsmen Waterhouse excepted from his condemnation of their nation: Galbraith, the master-at-arms, and Barnes, the sailing-master, who was wont to reprove them for misdeeds, 89saying: ‘I expect better things of you as Americans, I consider you all in a different light from that of a d—d set of French monkeys.’

The British officers were clearly uneasy about their custody of the Americans, and felt it to be an ignoble business. Said they: ‘The Yankees seemed to take a pleasure in making us uneasy, and in exciting our apprehensions of their escape, and then they laugh and make themselves merry at our anxiety. In fact, they have systematized the art of tormenting.’

The Government, too, appreciated ‘the difficult task which the miserable officers of this miserable Medway fleet had to perform’. It did not wish them to be more rigorous, yet knew that more rigour was necessary. Rumours got about that in desperation the Government was about to transfer all the Americans from the prison ships to Dartmoor—the place which, it was said, had been lost by the Duchess of Devonshire at a game of hazard to the Prince of Wales, who determined to utilize it profitably by making a prison there.

The national festival on July 4 was duly celebrated on board the two prison ships Crown Prince and Nassau. An additional allowance of drink was sanctioned, but the American flag was only allowed to be flown as high as the ‘railings’. There were drums and pipes which played Yankee Doodle on the fo’c’sle: cheers were exchanged between the ships, and the toast of the day was drunk in English porter. There was, of course, much speechifying, especially on the Nassau, where one orator declaimed for half an hour, and another recited a poem, ‘The Impressment of an American Sailor Boy’, which is too long to be quoted, but which, says our author, brought tears into many eyes. All passed off quietly, and acknowledgement is made of the ‘extraordinary good behaviour of all the British officers and men on board the Crown Prince‘.

Although Commodore Osmore was unpopular with the Americans, his charming wife exercised a good influence in the ship by her amiability and appreciation of the fact that American prisoners were not all a gang of vagabonds; and gradually a better feeling developed between captors and captured.

90In August 1814 the news of the transfer to Dartmoor was confirmed, and, says Waterhouse, was received with regret on the Crown Prince—the ship being ‘actually viewed with feelings of attachment’. The last scene, however, was marked by a disturbance.

Thirty prisoners had been told off to prepare for embarkation on a tender. At the appointed hour no tender appeared, and the embarkation was put off. But all hammocks had been packed, and upon application to Osmore for hammocks, the prisoners were told to shift as they could for the night, as the tender would arrive early the next morning, and it was not worth while to unpack the hammocks. Upon hearing this the prisoners resolved that if they were to be deprived of their night’s rest, nobody else should have any. So they harnessed themselves to benches, and ran about the deck, shouting and singing, and bumping the benches against everything which would make a noise, jammed down the marines’ crockery and brought into play every article which could add to the pandemonium. Osmore sent a marine down to quiet them. The marine returned, dishevelled, and disarmed. Osmore was furious. ‘I’ll be d—d if I do not fire on them!’ he roared: ‘Fire, and be d—d,’ was the response. As it was useless to attempt to quiet them, and to fire would have been criminal, the commodore retired, and did what he could to sleep amid the infernal din of bumping benches, jangling metal, shouts and songs, which lasted throughout the night.

When the tender took the men off in the morning it was to the accompaniment of a great roar of ‘Baa! Baa!’ as a parting shot.

The remainder of the Crown Prince Americans were transferred to the Bahama on October 15, 1814. Here they found 300 of their countrymen of the vicious, baser sort, gamblers all, and without any men of influence to order them. Danes occupied the main deck and Americans the lower. Jail fever had played havoc among Danes and Americans—no less than 84 of the latter being buried in the marshes in three months.

Next to the Bahama lay the Belliqueux hulk, full of harmless and dull Scandinavians, so that the captain thereof, having nothing to do in his own ship, started to spy upon the doings 91aboard the Bahama, and succeeded in getting a marine punished for smuggling liquor. Next day, the rations were fish and potatoes. The Americans collected all their potatoes, and watched for the appearance of the Belliqueux commander for his spying promenade on his quarter deck, the result being that when he did appear, he was greeted with such a hail of potatoes that he was fain to beat an undignified retreat. Soon he came off in his boat to complain to Commander Wilson of the Bahama of his treatment. Wilson, a passionate, hot-tempered, but just and humane man, said he was very sorry, but could do nothing, so back the discomfited officer had to go, pelted with more potatoes and some coals. Said Wilson: ‘These Americans are the sauciest dogs I ever saw; but d—n me if I can help liking them, nor can I ever hate men who are so much like ourselves.’

In October 1814 two hundred Americans were sent to Plymouth, where they were at once boarded by an army of loose women.

With Waterhouse’s experiences at Dartmoor I deal in the chapter devoted to that prison.

Under this heading are included various reminiscences of, and particulars about, the prison ships which could not be conveniently dealt with in the foregoing chapters.

In April 1759 five French prisoners from the Royal Oak hulk at Plymouth were executed at Exeter for the murder of Jean Maneaux, who had informed the agent that his comrades had forged passports in order to facilitate their escape to France. Finding this out, they got Maneaux into an obscure corner of the ship, tied him to a ringbolt, and gave him sixty lashes with a rope to the end of which was fastened an iron thimble as thick as a man’s wrist. He got loose, and fell back; they jumped on him till they broke his neck, then cut his body into small pieces, and conveyed them through a waste pipe overboard. The next day twenty-seven prisoners were arrested, and one of them pointed out the actual murderers.

In 1778 two prisoners escaped from the San Rafael at Plymouth, swam off to a lighter full of powder, overpowered the man in charge, ran down through all the ships in Hamoaze, round Drake’s Island, and got safely away to France, where they sold the powder at a handsome price.

Even more daring was the deed of eleven Frenchmen who, early in the morning of April 7, 1808, made their escape from the hulk Vigilant at Portsmouth, by cutting a hole, and swimming to the Amphitrite, a ship in ordinary, fitted up as the abode of the Superintendent Master. They boarded a boat, hanging on the davits, clothed themselves in the greatcoats of the boat’s crew, lowered her, and in the semi-darkness pulled away to the Master Attendant’s buoy boat, one of the finest unarmed crafts in the harbour, valued at £1,000. They boarded her, immediately got under way at about five a.m., 93and successfully navigated her to Havre, or Cherbourg, which they reached in the evening, and sold her for £700. She was fitted out, armed with eight six-pounders, and went forth as a privateer under the name of Le Buoy Boat de Portsmouth. Her career, however, was short, for in November she was captured by the Coquette.

The above-mentioned prison ship Vigilant seems to have hardly deserved her name, for in the year 1810 alone no less than thirty-two prisoners escaped from her, and of these only eight were recaptured.

On another occasion three prisoners escaped from a hulk, got a small skiff, rowed to Yantlett Creek, where they boarded a fishing-smack of which the master and boy were asleep. The master made a stout resistance and called on the boy to help him, but he was too terrified to do so. The master was overpowered and severely beaten, and then managed to jump overboard. The Frenchmen got off, taking the boy with them.

The Sampson at Chatham was evidently an ill-omened ship. It was on board her that occurred the disastrous event of May 31, 1811, when the half-starved prisoners, upon being docked of half their rations for the misdeeds of a few of their number, broke out into open mutiny, which was only quelled at the cost of six prisoners being killed and a great many wounded. On the Sampson, also, was fought a particularly terrible duel in 1812. Two prisoners quarrelled and determined to settle their difference quietly. So, attended only by their seconds, they betook themselves to the ordinary ship prison, which happened to be empty, and, armed with sticks to which scissor-blades had been fastened, fought. One of them received a mortal thrust in the abdomen, but, although his bowels were protruding, he continued to parry his opponent’s blows until he was exhausted. He died in spite of the surgeon’s attentions.

On board the same ship in 1813, three prisoners decided to murder the master’s mate and the sergeant of marines—men universally detested for their brutal behaviour—and drew lots as to who should do it. The lot fell upon Charles Manseraux. But he had ‘compunction of conscience’ because 94the sergeant was a married man with a family. However, he had to kill some one, and fixed on a private of the Marines. He took the opportunity when the unfortunate man was doing duty on the fo’c’sle and drove a knife into his back. Another prisoner saw the deed done, knocked Manseraux down and secured him. Manseraux and the others were tried at the Maidstone Assizes, found guilty, and executed.

Duelling and crimes of violence seem to have been rampant on certain ships more than on others. The San Damaso at Portsmouth was one of these, although on the Chatham hulks the unnatural deaths were so frequent that the Coroner of Rochester in 1812 claimed special fees from the Transport Office on account of the trebling of his duties, a claim which was not granted.

A very bold attempt at escape in broad daylight was made by some desperate prisoners of the Canada hulk at Chatham in 1812. Beef was being hoisted on board the prison ship from a lighter alongside, on board of which were half a dozen American prisoners who were assisting in the operation. Suddenly, they cut the painter, and, helped by a stiff breeze, actually sailed off, and, although the guards on all the prison ships fired at them, would have escaped if they had not run aground off Commodore’s Hard, Gillingham. They sprang ashore here, and ran, but the mud was too much for them and they were captured.

The Americans, whether ashore or afloat, were the hardest prisoners to guard of any. They seem never to have relaxed in their plans and attempts to escape, and as they were invariably better supplied with money than Frenchmen and Spaniards, they could add the power of the bribe to the power which knowledge of their captors’ language gave them. Hence no estimate can be formed of the real number of Americans who got away from the hulks, for, although a very exact system of roll call was in use, the ingenuity of the Americans, immensely backed by their purses, contrived matters so that not merely were the numbers on board always complete at each roll call, but upon more than one occasion, by some over-exercise of ingenuity, the captain of a hulk actually found himself commanding more prisoners than there were!

95By way of relief to the monotony of this guerre à outrance between captors and captives we may quote instances when the better humanity of the hapless ones came to the fore.

In 1812 a prisoner made an attempt to set the hulk Ganges on fire at Plymouth, and a large hole was burned in her side. The other prisoners helped to extinguish the flames, and were so angry with the incendiary that they were with difficulty prevented from tearing him to pieces.

Three officers of the Inverness Militia were sailing in the harbour at Portsmouth in the same year, when a squall upset their boat, and they were thrown into the water. One of the officers could not swim, and seeing him struggling for life, a French prisoner on the Crown hulk at once sprang overboard and brought him safely to the ship. He was at once liberated and returned to France.

But even heroism became a cloak for trickery among these weary, hopeless, desperate exiles ever on the watch for a chance of escaping. In 1810 a French prisoner at Plymouth obtained his freedom by saving a British sentry from drowning, but the number of British sentries who, after this, met with accidents which tumbled them overboard, and the unfailing regularity with which heroic prisoner-rescuers appeared on the scene, awakened the suspicions of the authorities, who found out that these occurrences were purely commercial transactions. So they stopped automatically.

It is equally pleasing to come across, in this continually dreary record of crime and misery, a foreign testimony to English kindness. The following letter was kindly lent to me by Mr. J. E. Mace, of Tenterden, Kent, to whose grandfather it was addressed:

In 1807, as a consequence of the bombardment of Copenhagen and the subsequent surrender to England of the Danish fleet, there were 1,840 Danish prisoners in England, who received double the allowance of French prisoners, inasmuch as they were rather hostages than prisoners—hostages for the good behaviour of Denmark as regards Napoleon;—the captain of a man-of-war got four shillings per diem, a commanding officer two shillings, the captain of an Indiaman three shillings, and so on. In other respects they were treated as prisoners of war.

These Danes were largely taken from the hulks to man our merchant navy, and one Wipperman, a Danish clerk on H.M.S. Utile, seems to have made this transfer business a very profitable one, until the accusation brought against him by a Danish prisoner of war of having obtained a watch and some money under false pretences, brought to light the fact that his men rarely if ever joined the British merchant service except to desert at the first opportunity, and generally went at large as free men. He was severely punished, and his exposure brought to an end an extensive crimping system by which hundreds of dangerous foreigners had been let loose from the prison ships, many of them spies and escape-aiders.

Foreign writers have included among their various complaints against the British Government its reluctance to allow religious ministration among the prisoners of war. But the Transport Office, as we shall see later, had learned by experience that the garb of sanctity was by no means always the guarantee of sanctity, and so when in 1808 a Danish parson applied to be allowed on the prison ships at Chatham, he got his permission only on the condition that ‘he does not repeat, the old offence of talking upon matters unconnected with his mission and so cause much incorrect inferences’—a vague expression which 97probably meant talking about outside affairs to prisoners, who had no other source of information.

In 1813 the Transport Office replied to the Bishop of Angoulême, who requested that a priest named Paucheron might minister on the prison ships at Chatham, that they could not accede inasmuch as Paucheron had been guilty ‘of highly improper conduct in solemnizing a marriage between a prisoner of war and a woman in disguise of a man’.

In no branch of art did French prisoners show themselves more proficient than in that of forgery, and, although when we come to treat of the prisons ashore we shall find that, from the easier accessibility to implements there, the imitation of passports and bank notes was more perfectly effected than by the prisoners on the hulks, the latter were not always unsuccessful in their attempts.

In 1809 Guiller and Collas, two prisoners on El Firme at Plymouth, opened negotiations with the captain’s clerk to get exchanged to the Généreux, telling him what their object was and promising a good reward. He pretended to entertain their proposals, but privately told the captain. Their exchange was effected, and their ally supplied them with paper, ink, and pencils of fine hair, with which they imitated notes of the Bank of England, the Naval and Commercial Bank, and an Okehampton Bank. Not having the official perforated stamp, they copied it to perfection by means of smooth halfpennies and sail-makers’ needles. When all was ready, the clerk gave the word to the authorities, and the clever rascals got their reward on the gallows at Exeter in 1810, being among the first war prisoners to be executed for forgery.

In 1812 two French prisoners on a Portsmouth hulk, Dubois and Benry, were condemned to be hanged at Winchester for the forgery of a £1 Bank of England note. Whilst lying in the jail there they tried to take their own lives by opening veins in their arm with broken glass and enlarging the wounds with rusty nails, declaring that they would die as soldiers, not as dogs, and were only prevented by force from carrying out their resolve. They died crying ‘Vive l’Empereur!’

In 1814 six officers were found to have obtained their liberty by forged passports. These men were, in their own 98vernacular, ‘Broke-Paroles’—men who had been sent from parole places to prison ships, for the crime of forging passports. Further investigation caused suspicion to be fixed upon a woman calling herself Madame Carpenter, who was ostensibly a tea and sugar dealer at 46 Foley Street, Portland Chapel, London, but who had gained some influence at the Transport Office through having rendered services to British prisoners in France, which enabled her to have access to the prison ships in her pretended trade, although she was a Frenchwoman. I cannot discover what punishment she received. We shall hear more of her in the chapter upon Stapleton Prison.

A clever quibble saved the life of a prisoner on the San Rafael hulk at Plymouth. He was tried at Exeter for imitating a £2 note with indian ink, but pleaded that as he was under the protection of no laws he had not broken any, and was acquitted. This was before cases of murder and forgery were brought under the civil jurisdiction.

Well-deserved releases of prisoners in recognition of good actions done by them in the past were not rare. In 1808 a prisoner on the Sampson at Chatham, named Sabatier, was released without exchange on the representation of the London Missionary Society, who acted for Captain Carbonel of the famous privateer Grand Bonaparte, who had shown great kindness to the crew and passengers of the ship Duff which he had captured.

In the same year a prisoner at Plymouth, named Verdie, was released unconditionally on the petition of Lieut. Ross, R.N., for having kindly treated the Lieutenant’s father when the latter was a prisoner in France.

In 1810 a Portsmouth prisoner was unconditionally liberated upon his proving satisfactorily that he had helped Midshipman Holgate of the Shannon to escape from imprisonment in France.

Almost to the very last the care of sick prisoners on the hulks seems to have been criminally neglected. For instance, the In-letters to the Transport Office during the year 1810 are full of vehement or pathetic complaints about the miserable state of the sick on the Marengo and Princess Sophia hospital ships at Portsmouth. Partly this may be due to an economical 99craze which affected the authorities at this time, but it must be chiefly attributed to medical inefficiency and neglect. Most of the chief medical officers of the prison ships had their own private practices ashore, with what results to the poor foreigners, nominally their sole care, can be imagined, and all of them resented the very necessary condition that they should sleep on the ships.

In this year 1810, Dr. Kirkwood, of the Europe hospital ship at Plymouth, was convicted of culpable neglect in regularly sleeping ashore, and was superseded. As a result of an inquiry into the causes of abnormal sickness on the Vigilant and at Forton Prison, Portsmouth, the surgeons were all superseded, and the order was issued that all prison-ship surgeons should daily examine the healthy prisoners so as to check incipient sickness. I append the States of the Renown hospital ship at Plymouth for February 1814:

(The Romans above mentioned were the most degraded and reckless of the Dartmoor prisoners, who had been sent to the hulks partly because there was no power in the prison that could keep them in order, and partly because their filthy and vicious habits were revolting to the other and more decent prisoners.)

The horrors of the English prison ships were constantly quoted by French commanders as spurs to the exertions of their men. Bonaparte more than once dwelt on them. Phillipon, 100the gallant defender of Badajos, afterwards a prisoner on parole in England, reminded his men of them as they crowded to hurl our regiments from the breaches. ‘An appeal’, says Napier, ‘deeply felt, for the annals of civilized nations furnish nothing more inhuman towards captives of war than the prison ships of England.’

The accompanying drawing from Colonel Lebertre’s book may give some idea of the packing process practised on the hulks. It represents a view from above of the orlop deck of the Brunswick prison ship at Chatham—a ship which was regarded as rather a good one to be sent to. The length of this deck was 125 feet, its breadth 40 feet in the widest part, and its height 4 feet 10 inches, so that only boys could pass along it without stooping. Within this space 460 persons slept, and as there was only space to swing 431 hammocks, 29 men had to sleep as best they could beneath the others.

Something with an element of fun in it may serve as a relief to the prevalent gloom of this chapter. It has been shown how largely gambling entered into the daily life of the poor wretches on the hulks, and how every device and excuse for it were invented and employed, but the instance given by Captain Harris in his book upon Dartmoor is one of the oddest.

In justice to our ancient foe I give here a couple of extracts, for which I have to thank Mr. Gates of Portsmouth, from the Hampshire Telegraph, illustrative of generous behaviour towards Englishmen who had been forced to aid prisoners to escape.

In old Calais there is or was a Rue Tom Souville. No foreigners and not many Calaisiens know who Tom Souville was, or what he had done to deserve to have a street named after him. The answer to these questions is so interesting that I do not hesitate to allow it a chapter.

About the year 1785, Tom Souville, aged nine, was, in accordance with a frequent custom of that day, sent to England for the purpose of learning English in exchange for a little English boy who came over to France. He was quartered in the house of the Rev. Mr. Wood, of Dover, whose sailor brother took a great fancy to the little stranger, and made him his constant companion on cruises up and down the Channel, with the result that Tom Souville got to know the Channel coasts thoroughly, a stock of learning which he afterwards made use of in a fashion little dreamed of by the old salt, his mentor.

At Christmas 1786, after eighteen months’ happiness at Dover, he returned to Calais, and in obedience to his irresistible bent, joined the navy. In 1795, the Formidable, with Tom Souville on board, was taken by H.M.S. Queen Charlotte, off Isle-Croix, after a fight in which she lost 320 killed and wounded out of her complement of 717, and Tom with his Captain, Linois, of whom mention will be made later in this work, were taken to Portsmouth. Tom Souville refused to sign a parole form, so was put into the cachot of the Diamond hulk; but only for a short time, as he was soon exchanged. However, in 1797 he was again captured, this time on the Actif, and was confined on the Crown hulk.

