PRISON-SHIP SUNDRIES
Under this heading are included various reminiscences of, and
particulars about, the prison ships which could not be conveniently
dealt with in the foregoing chapters.
In April 1759 five French prisoners from the _Royal Oak_ hulk at
Plymouth were executed at Exeter for the murder of Jean Maneaux, who had
informed the agent that his comrades had forged passports in order to
facilitate their escape to France. Finding this out, they got Maneaux
into an obscure corner of the ship, tied him to a ringbolt, and gave him
sixty lashes with a rope to the end of which was fastened an iron
thimble as thick as a man’s wrist. He got loose, and fell back; they
jumped on him till they broke his neck, then cut his body into small
pieces, and conveyed them through a waste pipe overboard. The next day
twenty-seven prisoners were arrested, and one of them pointed out the
actual murderers.
In 1778 two prisoners escaped from the _San Rafael_ at Plymouth, swam
off to a lighter full of powder, overpowered the man in charge, ran down
through all the ships in Hamoaze, round Drake’s Island, and got safely
away to France, where they sold the powder at a handsome price.
Even more daring was the deed of eleven Frenchmen who, early in the
morning of April 7, 1808, made their escape from the hulk _Vigilant_ at
Portsmouth, by cutting a hole, and swimming to the _Amphitrite_, a ship
in ordinary, fitted up as the abode of the Superintendent Master. They
boarded a boat, hanging on the davits, clothed themselves in the
greatcoats of the boat’s crew, lowered her, and in the semi-darkness
pulled away to the Master Attendant’s buoy boat, one of the finest
unarmed crafts in the harbour, valued at £1,000. They boarded her,
immediately got under way at about five a.m., and successfully navigated
her to Havre, or Cherbourg, which they reached in the evening, and sold
her for £700. She was fitted out, armed with eight six-pounders, and
went forth as a privateer under the name of _Le Buoy Boat de
Portsmouth_. Her career, however, was short, for in November she was
captured by the _Coquette_.
The above-mentioned prison ship _Vigilant_ seems to have hardly deserved
her name, for in the year 1810 alone no less than thirty-two prisoners
escaped from her, and of these only eight were recaptured.
On another occasion three prisoners escaped from a hulk, got a small
skiff, rowed to Yantlett Creek, where they boarded a fishing-smack of
which the master and boy were asleep. The master made a stout resistance
and called on the boy to help him, but he was too terrified to do so.
The master was overpowered and severely beaten, and then managed to jump
overboard. The Frenchmen got off, taking the boy with them.
The _Sampson_ at Chatham was evidently an ill-omened ship. It was on
board her that occurred the disastrous event of May 31, 1811, when the
half-starved prisoners, upon being docked of half their rations for the
misdeeds of a few of their number, broke out into open mutiny, which was
only quelled at the cost of six prisoners being killed and a great many
wounded. On the _Sampson_, also, was fought a particularly terrible duel
in 1812. Two prisoners quarrelled and determined to settle their
difference quietly. So, attended only by their seconds, they betook
themselves to the ordinary ship prison, which happened to be empty, and,
armed with sticks to which scissor-blades had been fastened, fought. One
of them received a mortal thrust in the abdomen, but, although his
bowels were protruding, he continued to parry his opponent’s blows until
he was exhausted. He died in spite of the surgeon’s attentions.
On board the same ship in 1813, three prisoners decided to murder the
master’s mate and the sergeant of marines—men universally detested for
their brutal behaviour—and drew lots as to who should do it. The lot
fell upon Charles Manseraux. But he had ‘compunction of conscience’
because the sergeant was a married man with a family. However, he had to
kill some one, and fixed on a private of the Marines. He took the
opportunity when the unfortunate man was doing duty on the fo’c’sle and
drove a knife into his back. Another prisoner saw the deed done, knocked
Manseraux down and secured him. Manseraux and the others were tried at
the Maidstone Assizes, found guilty, and executed.
