Established Diet
1st. Full Diet
Tea, or water-gruel with salt, for breakfast; the same for supper. Meat 12 oz., with potatoes or greens, and 1 pint of broth, for dinner. Bread 14 oz., sugar 2 oz., beer 2 pints (of beer at 16s. the 38 gallons), and if any other drink is wanted, water, or toast and water.
2nd. Reduced Diet
Tea, or water-gruel with salt, for breakfast; the same for supper. Meat 6 oz., with potatoes or greens, and 1 pint of broth, for dinner. Sugar 2 oz. The same quantity and quality of bread and beer as on full diet.
3rd. Low Diet
Water-gruel or tea for breakfast. Water-gruel or barley-water for dinner. The same or rice-water for supper. Bread 7 oz. Patients on low diet are supposed to require no stated meal, drinks only being allowable, or even desirable; a small quantity of beer may be given when anxiously wished for and permitted by their surgeon. The bread is supposed to be chiefly for toast and water, or, should the patient incline, a bit of toasted bread without butter, with a little of his gruel or tea. Sugar 2 oz.
Milk, 1 pint, for breakfast. Rice-milk, 1 pint and a half (sweetened with sugar when desired), for dinner. Milk, 1 pint, for supper. Bread 14 oz. Drink—water, barley-water, or rice-water. Sugar 2 oz.
5th. Mixed Diet
Milk, 1 pint, for breakfast. Meat 4 oz., with potatoes or greens, and 1 pint of broth, for dinner. Milk, 1 pint, for supper. Bread 14 oz. Drinks as on milk diet. Sugar 2 oz. Beer 1 pint.
Notes
The meat mentioned in the different diets to be beef and mutton alternately. Should any patient particularly require a mutton-chop or beefsteak, instead of either the beef or mutton boiled and made into broth, the surgeon may direct it accordingly.
The matron is allowed to purchase ripe fruit, or any other article not comprehended in the several diets, by permission and direction of the surgeon.
Sago, when particularly ordered by the surgeon, will be furnished in the quantity equal to the value of one day’s ordinary diet, but then for that day the matron is to supply nothing else, save toast and water, water-gruel, or barley-water, and any bread which may be ordered by the surgeon.
No beer is to be issued to any patient in the hospital until after dinner, unless particularly ordered by his surgeon, and no patient is allowed to give his allowance of beer to another, for when he does not choose the whole, or any part of it, it is to remain with the matron.
In fact, when we look to the sanitary condition of the hospital, its staff, its furnishing, the diet, the arrangements for the admission, the retention, and the treatment of the patients, we find in the records sufficient evidence that the provision for the care of the sick prisoners was at Norman Cross equal to, if not superior to, that offered by any civil institution of that date.
To pass from the discomforts of the prison to the luxurious life of the hospital was a temptation which favoured malingering, especially in the case of one of “Les Misérables,” who, having nothing left wherewith to gamble, needed a bed and food. The agent had in 1801, to issue a special order as to the precautions necessary to prevent prisoners shamming illness in order to obtain admission into the hospital. This was the year of the epidemic, when the hospital had been in the earlier months overcrowded, and we can only trust that no mistake was ever made, and that no prisoner sickening for the fatal disease was dealt with as a malingerer and denied admission into the wards.
As stated in an early chapter, the prisoners passed out of the agent’s charge when they fell sick, and the order of Captain Woodriff may have been the result of friction between himself and the surgeons.
The excellent arrangements made by the Government department for the care of the sick and wounded gave the sick prisoners the best chance of recovery. It was, nevertheless, the cruel fate of nearly 1,800 of those incarcerated at Norman Cross between 1797 and 1814 to end a captivity which had endured for a period varying from a few days to eleven years, without the solace of a glimpse of their native land, away from relatives, friends, and home, by death in the prison hospital, whence their bodies were borne to be laid in the prisoners’ cemetery, where they still lie, unknown and unhonoured. [171]
The succeeding chapter deals with this cemetery and cognate matters.
CHAPTER IX
THE CEMETERY—RELIGIOUS MINISTRATIONS—BISHOP OF MOULINS
No column high-lifted doth shadow their dust,
And o’er their poor ruin no willow trees wave;
Yet their honour is safe in the thought of the Just,
And their agony fireth the hearts of the Brave
Unto deeds that shall shine through Oblivion’s rust.Norman Hill, Père Lechaise.
For a short period after the occupation of the Depot, the prisoners who died were buried outside the prison wall, in the north-east corner of the site. The discovery of human skeletons by workmen engaged in excavating gravel in this locality gave rise to tales of violent deaths in duels and of surreptitious burials, tales which have to be dismissed as idle since our researches have brought to light the fact that the spot was for a brief period—the exact length of which cannot be determined—the burial-place of the prisoners. It is certain that very few burials took place in this corner. Early in the history of the prison, as mentioned in a previous chapter, the Government bought a portion of a field on the opposite—the western—side of the North Road for use as the prisoners’ cemetery, and in this field rest the remains of at least 1,770 of the captives taken by us in that long war.