As we have remarked before, the site of the prison was covered with trees
when its outlines were traced and surveyed by the rebel engineers. These
trees, felled to the ground, were hewn, and matched so well on the inner
line of the palisades as to give no glimpse of the outer world across the
space of the dead line, which averaged nineteen feet in width, and which
was defined by a frail wooden railing about three feet in height, from
fifteen to twenty-five feet distant from the palisades.
[Illustration]
This line of stockade rose from fifteen to eighteen feet above the surface
of the ground, while the outer line of logs, which was erected about sixty
paces distant from the inner line, was formed of the rough trunks of
pines, and projected twelve feet above the earth. The original stockade
measured but ten hundred and ten feet in length, and seven hundred and
eighty-three feet in width; and within this space were jammed together,
for several months, from twenty-two thousand to thirty-five thousand men,
thus giving a superficial area to each man, when the prison contained
thirty thousand prisoners, but seventeen square feet, after deducting the
nineteen feet average for the dead line, and the quagmire, three hundred
feet in width. This measurement would allow for thirty-five thousand men
but fifteen square feet of area, or less than two square yards to each
person, or more than twenty times the density of Liverpool. This was all
the space that was afforded before the enlargement, and this reckoning
does not include roads or by-paths for communication among the prisoners.
Seventeen and a half square feet of earth are allowed for the coffin's
length in the field of sepulchres. There were here to be seen twelve acres
of living men, packed together like the immense shoals of fish in the
ocean, but like nothing that has life on the earth, not even the
ant-fields. The ratio of density was equivalent to more than sixteen
hundred thousand people to the square mile. The densest portion of East
London has the great number of one hundred and sixty thousand to the
square mile.