It is equally pleasing to come across, in this continually dreary record of crime and misery, a foreign testimony to English kindness. The following letter was kindly lent to me by Mr. J. E. Mace, of Tenterden, Kent, to whose grandfather it was addressed:

‘Chatham. Le 10 janvier, 1798.

‘A Monsieur Mace, Tenterden.

‘Cher Monsieur:

‘S’il est cruel d’être livré aux dégoûts et aux peines que cause la captivité la plus dure, il est bien doux de trouver des êtres sensibles qui, comme vous, cher Monsieur, savent plaindre le sort rigoureux des victimes de la guerre. Ce que vous avez eu la bonté de m’envoyer, plus encore, l’expression des beaux sentiments me touche, me pénètre de la plus vive reconnaissance, et me fait sentir avec une nouvelle force cette vérité constante:—L’Humanité rapproche et unit tous les cœurs faits pour elle. Comme vous, cher Monsieur, et avec vous, je désire avec ferveur que les principes de notre Divin Législateur reprennent leur Empire sur la terre, la conséquence en est si belle!

‘Dieu vous garde beaucoup d’années.

‘Farbouriet, Colonel 12me Hussards.’

In 1807, as a consequence of the bombardment of Copenhagen and the subsequent surrender to England of the Danish fleet, there were 1,840 Danish prisoners in England, who received double the allowance of French prisoners, inasmuch as they were rather hostages than prisoners—hostages for the good behaviour of Denmark as regards Napoleon;—the captain of a man-of-war got four shillings per diem, a commanding officer two shillings, the captain of an Indiaman three shillings, and so on. In other respects they were treated as prisoners of war.

These Danes were largely taken from the hulks to man our merchant navy, and one Wipperman, a Danish clerk on H.M.S. Utile, seems to have made this transfer business a very profitable one, until the accusation brought against him by a Danish prisoner of war of having obtained a watch and some money under false pretences, brought to light the fact that his men rarely if ever joined the British merchant service except to desert at the first opportunity, and generally went at large as free men. He was severely punished, and his exposure brought to an end an extensive crimping system by which hundreds of dangerous foreigners had been let loose from the prison ships, many of them spies and escape-aiders.

Foreign writers have included among their various complaints against the British Government its reluctance to allow religious ministration among the prisoners of war. But the Transport Office, as we shall see later, had learned by experience that the garb of sanctity was by no means always the guarantee of sanctity, and so when in 1808 a Danish parson applied to be allowed on the prison ships at Chatham, he got his permission only on the condition that ‘he does not repeat, the old offence of talking upon matters unconnected with his mission and so cause much incorrect inferences’—a vague expression which probably meant talking about outside affairs to prisoners, who had no other source of information.

In 1813 the Transport Office replied to the Bishop of Angoulême, who requested that a priest named Paucheron might minister on the prison ships at Chatham, that they could not accede inasmuch as Paucheron had been guilty ‘of highly improper conduct in solemnizing a marriage between a prisoner of war and a woman in disguise of a man’.

In no branch of art did French prisoners show themselves more proficient than in that of forgery, and, although when we come to treat of the prisons ashore we shall find that, from the easier accessibility to implements there, the imitation of passports and bank notes was more perfectly effected than by the prisoners on the hulks, the latter were not always unsuccessful in their attempts.

In 1809 Guiller and Collas, two prisoners on El Firme at Plymouth, opened negotiations with the captain’s clerk to get exchanged to the Généreux, telling him what their object was and promising a good reward. He pretended to entertain their proposals, but privately told the captain. Their exchange was effected, and their ally supplied them with paper, ink, and pencils of fine hair, with which they imitated notes of the Bank of England, the Naval and Commercial Bank, and an Okehampton Bank. Not having the official perforated stamp, they copied it to perfection by means of smooth halfpennies and sail-makers’ needles. When all was ready, the clerk gave the word to the authorities, and the clever rascals got their reward on the gallows at Exeter in 1810, being among the first war prisoners to be executed for forgery.

In 1812 two French prisoners on a Portsmouth hulk, Dubois and Benry, were condemned to be hanged at Winchester for the forgery of a £1 Bank of England note. Whilst lying in the jail there they tried to take their own lives by opening veins in their arm with broken glass and enlarging the wounds with rusty nails, declaring that they would die as soldiers, not as dogs, and were only prevented by force from carrying out their resolve. They died crying ‘Vive l’Empereur!’

In 1814 six officers were found to have obtained their liberty by forged passports. These men were, in their own vernacular, ‘Broke-Paroles’—men who had been sent from parole places to prison ships, for the crime of forging passports. Further investigation caused suspicion to be fixed upon a woman calling herself Madame Carpenter, who was ostensibly a tea and sugar dealer at 46 Foley Street, Portland Chapel, London, but who had gained some influence at the Transport Office through having rendered services to British prisoners in France, which enabled her to have access to the prison ships in her pretended trade, although she was a Frenchwoman. I cannot discover what punishment she received. We shall hear more of her in the chapter upon Stapleton Prison.