Fresh meat was rarely furnished to the prison, according to the reports
and statements of witnesses, and we should doubt that it was furnished at
all, if it were not for the number of sections of the horns of cattle
which are strewn about the enclosure, and which the prisoners had used for
drinking dishes; still, many of these horns may have been taken from the
cattle killed for the guards.
That the issue of fresh beef would have been beneficial to the men, there
is no doubt; in fact, the experiment at Jamaica, which continued twenty
years, proves it; for the troops who were fed with a larger allowance of
fresh meat suffered far less from dysentery than any of the troops of the
West India islands. There is always great difficulty in preserving the
good qualities of fresh meat in hot climes, and, on the other hand, the
use of salt meat in the same regions is apt to engender scorbutic
disorders. Whenever putrefactive fermentation begins with any kind of
meat, or any recently living nitrogenized substance, catalytic action
takes place, ammonia is evolved, and the product is no longer pleasant to
the taste or nutritious to the system. Food, when even exposed to vitiated
air, becomes deteriorated in quality, just as good flour is rendered
worthless by mixture with the damaged fungoid grain. Butchers' meat on the
average affords but thirty-five per cent. of real nutritive matter, at
least such was the opinion presented to the French Minister of the
Interior by Vauquelin and Percy. Accepting this determination, we may form
some idea of the relative value of the scanty allowance of the doubtful
beef furnished to the prisoners, if it was furnished at all.
That bacon was furnished, there is no doubt; neither has the quantity been
underrated by the sufferers themselves, as we shall presently see. And
there is no reason why the quality should not have been most excellent,
unless it had been selected for the purposes of cruelty. There is evidence
that it was sometimes of very bad quality; but that it was generally and
systematically selected to disgust the prisoners, we are unwilling to
believe, although we have evidence that rotten bacon was furnished by
contractors, and the fact boasted of by them. The influence and effect of
this decomposed food may be surmised by the following remark of Donovan:
"Flesh contains the elements of some of the most deadly poisons that are
found even in the vegetable kingdom; a slight change in their mode of
combination, or of the ratio of their quantities, may convert nutriment
into a source of death."