“No, not a bit,” returned Max with a slight laugh. He paused a moment, then went on more gravely.
“The treatment they gave the Americans they took prisoner, was simply barbarous; unworthy of a civilized—not to say Christian—nation.”
“Yes, perfectly dreadful!” chimed in Lulu.
“Now I really don’t remember any such barbarity,” remarked Albert, rather apologetically. “But you know the Americans were considered rebels, and I—suppose the British officers may have thought it a duty to—refrain from coddling them.”
“Coddling indeed!” exclaimed Max. “Do you remember about the ‘Old Jersey’ prison-ship?”
“Can’t say that I do.”
“It was a dismasted hulk—an old sixty-four gun-ship moored in Wallabout Bay, near New York City. She was so old and worn-out and rotten that she wasn’t fit to go to sea; so they used her as a prison for Americans whom they captured, and starved them and treated them so horribly in every way, that eleven thousand died in her.”
“Wouldn’t it be charitable to suppose the starving may have been because of an unavoidable scarcity of provisions?” queried Albert mildly.
“There was no such unavoidable scarcity,” asserted Max, “yet the poor prisoners were sometimes so hungry as to be glad to eat cockroaches and mice when they could catch them.”
“On that vessel?” asked Albert.