The prisoners positively refused to give the man up, and declared that no force of arms should wrest him from their protection. He then ordered the market closed, and would not allow any communication with it, and refused the prisoners every privilege, and gave them only their allowance.
On the fourteenth, he entered the yard at the head of two hundred soldiers with fixed bayonets, and ordered every prisoner to retire within the prisons, that search might be made for the prisoner, and he again remanded to the cachot; but all the prisoners having previously agreed to stand by each other, and if they attempted to use any violence, to surround and disarm them; a signal was given to surround, and the soldiers were immediately surrounded, and the intention made known to the officers, and advised to retire, unless they were determined to risk the consequence. They then very prudently ordered the soldiers to fall back, and retire without the yard, and leave the man whom they sought.
The captain still harboring rancor in his breast, thought to compel us to give up the man by force of starvation, and kept the markets closed against us, and compelled us to subsist solely on our scant allowance; but we, to retaliate, forbid all prisoners going out of the yard to work, who at this time were about forty or fifty carpenters, masons, and other mechanics, who were a great profit to the government; this step put Shortland to great expense and inconvenience to procure others.
He at last concluded to make peace and restore tranquility, and let the man remain; and, on the twentieth, he again opened the markets to the prisoners, and we permitted the workmen to go out and work again. The other three men remained in the cachot, but a stronger guard was placed? there, otherwise we were determined to release them by force.
On the twenty-second, arrived a draft of prisoners, lately captured off the Cape of Good Hope, among whom were the crew of the late United States brig Syren; the treatment of these men before they arrived at this place will be mentioned in the supplements to this work. These, together with others taken in other parts, arrived since the last enumeration on the last day of one thousand eight hundred and fourteen, made in all at this depot five thousand eight hundred and fifty, which were all the prisoners in England, except officers on parole. The prisoners were barefooted, and very sickly.
On the twenty-sixth of this month, is gazetted in the London papers, the official account of the capture of the United States frigate President, Com. Decatur.
The editor says she was captured solely by the Endymion, of far inferior force; he says the engagement was in the old English style, yard-arm to yard-arm. Knowing this to be a falsehood, I addressed a letter to the editor, requesting him to read a short piece of poetry which I enclosed.
March commenced with cold and blustering weather, and the prison almost one continued scene of sick and dying, the small-pox was raging with a desolating aspect, and the greatest anxiety concerning the ratification of the treaty; afflictions, which seem never to come singly, were now pressing upon the back of one another; pestilence, famine and nakedness were not affliction enough, phrensy must be added.
On the fourth, a man in the hospital, in a sudden fit of insanity, seized a knife and stabbed two of the nurses very dangerously, of which wounds Jonathan Paul died on the tenth, the other survived.
On inquiry into the circumstances of the deceased, we found him to have been a married man, and his wife had lived a little distance from the prison since his confinement, who was in very narrow circumstances.