Duelling and crimes of violence seem to have been rampant on certain
ships more than on others. The _San Damaso_ at Portsmouth was one of
these, although on the Chatham hulks the unnatural deaths were so
frequent that the Coroner of Rochester in 1812 claimed special fees from
the Transport Office on account of the trebling of his duties, a claim
which was not granted.
A very bold attempt at escape in broad daylight was made by some
desperate prisoners of the _Canada_ hulk at Chatham in 1812. Beef was
being hoisted on board the prison ship from a lighter alongside, on
board of which were half a dozen American prisoners who were assisting
in the operation. Suddenly, they cut the painter, and, helped by a stiff
breeze, actually sailed off, and, although the guards on all the prison
ships fired at them, would have escaped if they had not run aground off
Commodore’s Hard, Gillingham. They sprang ashore here, and ran, but the
mud was too much for them and they were captured.
The Americans, whether ashore or afloat, were the hardest prisoners to
guard of any. They seem never to have relaxed in their plans and
attempts to escape, and as they were invariably better supplied with
money than Frenchmen and Spaniards, they could add the power of the
bribe to the power which knowledge of their captors’ language gave them.
Hence no estimate can be formed of the real number of Americans who got
away from the hulks, for, although a very exact system of roll call was
in use, the ingenuity of the Americans, immensely backed by their
purses, contrived matters so that not merely were the numbers on board
always complete at each roll call, but upon more than one occasion, by
some over-exercise of ingenuity, the captain of a hulk actually found
himself commanding more prisoners than there were!
By way of relief to the monotony of this _guerre à outrance_ between
captors and captives we may quote instances when the better humanity of
the hapless ones came to the fore.
In 1812 a prisoner made an attempt to set the hulk _Ganges_ on fire at
Plymouth, and a large hole was burned in her side. The other prisoners
helped to extinguish the flames, and were so angry with the incendiary
that they were with difficulty prevented from tearing him to pieces.
Three officers of the Inverness Militia were sailing in the harbour at
Portsmouth in the same year, when a squall upset their boat, and they
were thrown into the water. One of the officers could not swim, and
seeing him struggling for life, a French prisoner on the _Crown_ hulk at
once sprang overboard and brought him safely to the ship. He was at once
liberated and returned to France.
But even heroism became a cloak for trickery among these weary,
hopeless, desperate exiles ever on the watch for a chance of escaping.
In 1810 a French prisoner at Plymouth obtained his freedom by saving a
British sentry from drowning, but the number of British sentries who,
after this, met with accidents which tumbled them overboard, and the
unfailing regularity with which heroic prisoner-rescuers appeared on the
scene, awakened the suspicions of the authorities, who found out that
these occurrences were purely commercial transactions. So they stopped
automatically.
It is equally pleasing to come across, in this continually dreary record
of crime and misery, a foreign testimony to English kindness. The
following letter was kindly lent to me by Mr. J. E. Mace, of Tenterden,
Kent, to whose grandfather it was addressed:
‘Chatham. Le 10 janvier, 1798.
‘_A Monsieur Mace, Tenterden._
‘CHER MONSIEUR:
‘S’il est cruel d’être livré aux dégoûts et aux peines que cause la
captivité la plus dure, il est bien doux de trouver des êtres sensibles
qui, comme vous, cher Monsieur, savent plaindre le sort rigoureux des
victimes de la guerre. Ce que vous avez eu la bonté de m’envoyer, plus
encore, l’expression des beaux sentiments me touche, me pénètre de la
plus vive reconnaissance, et me fait sentir avec une nouvelle force
cette vérité constante:—L’Humanité rapproche et unit tous les cœurs
faits pour elle. Comme vous, cher Monsieur, et avec vous, je désire avec
ferveur que les principes de notre Divin Législateur reprennent leur
Empire sur la terre, la conséquence en est si belle!
‘Dieu vous garde beaucoup d’années.
‘FARBOURIET, Colonel 12^{me} Hussards.’
