More than this: at the other prisons a more or less sympathetic public was near at hand which kept the prisoners in touch with the free life without, even if many of its members were merely curious gapers and gazers, or purchasers of manufactures. At Dartmoor the natives who came to the prison gates, came only to sell their produce. Being natives of a remote district, they were generally prejudiced against the prisoners, and Farmer Newcombe’s speech in Mr. Phillpotts’ Farm of the Dagger, accurately reproduces the sentiments prevalent among them:
‘Dartymoor’s bettern they deserve anyway. I should like to know what’s too bad for them as makes war on us. ’Tis only naked savages, I should have thought, as would dare to fight against the most civilized and God-fearing nation in the world.’
Finally, it is much to be feared that the jacks-in-office and petty officials at Dartmoor, secure in their seclusion as they thought, were exacting and tyrannical to a degree not ventured upon in other places of confinement more easily accessible to the light of inspection, and unsurrounded by a desert air into which the cries of anguish and distress would rise in vain.
All the same, it was not long before the condition of prison life in Dartmoor became known, even in high places.
In July 1811, the Independent Whig published revelations of the state of Dartmoor which caused Lord Cochrane, member for Westminster, to bring the facts before the notice of the House of Commons, but he expressed his disappointment that his exposure had been without result, asserting that the Government was afraid of losing what little character it had. He declared that the soil of Dartmoor was one vast marsh, and was most pestilential. Captivity, said he, was irksome enough without the addition of disease and torture. He asserted that the prison had been built for the convenience of the town, and not the town for the convenience of the prison, inasmuch as the town was a speculative project which had failed. ‘Its inhabitants had no market, were solitary, insulated, absorbed, and buried in their own fogs.’ To remedy this it was necessary to do something, and so came about the building of the prison.
The article in the Independent Whig which attracted Lord Cochrane’s attention was as follows:
‘To foreigners, bred for the most part in a region the temperature of which is so comparatively pure to the air of our climate at the best of times, a transition so dreadful must necessarily have fatal consequences, and indeed it is related that the prisoners commonly take to their beds at the first arrival, which nothing afterwards can induce them to quit.... Can it bear reflection, much less inspection? Six or seven thousand human beings, deprived of liberty by the chance of war ... consigned to linger out probably many tedious years in misery and disease!
‘While we declaim against the injustice and tyranny of our neighbours, shall we neglect the common duties of humanity? If we submit to crowd our dungeons with the virtuous and the just of our country, confounding moral guilt with unintentional error, and subjecting them to indiscriminate punishment and the most inhuman privations, though we submit to this among ourselves, do not let us pursue the same system towards individuals thrown on our compassion by the casualties of war, lest we provoke a general spirit of retaliation, and plunge again the civilized world into the vortex of Barbarism. Let us not forget that the prisoner is a living trust in our hands, not to be subject to the wayward fancy of caprice, but a deposit placed at our disposal to be required at a future hour. It is a solemn charge, involving the care of life and the principle of humanity.’
‘Humanitas’ wrote in the Examiner, commenting upon Whitbread’s defence and laudation of Dartmoor as a residence, and amazed at the selection of such a place as the site for a prison:
‘The most inclement climate in England; for nine months there is no sun, and four and a half times as much rain as in Middlesex. The regiments on duty there have to be changed every two months. Were not the deaths during the first three years 1,000 a year, and 3,000 sick? Did not from 500 to 600 die in the winter of 1809? Is it not true that since some gentlemen visited the prison and published their terrible experiences, nobody has been allowed inside?’
The writer goes on, not so much to condemn the treatment of the prisoners as to blame the Government for spending so much money on such a site.