A clever quibble saved the life of a prisoner on the San Rafael hulk at Plymouth. He was tried at Exeter for imitating a £2 note with indian ink, but pleaded that as he was under the protection of no laws he had not broken any, and was acquitted. This was before cases of murder and forgery were brought under the civil jurisdiction.
Well-deserved releases of prisoners in recognition of good actions done by them in the past were not rare. In 1808 a prisoner on the Sampson at Chatham, named Sabatier, was released without exchange on the representation of the London Missionary Society, who acted for Captain Carbonel of the famous privateer Grand Bonaparte, who had shown great kindness to the crew and passengers of the ship Duff which he had captured.
In the same year a prisoner at Plymouth, named Verdie, was released unconditionally on the petition of Lieut. Ross, R.N., for having kindly treated the Lieutenant’s father when the latter was a prisoner in France.
In 1810 a Portsmouth prisoner was unconditionally liberated upon his proving satisfactorily that he had helped Midshipman Holgate of the Shannon to escape from imprisonment in France.
Almost to the very last the care of sick prisoners on the hulks seems to have been criminally neglected. For instance, the In-letters to the Transport Office during the year 1810 are full of vehement or pathetic complaints about the miserable state of the sick on the Marengo and Princess Sophia hospital ships at Portsmouth. Partly this may be due to an economical craze which affected the authorities at this time, but it must be chiefly attributed to medical inefficiency and neglect. Most of the chief medical officers of the prison ships had their own private practices ashore, with what results to the poor foreigners, nominally their sole care, can be imagined, and all of them resented the very necessary condition that they should sleep on the ships.
In this year 1810, Dr. Kirkwood, of the Europe hospital ship at Plymouth, was convicted of culpable neglect in regularly sleeping ashore, and was superseded. As a result of an inquiry into the causes of abnormal sickness on the Vigilant and at Forton Prison, Portsmouth, the surgeons were all superseded, and the order was issued that all prison-ship surgeons should daily examine the healthy prisoners so as to check incipient sickness. I append the States of the Renown hospital ship at Plymouth for February 1814:
‘Staff: 2 surgeons, 1 assistant surgeon, 1 matron, 1 interpreter, 1 cook, 1 barber, 1 mattress maker, 1 tailor, 1 washerwoman, and 10 nurses. Received 141. Discharged 69. Died 19. Remaining 53.
‘Fever and dysentery have been the prevalent complaints among the prisoners from Pampelune, whose deplorable state the Board of Inspection are in full possession of. (Among these were some forty women “in so wretched a state that they were wholly destitute of the appropriate dress of their sex”. Two of the British officers’ wives collected money for the poor creatures and clothed them.) Pneumonia has recently attacked many of these ill-conditioned men termed Romans, many of whom were sent here literally in a state of nudity, an old hammock in the boat to cover them being excepted.’
(The Romans above mentioned were the most degraded and reckless of the Dartmoor prisoners, who had been sent to the hulks partly because there was no power in the prison that could keep them in order, and partly because their filthy and vicious habits were revolting to the other and more decent prisoners.)
The horrors of the English prison ships were constantly quoted by French commanders as spurs to the exertions of their men. Bonaparte more than once dwelt on them. Phillipon, the gallant defender of Badajos, afterwards a prisoner on parole in England, reminded his men of them as they crowded to hurl our regiments from the breaches. ‘An appeal’, says Napier, ‘deeply felt, for the annals of civilized nations furnish nothing more inhuman towards captives of war than the prison ships of England.’
The accompanying drawing from Colonel Lebertre’s book may give some idea of the packing process practised on the hulks. It represents a view from above of the orlop deck of the Brunswick prison ship at Chatham—a ship which was regarded as rather a good one to be sent to. The length of this deck was 125 feet, its breadth 40 feet in the widest part, and its height 4 feet 10 inches, so that only boys could pass along it without stooping. Within this space 460 persons slept, and as there was only space to swing 431 hammocks, 29 men had to sleep as best they could beneath the others.