In 1807, as a consequence of the bombardment of Copenhagen and the
subsequent surrender to England of the Danish fleet, there were 1,840
Danish prisoners in England, who received double the allowance of French
prisoners, inasmuch as they were rather hostages than prisoners—hostages
for the good behaviour of Denmark as regards Napoleon;—the captain of a
man-of-war got four shillings per diem, a commanding officer two
shillings, the captain of an Indiaman three shillings, and so on. In
other respects they were treated as prisoners of war.
These Danes were largely taken from the hulks to man our merchant navy,
and one Wipperman, a Danish clerk on H.M.S. _Utile_, seems to have made
this transfer business a very profitable one, until the accusation
brought against him by a Danish prisoner of war of having obtained a
watch and some money under false pretences, brought to light the fact
that his men rarely if ever joined the British merchant service except
to desert at the first opportunity, and generally went at large as free
men. He was severely punished, and his exposure brought to an end an
extensive crimping system by which hundreds of dangerous foreigners had
been let loose from the prison ships, many of them spies and
escape-aiders.
Foreign writers have included among their various complaints against the
British Government its reluctance to allow religious ministration among
the prisoners of war. But the Transport Office, as we shall see later,
had learned by experience that the garb of sanctity was by no means
always the guarantee of sanctity, and so when in 1808 a Danish parson
applied to be allowed on the prison ships at Chatham, he got his
permission only on the condition that ‘he does not repeat, the old
offence of talking upon matters unconnected with his mission and so
cause much incorrect inferences’—a vague expression which probably meant
talking about outside affairs to prisoners, who had no other source of
information.
In 1813 the Transport Office replied to the Bishop of Angoulême, who
requested that a priest named Paucheron might minister on the prison
ships at Chatham, that they could not accede inasmuch as Paucheron had
been guilty ‘of highly improper conduct in solemnizing a marriage
between a prisoner of war and a woman in disguise of a man’.
In no branch of art did French prisoners show themselves more proficient
than in that of forgery, and, although when we come to treat of the
prisons ashore we shall find that, from the easier accessibility to
implements there, the imitation of passports and bank notes was more
perfectly effected than by the prisoners on the hulks, the latter were
not always unsuccessful in their attempts.
In 1809 Guiller and Collas, two prisoners on _El Firme_ at Plymouth,
opened negotiations with the captain’s clerk to get exchanged to the
_Généreux_, telling him what their object was and promising a good
reward. He pretended to entertain their proposals, but privately told
the captain. Their exchange was effected, and their ally supplied them
with paper, ink, and pencils of fine hair, with which they imitated
notes of the Bank of England, the Naval and Commercial Bank, and an
Okehampton Bank. Not having the official perforated stamp, they copied
it to perfection by means of smooth halfpennies and sail-makers’
needles. When all was ready, the clerk gave the word to the authorities,
and the clever rascals got their reward on the gallows at Exeter in
1810, being among the first war prisoners to be executed for forgery.
In 1812 two French prisoners on a Portsmouth hulk, Dubois and Benry,
were condemned to be hanged at Winchester for the forgery of a £1 Bank
of England note. Whilst lying in the jail there they tried to take their
own lives by opening veins in their arm with broken glass and enlarging
the wounds with rusty nails, declaring that they would die as soldiers,
not as dogs, and were only prevented by force from carrying out their
resolve. They died crying ‘Vive l’Empereur!’
In 1814 six officers were found to have obtained their liberty by forged
passports. These men were, in their own vernacular, ‘Broke-Paroles’—men
who had been sent from parole places to prison ships, for the crime of
forging passports. Further investigation caused suspicion to be fixed
upon a woman calling herself Madame Carpenter, who was ostensibly a tea
and sugar dealer at 46 Foley Street, Portland Chapel, London, but who
had gained some influence at the Transport Office through having
rendered services to British prisoners in France, which enabled her to
have access to the prison ships in her pretended trade, although she was
a Frenchwoman. I cannot discover what punishment she received. We shall
hear more of her in the chapter upon Stapleton Prison.