Of life on the Crown he gives the usual description. He speaks of the prisoner professors (who were known as the 104‘Académiciens’) being obliged to give their lessons at night, as the noise during the daytime made teaching impossible. But as no lights were allowed ‘tween decks after a certain hour, they saved up the fat of their ration meat, and put it into an oyster-shell with a wick of cotton threads, fencing it round with clothes. Sometimes the air was so foul that the light went out. If they were discovered, the guards destroyed everything, books, paper, slates, pens, &c.

Souville mentions one thing I have not noticed in any account of prison-ship life, that there were French women on board, ‘de basse extraction et extrêmement grossières’.

He emphasizes the incapacity and brutality of the British doctors, and particularizes one Weiss (not a British name, one is thankful to note!) as a type. He says that the orthodox treatment of the prisoners from San Domingo, who were suffering from the vomito negro, was to plunge them into icy water!

A system of signalling and holding conversation between one prison ship and another was carried out by the carpenters, who had their benches on the upper deck, a regular alphabet being arranged by means of hammer knocks and shifting the position of the benches. He is the first also to mention that theatricals were performed on a prison ship; the pieces given being a two-act vaudeville, Les Aventures d’une voyageuse sensible, and a drama in five acts, La Fiancée du Corsaire. The orchestra consisted of a flute and a violin; the female dresses were lent by the ladies of Portsmouth and Gosport, who also came as spectators. But the chief amusement, he says, was to vex the authorities as much as possible, to call the captain, who had an inflated sense of his own importance, a mere turnkey, to make songs on him, and above all to play tricks at the roll call, so as to create confusion and bewilderment.

The attempts to escape were very frequent, and this in spite of a recent savage threat that for every prisoner who escaped two should be hanged. Souville describes a daring escape which inspired him to action. A cutter laden with powder was alongside one of the hulks, waiting for morning to discharge into the Egmont man-of-war. Lieutenant Larivière and four or five other prisoners managed to slip out 105of the Crown and board her. They found the crew fast asleep, tied and gagged them securely, and adopted their clothes. At daybreak they hoisted their sail, Larivière giving loud commands in English, and passed by the Egmont, waiting for her powder. She hailed them to stop, but they crowded on all sail, and although the alarm was signalled, and they were pursued, they crossed safely to Roscoff.

As Souville, when he refused to be put on parole, had openly declared that he would escape at the first opportunity, he was carefully guarded. Thanks to his excellent knowledge of English he made friends among the bluejackets of the guard, and especially with one Will, whom he had helped with money when his mother’s home was threatened to be broken up for debt.

So he started the delicate and difficult operation of boring a hole in the ship’s side, large enough to admit the passage of a human body, above the water line, yet not too near the grated platform running round the ship, continually patrolled by guards. He counted on Will’s aid, and confided his scheme to him.

The very next morning he was conducted to the Black Hole, and was informed that his design had been betrayed, and he instantly guessed that his supposed friend Will was the betrayer, as he alone was in the secret. Whilst in the cachot he found a mysterious note merely saying that at a certain hour on a certain day the high tide would be over the mud-banks which had proved fatal to so many fugitives from the hulks. In the cachot with him were three men who had successfully shammed madness in order to get sent to France, and who were about to be liberated. One of them, whose form of assumed madness had been to crow day and night like a cock, gave Tom a clue to a hole he had commenced to bore in the event of his sham madness failing.

Souville found the hole, finished it, and on the date named in the note slipped out, and started for a three-mile swim towards a light ashore. After much labour, he negotiated the mud-banks, and landed. Exhausted, he fell asleep, and was awakened by a man. He sprang to his feet and prepared to defend himself from arrest; but the man impressed silence, and pointed 106to a fisher-hut whence a light shone, evidently that to which he had steered at first, but of which he had lost sight during his long struggle in the water.

He entered the hut and found Will! The whole affair, the arrest, the cachot, and the mysterious note turned out to be Will’s plot, who explained that if he had not divulged the secret of Souville’s first escape-hole when it was known that he had discovered it, he would probably have got a thousand lashes at the triangles, and that to atone for it he had conveyed to the cachot the note which was the means of Tom’s escape.

No time was lost in completely disguising him, and he started. As he passed along the smuggler’s cliff path he heard the guns which proclaimed the escape of a prisoner. At 9 a.m. he passed Kingston, and got to Farlington on the Chichester road. Here he put up at a lodging house, replying to suspicious inquiries that he was from London, bound for an American ship coming from Dover. From here he took coach to Brighton, and in two days was at Dover. At Dover he waited two more days before he could find a neutral ship to take him across, and then quietly smuggled himself on to a Danish brig bound for Calais, and hid under a coil of rope on deck. Whilst here the Admiralty people came on board to search for fugitives, and one of them actually sat on the heap of rope under which he was. The brig sailed, and then, to the astonishment of the master and crew, Tom presented himself. At first the master was disposed to put back and give Tom up, for the penalties were heavy for harbouring escaped prisoners, but the promise of a handsome reward and Tom’s mention of influential friends overcame his scruples and Tom was safely landed.

He went home, got the money, of which he gave 1,000 francs to the skipper, 500 francs to the crew, and 500 to the fisherman who landed him.

Souville now started the privateering business which was to make him famous, and during the years 1806 and 1807 won for his Glaneur a reputation on both sides of the Channel. At Dunkirk he distinguished himself on shore by saving two lives from a runaway carriage which had been upset into the port. He then changed to the Général Paris, and made a number of rich captures, but on November 30, 1808, was captured off 107Folkestone by two corvettes and a cutter, and found himself on the Assistance prison ship at Portsmouth. On the Assistance he made so many attempts to escape that he was changed to the Crown. Here he met an old shipmate, Captain Havas, of the Furet privateer, but from policy they agreed not to let it be seen that they were friends, and they lost no time in setting to work with saws made of barrel-hoops, and bits of fencing foils for gimlets, to make a hole a square foot in size through the nine inches of the wooden ship’s side, and, to avoid the noise they made being heard, they worked while the English soldiers were scrubbing the decks.

By the beginning of January 1809 the hole was ready. January 9 was a suitable day for this project, being foggy, and the only obstacle was the bitter cold of the water. They had saved up rum, and grease wherewith to rub themselves, and had a compass, a knife, a flask for the rum, and a waterproof fishing-basket to hold a change of clothes. At midnight they opened the hole; Havas slipped out, and Souville followed, but in doing so made a slight noise, but enough to attract the notice of the sentry. They swam away amidst a storm of bullets fired at random in the fog and darkness. Souville was soon caught by one of the boats which at the first alarm had put out from all the hulks. Havas hung on to the rudder of a Portuguese ship under repair, and paused to rest. When all was quiet, he climbed up, boarded the ship, crept down to the hold, got under a basket, and, utterly worn out, fell asleep.

A cabin boy coming for the basket in the morning, at the appearance of a strange man under it was terrified and cried out. Havas rushed up on deck, but at the mouth of the hatchway was met by an English soldier who promptly knocked him down, and he was secured.

The adventurers got a month’s Black Hole, and when they were released found the precautions against escape were stricter than ever. In May 1809 the news came that all the prisoners taken at Guadeloupe were to be exchanged. Havas and Souville determined to profit by the opportunity, and bought two turns of exchange from soldiers, with the idea of getting away as Guadeloupe prisoners. But, in order to pass the sentry it was necessary that they should have the appearance 108of having served in the tropics, so they had ‘to make themselves up’, with false moustaches and stained faces. This was effected, and at the signal of departure the two adventurers joined the Guadeloupe contingent and were taken ashore. But on the jetty stood Captain Ross, of the Crown, scrutinizing the prisoners.

‘You didn’t expect me here, my man,’ said he to Havas, at the same time taking hold of his moustache, which came off in his hand. ‘Never mind; although I am in duty bound to take you before Commodore Woodriff, I’ll ask him to let you off; if I don’t you’ll sink my ship with your eternal hole-boring through her!’

He meant what he said, for, although somewhat of a martinet (so says the biographer of Souville—Henri Chevalier), he was a good fellow at heart, but Woodriff, who had been in command at Norman Cross in 1797, was of another disposition: ‘un de ces moroses Anglais dont l’air sombre cache un caractère plus dur encore que sévère.’ He refused Ross’s request, and even admonished him for laxity of vigilance, and so our friends were sent back to the Crown, and got another month’s cachot. Then they were separated, Havas being sent to the Suffolk and Tom Souville to the Vengeance. Six uneventful months passed; then the prisoners of the Suffolk and Vengeance were transferred to the San Antonio, and Havas and Souville were re-united, and took into partnership Étienne Thibaut. The commander of the San Antonio was an affable Scot with a soft heart towards his prisoners. He took a fancy to Havas, often chatted with him, and at last engaged him as a French teacher. Captain B. had a pretty wife, ‘belle en tout point, blonde, grande, svelte et gracieuse,’ and a charming little girl, possessing ‘de bonnes joues roses, de grands yeux bleus, et des cheveux dorés à noyer sa tête si un ruban ne les eût captivés sur son cou; enfant pétulante et gaie, fraîche comme une fleur, vive comme un oiseau’.

Havas makes friends with the child, but aims at the favour of the mother. Being a dashing, attractive, sailor-like fellow, he succeeds, and moves her sympathy for his fate. Finally Mrs. B. promises that he shall go with her to a French theatrical performance ashore, as her husband rarely quits the 109ship except on duty. So they go, one fine spring day, she and Havas, and a Scots Captain R. with them to save appearances, first to the hulk Veteran where they learn that the play, to be acted in Portchester Castle, will be Racine’s Phèdre, and that it will commence at 4 p.m.

They attended the play. An old caulker played Theseus, Phèdre was presented by a novice, and Hippolyte by a top-man, which probably means that it was ludicrous. After the play, Captain R. went into the town, leaving Havas and Mrs. B. to enjoy a beautiful springtime walk together, winding up with refreshments in an arbour which Mrs. B. had engaged. All this time, however, Havas was not so intoxicated with the delightful novelty of a tête-à-tête walk with a pretty Englishwoman on a lovely day in a fair country, as not to be making mental notes of the local geography.

During the long continuance of the fine weather, which was all against their project, the three men made preparations for escape, and particularly in the manufacture of wooden skates for use over the two great mud-banks which separated the hulks from the shore, and which had always been fatal obstacles to escaping prisoners. At length the long-looked-for change in the weather came, and at 1 a.m. on a wild, stormy morning Havas and Souville got off (in the French original I find no allusion to Thibaut), well furnished with necessaries, including complete suits of stylish clothing! Once they were challenged, but the uproar of the storm saved them, and, moreover, the sea, even in the land-locked part, was so high that the sentries had been withdrawn from the external gallery. It was a hard struggle, but they reached the first mud-spit safely, got over it on their skates, swam another bit, and at the second mud-bank had to rest, as Souville was taken with a sudden vertigo. Finally, after three terrible hours of contest with wind and wave, they landed. Thence they made their way into the fields, washed and scraped the mud off, and with the stylish clothes transformed themselves, as the account says, into ‘elegants’.

For four hours they walked until they struck the London road, along which they tramped for an hour, that is until about 10 a.m., and breakfasted at an inn. At 3 p.m. they reached 110Petersfield, went boldly to the best hotel, dined as became gentlemen of their appearance, and ordered a post-chaise to be ready to take them to Brighton at 4 a.m.

They were three days on the journey to Brighton! Souville’s admirable English was their protection, and the only inconvenience they experienced was from the remarks of people who contrasted their elegant appearance with the small amount of luggage they carried, consisting of a pocket-handkerchief containing their belongings.

They arrived at Brighton at 10 a.m. on a Sunday morning. The Duke of York had arrived there to review the troops assembled at Brighton Camp on account of Bonaparte’s threatened invasion, so that the town was crowded with soldiers and visitors, accommodation was not to be had, and no chance of sailing to France was likely to be offered. So they decided to walk on to Hastings, a risky proceeding, as the country swarmed with soldiers. They walked for a day and a half, and then resolved to drive. For the night they had lodged at an inn which was full of soldiers, all of whom were incited by rewards to look out for spies, so they shut themselves in their room with food and two bottles of port, and busied themselves with mending and furbishing up the elegant clothes, which were beginning to show signs of wear and tear. The next day they left by coach; their fellow passengers included a faded lady of thirty, a comédienne, so she said, with whom Souville soon became on such excellent terms that she gave him her address at Hastings, and on the next day he went for a pleasant walk with her, noting carefully the lie of the country and looking out for a suitable boat on the beach in which to get over to France. Boats in plenty there were; but, in accordance with the Admiralty circular, inspired by the frequent appropriations of boats by escaping foreigners, from all of them masts, oars, and sails had been removed. So our friends resolved to walk on to Folkestone. They reached the ‘Bay of Rice’ (Rye Bay?) and had to pass the night in the open, as there was no inn, and arrived at Folkestone at 6 p.m. the next day.

During these stirring times of war between Britain and France, the French privateers and the English smugglers found it to be to their mutual interests to be good friends, for not only 111were the smugglers the chief carriers of escaped French prisoners, many of whom were officers of privateers, but they were valuable sources of information concerning the movements of war-ships and likely prizes. In return the French coastal authorities allowed them free access to their ports for purposes of the contraband trade. During his career afloat Souville had done a good turn to Mr. J. P., an English smuggler captain living at Folkestone, and Mr. J. P. promised that he would requite this at the first opportunity. And so Tom determined to find him at Folkestone. His excellent English soon procured him J. P.’s address, and there the fugitives had a royal reception, dinner, bed, a bath the next morning, fresh clothes and a change of linen. At breakfast they read the news of their escape and of the big reward offered for their recapture in the local newspaper.

They spent five happy days under this hospitable roof, waiting for favourable weather, and for their host to procure them a suitable boat. This came about in due course, and after a farewell banquet, the party, consisting of Souville, arm-in-arm with Mrs. P., Havas with her sister, J. P., and three friends, proceeded to the beach, and at 9 p.m. Souville and Havas embarked for Calais, where they arrived after a good passage, and had an enthusiastic reception, for it had been reported that in escaping from the San Antonio, they had been engulfed in the mud-banks.

Tom Souville lost no time in resuming his privateering life, and continued to be most successful, amassing money and gaining renown at the same time, but in 1812, when on the Renard, having in tow a brig prize of 200 tons, he was again captured, and once more found himself on the Crown prison ship, in ‘Southampton Lake’. The Crown was still commanded by Ross—called in the original (which is in the form of an interview with Souville by Eugene Sue) ‘Rosa’, that being the sound of the name in French ears. Ross was a fine old fellow who had lost an arm at Trafalgar, but he hated the French. Ross, knowing Tom Souville’s fame, ironically conducts him personally over the Crown, pointing out all the latest devices for the prevention of escape, and tells Tom that he will have a corporal specially told off to ‘attend to him’. He offers to 112allow Tom to go ashore every day if he will give his parole not to attempt escape, but Tom refuses.

On the Crown Tom finds an old friend, Tilmont, a privateer captain, and they at once set to work on a plan for escape. One morning Captain Ross sends for Tom and quietly informs him that one Jolivet had sold him the secret of the hole then in the process of being cut by Tom and Tilmont, and as he tells him this they walk up and down the lower deck together. Whilst they are walking there is a great noise of tramping overhead. Ross asks what it is, and Tom replies that the prisoners are dancing. The captain calls an orderly and tells him to stop the dancing, ‘the noise is distressing to Monsieur here,’ he adds sarcastically. Tom is annoyed and begs he will allow the poor men to amuse themselves, but the captain is obdurate. Presently the noise ceases, and to Tom’s horror he hears in the ensuing silence the sound of Tilmont working away at the hole. However, it did not attract the captain’s attention. The truth was that the whole affair, the betrayal of the hole, the dancing on deck, and the interview with Captain Ross, was of Souville’s arranging. Jolivet got £10 10s. for betraying the secret, which he at once paid into the ship’s ‘Escape Fund’; he had made it a condition that Souville and Tilmont should not be punished; the dancing on deck was arranged to be at the time of the interview between the captain and Tom, so that the noise of Tilmont’s final touches to the work of boring the hole should be drowned.

A few days before this, one Dubreuil had attempted to escape, but had been suffocated in the mud-bank. On the morning after the interview above described, the bugle sounded for all the prisoners to be paraded on the upper deck. Here they found the captain and officers, all in full uniform, the guard drawn up with fixed bayonets, and on the deck in front of them a long object covered with a black cloth. The cloth was removed, and the wasted body of Dubreuil, with his eyes picked out, was exposed.

Souville was called forward.

‘Do you recognize the body?’ asked the captain.

‘Yes,’ replied Tom, ‘but it does not matter much. He was a bad fellow who struck his mother.’

113The horrible exhibition had been intended as a deterrent lesson to the prisoners in general and to Souville in particular, especially as it was known that he and Dubreuil had been lifelong acquaintances in Calais, but, as far as Tom was concerned, his reply sufficiently proved that it was thrown away on him, whilst among the other prisoners it excited only disgust and indignation.

Tom Souville’s escape was arranged for that same night.

It was quite favourable for his enterprise, dark and so stormy that the hulk rolled heavily. Tilmont made Tom take a good drink of sugar, rum, and coffee; the two men greased themselves all over thoroughly; round Tom’s neck was an eelskin full of guineas, in his hat a map of the Channel, in a ‘boussole’ tinder and steel, a knife in the cord of his hat, and a change of clothes in a little leather bag on his back.

Overboard he slipped (Tilmont’s name is not again mentioned, although he greased himself, so I presume he did not start. There are many instances of poor fellows, after much elaborate preparation, being deterred at the last moment by the darkness, the black depths below, the long swim, and the extreme uncertainty of the result). It was a hard, long struggle in the wild night, and throughout appeared the face of Dubreuil with its empty orbits before the swimmer. However, in two hours and a half he reached land. He rested for a while, cleaned the mud off, changed his clothes and started to walk.

In nine days he reached Winchelsea, walking by night and hiding by day, for this time his clothes were not of the ‘elegant’ style, and the land was full of spy-hunters. He went on to Folkestone, and rested by the garden wall of a villa in the outskirts. As he rested he heard the voice of a woman singing in the garden. At once he recognized it as the voice of a captain’s wife who had been of the merry party at J. P.’s house on the occasion of his last visit to Folkestone, called her by name, and announced his own. He was warmly welcomed, there was a repetition of the old festivities, and in due course he was found a passage for Calais, where he arrived safely. Once more he trod the deck of the famous Renard, and was so successful that he saved money enough to buy a cutter on his own account. He soon became one of the most famous Channel corsaires; and 114in addition a popular hero, by his saving many lives at sea, not only of his own countrymen, but of English fishermen, and in one case, of the crew of a British ship of war which had been disabled by foul weather.

Then came the Peace of 1814; and when, after Waterloo, friendly relationship was solidly established between the two countries, Tom Souville, only at home on the ocean, obtained command of the cross-channel packet Iris, which he retained almost up to the day of his death in 1840, at the age of sixty-four.

During the progress of the Seven Years’ War, from 1756 to 1763, it became absolutely necessary, from the large annual increase in the number of prisoners of war brought to England, that some systematic accommodation for prisoners on land should be provided. Some idea of the increase may be formed when we find that the number of prisoners of war in England at the end of 1756 was 7,261, and that in 1763, the last year of the war, it was 40,000.

The poor wretches for whom there was no room in the already overcrowded hulks were herded together wherever space could be found or made for them.

They were in borough jails—veritable hells on earth even when filled with native debtors and felons: they were in common prisons such as the Savoy and Wellclose Square in London: they were in hired and adapted strong houses such as the Wool House at Southampton, and the old pottery works in Liverpool, or in adapted country houses such as Sissinghurst in Kent, or in adapted farms like Roscrow and Kergilliack in Cornwall; or in barracks as at Winchester, Tynemouth and Edinburgh. Portchester Castle was but an adaptation, so was Forton, near Gosport, and the only place of confinement built as a prison, and kept exclusively for prisoners of war, was for a long time the Millbay prison at Plymouth.

