This panorama of life in the prison represents only what that life was in good weather. When the weather was too inclement for the outdoor life commanded by the regulations, and when the prisoners were crowded in the bare and dismal caserns, contentment and high spirits can scarcely have been the dominant tone of the inmates. In the surveyor’s report, [105] referred to in a former chapter, mention is made of the holes cut by the prisoners in the walls of the caserns; on such a day these would be valued not so much for light and ventilation as for the opportunity which they afforded of a glimpse of the world outside—a view of the traffic on the road and of rustic life which would remind many of similar scenes from which the conscription had torn them to fight the battles of Buonaparte.
What a tale is told by those holes cut by the prisoners in the outer walls!
’Tis pleasant through the loopholes of retreat
To peep at such a world.
Poor fellows, the peep they got through the holes they cut was their only share for years of the world outside.
It must be borne in mind that the habits and customs of the various depots would be almost identical; the Government regulations under which they lived and which ruled the life of the prisoners were the same for all. There might be points of etiquette and social intercourse, derived from local circumstances, traditional in each prison; but there were constant interchanges of prisoners, and these men would take with them to the new prison the habits, including unfortunately the worst vices, which they had acquired in the old one. At Norman Cross there were, before it was completed, men waiting to be received into the prison who had been captives at the Depot of Falmouth, where they had been distributed in the town itself in Roskoff, Kerquillack, and Penryn, whence they were removed, because, in consequence of this multiplication of the places of confinement, the administration was not only inefficient, but extravagant. Many others were brought from Porchester and other prisons on account of their overcrowded condition. Mr. Perrot, the first agent (Mr. Delafons, it will be remembered, though the first agent appointed, served only a few days, ordering the first stores from the immediate locality and from Lynn and Wisbech, but acting only until Mr. Perrot arrived) came from Porchester, and thus both the administrators and the prisoners would bring old prison customs with them. It was not until the influx of Dutch prisoners, after Duncan’s victory off Camperdown on the 11th October following the April in which the prison was opened, that any number of prisoners passed, without intermediate imprisonment, direct from the Transports to Norman Cross.
Whatever the cause may have been, whether it was owing to the phlegmatic disposition of the Dutch or the mercurial temperament of the French, all accounts show that the general conduct of the former was much more commendable than that of the latter. Beyond a few escapes, which were only natural, no offences are attributed to the Dutch. For the misdemeanours and felonies, great and small, the French were responsible. The gamblers who arrived from other prisons would doubtless find among the fresh arrivals men, without other resources, ready to relieve the dreary monotony of prison life by the excitement of dice box or cards. However it may have originated, it is certain that, within three years from the day when the first prisoner entered Norman Cross, the vice of gambling was a curse in the prison, and its slaves had become the victims of cruel, avaricious usurers, whose guilty practices thwarted the efforts of the authorities to insure the health and comfort of those in their charge. Early in 1800, Captain Woodriff, the agent, sent a report to the Transport Office which induced the commissioners to send to M. Otto, the French commissary in London, a letter, [107] from which the following is an extract:
“There are in those prisons some men, if they deserve that name, who possess money, with which they purchase at the daily market whatever is allowed to enter, and with those articles they purchase of some unfortunate and unthinking Fellow-prisoner, his Rations of Bread for several days together, and frequently both Bread and Beef for a month, which he, the merchant, seizes upon daily, and sells it out again to some other unfortunate being, on the same usurious terms; allowing the former one halfpennyworth of potatoes daily to keep him alive; not contented with this more than savage barbarity he purchases next his clothes, and bedding, and sees the miserable man lie naked on the planks, unless he will consent to allow him one halfpenny a night to lie in his own hammock, and which he makes him pay by a further Deprivation of his rations when his original debt is paid.”
On the 9th September of the same year, 1800, the approach of winter making the matter very urgent, Captain Woodriff again reported to the commissioners that nothing he could do prevented the prisoners from selling their rations of provisions for days to come, and their bedding, that several of the French prisoners were destitute of clothing and bedding, that one or two had died, and that in his opinion, unless some clothing was issued to the prisoners, many of them would die should the winter be severe. These poor victims of their vicious passions are called in many documents “Les Misérables.”
There is no reason to doubt that the habits described in these reports were the true explanation of the want of food and clothing, for which the French Government blamed the British; but there is also too much reason to believe that many of these prisoners, the victims of their fellow captives the usurers, and of their own passion for gambling, died of want in our prisons, a fact for which we as a nation can only plead the blinding animosity which filled the hearts and brains of the combatants in the wars from 1793 to 1815.
It is possible that besides these, there were others who, although well supplied with food, were at times clothed in rags owing to the obstinacy with which each Government clung to its own view, as to whose duty it was to clothe the prisoners.