A clever quibble saved the life of a prisoner on the _San Rafael_ hulk
at Plymouth. He was tried at Exeter for imitating a £2 note with indian
ink, but pleaded that as he was under the protection of no laws he had
not broken any, and was acquitted. This was before cases of murder and
forgery were brought under the civil jurisdiction.
Well-deserved releases of prisoners in recognition of good actions done
by them in the past were not rare. In 1808 a prisoner on the _Sampson_
at Chatham, named Sabatier, was released without exchange on the
representation of the London Missionary Society, who acted for Captain
Carbonel of the famous privateer _Grand Bonaparte_, who had shown great
kindness to the crew and passengers of the ship _Duff_ which he had
captured.
In the same year a prisoner at Plymouth, named Verdie, was released
unconditionally on the petition of Lieut. Ross, R.N., for having kindly
treated the Lieutenant’s father when the latter was a prisoner in
France.
In 1810 a Portsmouth prisoner was unconditionally liberated upon his
proving satisfactorily that he had helped Midshipman Holgate of the
_Shannon_ to escape from imprisonment in France.
Almost to the very last the care of sick prisoners on the hulks seems to
have been criminally neglected. For instance, the In-letters to the
Transport Office during the year 1810 are full of vehement or pathetic
complaints about the miserable state of the sick on the _Marengo_ and
_Princess Sophia_ hospital ships at Portsmouth. Partly this may be due
to an economical craze which affected the authorities at this time, but
it must be chiefly attributed to medical inefficiency and neglect. Most
of the chief medical officers of the prison ships had their own private
practices ashore, with what results to the poor foreigners, nominally
their sole care, can be imagined, and all of them resented the very
necessary condition that they should sleep on the ships.
In this year 1810, Dr. Kirkwood, of the _Europe_ hospital ship at
Plymouth, was convicted of culpable neglect in regularly sleeping
ashore, and was superseded. As a result of an inquiry into the causes of
abnormal sickness on the _Vigilant_ and at Forton Prison, Portsmouth,
the surgeons were all superseded, and the order was issued that all
prison-ship surgeons should daily examine the healthy prisoners so as to
check incipient sickness. I append the States of the _Renown_ hospital
ship at Plymouth for February 1814:
‘Staff: 2 surgeons, 1 assistant surgeon, 1 matron, 1 interpreter, 1
cook, 1 barber, 1 mattress maker, 1 tailor, 1 washerwoman,
and 10 nurses.
Received 141. Discharged 69. Died 19. Remaining 53.
‘Fever and dysentery have been the prevalent complaints among the
prisoners from Pampelune, whose deplorable state the Board of Inspection
are in full possession of. (Among these were some forty women “in so
wretched a state that they were wholly destitute of the appropriate
dress of their sex”. Two of the British officers’ wives collected money
for the poor creatures and clothed them.) Pneumonia has recently
attacked many of these ill-conditioned men termed _Romans_, many of whom
were sent here literally in a state of nudity, an old hammock in the
boat to cover them being excepted.’
(The _Romans_ above mentioned were the most degraded and reckless of the
Dartmoor prisoners, who had been sent to the hulks partly because there
was no power in the prison that could keep them in order, and partly
because their filthy and vicious habits were revolting to the other and
more decent prisoners.)
The horrors of the English prison ships were constantly quoted by French
commanders as spurs to the exertions of their men. Bonaparte more than
once dwelt on them. Phillipon, the gallant defender of Badajos,
afterwards a prisoner on parole in England, reminded his men of them as
they crowded to hurl our regiments from the breaches. ‘An appeal’, says
Napier, ‘deeply felt, for the annals of civilized nations furnish
nothing more inhuman towards captives of war than the prison ships of
England.’