In 1760 public attention was drawn to the ‘dangerous spirit’ among the French prisoners in England. Escapes were frequent, were carried out by large bodies of men, and in many cases were characterized by open acts of defiance and violence. Inquiries were made about places which could be prepared to accommodate, between them, from fifteen to twenty thousand prisoners of war. No place was too sacred for the prison-hunters. A 116report upon the suitability of Kenilworth Castle was drawn up by a Dr. Palmer, who concluded, ‘If the buildings are completed, some thousands of prisoners will be so accommodated as I flatter myself will reflect Honour on the British Nation.’

General Simon, we shall see later, was confined in Dumbarton Castle. The Royal Palace at Linlithgow only escaped conversion into a war prison by the exertions of Viscount Dundas, Lord of the Admiralty—a fact to which Sir Walter Scott thus alludes in Waverley:

So the business of searching for suitable places and of adaptation of unsuitable went on, the prisoners being of course the chief sufferers, which in that hard, merciless age was not a matter of much concern, and it was not until 1782 that a move in the right direction seemed to be made by the abandonment of the old evil place of confinement at Knowle, near Bristol (visited and commented on by Wesley in 1759 and 1760, and by Howard in 1779), and the transfer of the prisoners to the ‘Fish Ponds’ prison, better known later as Stapleton.

In 1779 Howard says, in his General Report upon the prisons on land, ‘The French Government made an allowance of 3d. per diem to Captains, Mates, sailing masters and surgeons; 2d. per diem to boatswains, carpenters, and petty officers generally, and 1d. per diem to all below these ratings (which is almost exactly the same as the allowances made by the British Government to its prisoners abroad). There is, besides, a supply from the same Court of clothes, linen, and shoes to those who are destitute of these articles; a noble and exemplary provision much to the honour of those who at present conduct public affairs in France.’

Howard found the American prisoners, except at Pembroke, clean and well clothed, thanks to liberal supplies from their 117own country as well as from England. He noted the care and assiduity of the ‘Sick and Hurt’ Office in London, and decided that England and France treated foreign prisoners very much alike on the whole.

In 1794 Charles Townshend wrote to the Earl of Ailesbury: ‘The French prisoners have their quarters in Hillsea Barracks (Portsmouth), find our biscuit and beef much better than their own, and are astonished at the good treatment they meet with. Most of them are very young, and were driven on board by the bayonet.’

I quote this as I am only too glad when I come across any record or evidence which can serve to brighten the dark dreary record of these chapters in our national history.

In 1795 there were 13,666 prisoners of war in Britain, of whom 1,357 were officers on parole; of the remainder the largest number, 4,769, were at Portchester Castle.

In 1796–7 the great dépôt at Norman Cross near Peterborough, to contain 7,000 prisoners, was built and occupied. In 1798, further inquiries were made by the Government for prison accommodation, as the inflow of prisoners was unceasing and ever increasing, the total for this year being 35,000. The advertised specifications give us an idea of the space then considered sufficient for prisoners. Besides accommodation for a garrison calculated at the proportion of one guard for every twenty prisoners, cells were required measuring eight feet by seven, and eleven feet high, for four or five prisoners, or rooms twenty-four feet by twenty-two to be divided into nine cells, and replies were received from Coldbath Fields, London, Liverpool, Manchester, Preston, Lancaster Castle, Shrewsbury, and Dorchester.

In 1799 Stapleton Prison, near Bristol, was to be enlarged so as to be ready in June 1800, for twice its then complement of prisoners.

In 1803 a very general impression was prevalent in high places that an invasion of England was imminent from Ireland with which the prisoners of war all over the country, but especially the Western counties, were to be associated, and so, at the request of Sir Rupert George of the Transport Office, a detailed report was drawn up by Mr. Yorke of the best means 118to be taken to guard against this. To this was appended a memorandum of the capacity and condition of various inland prisons, such as Manchester, Stafford, Shrewsbury, Dorchester, Gloucester, Coldbath Fields in London, and Liverpool.

In 1806 the great prison at Dartmoor, built to hold 6,000 prisoners, and thus relieve the dangerous congestion at Plymouth, was founded, but the first prisoners did not enter it until 1809. In 1811 a large dépôt was formed at Valleyfield near Penicuik on the Esk, about nine miles south of Edinburgh, which was gradually enlarged until at the Peace of 1814 it contained 10,000 prisoners.

So by this time, 1814, there were nine large prisons at Dartmoor, Norman Cross, Millbay, Stapleton, Valleyfield, Forton, Portchester, Chatham (where the present St. Mary’s Barracks were first used as a war-prison), and Perth, holding about 45,000 prisoners; there were about 2,000 officers on parole; the hulks at Portsmouth, Plymouth, and Chatham—about fifty ships—would hold nearly 35,000 prisoners, and the grand total would be well in excess of the largest number of war prisoners in Britain in one year, that is, 72,000 in 1814.

In 1812 the following notification was sent to the Admiralty, who evidently treated it seriously, as a copy of it was sent to the agents of all the war prisons in the country:

Three men, named La Ferre, Denisham, and De Mussy, were to land as American gentlemen, and to take charge quietly and unobtrusively. The head-quarters were to be near Liverpool, Hull, and between Portsmouth and Plymouth, whence these emissaries were to gain access to all the prisons, and prepare the minds of the inmates for the Great Event.

Nothing came of this, but the correspondence of the Transport Office reveals the fact that by one means or another a more 119or less regular correspondence was kept up between France and the prisons, and that there were concerned in it some very well known officers on parole, and even some Englishmen.

The captaincy of a war prison was no sinecure, and if history shows that one or two of the officers occupying the position were ill-fitted for it, assuredly they had no reason to complain of a lack of rules, regulations, and instructions from head-quarters, and they were called to order in no measured terms.

The care of the prisoners themselves, desperate, restless, cunning rascals as many of them were, seems to have bothered the agent much less than the care of those who were in any way associated with the working of the prison—the big and little officials, the officers and soldiers of the garrison, the contractors, the tradesmen, the workmen, the servants, the innkeepers, farmers, post-office officials, even the stage coachmen and guards, not to mention the neighbouring gentry, parsons and old ladies who, of course, knew very much better how to run a war-prison than did Captain Pressland, or Captain Cotgrave, or Captain Draper, or any other selected man.

Another fact which contributed to the irksomeness of the post was that although a naval captain was always the head of a war prison, and his turnkeys were generally of the same service, and he was the responsible head of the establishment, the guardianship of the prisoners was absolutely in the hands of the military authorities, who were therefore responsible for the safe-keeping of the prisoners. Any difference therefore between the naval captain and the military colonel as to the arrangement and disposal of the guards—and such differences were frequent—was sure to betray itself in the condition of the prison.

It may be easily understood that although it was the naval captain in charge of a prison who was held responsible for every escape of a prisoner, he would be pretty sure to put the onus of it on to the military commander, who, in turn, would be ready to attribute the mishap to anything but deficiency in the arrangement of sentries or to any slackness on the part of his men.

Take again the position of the war prisoner agent, as he was called, with regard to the numberless appeals to his humanity with which he was assailed. The period of the Great 120Wars was not characterized by hyper-sensitiveness on the score of human suffering and want, although I thoroughly believe that the men selected for the position of war prisoner agents were generally as kindly disposed and as sympathetic, as refined and well-bred Englishmen as could be in an age not remarkable for gentleness. It must be remembered that they had ever to be on their guard against ruse and stratagem.

A forcible illustration is afforded by the much vexed question of the religious condition of the prisoners. In 1798 the Bishop of Léon asked that French priests should be allowed to minister to the prisoners at Portchester and Stapleton, and, although it was notorious that by far the greater number of Frenchmen were not merely indifferent to religion, but avowed preachers of atheism, the permission was given, and the Abbés De La Marc and Pasquier were told off for duty. Later on, however, it would seem that the privilege thus accorded had been grossly abused, and the permission cancelled, for the Transport Office writes:

The bishop also applies to have a priest at Deal. The Transport Office refuses, saying that Deal is not a dépôt for prisoners, but only a receiving place, and there are no turnkeys and clerks, such ‘as the admission of an Ecclesiastic might render necessary’.

121In 1801, the same Bishop of Léon had the assurance to request the release of a French priest taken under arms. To this the Transport Office replied:

In 1808, the Bishop of Moulins was chaplain to the prisoners at Norman Cross, and, according to the Rev. Arthur Brown, author of a little book about this prison, devoted his life to the spiritual regeneration of the poor fellows in captivity, although Dr. Walker, of Peterborough, estimates the bishop somewhat differently.

At any rate, his boy attendant, a prisoner, was found guilty of breaking one of the prison rules by selling straw hats clandestinely made by the prisoners, and was ordered back into confinement. The bishop, who did not live in the prison, but was staying at the Bell, in Stilton, applied for another prisoner attendant, but was refused.

Again, in 1814, the British and Foreign Bible Society asked that the Transport Office agents should be allowed to distribute New Testaments among the prisoners at Stapleton and Norman Cross. The Office replied:

That the Transport Office were justified in their refusal is confirmed by an incident at the final embarkation of the French prisoners from the Perth dépôt in July of the same year, 1814. A considerable number of French Testaments were sent from Edinburgh to be distributed among the prisoners leaving for France. The distribution was duly made, but by the time the 122prisoners had reached the waterside, almost every man had sold his Testament for a trifling sum.

It cannot be doubted, I think, that the hardships endured by the prisoners in the war prisons were very much exaggerated, and also that to a very large extent the prisoners brought them upon themselves. Especially was this the case in the matter of insufficient food and clothing. Gambling was the besetting sin of the prisons, and to get the wherewithal to gamble the prisoners sold clothing, bedding, and not only their rations for the day, but for days to come. At Dartmoor the evil occasioned by the existence of the sale of rations by prisoners to ‘brokers’, who resold them at a profit, was so great that Captain Cotgrave, the Governor, in February 1813, sent a number of the ‘brokers’ to the cachot. To their remonstrance he replied, in writing, much as a sailor man he would have spoken:

The appeal was useless, and he issued a proclamation a month later, threatening to stop the markets if the practice was persisted in. This was equally fruitless. Charitable people pitied the poor half-naked prisoners in winter, and supplied them abundantly with clothing; but when the same men were pointed out to them a few days later as naked as before, and it was represented to them that by their well-meant benevolence they were actually encouraging that which it was most desirable to check, they refused to believe it. Hence it became necessary to punish severely. The most efficacious form of punishment 123was to put an offender’s name at the bottom of the list for being exchanged against British prisoners to be sent from France or whatever country we happened to be at war with. But even this had no deterrent effect upon some, and the frenzy for gain was so remarkable that in all the prisons there was a regular market for the purchase and sale of places on the Exchange List, until the Government stopped the practice. The most common form of punishment was putting offenders on short allowance. For making away with hammock, bed, or blanket, the prisoner was put on short allowance for ten days; for making away with any two of these articles he was docked for fourteen days; for cutting or damaging bedding or clothes, he had half rations for five days and had to make the damage good.

Acts of violence brought confinement in the cachot or Black Hole. A prisoner who wounded a turnkey was to be kept handcuffed, with his hands behind him, for not less than twelve hours, and for not more than twenty-four!

For murder and forgery the prisoners came under the civil law; death was the penalty for both, but until 1810 no prisoner-forgers, although convicted, had been punished with death in England, owing to a doubt in the minds of judges whether prisoners of war were answerable to municipal tribunals for this sort of offence, which is not against the law of nations.

Prisoners who were not mentally or physically gifted enough to earn money by the exercise of their talents or employment in handicraft, had other opportunities of doing so. For working about the prisons as carpenters, gardeners, washermen, they were paid threepence a day. As helpers in the infirmaries—one to every ten patients—they received sixpence a day. Officers recaptured after breaking their parole or sent to prison for serious offences were glad, if they had means, to pay prisoners threepence a day to act as their servants, and do their dirty work generally. At the same rate sweepers were engaged at the ratio of one to every hundred men; cooks, in the proportion of one for every 400 men, received 4½d. a day, and barbers earned 3d. a day. At Dartmoor some five hundred prisoners were employed in these and other ways, each man wearing on his cap a tin plate with the nature of his calling thereon inscribed. A necessarily rough estimate showed that nearly half of the 124inmates of the war prisons made honest money in one way or another; the remainder were gamblers and nothing else. Still, a very large number of the wage-earners were gamblers also. Of these various professions and trades much will be said in the accounts of the prison life which follow, and when comparisons are instituted between the versatility, the deftness, the ingenuity, the artistic feeling, and the industry of the French prisoners in Britain, and the helpless indolence of the British prisoners abroad, testimony is unconsciously given in favour of that national system by which men of all social grades, of all professions, and of all trades, are compelled to serve in the defence of their country, as contrasted with that which, until late years, deemed only the scum of the population as properly liable to military service.

About the Sissinghurst one looks on to-day there is little indeed to remind us that here stood, one hundred and fifty years ago, a famous war prison, and it is hard to realize that in this tranquil, picturesque, out-of-the-way nook of Kent, for seven long years, more than three thousand captive fighting men dragged out a weary existence.

Originally the splendid seat of the Baker family, and in the heyday of its grandeur one of the Kentish halting-places of Queen Elizabeth during her famous progress in 1571, it had far fallen from its high estate when, in 1756, Government, hard pressed to find accommodation for the annually increasing numbers of prisoners of war, leased it.

Of the ‘Castle’, as it came to be called, of this period, the gate-house, a line of outbuildings which were partially used as barracks for the troops on guard, and a few memories, alone survive. The great quadrangle has disappeared, but the line of the ancient moat, in parts still filled with water, in part incorporated with garden ground, still enables the visitor to trace the original extent of the buildings. Part of the line of ivy-clad buildings which face the approach are said to have been used as a small-pox hospital, and the name François may still be seen carved on the brick; the field known as the ‘Horse Race’ was the prison cemetery, and human remains have sometimes within living memory been disturbed therein.

Otherwise, legends of the prison linger but faintly in the neighbourhood; but from some of these it would seem that officer-prisoners at Sissinghurst were allowed out on parole. The place-name ‘Three Chimneys’, at a point where three roads meet, exactly one mile from Sissinghurst, is said to be a 126corruption of ‘Trois Chemins’, so called by the French prisoners whose limit it marked.

Wilsley House, just out of Cranbrook, a fine old residence, formerly belonging to a merchant prince of the Kentish cloth trade, now occupied by Colonel Alexander, is said to have been tenanted by French officers on parole, and some panel paintings in one of the rooms are said to have been their work, but I think they are of earlier date. The neighbouring Barrack Farm is said to have been the prison garrison officers’ quarters, and the house next to the Sissinghurst Post Office is by tradition the old garrison canteen.

The only individual from whom I could gather any recollections of the French prisoner days was an old farm labourer named Gurr, living at Goford. He told me that his great-grandfather, ploughing one day near the prison, suddenly saw three men creeping along a hedgerow close to him. Recognizing them to be Sissinghurst prisoners, he armed himself with the coulter of his plough and went up to them. The poor fellows seemed exhausted and bewildered, and went with him back to the Castle without offering any resistance, telling him on the way that they had got out by tunnelling under the moat with small mattocks. Gurr said that he had often dug up human bones in the meadow opposite the Castle entrance.

The following letter, I think, was written from Sissinghurst, but it may be from Portchester. I insert it here as in all contemporary correspondence ‘le château’ means Sissinghurst.

127On June 24, 1758, the following complaint was sent up:

At about the same date twenty-seven paroled naval officers at Cranbrook signed a complaint that they were not allowed by the one-mile limit of their parole to visit their crews, prisoners at Sissinghurst, two miles away, to help them in their distress and to prevent them being robbed by the English who have the monopoly of getting things for sale into the prison, notably the jailers and the canteen man, not to mention others. Also that the prisoners at Sissinghurst had no chance of ventilating their grievances, which were heavy and many:

Many of the letters from relations in France to prisoners at Sissinghurst are preserved at the Record Office. It is only 128from acquaintance with these poor tattered, blotted ebullitions of affection and despair that the modern Englishman can glean a notion of what confinement in an English prison of husbands, fathers, brothers, and lovers meant to hundreds of poor, simple peasant and fisher women of France. The breath of most of them is religious resignation: in a few, a very few, a spirit of resentment and antagonism to Britain is prominent; most of them are humble domestic chronicles blended with prayers for a speedy liberation and for courage in the meanwhile. There is nothing quite like these mid-eighteenth century letters in the correspondence of the succeeding great struggle, when the principles of the Revolution had penetrated to the homes of the lowliest. One sees reflected in it the simplicity, the childish confidence in the rightness and fitness of all in authority, and, above all, the deep sense of religion, which invested the peasantry of France with a great and peculiar charm.

During this year, 1758, the letters of complaint are many and pitiful, the chief subject being the non-delivery to prisoners of their letters, and the undue surveillance exercised over correspondence of the tenderest private nature. In 1760 the occupants of Sissinghurst received their share of the clothes provided by English compassion. Many of them were accused of selling these clothes, to which they replied that it was to buy necessaries or tobacco, or for postage, and added that they had been for a long time on half-rations.

On October 14 a desperate attempt to escape was made, and frustrated in an unnecessarily brutal manner. A prisoner named Artus, his brother, and other prisoners discovered a disused latrine. Into this they crept, broke through a brick wall by a drain, and reached the edge of the moat, and crossed it to the opposite bank close to the first of the three sentries on duty along it. This was at ten o’clock on a moonlight night. Two of the prisoners passed the first and second sentries and got some way into the fields. Artus and his brother were to follow, and were crawling on hands and knees to avoid being seen. The first sentry, who was close by, did nothing, having probably been bribed; but the other two sentries, being alarmed by a fourth sentry, who was on the right hand of the first, ran up and challenged Artus, who cried: ‘Don’t fire! 129Surrender!’ But the sentry disregarded this, wounded him in two places on the arm, tearing his waistcoat, and then fired at him point blank, blowing off half his head. Artus’s brother, three yards behind, was secured by a drummer who was armed with nothing but a drumstick, thus proving the utterly unnecessary killing of Artus. Two other prisoners were captured later in the drain, ready to come out.

In the Annual Register we read that on Saturday, July 16, 1760, the alarm was given that a thousand prisoners had broken out of the Castle and were abroad in the country. ‘To arms’ was beaten immediately. ‘You would have been pleased to see with what readiness and alacrity the Surrey Militia here, universally, officers and men, advanced towards the place of danger’, says the correspondent, ‘I say, “towards,” because when they got as far as Milkhouse Street, the alarm was discovered to be a mistake. Many of the townspeople and countrymen joined them.’

On one Sunday morning in 1761 the good people of Cranbrook were sent flying out of church by the news that the Sissinghurst prisoners had broken out and were scouring the country fully armed, but this also was a false alarm.

It was from the top of the still standing gatehouse-tower that the deed was perpetrated which caused the following entry in the Cranbrook Register:

‘1761. William Bassuck: killed by a French prisoner.’ Bassuck was on sentry-go below, and the Frenchman dropped a pail on him.

In 1762 the misery of the prisoners at Sissinghurst culminated in a Petition to the Admiralty, signed by almost all of them, of so forcible and circumstantial a character, that in common justice it could not be overlooked, and so Dr. Maxwell was sent down to examine the charges against Cooke, the agent.

The Complaints and their replies were as follows:

(1) That the provisions were bad in quality, of short measure and badly served.

Reply: Not proved.

(2) That cheese had been stopped four ‘maigre’ days in succession to make good damage done by prisoners.

Reply: Only upon two days.

130(3) That prisoners had been put upon half allowance in the cachot or Black Hole for staying in the wards on account of not having sufficient clothing to leave them.

Reply: They were not put in the cachot, but upon half allowance for remaining in the wards during the day contrary to the Regulations. There was no need for them to lack ‘cloaths’.

(4) That they were put upon half allowance for appearing at a sudden muster without clothes.

Reply: This muster was ordered by the agent, Cooke, because he suspected the prisoners of embezzling clothes and of gambling them away.

