From the summary of the evidence above given, on the part of the prisoners, it must appear evident to every impartial reader, that Capt. Shortland made the attack with malice prepense. But to give the public the fairest opportunity to judge, I shall give a summary of the evidence on the part of Capt. Shortland, which came all from the mouth of witnesses particeps criminis, and acting with him. Those consisted of clerks, turnkeys, and soldiers, who had been the very instruments of the massacre. They deposed and said, that the prisoners were in a state of mutiny, and that great numbers had threatened to escape by forcing through the walls, and that the hole in the wall was big enough for a man to pass through; that the lock on the gate was broken by some prisoner, and that stones were thrown while the prisoners were at the gate, and also clubs and pieces of iron thrown at the guards by the prisoners while there; that great numbers had got into the square, and that they did mean to make their escape. Nothing material could be further drawn from these witnesses.
In the evening of this day, the bodies of our murdered countrymen were buried behind the prison walls in the same manner as before the peace, without form or ceremony, and no prisoner permitted to attend to see the last sad office, which one friend can perform for another in giving the grave its due. O! Britannia, thy boast is gone, thy pride is lost; humanity is fled from thy degenerate sons, and a safer asylum in the bosom of the savage tribes is found. Deny the dead their sacred due!
Thou ingrate race, is this the reward due to men who have labored many years thy faithful servant, and now, after having dragged out a painful imprisonment for two years, and the moment the hope of returning had rekindled the sparks of life, must be massacred in a most barbarous manner, and denied the right of the grave?
I must here relate one instance which occurred a few years ago, and which goes very far to show the inhumanity of those who have had the command of this depot heretofore. In a manuscript which was left here by the French prisoners, which I was this evening perusing, I find the following remarkable circumstance of cruelty related, which took place during their confinement.
Captain Cotgrave being agent, and Dr. Decker head surgeon of the hospital, in December, one thousand eight hundred and nine, a most malignant and contagious disease, bearing the most frightful and mortal symptoms, broke out among the French prisoners, which, in the short space of one month, carried off more than eight hundred.
This unfeeling man, Dr. Decker, caused the coffins to be brought into the rooms of the hospital to receive the bodies: where they often remained several days in readiness to receive the unhappy man fast approaching the end of all his sufferings.
It is said in the manuscript, that this worse than barbarian, would gaze with the greatest satisfaction on the surrounding victims, that he might discover from the very inmost recesses of the heart, what effect the appearance of these coffins had on their exhausted spirits.
However unfeeling this might be, yet their lot was envied by hundreds of their countrymen, who were left to perish in the prison without any assistance, without a friend, and in want of everything; and would not be received into the Hospital by this unfeeling man.
Their extreme sufferings would have moved the heart even of a cannibal, and it is a solitary instance of cruelty, that any one belonging to a civilized nation could rejoice at such a mournful spectacle, and exult over their fellow-beings in the agonies of death, as did this man often, in saying the more deaths the fewer enemies.
Another circumstance is related in the same manuscript, in which Capt. Isaac Cotgrave was the principal actor.