(Herbert, above quoted, said that the hospital was not worthy of the name, that when it rained the wet beat upon the patients as they lay in their beds.)
A new hospital was building, Howard continues, but he considered the wards were being made too low and too close, being seventeen feet ten inches wide, and ten feet high. In the American blocks the regulations were hung up according to rule, and he notes Article 5 of these to the effect that: ‘As water and tubs for washing their linen and clothes will be allowed, the prisoners are advised to keep their persons as clean as possible, it being conducive to health.’
I now make an extract from The Memoirs of Commodore Barney, published in Boston, 1832, chiefly on account of his stirring escape from Millbay, therein described.
Barney was captured in December 1780 by H.M.S. Intrepid, Captain Malloy, whom he stigmatizes as the embodiment of all that is brutal in man. He was carried to England on the Yarmouth, 74, with seventy other American officers. They were confined, he says, in the hold, under three decks, twelve feet by twenty feet, and three feet high, without light and almost without air. The result was that during the fifty-three days’ passage in the depths of winter, from New York to Plymouth, eleven of them died, and that when they arrived at Plymouth, few of them were able to stand, and all were temporarily blinded by the daylight.
It sounds incredible, but Mrs. Barney, the editress of the volume, says: ‘What is here detailed is given without adornment or exaggeration, almost in the very words of one who saw and suffered just as he has described.’
Barney was sent first to a hulk, which he describes as a Paradise when compared with the Yarmouth, and as soon as they could walk, he and his companions went to Mill Prison, ‘as rebels.’
He lost no time in conspiring to escape. With infinite pains he and others forced their way through the stone walls and iron gratings of the common sewer, only to find, after wading through several hundred feet of filth, their exit blocked by a double iron grating. He then resolved to act independently, and was suddenly afflicted by a sprain which put him on crutches. He found a sympathetic friend in a sentry who, for some reason or other, had often manifested friendship for the American prisoners. This man contrived to obtain for him a British officer’s undress uniform. One day Barney said to him, ‘To-day?’ to which the laconic reply was ‘Dinner’, by which Barney understood that his hours on duty would be from twelve till two.
Barney threw his old great coat over the uniform; arranged with his friends to occupy the other sentries’ attention by chaff and chat; engaged a slender youth at roll-call time to carry out the old trick of creeping through a hole in the wall and answer to Barney’s name as well as his own; and then jumped quickly on to the shoulders of a tall friend and over the wall.
Throwing away his great-coat, he slipped four guineas into the accomplice sentry’s hand, and walked quietly off into Plymouth to the house of a well-known friend to the American cause. No little alarm was caused here by the sudden appearance of a visitor in British uniform, but Barney soon explained the situation, and remained concealed until night, when he was taken to the house of a clergyman. Here he found two Americans, not prisoners, desirous of returning to America, and they agreed to buy a fishing boat and risk the crossing to France.
So the British uniform was exchanged for fisher garb, the boat purchased, and the three started. As his companions were soon prostrate from sea-sickness, Barney had to manage the craft himself; passed through the British war-ships safely, and seemed to be safe now from all interference, when a schooner rapidly approached, showing British colours, and presently lowered a boat which was pulled towards them.