(5) That the prisoners had been threatened with being deprived of their turn of Exchange for signing this Petition to the Board of Admiralty.

Reply: There was no foundation for this statement.

(6) That Cooke had refused to pay them for more than eighteen days’ work in carrying coals, although they were twenty-eight days.

Reply: In reality they had only worked for parts of these days, and had been paid for the work actually done.

(7) That Cooke showed no zeal for the welfare of the prisoners.

Reply: That there is no foundation for this statement.

(8) That they were ill-treated by the Militia guards.

This last complaint was the most serious of all, and the examination into it revealed a state of affairs by no means creditable to the authorities. Here it should be stated that on account of the great and constant demand made by the war upon the regular troops, the task of guarding the prisons was universally performed by the Militia—undesirable men from more than one point of view, especially from their lack of self-restraint and their accessibility to bribery. The following cases were cited. On November 28, 1757, Ferdinand Brehost, or Gratez, was shot dead by a sentry of General Amherst’s regiment. The sentry in defence said that he had had orders to fire upon any prisoners who did not take down the clothes they hung upon the palisades when ordered to.

It was adjudged that the sentry fired too precipitately.

131On the night of October 29, 1759, the prisoner Jacobus Loffe was shot dead in his hammock by a sentry.

In defence the sentry said that he called out several times for the prisoners to put out their lights. They refused and bid him fire and be damned. The evidence showed that all the prisoners were asleep, and that the light seen by the sentry was the reflection on the window of a lamp outside the building.

The same judgement as in the other case was given.

On July 11, 1760, two prisoners were shot by a sentry. John Bramston, the sentry, said in defence that a prisoner came too near the forbidden barrier, refused to keep off when ordered to, with the result that Bramston fired, killed him, and another prisoner further away.

Bramston was tried at Maidstone and acquitted, the jury finding that he did no more than his duty in accordance with the general orders at the Castle. Still, it came out in evidence that orders had been issued that sentries were not to fire if the object could be secured by the turnkey. Colonel Fairfax indeed ordered that sentries were not to fire at all. He had found out that Bramston was sometimes out of his senses, and he had discharged him from the service, but he was actually on duty after this affair, was found to have loaded his piece with two balls, and after the murder on the 11th had threatened to kill more prisoners.

On the same day two other prisoners were stabbed by sentries. In one case, however, a prisoner gave evidence in favour of the sentry, saying that he did not believe there was any intention to kill, but that the sentry being surrounded by a crowd of prisoners, pushed his bayonet to keep them at a distance for fear that they intended mischief.

It also came out that the soldiers were allowed to strike the prisoners with the flats of their sabres. This was now forbidden. Also that the soldiers abused the power they had of taking away the prisoners’ knives when they made improper use of them, and actually sold the knives thus confiscated to other prisoners. Also that the soldiers wilfully damaged forms and tables so that the prisoners should be punished.

The Commissioners of the ‘Sick and Hurt’ Office, in their summing up of Dr. Maxwell’s evidence, said that, while there 132was no doubt much exaggeration by the petitioners, there was too much reason for complaint, and found that the person in charge was not so much to blame, but the ‘common centinels’, whose understanding did not enable them to distinguish between the letter and the meaning of their orders, and that this arose from the lack of printed standing orders. The officers of the guard had arbitrary powers independent of the agent, and the latter said when asked why he did not complain to the Board, that he did not care to dispute with the officers.

It will be noted that this inquiry was not held until 1762, that is to say, until seven years of tyranny had been practised upon these unfortunate foreigners, and seven years of nameless horrors suffered in forced silence. Small wonder that throughout the correspondence of this period Sissinghurst is spoken of with disgust and loathing.

The record of only one Sissinghurst prisoner marrying an Englishwoman exists—that, in 1762, of Laurence Calberte, ‘a prisoner among the French at Sissinghurst House’, to Mary Pepper.

I have to thank Mr. Neve of the Castle House, Sissinghurst, for his kindness in allowing me to have the photograph taken of some exquisite little articles made in wood by Sissinghurst prisoners, and also to reproduce a picture of the ‘Castle’, as it was when used as a prison.

After its evacuation at the Peace of Paris, in 1763, Sissinghurst Castle became a workhouse, and when it ceased to be used for this purpose gradually fell into ruin and was pulled down.

It is just as hard for the visitor to-day to the site of Norman Cross, to realize that here stood, until almost within living memory, a huge war-prison, as it is at Sissinghurst. Whether one approaches it from Peterborough, six miles away, through the semi-rural village of Yaxley, by which name the prison was often called, or by the Great North Road from Stilton—famous for the sale, not the manufacture, of the famous cheese, and for the wreck of one of the stateliest coaching inns of England, the Bell—we see but a large, ordinary-looking meadow, dotted with trees, with three or four houses on its borders, and except for its size, which is nearly forty acres, differing in no way from the fields around.

An examination of the space, however, under the guidance of Dr. Walker, does reveal remains. We can trace the great ditch which passed round the prison inside the outer wall; some of the twenty-one wells which were sunk still remain, and about thirty feet of the original red brick wall, built in the old ‘English bond’ style, is still above ground. As, with the exceptions presently to be noted, the prisons proper, with the offices pertaining thereto, were built entirely of wood, and were sold and removed when the prison ceased to be, nothing of it remains here, although some of the buildings were re-erected in Peterborough and the neighbouring villages, and may still be seen. The only war-time buildings remaining are the Prison Superintendent’s house, now occupied by Alderman Herbert, and the agent’s house, now belonging to Mr. Franey, both, of course, much altered and beautified, and one which has been variously described to me as the officers’ quarters and the Barrack Master’s residence. In the Musée Historique Militaire at the Invalides, in Paris, there is a most minutely and beautifully 134executed model of the Norman Cross Prison, the work of one Foulley, who was a prisoner here for five years and three months. Not only are the buildings, wells, palisades, pumps, troughs, and other details represented, but tiny models of prisoners at work and at play are dotted about, and in front of the chief, the eastern gate, a battalion of Militia is drawn up, complete to the smallest particulars of arms and equipment.

Not the least interesting relic of the prison days is the prisoners’ burial-ground at the lower end of a field sloping down from the west side of the Great North Road.

On July 28 of the present year (1914) a memorial to the prisoners of war who died at Norman Cross was unveiled by Lord Weardale. The idea originated with Dr. T. J. Walker and Mr. W. H. Sands, and was developed by the Entente Cordiale Society. The memorial is in the form of a stone pillar, surmounted by an eagle with outstretched wings, standing upon a square pedestal approached by steps, the lowermost of which is shaped like the palisading of the old prison, and faces the Great North Road, the burial ground being at the bottom of the field behind it. Upon the monument is inscribed:

One might expect to find at Yaxley Church, as in so many other places in England associated with the sojourn of war prisoners, epitaphs or registry entries of officers who died on parole, but there are none. All that Yaxley preserves of its old connexion with the war prison are the stone caps of the prison east gate piers, which now surmount the piers of the west churchyard entrance, and the tablet in the church to the memory of Captain Draper, R.N., an agent of the prison, which is thus lettered:

135The Rev. Arthur Brown, in his little book The French Prisoners of Norman Cross, says that the prisoners asked to be represented at his funeral, and that their petition concluded with the assurance that, mauvais sujets as some of them were, not one would take advantage of the liberty accorded them to attempt to escape. It is gratifying to know that their request was granted. Other relics of the prisoners, in the shape of articles made by them for sale with the rudest of tools and the commonest of materials, are tolerably abundant, although the choicest are to be seen in museums and private collections, notably those in the Peterborough Museum and in the possession of Mr. Dack, the curator. Probably no more varied and beautiful specimens of French prisoner work in wood, bone, straw, and grass, than these just mentioned, are to be found in Britain.

The market at which these articles were sold was held daily from 10 a.m. till noon, according to some accounts, twice a week according to others. It was important enough, it is said, to have dwarfed that at Peterborough: as much as £200 was known to have been taken during a week, and at one time the concourse of strangers at it was so great that an order was issued that in future nobody was to be admitted unless accompanied by a commissioned officer. Visitors were searched, and severe penalties were imposed upon any one dealing in Government stores, a Yaxley tradesman in whose possession were found palliasses and other articles marked with the broad arrow being fined heavily, condemned to stand in the pillory at Norman Cross, and imprisoned for two years.

In the year 1796 it became absolutely necessary that special accommodation should be provided for the ever-increasing number of prisoners of war brought to Britain. The hulks were full to congestion, the other regular prisons,—such as they 136were,—the improvised prisons, and the hired houses, were crowded; disease was rife among the captives on account of the impossibility of maintaining proper sanitation, and the spirit of revolt was showing itself among men just then in the full flush of the influences of the French Revolution. Norman Cross was selected as the site of a prison which should hold 7,000 men, and it was well chosen, being a tract of land forty acres in extent, healthily situated on high ground, connected with the sea by water-ways via Lynn and Peterborough; and with London, seventy-eight miles distant, by the Great North Road. Time pressed; buildings of stone or brick were not to be thought of, so it was planned that all should be of wood, surrounded by a brick wall, but this last was not completed for some time after the opening of the prison. The skeletons of the prison blocks were framed and shaped in London, sent down, and in four months, that is to say in March 1797, the labour of 500 carpenters, working Sundays and week-days, rendered some of the blocks ready for habitation.

The first agent appointed was Mr. Delafons, but he only acted for a few days previous to the arrival of Mr. James Perrot from Portchester, on April 1, 1797. The superintendent of the transport of the prisoners was Captain Daniel Woodriff, R.N.

On March 23, 1797, Woodriff received notice and instructions about the first arrival of prisoners. On March 26 they came—934 in number—in barges from Lynn to Yaxley, at the rate of 1s. 10d. per man, and victualling at 7d. per man per day, the sustenance being one pound of bread or biscuit, and three quarters of a pound of beef.

The arrivals came in fast, so that between April 7 and May 18, 1797, 3,383 prisoners (exclusive of seven dead and three who escaped), passed under the care of the ten turnkeys and the eighty men of the Caithness Legion who guarded Norman Cross.

138Complaints and troubles soon came to light. A prisoner in 1797, ‘who appeared above the common class of men’, complained that the bread and beef were so bad that they were not fit for a prisoner’s dog to eat, that the British Government was not acquainted with the treatment of the prisoners, and that this was the agent’s fault for not keeping a sufficiently strict eye upon his subordinates. This was confirmed, not only by inquiry among the prisoners, but by the evidence of the petty officers and soldiers of the garrison, who said ‘as fellow creatures they must allow that the provisions given to the prisoners were not fit for them to eat, and that the water they had was much better than the beer’. In spite of this evidence, the samples sent up by the request of the ‘Sick and Hurt’ Office in reply to this complaint, were pronounced good.

In July 1797 the civil officials at Norman Cross complained of annoyances, interferences, and insults from the military. Major-General Bowyer, in command, in his reply stated: ‘I cannot conceive the civil officers have a right to take prisoners out of their prisons to the canteens and other places, which this day has been mentioned to me.’

By July 18 such parts of the prison as were completed were very full, and in November the buildings were finished, and the sixteen blocks, each holding 400 prisoners, were crowded. The packing of the hammocks in these blocks was close, but not closer than in the men-of-war of the period, and not very much closer than in the machinery-crowded big ships of to-day. The blocks, or casernes as they were called, measured 100 feet long by twenty-four feet broad, and were two stories high. On the ground floor the hammocks were slung from posts three abreast, and there were three tiers. In the upper story were only two tiers. As to the life at Norman Cross, it appears to me from the documentary evidence available to have been more tolerable than at any of the other great prisons, if only from the fact that the place had been specially built for its purpose, and was not, as in most other places, adapted. The food allowance was the same as elsewhere; viz., on five days of the week each prisoner had one and a half pounds of bread, half a pound of beef, greens or pease or oatmeal, and salt. On Wednesday and Friday one pound of herrings or cod-fish was substituted for the beef, and beer could be bought at the canteen. The description by George Borrow in Lavengro—‘rations of carrion meat and bread from which I have seen the very hounds occasionally turn away’, is now generally admitted to be as inaccurate as his other remarks concerning the Norman Cross which he could only remember as a very small boy.

The outfit was the same as in other prisons, but I note that 139in the year 1797 the store-keeper at Norman Cross was instructed to supply each prisoner as often as was necessary, and not, as elsewhere, at stated intervals, with one jacket, one pair of trousers, two pairs of stockings, two shirts, one pair of shoes, one cap, and one hammock. By the way, the prisoners’ shoes are ordered ‘not to have long straps for buckles, but short ears for strings’.

On August 8, 1798, Perrot writes from Stilton to Woodriff:

During the years 1797–8 there were many Dutch prisoners here, chiefly taken at Camperdown.

William Prickard, of the Leicester Militia, was condemned to receive 500 lashes for talking of escape with a prisoner.

On February 21, 1798, Mr. James Stewart of Peterborough thus wrote to Captain Woodriff:

Two turnkeys were shortly afterwards dismissed for having conveyed large quantities of ale into the prison.

Rendered necessary by complaints from the neighbourhood, the following order was issued by the London authorities in 1798.

Constant escapes made the separation of officers from men and the suspension of all intercourse between them to be strictly enforced.

Perrot died towards the end of 1798, and Woodriff was made agent in January 1799. Soon after Woodriff’s assuming office the Mayor of Lynn complained of the number of prisoners at large in the town, and unguarded, waiting with Norman Cross passports for cartel ships to take them to France. To appreciate this complaint we must remember that the rank and file, and not a few of the officers, of the French Revolutionary Army and Navy, who were prisoners of war in Britain, were of the lowest classes of society, desperate, lawless, religionless, unprincipled men who in confinement were a constant source of anxiety and watchfulness, and at large were positively dangers to society. If a body of men like this got loose, as did fifteen on the night of April 5, 1799, from Norman Cross, the fact was enough to carry terror throughout a countryside.

Yet there was a request made this year from the Norman Cross prisoners that they might have priests sent to them. At first the order was that none should be admitted except to men 141dangerously ill, but later, Ruello and Vexier were permitted to reside in Number 8 Caserne, under the rule ‘that your officers do strictly watch over their communication and conduct, lest, under pretence of religion, any stratagems or devices be carried out to the public prejudice by people of whose disposition to abuse indulgence there have already existed but too many examples’.

That Captain Woodriff’s position was rendered one of grave anxiety and responsibility by the bad character of many of the prisoners under his charge is very clear from the continual tenor of the correspondence between him and the Transport Board. The old punishment of simple confinement in the Black Hole being apparently quite useless, it was ordered that offenders sentenced to the Black Hole should be put on half rations, and also lose their turn of exchange. This last was the punishment most dreaded by the majority of the prisoners, although there was a regular market for these turns of exchange, varying from £40 upwards, which would seem to show that to many a poor fellow, life at Norman Cross with some capital to gamble with was preferable to a return to France in exchange for a British prisoner of similar grade, only to be pressed on board a man-of-war of the period, or to become a unit of the hundreds and thousands of soldiers sent here and there to be maimed or slaughtered in a cause of which they knew little and cared less.

It is worthy of note that these increased punishments were made law with the concurrence, if not at the suggestion, of the French Agent, Niou, who remarked with respect to the system of buying and selling turns of exchange, ‘. . . une conduite aussi lâche devant être arrêtée par tous les moyens possibles. Je viens en conséquence de mettre les Vendéens (I am inclined to regard ‘Vendéens’ as a mistake for ‘vendants’) à la queue des échanges.’

The year 1799 seems to have been a disturbed one at Norman Cross. In August the prisoners showed their resentment at having detailed personal descriptions of them taken, by disorderly meetings, the result being that all trafficking between them was stopped, and the daily market at the prison-gate suspended.

Stockdale, the Lynn manager of the prison traffic between 142the coast and Norman Cross, writes on one occasion that of 125 prisoners who had been started for the prison, ‘there were two made their escape, and one shot on their march to Lynn, and I am afraid we lost two or three last night ... there are some very artful men among them who will make their escape if possible’.

Attempts to escape during the last stages of the journey from the coast to the prison were frequent. On February 4, 1808, the crews of two privateers, under an escort of the 77th Regiment, were lodged for the night in the stable of the Angel Inn at Peterborough. One Simon tried to escape. The sentry challenged and fired. Simon was killed, and the coroner’s jury brought in the verdict of ‘Justifiable homicide’.

On another occasion a column of prisoners was crossing the Nene Bridge at Peterborough, when one of them broke from the ranks, and sprang into the river. He was shot as he rose to the surface.

On account of the proximity of Norman Cross to a countryside of which one of the staple industries was the straw manufacture, the prevention of the smuggling of straw into the prison for the purpose of being made into bonnets, baskets, plaits, &c., constantly occupied the attention of the authorities. In 1799 the following circular was sent by the Transport Board to all prisons and dépôts in the kingdom:

This traffic, however, was continued, for in 1807 the Transport Board, in reply to a complaint by a Mr. John Poynder to Lord Liverpool, ‘requests the magistrates to help in stopping the traffic with prisoners of war in prohibited articles, straw hats and straw plait especially, as it has been the means of selling obscene toys, pictures, &c., to the great injury of the morals of the rising generation’.

143To continue the prison record in order of dates: in 1801 the Transport Board wrote to Otto, Commissioner in England of the French Republic,

In this year a terrible epidemic carried off nearly 1,000 prisoners. The Transport Board’s Surveyor was sent down, and he reported that the general condition of the prison was very bad, especially as regarded sanitation. The buildings were merely of fir-quartering, and weather-boarded on the outside, and without lining inside, the result being that the whole of the timbering was a network of holes bored by the prisoners in order to get light inside. In the twelve solitary cells of the Black Hole there was no convenience whatever. The wells were only in tolerable condition. The ventilation 144of the French officers’ rooms was very bad. The hospital was better than other parts of the prison. The report notes that the carpenters, sawyers, and masons were prisoners, a fact at once constituting an element of uncertainty, if not of danger. In December 1801 Woodriff found it necessary to post up an order about shamming ill in order to be changed to better quarters:

Generals Rochambeau and Boyer were paroled prisoners who seem to have studied how to give the authorities as much trouble and annoyance as possible. The Transport Board, weary of granting them indulgences which they abused, and of making them offers which they contemptuously rejected, clapped them into Norman Cross in September 1804. They were placed in the wards of the military hospital, a sentinel at their doors, and no communication allowed between them, or their servants, and the rest of the prisoners. They were not allowed newspapers, no special allowance was made them of coals, candles, and wood, they were not permitted to go beyond the hospital airing ground, and Captain Pressland, the then agent of the prison, was warned to be strictly on his guard, and to watch them closely, despite his favourable remarks upon their deportment. It was at about this time that the alarm was widespread that the prisoners of war in Britain were to co-operate with an invasion by their countrymen from without. General Boyer, at Tiverton in 1803, ‘whilst attentive to the ladies, did not omit to curse, even to them, his fate in being deprived of his arms, and without hope of being useful to his countrymen when they arrive in England’. Rochambeau at Norman Cross was even more ridiculous, for when he heard that Bonaparte’s invasion was actually about to come off, he appeared for two 145days in the airing ground in full uniform, booted and spurred. Later news sent him into retirement.

Extracts from contemporary newspapers show that the alarm was very general. Said The Times:

A suggestion was made that the prisoners should be concentrated in the prisons of London and neighbourhood, and some newspapers even echoed Robespierre’s truculent advice: ‘Make no prisoners.’

