It is worth telling, too, that short as was the allowance of food, the prisoners stinted themselves on it and sold what they saved in order to buy an occasional newspaper. As these papers had with one or two exceptions only American victories at sea to describe, they filled the old hulk with rapturous joy—a joy that the officials resented, of course, in brutal fashion.
How the prisoners sawed a hole through the ship’s side with a case-knife and were detected; how they saw a Narragansett Indian, who was among the impressed-seamen prisoners on another ship, make a dash for liberty only to fail after a heroic effort; how eighteen from the Crown Princess did escape at last—all this makes interesting reading. The number of prisoners increased so rapidly at the last, however, that all were sent to Dartmoor.
Dartmoor Prison.
From a wood-cut of a contemporary engraving.
“It was in the summer of 1814 that we were sent in large drafts to Dartmoor. Soon we numbered, as we were told, six thousand. The double stone walls, about fourteen feet high, broad enough for hundreds of soldiers to walk on guard, formed a half moon, with three separate yards, containing seven massy stone buildings, capable of holding from 1,500 to 1,800 men each. The centre one was appropriated to colored prisoners.
“These buildings were located on the slope of a hill fronting the east, affording us a prospect of the rising sun; but it was shut out from our view long before sunset. On three sides one of the most dreary wastes, studded with ledges of rocks and low shrubs, met our view.”
Here the prisoners were reduced to the most miserable shifts to cover their persons. “A single bucket only, containing the food, was allowed to a mess, around which they gathered with the avidity of starving men, and each, with his wooden spoon, struggled to eat fastest and most. Filthy, ragged, covered with vermin, they strolled around the yard in the daytime, and, moody and despairing, gradually sank, through degrading companionship and the demoralization of want and suffering, lower and lower in the scale of humanity.” For there were European soldiers and sailors as well as Americans in the prison. Many were without hats and shoes and some became absolutely naked. The winters were terribly cold. The water in the stream in the yard and in the prison-rooms froze solid. Snow lay two feet deep on the hill-side. There was no fire in the rooms. Yet these naked men were mustered in the open yards, standing in the snow and storms, every day for an hour, that they might be counted.
Dartmoor Prison.