The next day his mission took him to the prison ships. Here he did not succeed so well, for as he approached one of the hulks he had a large basket of filth thrown over him, and he had to leave without boarding her. By way of punishment, the prisoners on this ship were made the last to leave England.
On May 15, 1814, the evacuation of Portchester began. Gille left on the 20th, carrying away the best of feelings towards the Agent and the Commandant, the former showing his sympathy with the prisoners to the very last, by taking steps so that the St. Malo men, of whom there were a great many, should be sent direct to their port instead of being landed at Calais.
Gille describes a very happy homeward voyage, thanks largely to the English doctor on the ship, who, finding that Gille was a Mason, had him treated with distinction, and even offered to help him with a loan of money.
Pillet, the irrepressible, tells a yarn that ‘Milor Cordower (Lord Cawdor), Colonel du régiment de Carmarthen’, visiting the Castle one day, was forgetful enough to leave his horse unattended, tied up in the courtyard; when he returned there was no horse to be found, and it turned out that the prisoners, mad with hunger, had taken the horse, killed it, and eaten it raw. Pillet adds that all dogs who strayed Portchester way suffered the same fate, and that in support of his statement he can bring many naval officers of Lorient and Brest.
Pillet’s story, I think, is rather better than Garneray’s about the great Dane on the prison ship (see pp. [68]–71).
The last French prisoners left Portchester at the end of May 1814, but American prisoners were here until January 1816. After the Peace all the wooden buildings were taken down and sold by auction (a row of cottages in Fareham, built out of the material, still enjoys the name of ‘Bug Row’). Relics of this period of the Castle’s history are very scanty. The old Guard House at the Land Gate, now the Castle Custodian’s dwelling, remains much as it was, and a line of white stones on the opposite side of the approach marks the boundary of the old prison hospital, which is also commemorated in the name Hospital Lane.
The great tower still retains the five stories which were arranged for the prisoners, and on the transverse beams are still the hooks to which the hammocks were suspended. Some crude coloured decoration on the beams of the lowest story may have been the work of the French theatrical artists, but I doubt it.
Names of French and other prisoners are cut on many of the walls and wooden beams, notably at the very top of the great tower, which is reached by a dark, steep newel stair of Norman work, now almost closed to the public on account of the dangerous condition of many of the steps. This was the stair used by Dufresne, and the number of names cut in the topmost wall would seem to show that the lofty coign, whence might be seen a widespread panorama, stretching on three sides far away to the Channel, and to these poor fellows possible liberty, was a favourite resort. I noted some twenty decipherable names, the earliest date being 1745 and the latest 1803.
Only one death appears in the Church Register—that of ‘Peter Goston, a French prisoner’, under date of December 18, 1812.
There seems to have been no separate burial ground for the rank and file of the prisoners, but it is said that they were shovelled away into the tide-swept mud-flats outside the South Gate, and that, for economy, a single coffin with a sliding bottom did duty for many corpses. But human remains in groups have been unearthed all around the Castle, and, as it is known that at certain periods the mortality among the prisoners was very high, it is believed that these are to be dated from the prisoner-of-war epoch of the Castle’s history.