In 1804, in reply to another application that priests might reside within the prison boundaries, the authorities said:

The ever-recurring question as to the exact lines of demarcation to be drawn between the two chief men of the prison, the Agent and the Commander of the garrison, occupies a great deal of Departmental literature. We have given one specimen already, and in 1804 Captain Pressland was thus addressed by his masters in London:

In the same year a serious charge was brought against Captain Pressland by the prisoners, that he was in the habit of deducting two and a half per cent from all sums passing through his hands for payment to the prisoners. He admitted having done so, and got off with a rebuke. It may be mentioned here that the pay of a prison agent was thirty shillings per diem, the same as that of a junior post captain on sea fencible service—quarters, but no allowances except £10 10s. per annum for stationery. In 1805 the boys’ building was put up. At first the suggested site was on the old burial ground; but as it was urged that such a proceeding might produce much popular clamour, as well as ‘other disagreeable consequences’, it was put outside the outer stockade, north of the Hospital. It is said that the boys were here brought up as musicians by the Bishop of Moulins.

At this time escapes seem to have been very frequent, and this in spite of the frequent changing of the garrison, and the rule that no soldier knowing French should be on guard duty. All implements and edged tools were taken from the prisoners, only one knife being allowed, which was to be returned every night, locked up in a box, and placed in the Guard-room until the next morning, and failure to give up knives meant the Black Hole. Any prisoner attempting to escape was to be executed immediately, but I find no record of this drastic sentence being carried into effect.

From The Times of October 15, 1804, I take the following:

A little later in the year, on a dark, stormy Saturday night, seven prisoners escaped through a hole they had cut in the wooden wall, and were away all Sunday. At 8 p.m. on that day, a sergeant and a corporal of the Durham Militia, on their way north on furlough, heard men talking a ‘foreign lingo’ near Whitewater toll-bar. Suspecting them to be escaped prisoners, they attacked and secured two of them, but five got off. On Monday two of these were caught near Ryall toll-bar in a state of semi-starvation, having hidden in Uffington Thicket for twenty-four hours; the other three escaped.

One of the most difficult tasks which faced the agents of prisons in general, and of Norman Cross in particular, was the checking of contraband traffic between the prisoners and outsiders. At Norman Cross, as I have said, the chief illicit trade was in straw-plaiting work. Strange to say, although the interests of the poor country people were severely injured by this trade, the wealth and influence of the chief dealers were so great that it was difficult to get juries to convict, and when they did convict, to get judges to pass deterrent sentences. In 1807, for instance, legal opinion was actually given that a publican could not have his licence refused because he had carried on the straw-plait traffic with the prisoners, although it was an open secret that the innkeepers of Stilton, Wansford, Whittlesea, Peterborough, and even the landlord of the inn which in those days stood opposite where now is the present Norman Cross Hotel, were deeply engaged in it.

In 1808, ‘from motives of humanity’, the prisoners at Norman 148Cross were allowed to make baskets, boxes, ornaments, &c., of straw, if the straw-plaiting traffic could be effectually prevented. The manufacture of these articles, which were often works of the most refined beauty and delicacy, of course did not harm the poor, rough straw-plaiters of Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire; but the radius of its sale was limited, the straw-plaiting meant quick and good returns, and the difficulty to be faced by the authorities was to ensure the rightful use of the straw introduced. In 1808 there were many courts-martial upon soldiers of the garrison for being implicated in this traffic, and in each case the soldier was severely flogged and the straw bonnet ordered to be burned. It was no doubt one of these episodes which so aroused George Borrows ire.^[4] The guard of the coach from Lincoln to Stilton was put under observation by order of the Transport Office, being suspected of assisting people to carry the straw plait made in the prison to Baldock to be made into bonnets.

In 1809 Pressland writes thus seriously to the Transport Office:

149A large bundle of documents contains the trial of Barnes, Lunn, Browne, and others, for, in conjunction with bribed soldiers of the garrison, taking straw into the prison and receiving the plaited article in exchange. The evidence of soldiers of the guard showed that James, ostler at the Bell, Stilton, had been seen many times at midnight throwing sacks of straw over the palisades, and receiving straw plait in return, and also bonnets, and that he was always assisted by soldiers. Barnes had said that he would get straw into the prison in spite of General Williams or anybody else, as he had bought five fields of wheat for the purpose. He was acting for his brother, a Baldock straw-dealer.

The trial came off at Huntingdon on March 20, 1811, the result being that Lunn got twelve months, and the others six months each. It may be noted here that so profitable for dealers was this contraband trade in war-prison manufactured straw articles, that a Bedfordshire man, Matthew Wingrave, found it to be worth his while to buy up wheat and barley land in the neighbourhood of the great Scottish dépôt at Valleyfield, near Penicuik, and carry on business there.

As an instance of the resentment aroused by this judgement among those interested in the illicit trade, a Sergeant Ives of the West Essex Militia, who had been especially active in the suppression of the straw-plait business, was, according to the Taunton Courier, stopped between Stilton and Norman Cross by a number of fellows, who, after knocking him down and robbing him of his watch and money, forced open his jaws with savage ferocity and cut off a piece of his tongue.

In November 1807 a brick wall was built round Norman Cross prison; the outer palisade which it replaced being used to repair the inner.

In 1809 Flaigneau, a prisoner, was tried at Huntingdon for murdering a turnkey. The trial lasted six hours, but in spite of the instructions of the judge, the jury brought him in Not Guilty.

Forgery and murder brought the prisoners under the Civil Law. Thus in 1805 Nicholas Deschamps and Jean Roubillard were tried at Huntingdon Summer Assizes for forging £1 bank notes, which they had done most skilfully. They were sentenced to death, but were respited during His Majesty’s pleasure, and remained in Huntingdon gaol for nine years, until they were pardoned and sent back to France in 1814.

150From the Stamford Mercury of September 16, 1808, I take the following:

I shall deal later in detail with the subject of prisoners on parole, so that it suffices here to say that every care was taken to avoid the just reproach of the earlier years of the great wars that officer prisoners of war in England were promiscuously herded on hulks and in prisons with the rank and file, and it was an important part of Prison Agent’s duties to examine each fresh arrival of prisoners with a view to selecting those of character and the required rank qualifying them for the privileges of being allowed on parole in certain towns and villages set apart for the purpose.

In 1796 about 100 Norman Cross prisoners were out on parole in Peterborough and the neighbourhood. The Wheatsheaf at Stibbington was a favourite house of call with the parole prisoners, says the Rev. A. Brown in the before-quoted book, and this, when afterwards a farmhouse, belonged to an old man, born before the close of the war, who told Dr. Walker that as a child he had often seen the prisoners regale themselves here with the excellent cooking of his grandmother, the milestone which was their limit from Wansford, where they lodged, being just outside the house.

The parole officers seem to have been generally received with kindness and hospitality by the neighbouring gentry, and a few marriages with English girls are recorded, although when it became known that such unions were not recognized as binding by the French Government, and that even the English wives of Frenchmen were sent back from Morlaix, the cartel port, the English girls became more careful. Some of the gentry, indeed, seem to have interested themselves too deeply in the 151exiles, and in 1801 the Transport Office requests the attention of its Agent ‘to the practices of a person of some property near Peterborough, similar to those for which Askew was convicted at the Huntingdon Assizes’—which was for aiding prisoners to escape.

By the Treaty of Paris, May 30, 1814, Peace was declared between France and Britain, and in the same month 4,617 French prisoners at Norman Cross were sent home via Peterborough and Lynn unguarded, but the prison was not finally evacuated until August. It was never again used as a prison, but was pulled down and sold.

We have already become acquainted with General Pillet as a rabid chronicler of life on the Chatham hulks; we shall meet him again out on parole, and now let us hear what he has to say about Norman Cross in his book on England.

This veracious chronicler continues:

With reference to the medical attendance at Norman Cross, Pillet says:

With George Borrow’s description in Lavengro of the brutalities exercised upon the prisoners at Norman Cross by the soldiers of the garrison, many readers will be familiar. As the recollection is of his early boyhood, it may be valued accordingly.

In 1808 a tourist among the churches of this part of East Anglia remarks upon the good appearance of the Norman Cross prisoners, particularly of the boys—the drummers and the ‘mousses’. He adds that many of the prisoners had learned English enough ‘to chatter and to cheat’, and that some of them upon release took away with them from two to three hundred pounds as the proceeds of the sale of their handiwork in drawings, wood, bone and straw work, chessmen, draughts, backgammon boards, dice, and groups in wood and bone of all descriptions.

153In 1814 came Peace. The following extracts from contemporary newspapers made by Mr. Charles Dack, Curator of the Peterborough Museum, refer to the process of evacuation, Norman Cross Dépôt being also known as Stilton or Yaxley Barracks.

To these notes the late Rev. G. N. Godwin, to whom I am indebted for many details of life at Norman Cross, added in the columns of the Norwich Mercury:

154The Cambridge Chronicle gives a pleasant picture on May 6th: ‘About 200 prisoners from Norman Cross Barracks marched into this town on Sunday last ... they walked about the town and ‘Varsity and conducted themselves in an orderly manner.’

Although it was rumoured that the buildings at Norman Cross were to be utilized, after the departure of the war prisoners, as a barrack for artillery and cavalry, this did not come about. The buildings were sold in lots; in Peterborough some of them were re-erected and still exist, and a pair of slatted gates are now barn-doors at Alwalton Rectory Farm, but the very memories of this great prison are fast dying out in this age of the migration of the countryman.

On October 2, 1818, the sale of Norman Cross Barracks began, and lasted nine days, the sum realized being about £10,000. A curious comment upon the condition of the prison is presented by the fact that a house built from some of it became known as ‘Bug Hall’, which has a parallel in the case of Portchester Castle; some cottages built from the timber of the casernes there, when it ceased to be a war prison, being still known as ‘Bug Row’.

In Shelley Row, Cambridge, is an ancient timbered barn which is known to have been regularly used as a night-shelter for prisoners on their way to Norman Cross.

The following particulars about the great Dépôt at Perth are largely taken from Mr. W. Sievwright’s book, now out of print and obtainable with difficulty.^[5] Mr. P. Baxter of Perth, however, transcribed it for me from the copy in the Perth Museum, and to him my best thanks are due.

The Dépôt at Perth was completed in 1812. It was constructed to hold about 7,000 prisoners, and consisted of five three-story buildings, each 130 feet long and 30 feet broad, with outside stairs, each with a separate iron palisaded airing-ground and all converging upon what was known as the ‘Market Place’. Each of these blocks held 1,140 prisoners. South of the great square was a building for petty officers, accommodating 1,100, and north of it the hospital for 150 invalids. Both of these latter buildings are still standing, having been incorporated with the present General Prison. The sleeping quarters were very crowded; so much so, says Sievwright, that the prisoners had to sleep ‘spoon fashion’, (as we have seen on the prison ships), the turning-over process having to be done by whole ranks in obedience to words of command; ‘Attention! Squad number so and so! Prepare to spoon! One! Two! Spoon!’

Around the entire space was a deep moat, ten feet broad; beyond this an iron palisade; beyond this a wall twelve feet six inches high, with a sentry-walk round it. Three or four regiments of Militia were always kept in Perth for guard duties, which occupied 300 men. Many acres of potatoes were planted outside the prison. When peace was finally made, and the prison was emptied, the owners of these profitable acres were 156in despair, until one of them discovered the London market, and this has been kept ever since.

The first prisoners came from Plymouth via Dundee in August 1812. They had been lodged the first night in the church of Inchtore.^[6] ‘During the night’, says Penny in his Traditions of Perth, ‘the French prisoners found means to extract the brass nails and purloin the green cloth from the pulpit and seats in the Church, with every other thing they could lay their hands on.’ Penny seems to have exaggerated. One prisoner stole a couple of ‘mort cloths’. This so enraged his fellows that they tried him by court martial, and sentenced him to twenty-four lashes. He got seventeen there and then, but fainted, and the remainder were given him later.

The prisoners were 400 in number, and had some women with them, and were in tolerably good condition. A great many came in after Salamanca. They had been marched through Fifeshire in very bad weather. ‘The poor creatures, many of them half naked, were in a miserable plight; numbers of them gave up upon the road, and were flung into carts, one above the other, and when the carts were full, and capable of holding no more, the others were tied to the backs with ropes and dragged along.’

Kirkcaldy on the Forth was the chief port for landing the prisoners; from Kirkcaldy they were marched overland to Perth.

The first attempt at escape from the new Dépôt was made in September 1812, there being at this time about 4,000 prisoners there. A prisoner slipped past the turnkey as the latter was opening a door in the iron palisading, and got away. The alarm was given; the prisoner had got to Friarton Toll, half a mile away, but being closely pursued was captured in a wheat field.

One Petite in this year was a slippery customer. He got out of Perth but was recaptured, and lodged at Montrose on 157the march back to gaol. Thence he escaped by unscrewing the locks of three doors, but was again caught at Ruthven print-field, and safely lodged in his old quarters in Perth gaol. Shortly after he was ordered to be transferred to Valleyfield, and a sergeant and eight men were considered necessary to escort him. They got him safely as far as Kirkcaldy, where they halted, and M. Petite was lodged for the night in the local prison; but when they came for him in the morning, he was not to be found, and was never heard of again!

Here Sievwright introduces a story from Penny, of date previous to the Dépôt.

As a supplement to this, it is recorded that two of the original quarry were afterwards captured, but were released unconditionally later on, when one of them proved that he had humanely treated General Walker, when the latter was lying seriously wounded at Badajos, saved him from being dispatched by a furious grenadier, and had him removed to a hospital. The General gave him his name and address, and promised to help him should occasion arise.

In January 1813 three prisoners got off in a thick fog and made their way as far as Broughty Ferry on the Forth. On their way, it came out later, they stopped in Dundee for refreshment without any apparent dread of disturbance, and were later seen on the Fort hill near Broughty Ferry. In the evening they entered a shop, bought up all the bread in it and had a leather bottle filled with spirits. At nine the same evening they boarded Mr. Grubb’s ship Nancy, and immediately got 158under weigh unnoticed. The Nancy was of fifteen tons burden, and was known to be provisioned for ten days, as she was going to start the next morning on an excursion. The prisoners escaped, and a woman and two Renfrewshire Militiamen were detained in prison after examination upon suspicion of having concealed and aided the prisoners with information about the Nancy which they could hardly have obtained ordinarily.

This was on Thursday, January 21. On the night of Monday, 18th, a mason at the Dépôt, on his way from Newburgh to Perth, was stopped by three men at the Coates of Fingask on the Rhynd road, and robbed of £1 18s. 6d. The robbers had the appearance of farm servants, but it seems quite likely that they were the daring and successful abductors of the Nancy.

On January 21, 1813, there were 6,788 prisoners at the Dépôt. On the evening of February 22, 1813, seven prisoners bribed a sentinel to let them escape. He agreed, but at once gave information, and was instructed to keep up the deception. So, at the fixed hour the prisoners, awaiting with confident excitement the arrival of their deliverer, were, instead, found hiding with scaling-ladders, ropes, and all implements necessary for escape upon them, and a considerable sum of money for their needs. They were at once conveyed to the punishment cells under the central tower.

At Perth, as elsewhere, the prisoners were allowed to amuse themselves, and to interest themselves in the manufacture of various knick-knacks, toys, boxes, and puzzles, from wood, and the bones of their beef; of these they made a great variety, and many of them are masterpieces of cunning deftness, and wonderfully beautiful in delicacy and perfection of workmanship. They made straw plait, a manufacture then in its infancy in this country; numbers made shoes out of bits of cloth, cutting up their clothes for the purpose, and it is possible that their hammocks may have yielded the straw. It is said that after a time straw plait and shoes were prohibited as traffic. Some of the prisoners dug clay out of their court-yards and modelled figures of smugglers, soldiers, sailors, and women. The prisoners had the privilege of holding a market daily, to which the public were admitted provided they carried no contraband articles. Potatoes, vegetables, bread, 159soap, tobacco, and firewood, were all admitted. Large numbers of the inhabitants went daily to view the markets, and make purchases. The prisoners had stands set out all round the railing of the yards, on which their wares were placed. Many paid high prices for the articles. While some of the prisoners were busy selling, others were occupied in buying provisions, vegetables and other necessaries of food. Some of the prisoners played the flute, fiddle, and other instruments, for halfpence; Punch’s opera and other puppet shows were also got up in fine style. Some were industrious and saving; others gambled and squandered the clothes from their bodies, and wandered about with only a bit of blanket tied round them.

From Penny’s Traditions of Perth comes the following market trick:

Attempts to escape were almost a weekly occurrence, and some of them exhibited very notable ingenuity, patience, and daring. On March 26, 1813, the discovery was made of a subterranean excavation from the latrine of No. 2 Prison, forty-two feet long, and so near the base of the outer wall that another hour’s work would have finished it.

On April 4, 1813, was found a pit twenty feet deep in the floor of No. 2 Prison, with a lateral cut at about six feet from the bottom. The space below this cut was to receive water, and the cut was to pass obliquely upwards to allow water to run down. A prisoner in hospital was suspected by the others of giving information about this, and when he was discharged he was violently assaulted, the intention being to cut off his ears. He resisted, however, so that only one was taken off. Then a rope was fastened to him, and he was dragged through the moat while men jumped on him. He was rescued just in time by a Durham Militiaman.

On the 28th of the same month three prisoners got with false keys into an empty cellar under the central tower. They had provided themselves with ordinary civilian attire which they intended to slip over their prison clothes, and mix with the market crowd. They were discovered by a man going into the cellar to examine the water pipes. Had they succeeded a great many more would have followed.

On May 5, 1813, some prisoners promised a big bribe to a soldier of the Durham Militia if he would help them to escape. He pretended to accede, but promptly informed his superiors, who told him to keep up the delusion. So he allowed six prisoners to get over the outer wall by a rope ladder which they had made. Four were out and two were on the burial ground which was between the north boundary wall and the Cow Inch, when they were captured by a party of soldiers who had been posted there. The other two were caught in a dry ditch. They were all lodged in the cachot. It was well for the ‘faithful Durham’, for the doubloons he got were only three-shilling pieces, and the bank notes were forgeries!

In June three men escaped by breaking the bar of 161a window, and dropping therefrom by a rope ladder. One of them who had got on board a neutral vessel at Dundee ventured ashore and was captured; one got as far as Montrose, but was recognized; of the fate of the third we do not hear.

A duel took place between two officers with sharpened foils. The strictest punctilio was observed at the affair, and after one had badly wounded the other, hands were shaken, and honour satisfied.

About this time a clerk in the Dépôt was suspended for attempting to introduce a profligate woman into the prison.

The usual market was prohibited on Midsummer market day, 1813, and the public were excluded, as it was feared that the extraordinary concourse of people would afford opportunities for the prisoners to escape by mixing with them in disguise.

The Medical Report of July 1813 states that out of 7,000 prisoners there were only twenty-four sick, including convalescents, and of these only four were confined to their beds.

On August 15, 1813, the prisoners were not only allowed to celebrate the Emperor’s birthday, but the public were apprised of the fête and invited to attend a balloon ascent. The crowd duly assembled on the South Inch, but the balloon was accidentally burst. There were illuminations of the prisons at night, and some of the transparencies, says the chronicler, showed much taste and ingenuity. Advantage was taken of the excitement of this gala day to hurry on one of the most daring and ingenious attempts to escape in the history of the prison. On the morning of August 24 it was notified that a number of prisoners had escaped through a mine dug from the latrine of No. 2 prison to the bottom of the southern outer wall. It was supposed that they must have begun to get out at 2 a.m. that day, but one of them, attempting to jump the ‘lade’, fell into the water with noise enough to alarm the nearest sentry, who fired in the direction of the sound. The alarm thus started was carried on by the other sentries, and it was found that no fewer than twenty-three prisoners had got away. Ten of them were soon caught. Two who had got on board a vessel on the Perth shore were turned off by the master. One climbed up a tree and was discovered. One made an attempt to swim the Tay, but had to give up from exhaustion, 162and others were captured near the river, which, being swollen by recent rains, they had been unable to cross; and thirteen temporarily got away.

Of these the Caledonian Mercury wrote:

The four poor fellows in Forfar Jail made yet another bold bid for liberty. By breaking through the prison wall, they succeeded in making a hole to the outside nearly large enough for their egress before they were discovered. The only tool they had was a part of the fire-grate which they had wrenched in pieces. Their time was well chosen for getting out to sea, for it was nearly high water when they were discovered. Two others were captured near Blair Atholl, some thirty miles north of Perth, and were brought back to the Dépôt.

