Mr. Wagstaff, travelling on foot through the night, managed, after several narrow escapes, to reach the seashore, along which he proceeded to Scheveningen, sheltering himself among the sandhills which line that coast.
Scheveningen, though within two miles of the Hague, where French soldiers already swarmed, proved to be unguarded. The town was then, as it is still in these days, no more than a small fishing village, possessing neither pier nor harbour, but only an open shore, on which the fishing luggers beach themselves on returning from a voyage. Perhaps the French thought the place too insignificant to need a guard; but, however that may be, Mr. Wagstaff found a fisherman willing to take him across the channel, and landed safely in England on May 26th, 1803.
It may be that the kidnapping of the unlucky prisoners at Helvoetsluis, and many another town in Holland and France, was a symptom rather than a cause of the peculiar exasperation with which the coming war was fought, but it certainly added vastly to the hatred with which Napoleon was regarded in this country; and when it was found that the release even of the diplomatists could be obtained only with the greatest difficulty, while all the remaining prisoners were reserved for a confinement of indefinite length, the general indignation knew no bounds.
A few of the Packets’ men, headed by Captain Flynn, managed to burst out of the Brill prison on the last evening of their sojourn there. They succeeded in reaching the beach, seized an open boat, and after many hours of great danger, were picked up by an English ship. The rest of the prisoners were taken to Verdun, where they appear to have been not ill-treated. Mr. Sevright, the Post-Office agent at Helvoetsluis, retained during the whole period of his captivity, which lasted for nine years, the authority with which he had been invested, keeping up some sort of discipline, and constituting himself the protector of the sailors. He received and distributed the allowance of six sous a day which the English Government granted to each captive sailor; and, being gifted with strong sense and discretion, was able to intervene with good effect whenever his men came into conflict, as restless seamen will, with the Commissary or his subordinates; to secure justice for them, and in many ways to mitigate the hardships of their unfortunate position.
Before leaving these men in their dreary captivity, it may not be out of place to refer to the extraordinary courage and endurance shown by some of the prisoners who attempted to escape.
John Carne, a native of Penryn, had been captured on one of the Falmouth Packets. He lay in prison for fifteen months; until one night he found an opportunity of climbing the prison wall. The wall was forty feet high; but Carne took the chance and leapt down. He fell upon his head and shoulders, broke his collar bone, and bruised himself very severely; but fortunately he was still able to walk, and, injured as he was, got clear away from pursuit. Travelling always by night, through bye roads and over hedges, half-crippled with his broken bone which remained unset, he lay by day concealed under bridges, or among reeds in river beds; and so, toiling on doggedly, he reached the coast at last, and in some way managed to cross to his own country.
Bourrienne in his memoirs tells on good authority a still more extraordinary story. Two English sailors in the year 1804 made good their escape from Verdun, and arrived at Boulogne without having been discovered, though all the roads were watched with great care. When these men reached the sea-coast, whence England was in sight, they were still as far from liberty as at Verdun. Napoleon was at Boulogne, supervising the collection of the flotilla which was to convey his armies into England. Every craft for miles along the coast was registered and watched. The two seamen had no money, and lay in hiding, desperate and almost hopeless.
At last they determined to construct a boat, and began gathering such scraps of wood as they could find. They had no tools except their knives, but with these the ingenious fellows fashioned a boat at last, though it was no more than three or four feet wide, and a trifle more in length. They covered it with a piece of sailcloth. It was so light that a man could easily carry it on his shoulders; and in this frail cock-boat they determined to cross the channel.
An English frigate one day lay off the coast, reconnoitring, and the two sailors made a bold effort to reach her. They pushed off in their skiff, but not unobserved; for they had made only a few hundred yards when they were pursued and brought back by the Custom-house officers. They then ran an excellent chance of being shot as spies, but their story reached Napoleon’s ears. He sent for them, and questioned them. Their boat was brought with them.
“Is it really true,” he asked, “that you thought of crossing the sea in this thing?”