The accompanying drawing from Colonel Lebertre’s book may give some idea
of the packing process practised on the hulks. It represents a view from
above of the orlop deck of the _Brunswick_ prison ship at Chatham—a ship
which was regarded as rather a good one to be sent to. The length of
this deck was 125 feet, its breadth 40 feet in the widest part, and its
height 4 feet 10 inches, so that only boys could pass along it without
stooping. Within this space 460 persons slept, and as there was only
space to swing 431 hammocks, 29 men had to sleep as best they could
beneath the others.
Something with an element of fun in it may serve as a relief to the
prevalent gloom of this chapter. It has been shown how largely gambling
entered into the daily life of the poor wretches on the hulks, and how
every device and excuse for it were invented and employed, but the
instance given by Captain Harris in his book upon Dartmoor is one of the
oddest.
‘When the lights were extinguished’, he says, ‘and the ship’s lantern
alone cast a dim glimmer through the long room, the rats were accustomed
to show themselves in search of the rare crumbs to be found below the
hammocks. A specially tempting morsel having been placed on an open
space, the arrival of the performers was anxiously looked for. They were
all known by name, and thus each player was able to select his champion
for the evening. As soon as a certain number had gained the open space,
a sudden whistle, given by a disinterested spectator, sent them back to
their holes, and the first to reach his hole was declared the winner. An
old grey rat called “Père Ratapon” was a great favourite with the
gamblers, for, though not so active as his younger brethren, he was
always on the alert to secure a good start when disturbed.’
In justice to our ancient foe I give here a couple of extracts, for
which I have to thank Mr. Gates of Portsmouth, from the _Hampshire
Telegraph_, illustrative of generous behaviour towards Englishmen who
had been forced to aid prisoners to escape.
[Illustration:
ORLOP DECK OF _BRUNSWICK_ PRISON SHIP, CHATHAM.
(_After Colonel Lebertre._)
Length, 125 feet. Breadth in widest part, 40 feet. Height, 4 feet 10
inches. Number of prisoners, 460.
]
‘July 20th, 1801. In a cartel vessel which arrived last week from
France, came over one Stephen Buckle, a waterman of this town. Three
gentlemen had hired this waterman to take them to the Isle of Wight, and
they had not proceeded farther than Calshot Castle when they rose upon
him, gagged him, tied him hand and foot, and threatened him with instant
death if he made the slightest noise or resistance. The boatman begged
for mercy, and promised his assistance in any undertaking if they would
spare his life; on which he was released, and was told they were French
prisoners, and ordered to make for the nearest port in France, at his
peril. The darkness of the night, and the calmness of the wind, favoured
their intentions, for after rowing two days and nights in a small, open
skiff, without having the least sustenance, they arrived safe at
Cherbourg. The waterman was interrogated at the Custom House as to the
prisoners’ escape; when, after giving the particulars and identifying
the persons, saying they threatened to murder him, the officers took the
three Frenchmen into custody, to take their respective trials. The poor
man’s case being made known to the Government, he was ordered to be
liberated, and his boat restored.’
‘September 21st, 1807. Between 9 and 10 o’clock on the evening of last
Sunday three weeks, two men engaged Thomas Hart, a ferryman, to take
them from Gosport beach to Spithead, to go on board a ship there, as
they said. When the boat reached Spithead they pretended the ship had
gone to St. Helens, and requested the waterman to go out after her.
Having reached that place, one of them, who could speak English, took a
dagger from under his coat, and swore he would take the life of the
waterman if he did not land them in France.
‘Under this threat the man consented to follow their directions, and
landed them at Fécamp. The men appeared to be in the uniform of officers
of the British Navy. The waterman was lodged in prison at Havre de
Grâce, and kept there for ten days. He was then released on representing
himself to be a fisherman, his boat was returned to him, and the
Frenchmen gave him six or seven pounds of bread, some cyder, and a
pocket compass, and a pass to prevent his being interrupted by any
French vessel he might meet with. In this state they set him adrift; he
brought several letters from English prisoners in France, and from
French persons to their friends in prison in this country.’