Brief allusion has been made to the remarkable healthiness of the prisoners at Perth. The London papers of 1813 lauded Portchester and Portsmouth as examples of sanitary well-being to other prisoner districts, and quoted the statistics that, out of 20,680 prisoners there, only 154 were on the sick list, but the average at Perth was still better. On August 26, 1813, there were 7,000 prisoners at Perth, of whom only fourteen were sick. On October 28, out of the same number, only ten were sick; and on February 3, 1814, when the weather was very severe, there was not one man in bed.

The forgery of bank notes and the manufacture of base coin was pursued as largely and as successfully at Perth as 163elsewhere. In the Perth Courier of September 19, 1813, we read:

It was publicly announced on September 16, 1813, that a mine had been discovered in the floor of the Officers’ Prison, No. 6, at the Dépôt. This building, a two-story oblong one, now one of the hospitals, still stands to the south of the General Prison Village Square. An excavation of sufficient diameter to admit the passage of a man had been cut with iron hoops, as it was supposed, carried nineteen feet perpendicularly down-wards and thirty feet horizontally outwards.

A detachment of the guard having been marched into the prison after this discovery, the men were stoned by the prisoners, among whom the soldiers fired three shots without doing any injury. At 11 o’clock the next Sunday morning, about forty prisoners were observed by a sentry out of their prison, strolling about the airing ground of No. 3. An alarm was immediately given to the guard, who, fearing a general attempt to escape, rushed towards the place where the prisoners were assembled, and, having seized twenty-four of them, drove the rest back into the prison. In the tumult three of the prisoners were wounded and were taken to the hospital. The twenty-four who were seized were lodged in the cachot, where they remained for a time, together with eleven retaken fugitives.

Next morning, on counting over the prisoners in No. 3, twenty-eight were missing. As a light had been observed in the latrine about 8 o’clock the preceding evening, that place 164was examined and a mine was discovered communicating with the great sewer of the Dépôt. Through this outlet the absentees had escaped. Two of them were taken on the following Monday morning at Bridge of Earn, four miles distant, and three more on Thursday.

A short time previous to this escape, 800 prisoners had been transferred to Perth from the Penicuik Dépôt, and these, it was said, were of a most turbulent and ungovernable character, so that the influence of these men would necessitate a much sterner discipline, and communication between the prisoners and the public much more restricted than hitherto. In the foregoing case the punishments had been very lenient, the market being shut only for one day.

Gradually most of the escaped prisoners were retaken, all in a very exhausted state.

Not long after, heavy rains increased the waters of the canal so that, by breaking into it, they revealed an excavation being made from No. 1.

In the same month three prisoners got out, made their way to Findon, Kincardineshire, stole a fishing-boat, provisioned it by thefts from other boats, and made off successfully.

Yet another mine was discovered this month. It ran from a latrine, not to the great sewer, but in a circuitous direction to meet it. The prisoners while working at this were surrounded by other prisoners, who pretended to be amusing themselves, whilst they hid the workers from the view of the sentries. But an unknown watcher through a loophole in a turret saw the buckets of earth being taken to the well, pumped upon and washed away through the sewer to the Tay, and he gave information.

Yet again a sentry noticed that buckets of earth were being carried from No. 6 prison, and informed the officer of the guard, who found about thirty cartloads of earth heaped up at the two ends of the highest part of the prison known as the Cock Loft.

On April 11, 1814, the news of the dethronement of Bonaparte reached Perth, and was received with universal delight. The prisoners in the Dépôt asked the agent, Captain Moriarty, to be allowed to illuminate for the coming Peace and freedom, 165but at so short a notice little could be done, although the tower was illuminated by the agent himself. That the feeling among the prisoners was still strong for Bonaparte, however, was presently shown when half a dozen prisoners in the South Prison hoisted the white flag of French Royalty. Almost the whole of their fellow captives clambered up the walls, tore down the flag, and threatened those who hoisted it with violent treatment if they persisted.

The guard removed the Royalists to the hospital for safety, and later their opponents wrote a penitential letter to Captain Moriarty. In June 1814 the removal of the prisoners began. Those that went down the river in boats were heartily cheered by the people. Others marched to Newburgh, where, on the quay, they held a last market for the sale of their manufactures, which was thronged by buyers anxious to get mementoes and willing to pay well for them. ‘All transactions were conducted honourably, while the additional graces of French politeness made a deep impression upon the natives of Fife, both male and female,’ adds the chronicler. It was during this march to Newburgh that the prisoners sold the New Testaments distributed among them by a zealous missionary.

Altogether it was a pleasant wind-up to a long, sad period, especially for the Frenchmen, many of whom got on board the transports at Newburgh very much richer men than when they first entered the French dépôt, or than they would have been had they never been taken prisoners. Especially pleasant, too, is it to think that they left amidst tokens of goodwill from the people amongst whom many of them had been long captive.

The Dépôt was finally closed July 31, 1814.

During one year, that is between September 14, 1812, and September 24, 1813, there were fourteen escapes or attempted escapes of prisoners. Of these seven were frustrated and seven were more or less successful, that is to say, sixty-one prisoners managed to get out of the prison, but of these thirty-two were recaptured while twenty-nine got clean away.

From 1815 to 1833 the Dépôt was used as a military clothing store, and eventually it became the General Prison for Scotland.

Of the thousands of holiday-makers and picnickers for whom Portchester Castle is a happy recreation ground, and of the hundreds of antiquaries who visit it as being one of the most striking relics of combined Roman and Norman military architecture in Britain, a large number, no doubt, learn that it was long used as a place of confinement for foreign prisoners of war, but are not much impressed with the fact, which is hardly to be wondered at, not only because the subject of the foreign prisoners of war in Britain has never received the attention it deserves, but because the interest of the comparatively modern must always suffer when in juxtaposition with the interest of the far-away past.

But this comparatively modern interest of Portchester is, as I hope to show, very real.

As a place of confinement Portchester could never, of course, compare with such purposely planned prisons as Dartmoor, Stapleton, Perth, or Norman Cross. Still, from its position, and its surrounding walls of almost indestructible masonry, from fifteen to forty feet high and from six to ten feet thick, it answered its purpose very well. True, its situation so near the Channel would seem to favour attempts to escape, but it must be remembered that escape from Portchester Castle by no means implied escape from England, for, ere the fugitive could gain the open sea, he had a terrible gauntlet to run of war-shipping and forts and places of watch and ward, so that although the number of attempted escapes from Portchester annually was greater than that of similar attempts from other places of confinement, the successful ones were few.

Portchester is probably the oldest regular war prison in Britain. In 1745 the Gentleman’s Magazine records the escape of Spanish prisoners from it, taken, no doubt, during the War of the Austrian Succession, but it was during the Seven Years’ War that it became eminent.

167In 1756 Captain Fraboulet of the French East India Company’s frigate Astrée, who appears to have been a medical representative of the Government, reported on the provisions at Portchester as being very good on the whole, except the small beer, which he described as being very weak, and ‘apt to cause a flux of blood’, a very prevalent malady among the prisoners. He complained, and the deficiency was remedied. Of the hospital accommodation he spoke badly. There was no hospital in the Castle itself, so that patients had either to be sent to Fareham, two miles away, where the hospital was badly placed, being built of wood and partly on the muddy shores of the river, or to Forton, which, he says, is seven miles off. This distance, he says, could be reduced, if done by water, but it was found impossible to find boatmen to take the invalids, the result being that they were carted there, and often died on the way. He also complained that in the hospital the dying and the convalescent were in the same wards, and he begged the Government to establish a hospital at Portchester. He says that he will distribute the King’s Bounty no more to invalids, as they spend it improperly, bribing sentries and attendants, and all who have free access and egress, to get them unfit food, such as raw fruit, salt herrings, &c. He will only pay healthy men. He has done his best to re-establish order in the Castle; has asked the Commissioners of the ‘Sick and Hurt’ Office to put down the public gaming-tables; to imprison those who gamble and sell their kits and food, and to stop the sale of raw fruit, salt fish, and all food which promotes flux of blood.

In 1766 Valérie Coffre quarrelled with a fellow prisoner, Nicholas Chartier, and killed him with a knife. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. He was attended by a Roman Catholic priest, was very earnest in his devotions, and was executed at Winchester, the whole of his fellow prisoners being marched thither under a strong guard to witness the scene. He was a handsome, well-built man of twenty-two.

In 1784 the Castle was properly fitted up as a War Prison. The ancient moat outside the walls, which during long years of neglect had become choked up with rubbish, was filled with 168water, and the keep was divided into five stories, connected with a wooden stairway at the side, and the entire Castle was arranged for the accommodation of about 8,000 prisoners.

In 1794 the prisoners captured in Howe’s victory of the ‘Glorious First of June’ were lodged in Portchester. One of the prizes taken, the Impétueux, took fire, and at one time there was danger that the fire would spread. The prisoners at Portchester were delighted, and danced about singing the Ça ira and the Marseillaise, but happily the ship grounded on a mud-bank, and no further damage was done.

In 1796 two prisoners quarrelled over politics, one stabbed the other to death, and was hanged at Winchester.

In 1797 the agent in charge complained that many Portsmouth people, under pretence of attending Portchester Parish 169Church, which stood within the Castle enceinte, came really to buy straw hats and other forbidden articles manufactured by the prisoners.

The inconvenience of the position of this church was further manifested by a daring escape which was made about this time. One Sunday morning, just as service had begun, the sentry on duty at the Water Gate saw three naval officers in full uniform come towards him from the churchyard. Thinking that they were British officers who had seen their men into church and were going for a walk, he presented arms and allowed them to pass. Soon after it was discovered that three smart French privateer captains had escaped, and without doubt they had contrived to get second-hand British naval uniforms smuggled in to them by soi-disant worshippers!

A comical incident is recorded in connexion with Portchester churchyard. A sentry was always on duty at an angle of the churchyard close to the South or Water Gate, where there was and still is a remarkable echo. Upon one wild, stormy night, this position was occupied by a soldier of the Dorset Militia, which, with the Denbighshire Militia, performed garrison duty at the Castle. Suddenly the man saw against the wall a tall, white figure with huge horns. He mastered up courage enough to challenge it, but the only reply was a distinct repetition of his words. He fired his piece, but in his agitation evidently missed his aim, for the figure bounded towards him, and he, persuaded that he had to do with the Devil, ran, and gave the alarm. Captain M., the officer of the guard, cursed the man for his fears and, drawing his sword, ran out to meet the intruder. The figure charged him, bowled him over among the gravestones, and made for the Landport Gate, the sentry at which had just opened it at the sound of the disturbance in the churchyard, to see what was going on. The figure disposed of him as he had done Captain M., and made straight away for the door of the Denbighshires’ drum-major’s quarters, where it proved to be the huge, white regimental goat, who, when disturbed by the sentry, had been browsing upon his hind legs, on the pellitory which grows on the Castle walls!

From the Rev. J. D. Henderson’s little book on Portchester I take the following:

Much romance which has been unrecorded no doubt is interwoven with the lives of the foreign prisoners of war in Britain. Two cases associated with Portchester deserve mention.

The church register of 1812 records the marriage of Patrick Bisson to Josephine Desperoux. The latter was one of a company of French ladies who, on their voyage to Mauritius, were captured by a British cruiser, and sent to Portchester. Being non-combatants, they were of course not subjected to durance vile in the Castle, but were distributed among the 171houses of the village, and, being young and comely, were largely entertained and fêted by the gentry of the neighbourhood, the result being that one, at least, the subject of our notice, captivated an English squire, and married him.

The second case is that of a French girl, who, distracted because her sailor lover had been captured, enlisted as a sailor on a privateer on the bare chance of being captured and meeting him. As good luck would have it, she was captured, and sent to the very prison where was her sweetheart, Portchester Castle. For some months she lived there without revealing her sex, until she was taken ill, sent to the hospital, where, of course, her secret was soon discovered. She was persuaded to return to France on the distinct promise that her lover should be speedily exchanged.

An attempt to escape which had fatal results was made in 1797. Information was given to the authorities that a long tunnel had been made from one of the prison blocks to the outside. So it was arranged that, at a certain hour after lock-up time, the guards should rush in and catch the plotters at work. They did so, and found the men in the tunnel. Shortly afterwards the alarm was given in another quarter, and prisoners were caught in the act of escaping through a large hole they had made in the Castle wall. All that night the prisoners were very riotous, keeping candles lighted, singing Republican songs, dancing and cheering, so that ‘it was found necessary’ to fire ball cartridges among them, by which many men were wounded. But the effect of this was only temporary. Next morning the tumult and disorder recommenced. The sentries were abused and insulted, and one prisoner, trying to get out at a ventilator in the roof of one of the barracks, was shot in the back, but not mortally. Another was shot through the heart, and the coroner’s verdict at the inquest held upon him was ‘Justifiable Homicide’.

On another occasion treachery revealed a plot of eighteen Spaniards, who, armed with daggers which they had made out of horseshoe files, assembled in a vault under one of the towers with the idea of sallying forth, cutting down the sentries, and making off; but the guards crawled in and disarmed them after a short struggle.

172In 1798 a brewer’s man, John Cassel, was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment for helping two French captains to escape by carrying them away in empty beer casks.

In The Times of July 2, 1799, I find the following:

The quiet pathos of the above two bald newspaper announcements must appeal to everybody who for a moment pictures in his mind what the six poor, drowned fellows, and the two friends—one taken, the other left—must have gone through in their desperate bids for liberty. These are the little by-scenes which make up the great tragedy of the War Prisoners in England.

In December of this year there was great sickness and mortality at Portchester.

In the same year a plot to murder sentries and escape was discovered the day before the date of the arranged deed. Forty men were concerned in the plot, and upon them were found long knives, sharpened on both sides, made out of iron hoops.

In 1807 a Portchester prisoner named Cabosas was fined one shilling at Winchester for killing a fellow prisoner in a duel, and in the same year one Herquiand was hanged at Winchester for murder in the Castle.

173In 1810 it was reported that Portchester Castle was too crowded, and that only 5,900 prisoners could be kept in health there instead of the usual 7,000.

I will now give some accounts of life at Portchester, and I begin with one by an English officer, ‘The Light Dragoon,’ as a relief from the somewhat monotonous laments which characterize the average foreign chronicler, although it will be noted that our writer does not allow his patriotism to bias his judgement.

Placed on guard over the prisoners, he says:

One wishes that the British officer could have given us some account of the inner life at Portchester, from his point of view, but the foreign narratives which follow seem to have been written in a fair and broad spirit which would certainly have not been manifest had the genius loci of the hulks been influencing the minds of the writers.

The two following accounts, by St. Aubin and Philippe Gille, were written by men who were probably in Portchester at the same time, as both had come to England from Cabrera—that terrible prison island south of Majorca, to which the Spaniards sent the captives of Baylen in July 1808—unfortunates whose prolonged living death there must ever remain an indelible stain upon our conduct during the Peninsular War.

St. Aubin describes the Castle as divided into two by a broad road running between palisades, on the one side of which were a large and a small tower and nine two-storied wooden buildings, and on the other a church, kitchens, storehouses, offices, and hospital. It is evident that what he calls the large tower is the castle keep, for this held from 1,200 to 1,500 prisoners, while each of the nine barracks accommodated 500.

St. Aubin gives us the most detailed account of the Portchester prisoners and their life. At 6 a.m. in summer, and 7 in winter, the bell announced the arrival of the soldiers and turnkeys, who opened the doors and counted the prisoners. At 9 o’clock the market bell rang and the distributions of bread were made. The prisoners were divided into plats or messes of twelve, each plat was again subdivided, and each had two gamelles or soup-pots. At midday the bell announced the closing of the market to English sellers, who were replaced by French, and also the distribution of soup and meat. At sunset the bell went again, jailers and soldiers went through the evening count, all were obliged to be within doors, and lights were put out.

176Occasionally in the grand pré, as the enclosure within the walls was called, there was a general airing of prisons and hammocks, and the prisoners were obliged to stay out of doors till midday; during this performance the masons went round to sound walls and floors, to see that no attempts to escape were being engineered. Each story of the tower and the prisons had two prison superintendents at eight shillings per month, who were responsible for their cleanliness, and a barber. The doctor went through the rooms every day.

The prisoners prepared their own food, the wages of the master cooks being sevenpence per diem. St. Aubin complains bitterly of the quality of the provisions, especially of the bread, and says that it was quite insufficient on account of the avarice of the contractors, but at any rate, he says, it was regularly distributed.

In spite of all this, Portchester was preferred by the prisoners to other dépôts, because it was easy to get money and letters from France; and it may be noted that while we get little or no mention of recreation and amusement at Norman Cross, or Stapleton, or Perth, unless gambling comes within the category, we shall see that at Portchester the prisoners seem to have done their very best to make the long days pass as pleasantly as possible.

Portchester was a veritable hive of industry. There were manufacturers of straw hats, stockings, gloves, purses, and braces. There were cunning artificers in bone who made tobacco boxes, dominoes, chessmen, models of all kinds, especially of men-of-war, one of which latter, only one foot in length, is said to have been sold for £26, as well as of the most artistic ornaments and knick-knacks. There were tailors, goldsmiths (so says St. Aubin), shoemakers, caterers, limonadiers, and comedians of the Punch and Judy and marionette class. There were professors of mathematics, of drawing, of French, of English, of Latin, of fencing, of writing, of dancing, of the bâton, and of la boxe. St. Aubin quotes as a strange fact that most of the prisoners who, on going to Portchester, knew neither reading nor writing, ‘en sont sortis la tête et la bourse passablement meublées.’

But the unique feature of Portchester industry was its thread lace manufacture.

177The brilliant idea of starting this belonged to a French soldier prisoner who had been born and bred in a lace-making country, and had been accustomed to see all the women working at it. He recalled the process by memory, took pupils, and in less than a year there were 3,000 prisoners in Portchester making lace, and among these were ‘capitalists’ who employed each as many as from fifty to sixty workmen. So beautiful was this lace, and so largely was it bought by the surrounding families, that the English lace-makers protested, its manufacture within the prison was forbidden, and it is said that the work of suppression was carried out in the most brutal manner, the machines being broken and all lace in stock or in process of manufacture destroyed.

Gambling, says St. Aubin, was the all-pervading vice of Portchester, as in the other prisons. For ‘capitalists’ there was actually a roulette table, but the rank and file gambled upon the length of straws, with cards or dominoes, for their rations, their clothes, or their bedding. The authorities attempted occasionally to check the mania among the most enslaved by placing them apart from their fellows, reclothing them, and making them eat their rations, but in vain, for they pierced the walls of their places of confinement, and sold their clothes through the apertures. Duels, as a consequence, were frequent, the usual time for these being the dinner hour, because all the prisoners were then temporarily in the salles.

St. Aubin thus describes his fellow prisoners. Sailors, he says, were brusque but obliging; soldiers were more honest, softer and less prompt to help; maîtres d’armes were proud and despotic. The scum of the community were the Raffalés, who lived in the top story of the tower. Among the two hundred of these there were only two or three suits of clothes, which were worn in turn by those who had to go out foraging for food. These men terrorized the rest, and their captain was even held in some sort of fear, if not respect, by the authorities.

The prison amusements were various. The prisoners who had no occupations played draughts, cards, dominoes, and billiards. On Sundays the beer-man came, and much drunkenness prevailed, especially upon fête days, such as St. Martin’s, Christmas, and August 15, the Emperor’s birthday: the 178principal drinks being compounds of beer and spirits known as ‘strom’ and ‘shum’. On St. Cecilia’s Day the musicians always gave an entertainment, but the chief form of amusement was the theatre.

