Occasionally the administration made an attempt to clothe them. In April 1813, fourteen who were entitled to a fresh issue were caught, scrubbed from head to foot in the bath-house, deprived of their filthy rags, and properly clothed, but on the very next day they had sold every garment, and were again seen in the yards with nothing to cover their nakedness but the threadbare blanket common to the tenants of the “Capitole.” In 1812 they were banished to No. 4 prison, and in order to keep them from annoying their fellow prisoners the walls were built which separated No. 4 and its yard from the rest of the prison, for it was hoped that where all were destitute, those who would sell their clothing, bedding and provisions would be unable to find a purchaser. But though new hammocks and clothing were given to them by charitable French prisoners as well as by the Government, they disposed of them all through the bars of the gate and went naked as before.
Unquestionably, the greatest evil which Captain Cotgrave was called upon to face was the sale of rations. Serious crime could safely be left to the prisoners themselves to punish, but this inhuman traffic was the business of nobody but the persons who indulged in it.
Each prisoner was served with rations every day, but if he chose to sell them instead of eating them, it was very difficult to interfere. Certain prisoners set up shops where they bought the rations of the improvident and sold them again at a profit. Gambling, of course, was at the bottom of the evil. To get a penny or two to stake at the tables, men who had sold all their clothes would hypothecate their rations for several days, and, having lost, and knowing that to beg would be useless, they would sit down to starve, until, in the last stage of weakness, they were carried to the infirmary to die. Sometimes these miserable creatures would forestall the end by hanging themselves to a hammock stanchion, rather than be forced out of their beds by the guards.
In February 1813, very much to their surprise, Captain Cotgrave clapped a few of the most notorious food buyers into the Cachot, and kept them there for ten days, on two-thirds allowance. To their remonstrances he replied as follows:
“To the Prisoners in the Cachot for Purchasing Provisions.
“The orders to put you on short allowance from the Commissioners of His Majesty’s Transport Board is for purchasing the provisions of your fellow prisoners, by which means numbers have died from want of food, and the hospital is filled with sick not likely to recover. The number of deaths occasioned by this inhuman practice occasions considerable expense to the Government, not only in coffins, but the hospital filled with those poor unhappy wretches so far reduced from want of food that they linger a considerable time in the hospital at the Government’s expense, and then fall a victim to the cruelty of those who have purchased their provisions to the disgrace of Christians and whatever nation they belong to.
“The testimony of your countrymen and the surgeons prove the fact.”
But it was all to no purpose, and in the following month we find him appealing to the whole body of prisoners.
“Notice to the Prisoners in General.”
“The infamous and horrible practice of a certain number of prisoners who buy the provisions of some evil-conducted and unfortunate of their fellow-countrymen, thereby tearing away from them the only means of existence they possess forces me to forewarn the whole of the prisoners that on the first appearance of a recurrence of this odious and abominable practice I shall, without any exception prevent any person from keeping shops in the prison, and I will stop the market.
“As it would be entirely against my wishes and inclination to have recourse to these violent measures, I strongly request of the well-conducted of the prisoners to use all their exertions to put a stop thereto.”
The threat was an empty one; the well-conducted prisoners discountenanced the practice, but the Romans bought and sold among themselves.
After their attack upon the American prisoners in July 1813, they were further isolated, by being confined to the small yard on the south side of No. 4 (now the separate cells yard). For more than four years they had skulked about the yards by day, almost naked, exposed to the damp fogs of summer and the icy blasts of winter; had huddled by night upon a wet and filthy stone floor, had subsisted half-starved upon garbage until the wind seemed to blow through their skeleton ribs; had neglected every elementary law of sanitation, and yet, strange to relate, every succeeding epidemic had passed them by, and it was notorious throughout the prison that sickness was almost unknown among the Romans. When General Stephenson and Mr. Hawker held their inquiry in 1813, the scandal of their mode of life was so great that the principal recommendation of the Commission was that “the prisoners calling themselves Romans” should be removed and compelled to live like human beings in some place where they could be kept under strict surveillance. And so, on October 16th, 1813, the scarecrow battalion of 436 “Romans” was mustered at the gate, decently clothed, and marched under a strong escort to a prison hulk in Plymouth, and kept under strict discipline until the peace. Fit products of the Terror these Romans, who as children may have hooted after the tumbrils in Paris, and shrieked with unholy glee as the boats went down in the Noyades under the quai at Nantes.