This was arranged in the basement of the large tower—that is, the keep, where three hundred people could be accommodated. Part of the boxes were set apart for English visitors, who appreciated the French performances so much that they even said that they were better than what they were accustomed to in Portsmouth, and flocked to them, much to the disgust of the native managers, who represented to the authorities that those untaxed aliens were taking the bread out of their mouths. The Government considered the matter, and upon the plea that the admission of the English public to the French theatre was leading to too great intimacy between the peoples, and thus would further the escapes of prisoners, took advantage of the actual escape of a prisoner in English dress to ordain that although the theatre might continue as heretofore, no English were to be admitted. The result of this was that the receipts dropped from £12 to £5 a night.

St. Aubin remarks, en passant, that Commander William Patterson and Major Gentz, who were chiefly responsible for the retention of the theatre, were the only Englishmen he ever met who were worthy of respect!

Of the pieces played, St. Aubin mentions L’Heureuse Étourderie by himself; the tragedies Zaïre, Mahomet, Les Templiers; the comedies Les Deux Gendres, Les Folies amoureuses, Le Barbier de Séville, Le Tyran domestique, Défiance et Malice; many dramas, and even vaudevilles and operas such as Les Deux Journées, Pierre le Grand, Françoise de Foix, of which the music was composed by prisoners and played by an orchestra of twelve.

A terrible murder is said to have been the outcome of theatricals in the prison. In describing it St. Aubin starts with the opinion that ‘Les maîtres d’armes sont toujours fort vilains messieurs’. There was a quarrel between a gunner and a maître des logis; some said it was about a theatrical part, but others that the gunner, Tardif, had committed a crime in past days, had described it in writing, that the paper had fallen from 179his hammock into that of Leguay, the maître des logis, and that Tardif determined to get the possessor of his secret out of the way. So he attacked Leguay, who ran bleeding to his hammock, followed by Tardif, who then dispatched him, and displayed a strange, fierce joy at the deed when overpowered and tied to a pillar. He was tried, and condemned to be hanged at Portchester in the sight of all the prisoners. ‘The scaffold was erected on the Portsmouth road’, says St. Aubin, not within the Castle precincts, as another account states. He had previously sold his body for ten francs to a surgeon for dissection.

At the request of the prisoners the body of Leguay was buried in Portchester churchyard. All joined to raise funds for the funeral, and the proceeds of a performance of Robert, chef de brigands, was devoted to the relief of the widow and children of the murdered man.

At the funeral of Leguay, sous-officiers of his regiment, the 10th Dragoons, carried the coffin, which was preceded by a British military band, and followed by the sous-officiers in uniform, British officers, and inhabitants of the neighbourhood.

Tardif was conveyed from Winchester to the King’s Arms Inn at Portchester, where Mr. White, the Roman Catholic priest, tried to get him to take the last Sacrament, but in vain: Tardif only wanted the execution to be got over as soon as possible. He was taken in a cart to the prison yard, where were assembled 7,000 prisoners. Again the priest urged him to repent, but it was useless. The cap was drawn over his face, but he tore it away, and died as he had lived. The behaviour of the spectator prisoners was exemplary.

At the Peace and Restoration of 1814, although the Portchester prisoners were Bonapartists almost to a man, quite a boyish joy was exhibited at the approaching liberation: great breakfasts were given in the village, and by the end of May the Castle was empty.

The notes on Portchester of Philippe Gille, author of Mémoires d’un Conscrit de 1798, are as interesting as those of St. Aubin, particularly as regards the amusements of the prisoners, and I make no apology for adding to them his immediately previous experiences, as they are not distasteful reading.

180Gille was taken prisoner in Baylen, and at first was put on board No. 27 Hulk, at Cadiz, in which ship, he says, were crowded no less than 1,824 prisoners! Thence he was sent to Cabrera and relates his frightful experiences on that prison island.

After a time the prisoners were taken on board British ships, and learned that their destination was an English prison—perhaps the dreaded hulks!

Gille was on board the Britannia. Let me tell the effect of the change in his own words, they are so gratifying:

On board there were cleanliness and space, good food for officers and men alike, and plenty of it, the allowance being the same for six prisoners as for four British. Rum was regularly served out, and Gille lays stress on a pudding the prisoners made, into the composition of which it entered.

They duly reached Plymouth; the beautiful scenery impressed Gille, but he was most astonished when the market-boats came alongside to see fish-women clothed in black velvet, with feathers and flowers in their hats!

Thence to Portsmouth, where they got a first sight of the hulks, which made Gille shudder, but he was relieved to learn that he and his fellows were destined for a shore prison.

On September 28, 1810, they arrived at Portchester. Here they were minutely registered, and clothed in a sleeved vest, waistcoat, and trousers of yellow cloth, and a blue and white striped cotton shirt, and provided with a hammock, a flock mattress of two pounds weight, a coverlet, and tarred cords for hammock lashings.

Gille gives much interesting detail about the theatre. The Agent, William Patterson, found it good policy to further any scheme by which the prisoners could be kept wholesomely occupied, and so provided all the wood necessary for the building 181of the theatre, which was in charge of an ex-chief-machinist of the Théâtre Feydau in Paris, Carré by name. He made a row of boxes and a hall capable of holding 300 people, and thoroughly transformed the base story of the keep, which was unoccupied because prisoners confined there in past times had died in great numbers, and the authorities deemed it unwholesome as a sleeping-place.

Carré’s Arabian Féerie was a tremendous success, but it led to the Governmental interference with the theatre already mentioned. An English major who took a lively interest in the theatre (probably the Major Gentz alluded to by St. Aubin) had his whole regiment in to see it at one shilling a head, and published in the Portsmouth papers a glowing panegyric upon it, and further invited the directors of the Portsmouth Theatre to ‘come to see how a theatre should be run’. They came, were very pleased and polite, but very soon after came an order from the authorities that the theatre should be shut. However, by the influence of the Agent, it was permitted to continue, on the condition that no English people were to be admitted.

Carré painted a drop-scene which was a masterpiece. It was a view of Paris from a house at the corner of the Place Dauphine on the Pont-Neuf, showing the Café Paris on the point of the island, the Bridges of the Arts, the Royal and the Concorde, and the Bains des Bons-Hommes in the distance, the Colonnade of the Louvre, the Tuileries with the national flag flying, the Hôtel de Monnaies, the Quatre Nations, and the ‘théatins’ of the Quai Voltaire. It may be imagined how this home-touch aroused the enthusiasm of the poor exiles!

New plays were received from Paris, amongst them Le Petit Poucet, Le Diable ou la Bohémienne, Les Deux Journées and Adolphe et Clara. The musical pieces were accompanied by an orchestra (of prisoners, of course) under Corret of the Conservatoire, who composed fresh music for such representations as Françoise de Foix and Pierre le Grand, as their original music was too expensive, and who played the cornet solos, Gourdet being first violin.

Gille’s own métier was to make artificial flowers, and to give lessons in painting, for which he took pupils at one franc fifty centimes a month—the regulation price for all lessons. He 182also learned the violin, and had an instrument made by a fellow prisoner.

At Portchester, as elsewhere, a Masonic Lodge was formed among the prisoners.

In 1812 was brought to light the great plot for the 70,000 prisoners in England to rise simultaneously, to disarm their guards, who were only militia men, and to carry on a guerilla warfare, avoiding all towns. At Portchester the 7,000 prisoners were to overpower the garrison, which had two cannon and 800 muskets, and march to Forton, where were 3,000 prisoners. The success of the movement was to depend upon the co-operation of the Boulogne troops and ships, in keeping the British fleet occupied, but the breaking up of the Boulogne Camp, in order to reinforce the Grand Army for the expedition to Russia, caused the abandonment of the enterprise.

The news of the advance of the Allies in France only served to bind the Imperialists together: the tricolour cockade was universally worn, and an English captain who entered the Castle wearing a white cockade was greeted with hisses, groans, and even stone-throwing, and was only saved from further mischief by the Agent—a man much respected by the prisoners—who got him away and gave him a severe lecture on his foolishness. On Easter Day, 1814, the news of Peace, of the accession of Louis XVIII, and of freedom for the prisoners came. The Agent asked the prisoners to hoist the white flag as a greeting to the French officer who was coming to announce formally the great news, and to arrange for the departure of the prisoners. A unanimous refusal was the result, and a British soldier had to hoist the flag. Contre-amiral Troude came. There was a strong feeling against him, inasmuch as it was reported that in order to gain his present position he had probably given up his fleet to England, and a resolution was drawn up not to acclaim him. All the same, Gille says, the speech he made so impressed the prisoners that he was loudly cheered, and went away overcome with emotion.

The next day his mission took him to the prison ships. Here he did not succeed so well, for as he approached one of the hulks he had a large basket of filth thrown over him, and he had to leave without boarding her. By way of punishment, 183the prisoners on this ship were made the last to leave England.

On May 15, 1814, the evacuation of Portchester began. Gille left on the 20th, carrying away the best of feelings towards the Agent and the Commandant, the former showing his sympathy with the prisoners to the very last, by taking steps so that the St. Malo men, of whom there were a great many, should be sent direct to their port instead of being landed at Calais.

Gille describes a very happy homeward voyage, thanks largely to the English doctor on the ship, who, finding that Gille was a Mason, had him treated with distinction, and even offered to help him with a loan of money.

Pillet, the irrepressible, tells a yarn that ‘Milor Cordower (Lord Cawdor), Colonel du régiment de Carmarthen’, visiting the Castle one day, was forgetful enough to leave his horse unattended, tied up in the courtyard; when he returned there was no horse to be found, and it turned out that the prisoners, mad with hunger, had taken the horse, killed it, and eaten it raw. Pillet adds that all dogs who strayed Portchester way suffered the same fate, and that in support of his statement he can bring many naval officers of Lorient and Brest.

Pillet’s story, I think, is rather better than Garneray’s about the great Dane on the prison ship (see pp. 68–71).

The last French prisoners left Portchester at the end of May 1814, but American prisoners were here until January 1816. After the Peace all the wooden buildings were taken down and sold by auction (a row of cottages in Fareham, built out of the material, still enjoys the name of ‘Bug Row’). Relics of this period of the Castle’s history are very scanty. The old Guard House at the Land Gate, now the Castle Custodian’s dwelling, remains much as it was, and a line of white stones on the opposite side of the approach marks the boundary of the old prison hospital, which is also commemorated in the name Hospital Lane.

The great tower still retains the five stories which were arranged for the prisoners, and on the transverse beams are still the hooks to which the hammocks were suspended. Some crude coloured decoration on the beams of the lowest story may have been the work of the French theatrical artists, but I doubt it.

184Names of French and other prisoners are cut on many of the walls and wooden beams, notably at the very top of the great tower, which is reached by a dark, steep newel stair of Norman work, now almost closed to the public on account of the dangerous condition of many of the steps. This was the stair used by Dufresne, and the number of names cut in the topmost wall would seem to show that the lofty coign, whence might be seen a widespread panorama, stretching on three sides far away to the Channel, and to these poor fellows possible liberty, was a favourite resort. I noted some twenty decipherable names, the earliest date being 1745 and the latest 1803.

Only one death appears in the Church Register—that of ‘Peter Goston, a French prisoner’, under date of December 18, 1812.

There seems to have been no separate burial ground for the rank and file of the prisoners, but it is said that they were shovelled away into the tide-swept mud-flats outside the South Gate, and that, for economy, a single coffin with a sliding bottom did duty for many corpses. But human remains in groups have been unearthed all around the Castle, and, as it is known that at certain periods the mortality among the prisoners was very high, it is believed that these are to be dated from the prisoner-of-war epoch of the Castle’s history.

No descendants of the prisoners are to be traced in or about Portchester; but Mrs. Durrand, who is a familiar figure to all visitors to the Castle, believes that her late husband’s grandfather was a French prisoner of war here.

It may be noted that Arthur Wellesley, afterwards Duke of Wellington, was at one time an officer of the garrison at Portchester.

Liverpool became a considerable dépôt for prisoners of war, from the force of circumstances rather than from any suitability of its own. From its proximity to Ireland, the shelter and starting and refitting point of so many French, and, later, American privateers, Liverpool shared with Bristol, and perhaps with London, the position of being the busiest privateering centre in Britain.

Hence, from very early days in its history, prisoners were continually pouring in and out; in, as the Liverpool privateers, well equipped and armed by wealthy individuals or syndicates, skilfully commanded and splendidly fought, swept the narrow seas and beyond, and brought in their prizes; out, as both sides were ready enough to exchange men in a contest of which booty was the main object, and because the guarding of hundreds of desperate seafaring men was a matter of great difficulty and expense in an open port with no other than the usual accommodation for malefactors.

Before 1756 the prisoners of war brought into Liverpool were stowed away in the common Borough Gaol and in an old powder magazine which stood on the north side of Brownlow Street, where Russell Street now is. Prisoners taken in the Seven Years’ War and the American War of Independence were lodged in the Tower Prison at the lower end of Water Street, on the north side, where now Tower Buildings stand, between Tower Garden and Stringers Alley, which remained the chief jail of Liverpool until July 1811. It was a castellated building of red sandstone, consisting of a large square embattled tower, with subordinate towers and buildings, forming three sides of a quadrangle of which the fourth side was occupied by a walled garden, the whole covering an area of about 3,700 square yards.

188In 1756 the Admiralty had bought the dancing-room and the buildings adjoining at the bottom of Water Street, and ‘fitted them up for the French prisoners in a most commodious manner, there being a handsome kitchen with furnaces, &c., for cooking their provisions, and good lodging rooms both above and below stairs. Their lordships have ordered a hammock and bedding (same as used on board our men of war), for each prisoner, which it is to be hoped will be a means of procuring our countrymen who have fallen into their hands better usage than hitherto, many of them having been treated with great inhumanity.’

One of the most famous of the early French ‘corsaires’, Thurot—who during the Seven Years’ War made Ireland his base, and, acting with the most admirable skill and audacity, caused almost as much loss and consternation on this coast as did Paul Jones later—was at last brought a prisoner into Liverpool on February 28, 1760.

The romance of Felix Durand, a Seven Years’ War prisoner at the Tower, is almost as interesting as that of Louis Vanhille, to which I devote a separate chapter.

The wife of one P., an ivory carver and turner in Dale Street, and part owner of the Mary Ellen privateer, had a curiously made foreign box which had been broken, and which no local workman could mend. The French prisoners were famous as clever and ingenious artisans, and to one of them, Felix Durand, it was handed. He accepted the job, and wanted ample time to do it in. Just as it should have been finished, fifteen prisoners, Durand among them, escaped from the Tower, but, having neither food nor money, and, being ignorant of English and of the localities round Liverpool, all, after wandering about for some time half-starved, either returned or were captured.

Says Durand, describing his own part in the affair:

So, choosing a stormy night, the prisoners commenced by loosening the stone work in the east wall, and packing the mortar under their beds. They were safe during the day, but once when a keeper did come round, they put one of their party in bed, curtained the window grating with a blanket, and said that their compatriot was ill and could not bear the light. So the officer passed on. At last the hole was big enough, and one of them crept through. He reported an open yard, that it was raining heavily, and that the night was affreuse. They crept out one by one and got into the yard, whence they entered a cellar by the window, traversed a passage or two, and entered the kitchen, where they made a good supper, of bread and beef. While cutting this, one of them let fall a knife, but nobody heard it, and, says Durand, ‘Truly you Englishmen sleep well!’

Finally, as a neighbouring clock struck two, they managed to get past the outer wall, and one man, sent to reconnoitre, reported: ‘not a soul to be seen anywhere, the wind rushing up the main street from the sea.’

They then separated. Durand went straight ahead, ‘passed the Exchange, down a narrow lane [Dale Street] facing it, in which I knew Mademoiselle dwelt, but did not know the house; therefore I pushed on till I came to the foot of a hill. I thought I would turn to the left at first, but went on to take my chance of four cross roads—’ (Old Haymarket, Townsend Lane, now Byron Street, Dale Street, and Shaw’s Brow, now William Brown Street).

He went on until he came to the outskirts of Liverpool by Townsend Mill (at the top of London Road), and so on the road to Prescot, ankle-deep in mud. He ascended Edge Hill, keeping always the right-hand road, lined on both sides with high trees, and at length arrived at a little village (Wavertree) as a clock struck three. Then he ate some bread and drank from a pond. Then onwards, always bearing to the right, on to 190‘the quaint little village of Hale,’ his final objective being Dublin, where he had a friend, a French priest.

At Hale an old woman came out of a cottage and began to take down the shutters. Durand, who, not knowing English, had resolved to play the part of a deaf and dumb man, quietly took the shutters from her, and placed them in their proper position. Then he took a broom and swept away the water from the front of the door; got the kettle and filled it from the pump, the old woman being too astonished to be able to say anything, a feeling which was increased when her silent visitor raked the cinders out of the grate, and laid the fire. Then she said something in broad Lancashire, but he signified that he was deaf and dumb, and he understood her so far as to know that she expressed pity. At this point he sank on to a settle and fell fast asleep from sheer exhaustion from walking and exposure. When he awakened he found breakfast awaiting him, and made a good meal. Then he did a foolish thing. At the sound of horses’ hoofs he sprang up in alarm and fled from the house—an act doubly ill-advised, inasmuch as it betrayed his affliction to be assumed, and, had his entertainer been a man instead of an old woman, would assuredly have stirred the hue and cry after him.

He now took a wrong turning, and found himself going towards Liverpool, but corrected his road, and at midday reached a barn where two men were threshing wheat. He asked leave by signs to rest, which was granted. We shall now see how the native ingenuity of the Frenchman stood him in good stead in circumstances where the average Englishman would have been a useless tramp and nothing more. Seeing some fresh straw in a corner, Durand began to weave it into a dainty basket. The threshers stayed their work to watch him, and, when the article was finished, offered to buy it. Just then the farmer entered, and from pity and admiration took him home to dinner, and Durand’s first act was to present the basket to the daughter of the house. Dinner finished, the guest looked about for work to do, and in the course of the afternoon he repaired a stopped clock with an old skewer and a pair of pincers, mended a chair, repaired a china image, cleaned an old picture, repaired a lock, altered a key, and fed the pigs!

191The farmer was delighted, and offered him a barn to sleep in, but the farmer’s daughter injudiciously expressed her admiration of him, whereupon her sweetheart, who came in to spend the evening, signed to him the necessity of his immediate departure.

For weeks this extraordinary man, always simulating a deaf-mute, wandered about, living by the sale of baskets, and was everywhere received with the greatest kindness.

But misfortune overtook him at length, although only temporarily. He was standing by a very large tree, a local lion, when a party of visitors came up to admire it, and a young lady expressed herself in very purely pronounced French. Unable to restrain himself, Durand stepped forward, and echoed her sentiments.

‘Why!’ exclaimed the lady. ‘This is the dumb man who was at the Hall yesterday repairing the broken vases!’

The result was that he was arrested as an escaped prisoner of war, sent first to Ormskirk, and then back to his old prison at the Liverpool Tower.

However, in a short time, through the influence of Sir Edward Cunliffe, one of the members for Liverpool, he was released, and went to reside with the P.’s in Dale Street. In the following September Mr. Durand and Miss P. became man and wife, and he remained in Liverpool many years, as partner in her uncle’s business.

In 1779 Howard the philanthropist, in his tour through the prisons of Britain, visited the Liverpool Tower. He reported that there were therein 509 prisoners, of whom fifty-six were Spaniards, who were kept apart from the French prisoners, on account of racial animosities. All were crowded in five rooms, which were packed with hammocks three tiers high. The airing ground was spacious. There were thirty-six invalids in a small dirty room of a house at some distance from the prison. There were no sheets on the beds, but the surgeons were attentive, and there were no complaints.

At the prison, he remarked, the bedding required regulation. There was no table hung up of regulations or of the victualling rate, so that the prisoners had no means of checking their allowances. The meat and beer were good, but the bread was 192heavy. The late Agent, he was informed, had been very neglectful of his duties, but his successor bore a good character, and much was expected of him.

It has been said that most of the prisoners of war in Liverpool were privateersmen. In 1779 Paul Jones was the terror of the local waters, and as his continual successes unsettled the prisoners and incited them to continual acts of mutiny and rebellion, and escapes or attempts to escape were of daily occurrence, a general shifting of prisoners took place, many of the confined men being sent to Chester, Carlisle, and other inland towns, and the paroled men to Ormskirk and Wigan.

In 1779 Sir George Saville and the Yorkshire Militia subscribed £50 to the fund for the relief of the French and Spanish prisoners in Liverpool. The appeal for subscriptions wound up with the following complacent remark:

In 1781 the Rev. Gilbert Wakefield wrote:

In 1793, the New Borough Gaol in Great Howard Street, (formerly Milk House Lane), which had been built in 1786, but never used, was made ready for prisoners of war.

The following letter to the Liverpool Courier of January 12, 1798, was characterized by The Times as ‘emanating from some sanguinary Jacobin in some back garret of London’:

So the Mayor and Magistrates of Liverpool made minute inspection of the prison (which had been arranged in accordance with Howard’s recommendations), and published a report which absolutely contradicted the assertions of ‘Philanthropos’. There were, it said, six large detached buildings, each of three stories, 106 feet long, twenty-three feet high, and forty-seven feet wide; there were two kitchens, each forty-eight feet long, twenty feet broad, and thirteen feet high. In the two upper stories the prisoners slept in cells or separate compartments, nine feet long, seven feet broad, and eleven feet high, each with a glazed window, and in each were generally three or four, never more than five, prisoners. The Hospital occupied two rooms, each thirty-three feet long, thirty feet broad, and eleven feet high. The officer-prisoners, seventy in number, occupied a separate building, and the other prisoners, 1,250 in number, were in the five buildings. The mortality here, from May 15 to December 31, 1798, among 1,332 prisoners was twenty-six.

Richard Brooke, in Liverpool from 1775 to 1800, says:

194One famous prisoner here was a Pole, named Charles Domery, whose voracity was extraordinary. He ate anything. After the surrender of the frigate on which he was captured he was so hungry that he was caught tearing the mangled limb of one of his fallen comrades. In one year he ate 174 cats, some of them alive, besides dogs, rats, candles, and especially raw meat. Although he was daily allowed the rations of ten men, he was never satisfied. One day the prison doctor tested his capacity, and at a sitting he ate fourteen pounds of raw meat and two pounds of candles, and washed it all down with five bottles of porter. Some of the French prisoners used to upbraid him with his Polish nationality, and accuse him of disloyalty to the Republic. Once, in a fit of anger at this, he seized a knife, cut two wide gashes on his bare arm, and with the blood wrote on the wall ‘Vive la République!’

He stood six feet two inches, was well made, and rather thin, and, despite the brutality of his taste in food, was a very amiable and inoffensive man.

The following touching little letter was evidently written by a very poor prisoner whose wife shared his confinement.

From Brooke’s Liverpool I also take the following:

One of these men had accumulated three hundred guineas by his manufactures.

As no book alludes to Liverpool as possessing a war-prison after 1802, it may be concluded that it ceased to have one after that date. This, I think, is probable, as it was eminently unsuitable owing to its position and its proximity to disturbed Ireland.^[7]

About a mile and a half on the Edinburgh side of Penicuik, on the great south road leading to Peebles and Dumfries, is the military station of Glencorse, the dépôt of the Royal Scots Regiment. Until about ten years ago the place was known as Greenlaw, but the name was changed owing to postal confusion with Greenlaw in Berwickshire.

In 1804, when, for many reasons, war-prisoners were hurried away from England to Scotland, the old mansion house of Greenlaw was bought by the Government and converted into a dépôt for 200 prisoners of war. It was situated in the south-west corner of a park of sixty acres, and consisted of a great square building, which was surrounded by a high wooden palisade, outside which was an airing ground, and space for the necessary domestic offices, guard rooms, garrison quarters, and so forth, within an outer stone wall. Other buildings, chiefly in wood, were added, and until 1811 it was the only Scottish war-prison south of Edinburgh.

For a year Greenlaw depended upon regulars from Edinburgh for its garrison, but after 1805 the drain upon the army for foreign service was so great, that the Militia was again requisitioned to do duty at the war-prisons. The garrison at Greenlaw consisted of one captain, four subalterns, eight sergeants, four drummers, and 155 rank and file, the head-quarters being at the Old Foundry in Penicuik. Discipline seems to have been strict, and special attention was given to the appearance and turn-out of the men. Eleven sentries were on duty night and day, each man having six blank and six ball cartridges, the latter only to be used in case of serious need—a very necessary insistance, as the militiamen, although of a better class generally than their successors of recent years, were more apt to be 197carried away by impulse than seasoned regulars. A private of the Stirling Militia was condemned in 1807 to receive 800 lashes for being drunk and out of quarters after tattoo, for having struck his superior officer, and used mutinous language—and this was a sentence mitigated on account of his previous good conduct and his expression of regret.

After the Peace of 1814, Greenlaw seems to have remained untenanted until 1846, when extensive buildings were added—mostly of wood—and it was made the military prison for Scotland. This it continued to be until 1888. In 1876 still further additions were made in a more substantial fashion, as it was decided to make it also the Scottish South Eastern Military Dépôt. In 1899 the old military prisons in wood were demolished, and with them some of the original war-prison buildings, so that all at present existing of the latter are the stone octagon Guard House, in the war-times used as the place of confinement for officers, and the line of building, now the married men’s quarters, then the garrison officer’s quarters, and some of the original stone boundary wall.

In 1810 the Government bought the Esk Mills at Valleyfield, and on February 6, 1811, the first batch of 350 prisoners arrived. Building was rapidly pushed forward to provide accommodation for 5,000 prisoners at a cost of £73,000, the new war-prison being known as Valleyfield.

‘About nine miles south of Edinburgh,’ says a writer in Chambers’s Journal for 1887, ‘on the main road to Peebles, stands the village of Penicuik, for the most part built on the high road overlooking and sloping down the valley of the North Esk. Passing through the village, and down the slope leading to the bridge that spans the Esk and continues the road, we turn sharply to the left just at the bridge, and a short distance below are the extensive paper-mills of Messrs. Alexander Cowan and Sons, called the Valleyfield Paper Mills.’

I followed this direction, and under the courteous guidance of Mr. Cowan saw what little remains of one of the most famous war-prisons of Britain.

Until 1897 one of the original ‘casernes’ was used as a rag store. In August of that year this was pulled down. It measured 300 feet long, ‘and its walls were eleven feet six 198inches thick.’^[8] It had formed one of the first buildings at Glencorse. Valleyfield House, now the residence of Mr. Cowan, was in the days of the war-prison used as the Hospital.

In 1906, during excavations for the new enamelling house at the Mills, a dozen coffins were unearthed, all with their heads to the east. The new buildings of 1812 at Valleyfield consisted of six ‘casernes’, each from 80 to 100 feet long, of three stories, built of wood, with openings closed by strong wooden shutters. They were without fire-places, as it was considered that the animal heat of the closely-packed inmates would render such accessories unnecessary! The whole was surrounded by a stout wooden stockade, outside which was a carriage-road.

Notwithstanding apparent indifference to the comfort of the prisoners, the mortality at Valleyfield during three years and four months was but 309, being at the rate of 18·5 per mille, and in this is included a number of violent deaths from duels, quarrels, and the shooting of prisoners attempting to escape.

In the beautiful hillside garden of Valleyfield House is a monument, erected by Mr. Alexander Cowan, to the memory of these prisoners, inaugurated on June 26, 1830, the day on which George IV died. On it was inscribed:

On the other side:

199It may be noted that Sir Walter Scott, who showed a warm interest in the erection of the monument, suggested the Latin quotation, which is from Saumazarius, a poet of the Middle Ages. Despite the inscription, the monument was raised at the sole expense of Mr. Alexander Cowan.

An interesting episode is associated with this monument. In 1845, Mr. John Cowan of Beeslack, on a visit to the Paris Invalides, found an old Valleyfield prisoner named Marcher, and on his return home sent the old soldier a picture of the Valleyfield Memorial, and in the Cowan Institute at Penicuik, amongst other relics of the war-prison days, is an appreciative letter from Marcher, dated from the Invalides, December 1846.

Marcher, when asked his experience of Valleyfield, said that 200it was terribly cold, that there were no windows, no warmth, no fruit, but that the cabbages were very large. He lost an arm at Waterloo.

The guard consisted of infantry of the Ayr and Kircudbright militia and artillery, who had their camp on the high ground west of Kirkhill Village. On one occasion an alarm that prisoners were escaping was given: the troops hurried to the scene of action, the artillery with such precipitancy that horses, guns, and men were rolled down the steep hill into the river, luckily without injuries.

The attempts to escape were as numerous here as elsewhere, and the Black Hole, made of hewn ashlar work, never lacked occupants. One man, a sailor, it was impossible to keep within, and, like his fellow countryman, Dufresne, at Portchester, was used to getting in and out when he liked, and might have got away altogether, but for his raids upon farm-houses and cottages around, which caused the natives to give him up. On one occasion three prisoners rigged a false bottom to the prison dust-cart, hid themselves therein, and were conveyed out of the prison. When the cart stopped, the prisoners got out, and were entering a wood, when a soldier met them. Him they cut at, and he, being unarmed, let them go. They were, however, recaptured. On December 18, 1811, fourteen prisoners got out, but were all recaptured. One memorable attempt to get out by a tunnel from one of the original buildings, to another in course of erection, and thence to the outer side of the stockade, was made in the same year. The tunnel was one hundred yards long, and the enormous quantity of earth excavated was carried out in the men’s pockets, dropped about on the airing ground, and trodden down. The venture only failed owing to the first man mistaking the hour of day, and emerging before sunset, whereupon he was seen by a sentry and fired on.

It was at the daily market when the country people were brought into acquaintance with the prisoners, that many attempts to escape were made, despite the doubling of the guards. One prisoner had arranged with the carter who came every morning to take away the manure that he would conceal himself in the cart, keep himself covered up with the filth, and thus pass the sentries. The field where the rubbish was emptied 201was just outside the village, and the prisoner would know that it was time for him to crawl out and run away when the cart halted. All started well; the cart passed through the gate, and passed the first, second, and third sentries, and was close to where the Free Church manse now stands, when a friend of the carter hailed him in a loud voice. The cart pulled up, and the poor prisoner, thinking that this was the signal, jumped out, and was shot down before he had gone many yards.

Another prisoner, by name Pirion, broke his parole, and was making his way to London by the coach road, and took shelter from the rain when he had got as far south as Norman Cross, not knowing where he was. He was recognized as an old Norman Cross prisoner, and was arrested and brought back.

In 1812 the report upon the condition of Valleyfield was very bad, and in particular it was recommended that a special stockade should be built to hide the half-naked prisoners from public view at the market.

In 1813 a Valleyfield prisoner was released in order that he might help a Mr. Ferguson in the cod and herring fishery: almost as easy a release as that of the Norman Cross prisoner who was freed because he had instructed the Earl of Winchester’s labourers at Burleigh, by Stamford, in the use of the Hainault scythe!

At one time very few of the prisoners at Valleyfield were Frenchmen. About twenty of them were allowed to live on parole outside the prison, and some of them enjoyed the friendship of the Cowan family; one in particular, Ancamp, a Nantes merchant, had been a prisoner nine and a half years, and had had a son born to him since his capture, whom he had never seen.

In 1814, Valleyfield was evacuated, and remained unoccupied until 1820, when, after having been advertised for sale and put up to auction several times without success, it was purchased by Cowan for £2,200.

In Penicuik many relics of the prisoners’ manufactures may still be seen, and what is now the public park was formerly the vegetable garden of the prison.

An elderly lady at Lasswade told Mr. Bresnil of Loanhead that she remembered in her childhood an old farmer who was pointed out as having made his fortune by providing 202oatmeal to the prisoners at Valleyfield of an inferior quality to that for which he had contracted.

I shall now give two accounts of life at these prisons. The first is by Sergeant-Major Beaudouin, of the 31st Line Regiment, whom we have met before in this book on the hulks at Chatham. He was captured off Havana, 26th Germinal, An XII, that is, on April 16, 1804, on board one of the squadrons from St. Nicholas Mole, San Domingo, and brought via Belfast to Greenock, at which port he happened to arrive on June 4, in the midst of the celebrations of the King’s birthday. (It may be mentioned that he quitted England finally, eight years later, on the same day.) Bonaparte in effigy, on a donkey, was being paraded through the street preparatory to being burned, and the natives told him that they hoped some fine day to catch and burn Bonaparte himself, which upset Beaudouin and made him retort that despite all England’s strength France would never be conquered, and that 100,000 Frenchmen landed in England would be sufficient to conquer it, whereupon a disturbance ensued.

Beaudouin landed at Port Glasgow, and thence to Renfrew and Glasgow, of which city he remarks:

From Glasgow the prisoners marched to Airdrie, ten miles, where the people were affable. For the six prisoners there was an escort of a sergeant, a corporal, and eight men.

From Airdrie they proceeded to Bathgate, fourteen miles, thence to Edinburgh, twenty-two miles, where they were lodged for the night in the guard-house of the Castle. From Edinburgh they came to Greenlaw, ten miles, June 10, 1804.

Beaudouin thus describes Greenlaw:

At first they were quartered with Dutch prisoners, but when peace was made between Britain and Holland, these latter left.

At Greenlaw there were 106 French and 40 Spanish prisoners. The Spaniards were very antagonistic to the French, and also among themselves, quarrelling freely and being very handy with their knives. Beaudouin gives many instances of their brutality. At call-over a Spaniard waited for another to come through the door, and stabbed him in the face. An Italian and a Spaniard fought with knives until both were helpless. Two Spaniards quarrelled about their soup, and fought in public in the airing ground. The guard did not attempt to interfere—and wisely.

He describes Valleyfield as cold, with very little fine weather, but healthy. At the end of a week or so the newly arrived prisoners settled to work of different kinds. Some plaited straw for bonnets, some made tresse cornue for baskets and hats; some carved boxes, games, &c.; some worked hair watch-chains; some made coloured straw books and other knick-knacks, all of which they sold at the barriers.

Beaudouin learned to plait straw, and at first found it difficult as his fingers were so big. The armateur, the employer, gave out the straw, and paid for the worked article three sous per ‘brasse’, a little under six feet. Some men could make twelve ‘brasses’ a day. Beaudouin set to work at it, and in the course of a couple of months became an adept. After four years came the remonstrance of the country people that this underpaid labour by untaxed men was doing infinite injury to them; the Government prohibited the manufactures, and much misery among the prisoners resulted. From this prohibition resulted the outside practice of smuggling straw into the prison, and selling it later as the manufactured article, and a very profitable industry it must have been, for we find that, during the trial of Matthew Wingrave in 1813, for engaging in 204the straw-plait trade with the prisons at Valleyfield, it came out that Wingrave, who was an extensive dealer in the article, had actually moved up there from Bedfordshire on purpose to carry on the trade, and had bought cornfields for the purpose. The evidence showed that he was in the habit of bribing the soldiers to keep their eyes shut, and that not a few people of character and position were associated with him in the business.

Beaudouin then learned to make horsehair rings with names worked into them: these fetched sixpence each: rings in human hair were worth a shilling. For five years and a half he worked at this, and in so doing injured his eyesight. ‘However,’ he said, ‘it kept me alive, which the rations would never have done.’

Nominally the clothing was renewed every year, but Beaudouin declares that he had only one change in five and a half years. To prevent the clothes from being sold, they were of a sulphur-yellow colour.

‘En un mot, les Anglais sont tous des brigands,’ he says, and continues:

The prisoners signed a petition about their miserable condition generally, and this outrage in particular, and sent it up to the Transport Board. Fifteen days later the Agent entered the prison furious: ‘I must know who wrote that letter to the Government,’ he roared, ‘and I will put him into the blokhall (Black Hole) until he says who put it in the post.’

It ended in his being dismissed and severely punished. Ensign Maxwell of the Lanark Militia, who had ordered the sentry to fire into the prison because a light was burning there after drum-beat, whereby a prisoner, Cotier, was killed, was condemned to nine months’ imprisonment in the Tolbooth. This was in 1807.^[9] Many of the prisoners went to Edinburgh 205as witnesses in this case, and thereafter an order was posted up forbidding any firing upon the prisoners. If lights remained, the guard was to enter the prison, and, if necessary, put the offenders into the Black Hole, but no violence was to be used.

On March 30, 1809, all the French prisoners at Greenlaw were ordered to Chatham, of which place very bad reports were heard from men who had been on the hulks there.

On October 31, 1809, Beaudouin left Greenlaw, where he had been since June 10, 1804, for Sheerness, Chatham, and the Bristol prison-ship.

The next reference to Greenlaw is from James Anton’s A Military Life. He thus describes the prison at which he was on guard:

To Mr. Robert Black, and indirectly to Mr. Howden, I am much indebted for information about Greenlaw. To Mr. Cowan for helping me at Valleyfield I have already expressed my obligation, but I must not omit to say that much of the foregoing information about Valleyfield and the Esk Mills has been taken from The Reminiscences of Charles Cowan of Logan House, Midlothian, printed for private circulation in 1878.

Bristol, as being for so many centuries the chief port of western England, always had her full quota of prisoners of war, who, in the absence of a single great place of confinement, were crowded away anywhere that room could be made for them. Tradition says that the crypt of the church of St. Mary Redcliff was used for this purpose, but it is known that they filled the caverns under the cliff itself, and that until the great Fishponds prison at Stapleton, now the workhouse, was built in 1782, they were quartered in old pottery works at Knowle, near Totterdown and Pile Hill, on the right-hand side of the road from Bristol, on the south of Firfield House.

In volume XI of Wesley’s Journal we read:

But it was to be the same story here as elsewhere of gambling being the cause of much of the nakedness and want, for he writes:

208In 1779 John Howard visited Knowle on his tour of inspection of the prisoners of England. He reported that there were 151 prisoners there, ‘in a place which had been a pottery’, that the wards were more spacious and less crowded than at the Mill Prison at Plymouth, and that in two of the day rooms the prisoners were at work—from which remark we may infer that at this date the industry which later became so notable a characteristic of the inmates of our war-prisons was not general. The bread, he says, was good, but there was no hospital, the sick being in a small house near the prison, where he found five men together in a dirty and offensive room.

In 1782 the prison at Fishponds, Stapleton, was built. Howard visited it in that year, and reported that there were 774 Spaniards and thirteen Dutchmen in it, that there were no chimneys to the wards, which were very dirty, as they were never washed, and that an open market was held daily from 10 to 3. In 1794 there were 1,031 French prisoners at Stapleton, of whom seventy-five were in hospital.

In 1797 the ferment among the prisoners caused by reports of the success of Tate’s ‘invasion’ at Fishguard, developed into an open riot, during which a sentry fired and accidentally killed one of his comrades. Tradition says that when the Bristol Volunteers were summoned to take the place of the Militia, who had been hurried away to Fishguard, as there could be found no arms for them, all the mop-sticks in Bristol were bought up and furnished with iron heads, which converted them into very respectable pikes. It was on this occasion that, in view of the desperate feeling among the prisoners and the comparative inefficiency of their guards, it was suggested that all the prisoners should be lowered into the Kingswood coal-pits!

In 1799 the prison was enlarged at the contract price of £475; the work was to be done by June 1800, and no Sunday labour was to be employed, although Sanders, of Pedlar’s Acre, Lambeth, the contractor, pleaded for it, as a ship, laden with timber for the prison, had sunk, and so delayed the work.

In 1800 the following report upon the state of Stapleton Prison was drawn up and published by two well-known citizens of Bristol, Thomas Batchelor, deputy-governor of St. Peter’s Hospital, and Thomas Andrews, a poor-law guardian: