French and American Prisoners of War at Dartmoor Prison, 1805-1816: The Strangest Experiment 9783030838904, 3030838900

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French and American Prisoners of War at Dartmoor Prison, 1805–1816 The Strangest Experiment Neil Davie

French and American Prisoners of War at Dartmoor Prison, 1805–1816

Description of the New Prison of War, Dartmoor (detail)

Neil Davie

French and American Prisoners of War at Dartmoor Prison, 1805–1816 The Strangest Experiment

Neil Davie Lyon Lumière University Lyon, France

ISBN 978-3-030-83890-4    ISBN 978-3-030-83891-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83891-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Niday Picture Library / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Anne A good heart is the sun and the moon; or, rather, the sun and not the moon, for it shines bright and never changes—William Shakespeare

Acknowledgements

The archival research undertaken for this book was made possible thanks to a period of sabbatical leave awarded by the French National University Council, the Conseil national des universités (CNU), and to the financial and logistical support of the Lyon-based Rhône-Alpes Centre for Historical Research (LARHRA). To the members of the CNU, and to the then directeur of the LARHRA, Professor Bernard Hours, and his colleagues go my sincere gratitude. My thanks too to the staff of the various libraries and archive repositories in Britain, the United States and France, consulted during the fieldwork stage of the preparation of this book. I am particularly indebted in this regard to Kate Monea and Carl Herzog of the USS Constitution Museum, Boston; Gena Reynolds of Oberlin College Library; Hannah Swan of the Peabody Essex Museum and Thierry Vincent of Le Havre Municipal Archives. Françoise Le Jeune and Eric Blais of Nantes University were also of invaluable help in obtaining a copy of Pierre Barbier’s Dartmoor poems. My warm thanks too to Heather Carson, Jay Hamilton, Liz Jones-Minsinger, David Sinclair and Barbie Thompson for generously sharing their expertise on Dartmoor Prison, and for suggesting valuable leads for my research; to Alan Forrest, Paul Gilje and Renaud Morieux for their incisive comments for the cover; and to Emily Russell and her editorial team and the anonymous readers at Palgrave Macmillan for seeing the potential in this “strangest experiment” and for carrying it forward to publication with consummate skill and good humour. My warm thanks too to Heather Carson, Paul Finegan, Nick Guyatt, Jay Hamilton, Liz Jones-Minsinger, David Sinclair and Barbie Thompson for generously sharing their expertise on Dartmoor Prison. vii

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Finally, my deep-felt thanks to my wife extraordinaire, Anne, for her unflagging support, encouragement and stimulating insights at every stage of the project. This book is dedicated to her. Lyon and Belley, France May 2021

Neil Davie

Note on Text

Emphasis and spelling are original unless otherwise stated. For reasons of clarity, punctuation has been modernised, except for verse. All translations from the French are my own unless otherwise stated.

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Contents

1 Introduction: Dartmoor—The Lost Prison?  1 I   4 II   9 2 Prisons and Prisoners of War: Shifting Definitions, 1780–1815 17 I  18 II  25 III  40 IV  48 3 The Prison on the Moor: Conception and Design 51 I  53 II  58 III  64 IV  70 V  82 VI  94 4 A “Fair Matter for Public Discussion and Enquiry?” 97 I  98 II 101 III 110 IV 124 xi

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Contents

5 Hierarchy, Solidarity and Conflict: Dartmoor’s Hybrid Regime137 I 141 II 148 III 151 IV 159 V 175 6 The Porous Prison: Commerce, Culture and Escape183 I 188 II 191 III 194 IV 199 V 204 VI 209 VII 216 VIII 222 IX 226 7 “Blood Shed & Cloudy Weather, Wind Easterly”: The Dartmoor Massacre (1815)235 I 238 II 249 III 259 IV 264 V 283 8 Conclusion297 Bibliography311 Index331

Abbreviations

AN AO BAOWMS Cotgrave, “Answers and Remarks”

DNB Dye Database

GEB GEBCHFR GEBDPFR GEBDPUS

Archives nationales, French National Archives, Pierrefitte, Paris Archive Office Bedford Archives Office, Whitbread Manuscripts TNA ADM 1/3764, Transport Board Letters, 1813, fols. 497–500: Capt. Cotgrave to Transport Board, May 8, 1813: “Answers and Remarks on the purport of the Letter addressed by the French Prisoners” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, online edition, 2004 USS Constitution Museum, Boston: Ira Dye’s [American] prisoners of war database [https://ussconstitutionmuseum.org/ ira-­dye-­prisoner-­of-­war-­database, consulted 12 March 2020] General Entry Books General Entry Books, Chatham, French prisoners of war General Entry Books, Dartmoor Prison, French prisoners of war General Entry Books, Dartmoor Prison, US prisoners of war

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ABBREVIATIONS

GEBPLFR HS MPUS

NA PAB Prison Regulations

RCP

SHD TB TBLADP TBLAPL TBLPW TBMPW TNA TO

General Entry Books, Plymouth, French prisoners of war Historical Society Message from the President of the United States, transmitting a report of the secretary of state, … in relation to the transactions at Dartmoor Prison, in the month of April last, so far as the American prisoners of war, there confined, were affected by such transaction (Washington: William Davis, Jan. 31, 1816) US National Archives, Washington, D.C. Plymouth Archive, The Box (formerly Plymouth and West Devon Record Office) TNA ADM 1/3767, Letters from the Transport Board, 1814, fols. 25–34: “Regulations which all the Prisoners of War in Depôts are bound to observe” (n.d., c. 1814) “Report from the Committee on the Prisons within the City of London and Borough of Southwark, 1. Newgate, etc.”, Parliamentary Papers, 1818, vol. 8, 297–544 Service Historique de la Défense, French Ministry of Defence Archives, Vincennes Castle Transport Board Transport Board, Letters to agents, Dartmoor Prison Transport Board, Letters to agents, Plymouth naval station Transport Board, Out-letters relating to prisoners of war Transport Board minutes, prisoners of war UK National Archives, Kew, London Transport Office

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4

Fig. 3.5

Fig. 3.6 Fig. 3.7 Fig. 7.1

Dartmoor War Prison, 1805–1809, Axonometric, David Sinclair (used with permission) 61 Dartmoor War Prison, 1805–1809, Axonometric (detail), David Sinclair (used with permission) 62 Dartmoor Prison from the air, 2017 (detail) (Photo: Andrew Abbot CC BY-SA 4.0) 63 “Description of the New Prison of War, Dartmoor”, The Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce, Manufactures, Fashions, and Politics, vol. 4, n° 21 (Sept. 1810), 161 (author’s collection)70 “Perspective View of the War Prison near Tor Royal upon Dartmoor”, after Samuel Prout, in Charles Vancouver, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Devon (London: Richard Phillips, 1808), opposite page 278 (Photo: author) 71 Entrance arch, Dartmoor War Prison, Daniel Alexander, 1805–1809 (Photo: Steve Taylor ARPS/Alamy) 74 “View of Dartmoor Prison, from a drawing taken on the spot by J.J. Taylor, one of the prisoners, 1815” (US Library of Congress)83 “Dartmoor Prison drawn by Glover Broughton, 1815” (detail) (Wellcome Collection CCBY) 286

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List of Figures

Fig. 7.2

Fig. 7.3

“Description of Dartmoor Prison, England” (detail), Benjamin Waterhouse [& Henry Torry], Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, Late a Surgeon on Board an American Privateer, Who was Captured at Sea by the British, in May, Eighteen Hundred and Thirteen, and was Confined First, at Melville Island, Halifax, then at Chatham, in England, and Last, at Dartmoor Prison (Boston: Rowe and Hooper, 1816), frontispiece (Internet Archive) “A representation of the massacre of American prisoners in Dartmoor Prison, April 6, 1815” (detail), Hitchcock C. De Witt, 1845 (US Library of Congress)

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Dartmoor—The Lost Prison?

Few words relating to the history of criminal justice in Britain are as resonant as Dartmoor, with what has been described as “its unique capacity to invoke an idealised, and even mythical, representation of all prisons”.1 What the example of Dartmoor appears to confirm is that Victorian incarceration, and perhaps incarceration more generally, is an unchanging story of forbidding, fortress-like architecture, a brutal prison regime and dangerous, violent offenders. Thus, “in the popular imagination, Dartmoor is, at once, menacing, thrilling and also, paradoxically, ‘comfortable’, in that it appears to confirm what we ‘know’ to be true, or would like to be true, about prisons and those who are incarcerated”.2 A prison less “lost” might be hard to imagine, even if, as will have been clear from the tone of these remarks from historians Alana Barton and Alyson Brown, much of what we think we know about Dartmoor turns out to be at best partial truth. However, even that partial truth turns out to be of little assistance in the present case, for it is founded on the assumption that the prison served uniquely to incarcerate convicts: men like the escaped inmate Selden who makes a shadowy appearance in Arthur Conan Doyle’s celebrated Sherlock Holmes mystery set on Dartmoor, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901–1902). 1 2

 Barton & Brown, 479.  Ibid., 488.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Davie, French and American Prisoners of War at Dartmoor Prison, 1805–1816, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83891-1_1

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Dartmoor Prison would indeed perform this function for many decades, beginning with the arrival of the first of its male convict inmates at the end of 1850. Twelve months later, the prison’s population stood as 1023, just 7 short of its theoretical capacity.3 British penal policy at this period was at a crossroads. The sixty-year-old system of convict exile to the Antipodes was being wound down (though it would not finally be brought to an end until 1868), and henceforth the country’s serious criminals would increasingly be detained on British soil, in one of a network of new “public works” prisons. Dartmoor was the second such prison to open, two years after the construction of the convict establishment on the Isle of Portland in Dorset. New prisons at Portsmouth, Chatham and Brixton would follow later in the same decade. Run directly from the Home Office, these public works prisons were designed to instil the values of discipline, obedience and industry in a population of male convicts (female offenders had their own, different arrangements),4 sentenced to terms of between three and twenty years of what was aptly named penal servitude. Few penal administrators in the subsequent period would hold out much hope that incarceration in such conditions could effect a permanent change in the behaviour and attitudes of inmates; the focus henceforth would be above all on the deterrent function of the prison.5 With the abandonment of transportation, the convict prison became the severest custodial sentence available within the Victorian judicial system. Inmates would begin their prison sentence with a twelve-month spell of separate confinement.6 Only after this short, sharp shock of penal isolation would offenders be transferred to a public works prison like Dartmoor or Portland. Convicts sentenced to penal servitude were subjected to a regime of unbending discipline, mind-numbing routine and back-­breaking labour; what one senior Home Office official aptly summed up as “Hard Labour, Hard Fare and a Hard Bed”.7 The official report on Dartmoor for 1851 commended the “spirit of industry” at the new prison, “strikingly observable in all the working parties; and even the invalids, who formerly passed their time in shapeless idleness on board a hulk, exert themselves to the utmost of their ability at such labour as they are capable of performing”.8  Report on the convict prisons, 2, 20–22; Thomson, 213.  Zedner, ch. 5. 5  Brown, ch. 5. 6  Reduced to nine months in 1853 (Priestley, 39). 7  Report on the convict prisons, 105. 8  Ibid., 32. 3 4

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“Exertion” and “spirit” should not, however, be mistaken for willingness. Researchers have found that penal labour, in which inmates were often used as little more than human beasts of burden, was intensely disliked by convicts; and some could be driven to it only by repeated punishments.9 In many cases, those punishments involved the deprivation of food, a sanction described by historian Randall McGowen as the “mainstay” of mid-Victorian prison discipline.10 Thus, those convicts failing to meet their work quota, caught talking or just seeming not to embrace the “spirit of industry” referred to above might find themselves placed on a diet of bread and water. Figures from Dartmoor for 1853 record 584 instances of inmates being placed on a bread and water diet, and a further 508 cases in which a prisoner was “deprived of a meal or part of a meal”. In contrast, corporal punishment, solitary confinement and the imposition of irons during working hours were  resorted to only relatively infrequently.11 Evidently, there was a certain sense of frustration that the “invalid” inmates at Dartmoor (spared the full rigours of penal servitude on the grounds of poor mental or physical health, infirmity or age)12 could not be disciplined “by either confinement in a separate cell, or privation of any part of the usual daily food”.13 McGowen notes that the “pettiness and spitefulness” of such measures “did far more to set the tone for imprisonment than any of the lofty words of spiritual consolation”.14 By the early 1850s then, the idea that Britain’s central government should itself commission and run prisons was well established. However, this book is concerned with an entirely different time frame, one which involves looking back from 1850 rather than forward, to a time when the prison at Dartmoor served an entirely different purpose. Thus, it was not a matter of the convict prison being retrofitted for a new function; the convict prison established on the Devon moor in 1850 was the new function, coming over forty years after the prison’s construction. It is important therefore for our purposes to strip away the iconic imagery and representations surrounding Dartmoor referred to above, superimposed in the manner of a palimpsest on earlier meanings and structures. What is revealed is a prison that was in many respects strikingly different from the  McConville, 397–98.  McGowen, 96–97. 11  Reports of the directors of convict prisons … 1853, Appendix C–D, 165, 168–69. 12  Johnston & Turner, 12. 13  Ibid., 163. 14  McGowen, 97. 9

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one we associate with the site: different in its design, different in its regime and imprisoning within its walls very different kinds of inmates.

I In 1800, the only direct central government involvement in the punishment of crime in Britain was through the application of the death penalty, and, for those serious criminals spared the rope, the organisation of their exile to the Antipodean penal colony at Botany Bay, founded in 1788. That is not to say that there were no prisons in Britain at this date. Each county town and many boroughs had their own penal establishments, bearing a variety of names (often of historical rather than practical significance by this period): prisons, gaols (or jails), bridewells and houses of correction. Each was funded locally and run according to locally established rules. The population held in such prisons was highly varied, both in terms of size and in terms of status. Conditions also varied considerably, despite a nominally uniform legislative framework regulating different aspects of the prison regime. Those detained behind their walls included petty criminals serving short prison terms of up to two years, debtors and those awaiting trial or punishment elsewhere. Among the latter category were a certain number of convicts, usually held in small groups at their local county gaol. For them, incarceration was generally only a transitional phase; their ultimate fate being either the gallows or transportation to Britain’s new penal colony at Botany Bay. A second Australian destination for transported convicts, Van Diemen’s Land, was added in 1804. It is important to emphasise then that at the beginning of the nineteenth century incarceration on the British mainland either took the form of a short prison sentence or represented a prelude to trial, release or punishment, all destined to take place elsewhere. As one specialist puts it, the function of the criminal courts in this period was “largely to empty prisons and not to fill them”.15 With the prison thus functioning essentially as a place of short-term punishment or as a carceral way station, there was little incentive to devote much time, effort or money to either prison design or the improvement of conditions for inmates, though there were periodic initiatives in this area at both national and local levels. Prison reformer John Howard had drawn attention to the woefully inadequate standards in many of the country’s local prisons in his pioneering 1777 survey, The  Morgan, 392.

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State of the Prisons in England and Wales: with Preliminary Observations, and an Account of some Foreign Prisons.16 Howard’s book is essentially a gazetteer of English carceral abuse and misery, based on the 553 prison visits he carried out during a four-year period between 1773 and 1777. Although The State of the Prisons does not stint on praise for particular prisons or individual officials where it considers it due, it remains the case that the overriding impression left on the reader by the book, as one modern commentator puts it, is of “damp, dark, dank, airless cells, famished prisoners, negligent authorities, apathy, corruption, disease and death”.17 Partly as a result of the impact of The State of the Prisons, legislation had been passed in 1779 aimed at facilitating the construction of two government-­ run prisons organised around the Howardian tenets of health, order and security.18 The new prisons were to be known, significantly, as “penitentiaries”; their single cells vaunted not only as a useful means of maintaining order within prison walls, but also for providing a vital stimulus to the contrition and, ultimately, the reform of offenders. As one enthusiast for separate confinement put it, writing a few years earlier, the cell seemed able to “creat[e] a real change in the heart, to raise theirs that are fallen; and guard those who are most subject to be assailed”. The result, it was confidently predicted, would be that “tears of repentance will flow, where the succours of mercy are offered by the hand of humanity; and the sympathy of our common nature”.19 Those tears of repentance would not in fact be flowing any time soon. Not, that is, if they depended on the provision of separate cells in a government-run penitentiary, for the Penitentiary Act 1779 was to remain a dead letter. This was partly thanks to Howard again, whose dogmatic refusal to compromise contributed to the failure of a committee set up in the wake of the act to agree on a site for the new reformed prisons. More important than this, however, was the fact that there was no consistent will at government level to back the new penitentiary scheme. Indeed, it could be argued that had the outbreak of the American War of Independence in 1775 not forced the government to interrupt the system of colonial exile, even such modest support as there was for building convict prisons on British soil would probably never have translated into legislative backing. As it was, once Australia had offered  Howard, State of the Prisons.  Porter, 9. 18  Devereaux. 19  Hanway, 44. 16 17

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itself in the 1780s as a viable alternative to North America for the reception of the country’s serious criminals, the penitentiary scheme would be allowed to wither on the vine, its provisions buried for a generation. As I have shown elsewhere,20 there were those in Britain in the subsequent period who continued to argue the case for a national penal policy founded on the construction of penitentiary-type prisons as an alternative to, and possibly a replacement for, transportation. While such arguments made little headway at the national level, a number of ambitious local building programmes did get off the ground, though lack of investment, lack of inspection or simply a loss of momentum meant that the new “reformed” prisons often differed less than had been hoped from the institutions they had been designed to replace. The situation was aggravated by a marked rise in prisoner numbers in the late 1790s and early 1800s, which meant that many of the new cells intended for solitary reflection and contrition were now accommodating two or even three inmates. The situation at the North London prison of Cold Bath Fields (the Capital’s largest) provides a good example of these trends. A committee investigating the prison in 1800 found that a building constructed just six years earlier for 174 inmates was now regularly accommodating 260, and at one point during the previous year numbers had risen to 320. The committee’s report also noted pointedly that the prison only possessed 248 bedsteads.21 In fact, British penal policy at the turn of the new century was characterised above all by a lack of clarity and direction, with regular policy reversals, damp squibs and dead ends. As noted, some penitentiary-style prisons had been built under the auspices of county or borough authorities in the 1780s and 1790s, but other penal establishments remained much as Howard had depicted them in The State of the Prisons. Those responsible for the new prisons struggled with varying degrees of success to maintain a commitment to the enlightened principles of order, health and reform; others had clearly given up the fight. The local prisons continued to cater for a very wide variety of types of inmates, sometimes kept apart from each other, more often not; with few of their number destined to stay in gaol for more than a few weeks or a few months. It was hardly a propitious moment for the British government to be commissioning its first purpose-built, permanent prison on home soil, and  Davie, ch. 2–3.  Papers relating to His Majesty’s prison in Cold Bath Fields, 41–42.

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one, moreover, that would end up incarcerating thousands of prisoners for periods that in some cases could be counted in years, rather than in weeks or months. Yet this is precisely what would happen in 1805. It would not be a question of the government resurrecting the penitentiary legislation of 1779, or of seeking an alternative to transportation, though both forces would be at work to varying extents in later decades. The priority in the short term lay elsewhere, and like at Cold Bath Fields, the new policy was driven forward above all by the pressure of numbers. However, it was not the growing number of criminals that was the problem this time—or rather that was not the only problem. There was now an additional reason to be preoccupied about prisoner numbers: the question of what to do about the burgeoning population of prisoners of war. On this occasion, it was not a problem that could be left in the hands of local magistrates and county and borough authorities. The presence of prisoners of war on British soil was not of course a new phenomenon. Indeed, with the country rarely at peace for more than a few years at a time for much of the eighteenth century, the problem had been a recurrent one.22 What was new, however, was the scale of the prisoner of war problem now facing Britain’s government planners. In the context of the long-running wars with revolutionary and Napoleonic France, prisoner numbers were no longer to be counted in their thousands but in their tens of thousands. By April 1810, after seventeen years of virtually uninterrupted conflict starting in 1793, the total had reached 44,583.23 The accounts of the Navy’s Transport Office reveal that in that month more than 10 per cent of that number (5352) were being detained at Dartmoor Prison. A year later, the number had risen to 5594.24 Estimates for the total number of French prisoners imprisoned in Britain during the period 1803–1814 vary between 130,000 and 150,000.25 To this figure needs to be added a sizeable contingent of American prisoners, most of them sailors, detained during the brief period when Britain was at war concurrently with Napoleonic France and its allies and with the young republic of the United States. During what came to be known as the War of 1812 or Madison’s War (1812–1815), some 17,000–20,000 American prisoners were detained by the  Wilson, ch. 3.  Daly, 363. 24  Account of the Number of French Prisoners of War [1811]. 25  Le Carvèse, Part 1, 16; Calvet, 22. 22 23

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British—between one in six and one in five of the US naval fighting force.26 About a third of that number (6559) would be held at some point at Dartmoor.27 When all nationalities and all categories of detainees are taken into account, the total number of prisoners of war held in Britain during the whole period of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars may have topped a quarter of a million.28 Given the background sketched above, there was little precedent for government planners to draw on when it came to devising a system for detaining large numbers of foreign combatants on British soil for potentially long periods of time. It fell to the Admiralty to deal with the considerable logistical, financial and human problems thrown up by the prisoner of war question, whether it concerned the detention of foreign combatants and civilians in Britain and her territories, or the welfare of British soldiers, sailors and others held in captivity by the Americans and by the French and their allies. As naval historian Patricia Crimmin observes, Prisoners were a muted and secondary—but not negligible—part of war policy [in this period]. Their release or retention posed not merely legal and administrative questions but involved balancing seemingly contradictory outcomes: weakening an enemy by keeping his men, particularly the skilled and the leaders, or weakening itself by using its resources to care for them.29

From 1795, the Admiralty’s Transport Office was charged with this complex responsibility, taking over from the Sick and Hurt Board.30 Clothed, fed and disciplined according to the naval rule-book, the experience of prisoners of war in this period was thus strongly coloured, both administratively and culturally, by maritime life, even though, for the most part, they were detained on dry land.31 To begin with, there was every expectation that the war with revolutionary France would be over quickly, and that the customary exchange of prisoners—a staple of eighteenth-century warfare—would in any case soon relieve pressure on existing facilities.32 Both assumptions would turn  See below, 19 and note; Dye, “American Maritime Prisoners”, 293 & note.  Dye database. 28  Crimmin, 17. 29  Ibid. 30  Rodger, 491. 31  Duché, “Sea of Stories”, 58. 32  Crimmin, 18. 26 27

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out to be unfounded, though the implications of that miscalculation would take some time to inform government policy. Thus, in the early years of the revolutionary wars, the solutions adopted for dealing with foreign combatants were typically ad hoc: placing prisoners in local prisons with spare capacity (and sometimes in those where there was none); converting existing military buildings for prisoner use (including war prisons used during the pre-revolutionary period); and perhaps the most well-­ known expedient of all: retrofitting decommissioned naval warships for a new lease of life as immobile floating prison vessels, or “hulks”. A total of fifty-five of these prison ships were used for detaining prisoners of war in this period, moored at Chatham, Plymouth and Portsmouth.33 By 1814, French figures reveal that a third of all that country’s prisoners detained in Britain were being held on board one of these insalubrious, cramped “floating tombs”.34 All of these expedients would prove insufficient in the face of the sheer numbers of prisoners involved. It was not only a case of numbers, however, for concerns had also been raised about conditions in the existing prisoner of war depots—notably on board the hulks. A wood-­ framed prisoner of war camp had been constructed in record time in 1797 at Norman Cross near Peterborough, but by 1805, the unrelenting pressure of numbers, coupled with a growing recognition that the conflict with France could go on for many years, had forced a change of direction among Admiralty planners. The result was a network of new prisoner of war depots, built for permanence in stone and brick. The first of the new depots would be Dartmoor War Prison, which received its first consignment of prisoners in May 1809. A second new prison, at Perth in Scotland, opened in 1812.

II Basil Thomson’s 1907 history of Dartmoor, published to coincide with the centenary of the establishment’s foundation, opens with the words: “It was by caprice that Fate chose fifteen acres in the heart of the Dartmoor high lands for one of her strangest experiments”.35 Whoever was doing the choosing, the experiment was indeed in many respects a strange one, involving the construction of a permanent penal establishment capable of  Chamberlain, Hell Upon Water, 57–60.  Dupin, 27–28, qtd. Daly 364. 35  Thomson, v. 33 34

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accommodating up to 10,000 prisoners of war on a desolate moorland site a day’s march over difficult terrain from the nearest sizeable town, and where what one contemporary called the “Russian climate” risked cutting the prison off from the outside world for weeks at a time during the winter months.36 However, while the history of Dartmoor, to cite once again Barton and Brown, “has loomed large in England’s penal and cultural past”,37 both scholarly and popular interest in the prison has been largely confined to the period since its conversion into a convict prison in 1850. The circumstances surrounding its foundation forty years earlier and its early history as a war prison have in contrast been the object of virtually no detailed study by historians.38 There has been some valuable work on the American sailors imprisoned at Dartmoor from 1813 to 1815, though this has been mainly in the context of a more general interest (principally by US naval historians) in the Anglo-American conflict of 1812–1815, and more generally in antebellum maritime history.39 The fate of the French prisoners of war detained in Britain in this period has received even less scholarly attention,40 despite a notable expansion in recent years in the field of prisoner of war studies in general, including in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period.41 In what remains one of the rare journal articles on the subject, published in 2004, Gavin Daly observed that the experience of French prisoners of war “rarely rate a mention” in studies of the French army of this period. Indeed, he goes on, “once lost to the emperor on the battlefield or high seas, French prisoners of war in Britain have also been lost to the general history of the period”.42

 Magrath, 252.  Barton & Brown, 479. 38  Two early article-length studies are, however, worth citing (Fabel; Horsman). This generalisation will require revision with the publication of Nicholas Guyatt’s The Hated Cage (Basic Books/Oneworld, forthcoming). 39  The work of Ira Dye and more recently Paul A. Gilje is particularly noteworthy in this respect (see bibliography). Also relevant are Bolster, Dzurec, Hicks, Glenn, Jones-­ Minsinger, Taylor. 40  An early popular history in French (Masson) devotes a chapter to the war prisons, but relies entirely on printed sources. The same is true of a more recent study of French prisoners of war in this period (Bernard). More useful is the early article by Kirkor, and, more recently, those by Calvet and Le Carvèse. 41  Beaupré & Rance; Charters et al.; Duché, Passage to Imprisonment; Jalabert; Kennedy; Rouanet, Prisonniers de guerre. 42  Daly, 362. On this point, see also Le Carvèse. 36 37

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Things have evolved somewhat since Daly’s comments as far as the study of Dartmoor War Prison is concerned, notably with the publication in 2013 of a book devoted specifically to the subject, written by former prison guard and local historian, Trevor James.43 Several general works on prisoners of war in Britain during this period have also appeared,44 to add to two earlier books covering aspects of the history of Dartmoor Prison during the period 1805–1816,45 but with the notable exception of Renaud Morieux’s important 2019 monograph, these works rely, like James’ book, on already familiar sources, principally those of the Navy’s Transport Office, and engage neither with the voluminous historiography of the French and American wars of the period, nor with research on the history of the Prison.46 The Strangest Experiment follows Daly in considering that “French prisoners of war in Britain deserve a more important place in Revolutionary-­ Napoleonic history than has traditionally been their lot”,47 extending that argument to include also the American captives of the War of 1812. The book attempts to uncover the full significance of Dartmoor Prison during these years; not only in terms of government policy and international relations, but also, crucially, in terms of the daily life of the various multi-­ national, multi-lingual and multi-ethnic prison communities (both prisoners and personnel, military and civilian) living—and dying—on the site during this ten-year period. In addition, by combining a focus on Dartmoor as an episode in the history of the French and American wars of the period, and as a key moment in the history of prison design and management, two research fields which rarely intersect, it is hoped that this book will offer a fresh perspective on this unique, and indeed “strange”, penal experiment: one which involved three nations and two continents and a prison constructed in a remote corner of the English countryside during one of modern Europe’s epoch-making conflicts. To address these issues, the book brings together archive sources from the government and diplomatic records of the United Kingdom, the United States and France,  James.  Lloyd, Prisoners of War; Lloyd, Arts and Crafts; Chamberlain, Hell Upon Water; Chamberlain, Norman Cross. 45  Joy; Stanbrook. 46  Morieux, Society of Prisoners. A second, partial, exception to this generalisation is Ian MacDougall’s detailed study of prisoners of war detained in Scotland during the period 1803–1814 (MacDougall). 47  Daly, 362–63. 43 44

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and also taps into the rich corpus of surviving personal letters, diaries and accounts from Dartmoor prisoners of war and visitors of different nationalities. These comprise both a significant number of captivity narratives relating to the prison, published in France and—above all—in the United States between the 1810s and the 1860s, and also a series of unpublished, first-hand manuscript accounts, scattered in repositories in the three countries, many of which are examined in detail in this book for the first time. The second chapter of The Strangest Experiment considers the shifting definitions of “prison” and “prisoner of war”, and the relationship between the two. Prison design was coming under the influence of new conceptions of penal institutions as places of reform, order and isolation, though an older conception of the prison as little more than a secure holding-pen remained influential. Attitudes to prisoners of war were also changing. What has been termed “a decisive shift” took place in this period in the conventions governing the detention, exchange and classification of prisoners of war, with new, more punitive attitudes emerging on all sides.48 These themes will be explored through a detailed discussion of the regime put in place on the hulks and in the sprawling prisoner of war camp built in 1796 at Norman Cross (Cambridgeshire). Official records and French captivity narratives will be used to build up a picture of how the Admiralty dealt with the prisoner of war question on the ground in the period before the construction of Dartmoor; a study which aims not only to provide valuable comparative material for the discussion of the Devon prison later in the book, but also to explore some of the various heuristic issues raised by working with both official sources and prisoner of war accounts. Chapter 3 seeks to establish why Dartmoor Prison was built when it was, where it was and how it was. Conceived in a context of the sharp rise in prisoner of war numbers in Britain, the decision to build the prison marked a clear break with the earlier Admiralty policy of detaining prisoners of war in temporary camps or hulks, or of adapting existing buildings for the purposes of confinement. The design for Dartmoor by London architect Daniel Asher Alexander was undoubtedly influenced by the latest thinking on prison architecture, but it also reflected the specific exigencies emanating from the Admiralty, based on its assessment of how best to confine securely 5000 enemy combatants (later increased to 10,000) in wartime. The result was a prison design with a decidedly hybrid character. This chapter will consider how this design came to be conceived, and  Kennedy, 15. For the broader context, see Broers; Neff.

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examine the extent to which the initial specifications for the prison were dictated to Alexander by the Admiralty, or on the contrary were brought to the table by the architect. After detailing the initial, troubled construction phase at Dartmoor, the chapter will turn to examine the prison’s spatial economy, both as originally conceived, and as modified during the next six-and-a-half years. The book’s fourth chapter explores in detail the carceral regime at Dartmoor, part of a broader framework of management and oversight put in place by the Admiralty’s Transport Board in the war depots during this period. Particular attention will be paid to the role of the prison’s two naval agent-governors, Captain Isaac Cotgrave (1808–1813) and Captain Thomas Shortland (1813–1816). Although the work of a Board agent was theoretically constrained by a detailed set of official Instructions for Agents […] Respecting the Management of Prisoners of War at Home, published in 1809, Dartmoor’s two agents possessed in reality considerable discretionary power over the daily lives of both prisoners and staff. That power was exercised within a regulatory and punitive framework similar in some respects to the regimes in place at the criminal prisons of the period, but with some significant differences. The regulatory and punitive framework at Dartmoor in these years will be examined in this chapter both through a detailed study of the prison rule-book, and through an analysis of a series of petitions, speeches and letters penned by prisoners and domestic critics of the Transport Office. Chapter 5 focuses on the nature of the relationships on the ground between captives and captors at Dartmoor, and draws on prisoner narratives and official sources to build up a detailed picture of the shifting hierarchies, solidarities and conflicts that characterised daily life at the prison. Particular attention is paid to a set of rituals designed to transform inmates from free combatants into prisoners of war, including registration, roll-call and prison dress. This chapter also examines the central issue of the food ration, a subject that offers a striking example of what might be termed the hybrid nature of the regime at Dartmoor; with “punitive-carceral” elements combining with “contractual” ones, the latter giving prisoners a role (albeit within clearly defined limits) over the choice and preparation of food. That hybrid regime is also strikingly illustrated by the role of elected prisoner committees at the prison. A key question raised by the presence of these committees is whether the social structures and volatile relationships which characterised Dartmoor’s prisoner community during these years were the result above all of punitive discipline imposed from

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above, or reflected rather a degree of agency and autonomy accorded to, or seized by, the prison’s inmates. Chapter 5 also explores the place of two vilified groups living on the margins of prisoner society, the French “Romans” and the US “Rough Allies”, and closes by considering the ramifications of the presence of up to 1000 sailors of colour at the prison during the period 1813–1815. Chapter 6 is concerned with Dartmoor’s economy, both licit and illicit. A key theme running through the chapter is that of “porosity”, with the Transport Office and its agents struggling (often in vain) to regulate contact between the prisoners and the outside world. Certain forms of commercial transaction were permitted, or even encouraged, notably the daily market. The prison market played an important role in the local economy, with farmers and tradespeople travelling many miles to sell their produce to the prisoners. In fact, such was its importance on a social and psychological as well as economic level in the daily life of the prisoners that its suspension represented a powerful disciplinary or punitive tool in the hands of the prison agent, and the issue generated a considerable degree of friction, and on occasion of conflict, between inmates and the prison authorities. Illicit commerce and unauthorised contact with the outside remained a constant problem for the authorities, a situation exacerbated by the presence of large sums of money circulating inside the prison (albeit unequally distributed), derived from personal funds supplied to individual prisoners; back pay and prize money (notably for former Royal Navy sailors among the US prisoners); and from employment offered to inmates by the prison authorities and by fellow prisoners. Along with illicit commerce and escape attempts, the prison’s well-primed cash economy also supported a whole range of services and activities provided by and for prisoners—illustrating how carceral culture was closely bound up with the circulation of money inside the prison. The book’s seventh chapter looks in detail at what came to be known as the “Dartmoor Massacre” (April 6, 1815), in which members of the prison garrison opened fire on a group of American prisoners, killing nine and wounding fifty. The focus will be in part on establishing what precisely took place that day, based on a detailed analysis of an often overlooked source: the reports and testimony generated by the various official and unofficial inquiries held in the aftermath of the massacre. The Dartmoor Massacre came at the end of a period of several months of deepening tensions and conflict at the prison, set against the background of a sharp rise in prisoner numbers and persistent uncertainty and rumour concerning

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the timetable for the ratification of the peace treaty at Ghent, and thus for the subsequent liberation of the prison’s American inmates. It is argued here that the decisions taken, and the choices made, on April 6, 1815, and the massacre’s subsequent (re)interpretation on all sides can only be fully understood in that broader context. The picture of Dartmoor Prison that is revealed in the following pages is ambiguous and contrasted; one where the high hopes and (sometimes) noble intentions of the planners often contrasted starkly with the grim realities on the ground; where international cooperation existed between nations—even those at war with each other—but was regularly impeded by misunderstanding and by bad faith; and where conflict, neglect, cruelty and death existed side by side with the values of honour, dignity and humanity.

CHAPTER 2

Prisons and Prisoners of War: Shifting Definitions, 1780–1815

On July 9, 1805, London architect Daniel Asher Alexander was sent instructions by the Admiralty’s Transport Office to journey to south Devon on the 18 of that month to Tor Royal, the seat of local landowner, MP and royal office holder, Thomas Tyrwhitt. A third man, Transport Board commissioner Edward Bouverie, would complete the party. The purpose of the meeting was to select a “fit situation” on nearby Dartmoor for the construction of a prisoner of war depot intended to hold “not less than five thousand men”.1 Later that month, Alexander wrote to the Board, describing how the three men had “examine[d] various parts of the Moor which appeared eligible as to situation—aspect, in regard to exposure to winds,—Water,—nearness to Plymouth, and the cultivated Country bordering the South West edge of the Moor—and the power of immediate possession of sufficient land of the Prince’s at no Cost”. They had fixed upon a “Spot [that] forms a gentle slope, inclining North Westward, much below the high lands and round about it to the South, and South West, and considerably above the bottom of the valley below it to the North and North West”. The site, Alexander went on, was protected from south-westerly storms, its soils were well-drained and there 1  TNA ADM 1/3774, TBLPW (supplementary), 1801–1808: TO to W. Marsden, June 26, 1805; ADM 98/143, fol. 83, TBLPW: TO to D.  Alexander, July 9, 1805; ADM 105/44, TB, Visitation reports, 1796–1814, E. Bouverie to TO, July 11 & 20, 1805.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Davie, French and American Prisoners of War at Dartmoor Prison, 1805–1816, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83891-1_2

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was a plentiful supply of spring water. In short, here was “a situation [that] includes in it all that is required (as far as Dartmoor can do) for the construction of a Prison; for the Health and Safe Custody of Prisoners and for the victualling [of] the Prisoners and Guard”. The architect added reassuringly that “On the Health and Custody of the Prisoners […] the fogs which are seen to rise there, are more clouds than Fogs; […] they are not unhealthy, but […] on the contrary the whole of the Cottages about Tor Royal and Two Bridges are healthy in the extreme”.2 By September 1805, Alexander had submitted plans for the new prison, and after some haggling, a revised estimate, costed at £70,146 4s 10d, was accepted by the Admiralty. In March the following year, the foundation stone at the new prisoner of war depot was laid by Thomas Tyrwhitt on land leased from the Prince of Wales, and construction work at the fifteen-acre site was able to begin, albeit fitfully.3 Daniel Alexander’s architectural plans for Dartmoor, and their realisation in stone, slate and wood during the period 1806–1809, will be examined in detail in the following chapter. However, the mere fact that plans for the prison were drawn up in 1805 raises in itself a whole raft of questions, relating both to prison construction and to provision for prisoners of war. As noted in the introduction, and recently argued by Renaud Morieux, scholarly interest in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century prison design and penal reform on the one hand and the incarceration of prisoners of war on the other, have tended up until now to run on parallel historiographical tracks, leaving the intersections between the two “largely unexplored”.4 Only by considering these two aspects together, it will be suggested in this chapter, is it possible to appreciate fully why Dartmoor Prison was built where it was, when it was and how it was.

I By 1805, Britain had been at war with France and her allies continuously for twelve years, bar the brief interlude of 1802–1803 following the Treaty of Amiens. Although, as noted in the introduction, the country had  BAOWMS, W1/2708: D. Alexander to TO, July 29, 1805, fols. 2–3.  Stanbrook, 9–14; James, 24–32; Joy, 18–21. 4  Morieux, Society of Prisoners, 199. It is significant in this context that the respected Oxford History of the Prison (1998) has only three entries in its index for “prisoners of war”, none of which relate to the period under consideration here (Morris & Rothman). 2 3

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acquired considerable experience in dealing with prisoners of war during the previous century, both in its repeated military entanglements on the continent of Europe, and in its conflict with its rebellious North American colonies, the renewed outbreak of hostilities with France in 1793 had brought new challenges. The most striking feature of the new situation was the sheer numbers of prisoners involved, dwarfing those of previous conflicts. One recent estimate puts the total number of French prisoners held by the British during the period 1803–1814 at 150,000.5 To this number should be added between 17,000 and 20,000 Americans captured during the War of 1812.6 Even the more conservative figure of 122,440 for captives of all nationalities, first suggested by Francis Abell in 1914, is impressive enough.7 Annual totals of prisoners were lower than this of course, but once again they reveal the extent to which the system had had to expand since the mid-eighteenth century. In 1761, during the Seven Years’ War, 20,000 prisoners were stationed in England; by 1813 the figure was more than three times higher, at 72,000.8 The sheer weight of numbers added a new layer of complexity to the question of how to detain enemy combatants in Britain in such a way as to prevent them from escaping and swelling enemy ranks. There were also concerns that a mass break-out of prisoners might pose a security threat to the country’s military installations.9 It was not only that the Transport Office was having to guard and feed much larger numbers of prisoners than ever before. The breakdown of the exchange system with France after 1803 and the United States after 1813 (to be discussed below) also increased the likelihood that the prisoners held in its various depots, camps and prison ships would be facing the prospect of long periods of confinement on British soil, possibly for several decades, a wholly unprecedented situation.10 During the early stages of the conflict with revolutionary France, the small numbers of prisoners captured were usually exchanged within eighteen months to two years of capture.11 This 5  Calvet, 22. For a lower estimate on French prisoners in this period (129,769), see Le Carvèse, Part 1, 17. 6  Ira Dye identified by name 17,024 Americans in the British prisoner of war registers (Dye database). The contemporary estimate of 20,000 is widely quoted (Hickey, 312). 7  Abell, 450. 8  Charters, 92; Chamberlain, Hell Upon Water, 121. 9  Forrest, “Prisonniers de guerre”, 100. 10  Knight, 155; Rodger, 501. 11  Chamberlain, Hell Upon Water, 215.

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system of exchange had evolved gradually during the eighteenth century, and by 1793 its basic principles were accepted on all sides. Prisoners were to be provided with food, clothing and bedding in quantities agreed on by both parties, and with funds provided by their own country. Access to medical treatment was to be provided, if needed. If funds could not be transferred in wartime, accounts would be settled up at the end of the conflict. Each belligerent nation would appoint an “agent” to supervise the treatment of their nationals in enemy prisons; markets were open to them to check local prices, and they were allowed to visit prisoner depots and hear complaints. Regular exchange cartels would take place, with prisoners selected by the agents of each country according to a table, stating equivalents in numbers of men exchanged for officers.12 In the case of Britain and France, the traditional cartel port was Morlaix in northern Brittany. Prisoners who were injured, infirm or of advanced age; boys under twelve; and women and children were to be returned immediately without any need for exchange. Surgeons, pursers, secretaries, chaplains, priests, schoolmasters, and civilians and other non-­ combatants were not to be held captive. Serving officers, comprising about 10 per cent of all prisoners held in Britain, were generally separated from their men. On pledging their parole d’honneur not to escape, they were permitted to live in private houses in one of the country’s fifty designated “parole towns”, on condition they abided by certain rules. The latter included a ban on any contact with their home country (except through their designated Transport Office agent), and a promise not to venture more than a mile beyond the boundary of their town of residence. A smaller (and falling) number of paroled officers were granted their freedom to return home on condition that they did not take up arms again for the duration of the conflict or for a set period of time.13 The new challenges facing the British authorities in the early 1800s reflected a broader, international shift in the treatment of prisoners of war at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the various forms of reciprocal exchange agreement between belligerent nations increasingly giving way to long-term incarceration. This represented, as noted in the introduction (quoting Catriona Kennedy), “a decisive shift in the conventions that governed the detention, exchange and classification 12  For the table agreed between Britain and France in 1780, and republished in 1798, see ibid., 222. 13  Ibid., 116–19; Crimmin, 17; Daly, 355–56; Forrest, “Prisonniers de guerre”, 112.

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of prisoners of war”.14 The former aristocratic code of honour, shared by the officers and gentlemen of all nations, which had played such a central role in eighteenth-century European and Atlantic warfare,15 came under intense pressure, and new, more punitive attitudes emerged on all sides amidst an atmosphere of mutual suspicion and recrimination.16 There were new cartel negotiations between Britain and France in 1803–1804, 1806, 1810 and 1812–1813, but all came to naught, with each side blaming the other for the breakdown in talks.17 A key sticking point in the negotiations was how to take into account the numerical imbalance between the numbers of prisoners on each side. In 1810, for example, there were 41,000 French prisoners confined in Britain, compared with only 11,000 British prisoners in France. What Gavin Daly describes as the “cold rationale” of the Napoleonic regime (though one entirely in keeping with earlier international precedents, he stresses) was that it would be to France’s strategic advantage to scupper the cartel talks, on the basis that her gargantuan military machine could better bear the loss of 40,000 men than the British could 10,000. In addition, feeding and clothing those 40,000 (estimated at £300,000 a year by the mid-1790s)18 would represent a major drain on Britain’s wartime coffers.19 The result was an inexorable decline in the exchange of prisoners: between 1803 and 1814, only 17,607 were exchanged or deemed permanently incapacitated and unfit for military service and sent home as “invalids”.20 By 1811, notes Paul Chamberlain, the chances of any new general exchange of French and British prisoners had become “non-­ existent”, although various smaller-scale conventions and cartels established by individual commanders in the field did enable the release of some French prisoners.21 The use of parole also declined after 1803, notably the form which allowed officers to return home once they had promised not to bear arms against the enemy. This trend was accompanied by a rise in

 Kennedy, 115.  Best, ch. 1. 16  Ibid., 125–26; Daly, 371–72. 17  Chamberlain, Hell Upon Water, ch. 9; MacDougall, 454–55. 18  Equivalent to about £45 m in 2020. 19  Daly, 372–73; Crimmin, 18. 20  Chamberlain, Norman Cross, 179. 21  Chamberlain, Hell Upon Water, 223, 230; Daly, 368. 14 15

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the number of parole violations.22 The result was that “the overwhelming majority [of French combatants after 1803] remained prisoners”.23 The same would be true of the 17,000–20,000 American combatants captured by the British during the War of 1812. Although small-scale exchanges of prisoners did occur (notably of Americans detained at British depots in North America for British prisoners held in the United States), attempts to agree on a durable system of exchange between the two nations floundered, in spite of a promising start with the signing of a cartel agreement at Halifax, Nova Scotia, in November 1812, driven by the clear economic interest for both sides to reach an accord.24 Ira Dye has argued that subsequent British prisoner of war policy in the Atlantic theatre was dominated by two main goals: “to deny to the United States the use of as many American seafarers as possible for as long as possible” and “to encourage the entry of as many American prisoners of war as possible into British service, primarily the Royal Navy, but also the merchant service and the Army”. The recovery of British prisoners held in the United States was thus considered of subsidiary importance.25 For the Madison administration in contrast, Dye argues, the recovery of American prisoners held by the British—particularly those detained in Canada and the West Indies—was the number one priority.26 This different order of priorities was a logical consequence of the numerical imbalance in prisoner numbers between the two belligerent nations, and, even more significant, of their relative importance in the military—particularly naval—capability of each. In this case, unlike in the European theatre, the advantage lay with the British. And the latter knew full well that the neutralisation of up to a fifth of US naval manpower could have a major impact on the outcome of the conflict.27 The effects of this imbalance were exacerbated, as far as American prisoners held in England were concerned, by a number of policy decisions taken by the British at the outbreak of war in 1812, which flowed from the goals noted by Dye above, the result of which was to make the exchange of prisoners less rather than more likely. Firstly, American mariners who 22  860 French officers are recorded as having violated their parole between May 1803 and August 1811, 590 of whom made their way successfully to France (Davey, 172). 23  Daly, 367–69 (quotation at 368). 24  Springer, ch. 3; Dye, “American Maritime Prisoners”; Gardiner, 180. 25  Dye, “American Maritime Prisoners”, 295. 26  Ibid., 296. 27  Calculated from ibid., 293.

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found themselves in Britain at the commencement of hostilities, whether employed on a merchant vessel or between jobs, were considered distinct from other American civilians, and could not be released unless exchanged. Secondly, it was decreed that only official exchanges negotiated between the agents of the two countries could be taken into account, thus ruling out, at a stroke, exchanges between commanders at sea, and (even more important) prisoners released in neutral ports by cruising US privateers and armed merchantmen.28 The third—and from the American perspective most tendentious—British policy directive concerned US nationals who had been serving on British warships when war was declared, many of them as a result of the Royal Navy’s controversial practice of impressment. These men were now to be given the uncomfortable choice between continuing to serve in the Navy—but now, potentially, with their own countrymen in their sights—or claiming prisoner of war status until their citizenship status could be unequivocally established, at which point they would be eligible for release or exchange. A majority, some 2200 men, chose the latter option.29 There was a certain bureaucratic logic to the British position, but it provoked widespread outrage in the United States, where the resort to impressment by the Royal Navy had been a source of vociferous complaint for a decade or more, and indeed had been a significant contributory factor in the outbreak of war in June 1812.30 There was also anger at the manner in which the British authorities regularly dismissed as fraudulent any documents produced by American sailors to prove their citizenship, and assumed enemy ships to be teeming with their own nation’s deserters and renegades.31 By the summer of 1813, cartel negotiations between Britain and the United States had collapsed, soured by a series of punitive tit-for-tat actions taken by both countries against prisoners of war in their charge. The fact that on both sides there were vigorous efforts to recruit soldiers and sailors amongst each other’s captives served only to fan the flames. Indeed, at one point in 1813, a downward spiral into mass hostage-taking and executions on both sides seemed a real possibility.32 The result of the breakdown of exchange negotiations was that, like their French  Taylor, 363; Kert, 55–56.  Hickey, 177–78. 30  Black, ch. 1. 31  Taylor, 363; Campbell, 6–7; Dye, “American Maritime Prisoners”, 301–2. 32  Taylor, 353–54, 361; Hickey, 178–81. 28 29

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c­ounterparts of the Napoleonic period, most US captives detained in Britain would not be exchanged or released, but would remain in enemy hands throughout the war. For 6559 American prisoners, around a third of the total, that would mean detention in Dartmoor Prison, in some cases until well after the cessation of hostilities.33 This overall trend towards holding prisoners of war for the duration of a conflict inevitably threw into sharp relief a number of questions linked to their maintenance and the conditions of their internment. These included the thorny issue of whether the captor or home state should be responsible for the costs of holding and maintaining prisoners. In time, this issue would be resolved unequivocally in favour of the costs falling on the captor state, but during the period of the French wars, and indeed of the War of 1812, the question would generate a great deal of debate, argument and tension between the belligerent nations. Other than the issue of cost, that of the treatment of prisoners of war gained a new prominence in this period. In a context in which prisoners were likely to be rapidly paroled and/or exchanged and returned to their home country, there was little reason to focus on the conditions of their confinement. However, the possibility that one’s countrymen might spend a decade or more in enemy hands in a camp, depot or on a prison ship was a very different prospect, fundamentally shifting the terms of the debate. The principle of reciprocity referred to earlier ensured in theory that humane treatment for prisoners would continue, with both a fear of reprisals and a shared (if sometimes flexible) commitment to the Enlightenment ideals of respect for the law and civilised behaviour towards one’s brothers in arms governing the behaviour of nations at war.34 As Sybille Scheipers observes, however, while reciprocity agreements like the putative exchange cartel signed by representatives of the British and American governments in May 181335 (before relations between the two countries soured definitively), offered theoretical protection to prisoners of war, once the latter were detained for long periods, “they became important potential targets for reprisals intended to ensure the adversary’s compliance with legal norms in warfare in general and in their treatment of prisoners in particular”.36 At the same time, she adds, the development of long-term  Dye database.  Forrest, “Prisonniers de guerre”, 100. 35  Miller, 557–68. 36  Scheipers, “Introduction”, 14, 8. 33 34

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confinement provided new opportunities for states to make political and diplomatic capital out of their own humane treatment of captives—or the lack of it amongst their enemies.37

II The British recourse after 1793 to the confinement of enemy prisoners of war on board hulks provides a striking example of several of the developments discussed above and is worth considering at some length. This early example of “the culture of ‘recycling’”, as it has been termed, had first been used during the Seven Year’s War, and on a larger scale—by both sides—during the American War of Independence. By the 1770s, these demasted, dearmoured and decommissioned warships were also being used to accommodate part of Britain’s male convict population, temporarily landlocked by the closure of the Atlantic to the country’s traffic in transported felons to its American colonies as a result of the War of Independence.38 The onset of the Revolutionary Wars with France in 1793 would see an exponential growth in the use of these floating relics. Many dated back to the mid-eighteenth century, and more vessels were hastily pressed into service with each new influx of prisoners. At the end of 1796, nine prison ships were being used to detain prisoners of war in the naval ports of Chatham, Plymouth and Portsmouth. By 1808, this number had risen to twenty-five, and by the end of 1813, to thirty-six. By the latter date, at least 20,000 prisoners were being confined in the hulks moored at the three sites.39 It was not that alternatives to the prison ships were lacking. There were a series of land depots, commissioned by the Admiralty during previous conflicts, which could be brought out of retirement, such as Mill Prison at Plymouth, built in the early 1740s, and Stapleton Prison, near Bristol, completed in 1782.40 A motley assortment of other buildings—some of them formerly used as criminal prisons, some as barracks or storage facilities—could also be commandeered and converted for the use of prisoners of war, and some county and borough criminal gaols also provided space 37  Ibid., 8–9. For a detailed discussion of this point with regard to Britain and France after 1793, see Morieux, Society of Prisoners, 115–27. 38  Branch-Johnson, 4–13, 45; Lloyd, Prisoners of War, ch. 5, 7. 39  Knight, 445; Chamberlain, Hell Upon Water, 56. Figures calculated from ibid., 58–60. 40  Morieux, Society of Prisoners, 203; Lloyd, Prisoners of War, 218–28, 266–72; Vintner.

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(if often grudgingly) for foreign captives.41 However, for cost and convenience, the Admiralty reasoned that nothing could beat the ready availability of old Royal Navy warships in Ordinary or captured enemy vessels (the latter growing in number considerably as the war progressed), from which candidates suitable for conversion for prisoners of war could be chosen.42 Only gradually, as the war dragged on, and some of the drawbacks of the hulks became apparent (as will be seen presently), did the Transport Office begin to devote greater energy and resources to the construction of new land depots. Dartmoor would be the first result of that shift in policy. In the short term, however, the word “convenience” remained stubbornly attached to the use of the prison ships. What did that epithet mean in practice, beyond the evident attractions of low cost and easy availability? Official thinking at the Admiralty was that the prison ships were easier to guard than land depots. The vessels, moored in long lines bow to stern or broadside on within sight of the shore, could only be reached by boat, which meant that sea water (or in some cases mud at low tide) offered an effective natural barrier to would-be escapers, few of whom, in all likelihood, would have been able to swim.43 In addition to being surrounded by a natural moat, the fact that accommodation for the 700 or so inmates on each ship was stacked vertically on a series of converted gun-decks rather than dispersed horizontally over a larger site, meant that fewer personnel were deemed necessary to guard the prisoners; perhaps 30–35 men and boys for a typical prisoner of war hulk, plus between fifteen and twenty marines for guard and sentry duty.44 Like all prisoner of war depots, the primary purpose of the hulks was to detain securely, and as in most eighteenth-century prison designs, the emphasis was on establishing a secure external perimeter (or series of perimeters), with observation posts placed on that boundary (or boundaries), from which the prisoners could be effectively and safely kept under watch by guards.45 In the case of the prisoner of war hulks, the parts of the ship occupied by the inmates were separated from the guards’ quarters by strong wooden bulkheads, reinforced with iron, effectively separating the  Morieux, Society of Prisoners, 212–16.  Branch-Johnson, 46–47; Lloyd, Prisoners of War, 81. 43  Knight, 445; Adkins & Adkins, War for all the Oceans, 318. 44  Lloyd, Prisoners of War, 84. 45  Johnston, 44. 41 42

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vessel into two largely hermetic worlds, that of the captives and that of their captors.46 Observation holes bored into the bulkheads allowed the guards to observe the prisoners’ quarters, and could be used as gun-ports in case of mutiny or riot. Sentinels were placed at strategic locations around the vessel, including at the foot of the ladders which were the only way up and down from the lower decks, while, just above the waterline, a gallery, running right around the hull, was manned day and night by sentries. A further group of eight to ten guards was permanently kept on alert to deal with any kind of disturbance.47 In the traditional configuration of the Georgian criminal prison, it was common practice to accommodate inmates in large communal quarters or “wards”, sometimes grouped together in rectilinear blocks or “pavilions”, and sometimes in wings placed around a central courtyard. Although this was changing, in many prisons, the young continued to be confined indiscriminately with older offenders, those awaiting trial with “habituals”, and men with women. Unless there was some specific provision for prison labour (a rarity in British criminal gaols before the late eighteenth century), inmates would effectively be left to their own devices during the day, providing they did not attempt to leave the quarters allocated to them. And once the sleeping wards had been secured at dusk, they were effectively off-limits to guards until the doors were unlocked at first light the following morning, except if a serious disturbance required their intervention during the night.48 The prisoner of war hulks functioned in precisely the same fashion, except that instead of communal wards, the prisoners were detained on converted gun-decks, usually two in number, one above the other; and instead of a brick or stone perimeter wall, the external boundary of the hulk was marked by the external observation gallery referred to above. In this respect, in terms of the organisation and management of space, the prisoner of war hulk resembled more closely a mid-eighteenth-century criminal prison than it did a navy warship, however much it might continue to recall the latter in superficial terms (albeit without the ship-of-the-line’s masts, rigging or guns, and having belatedly sprouted a series of makeshift shacks, shanties, galleries and chimneys).49

 Masson, 83.  Lloyd, Prisoners of War, 84. 48  Johnston, ch. 3; Brodie et al., ch. 1. 49  Gardiner, 181. 46 47

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By the 1790s, the criminal prisons were feeling the full heat of a reform movement, seeking to sweep away the old forms of carceral organisation and architecture, and replace them with something radically different, based on the principles of security, salubrity and reformation; principles first popularised by former county sheriff and self-appointed prisons inspector John Howard in his influential 1777 work, The State of the Prisons in England and Wales: with Preliminary Observations, and an Account of some Foreign Prisons.50 The prison reform movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries tapped into a number of political, intellectual and religious developments of the age, and, as noted earlier, gained immediate traction in the mid-1770s from the need to find an alternative to Atlantic transportation for the country’s convicted felons. In addition, the worrying increase in the size of the carceral population, together with the related fear of epidemics of “gaol fever” spreading beyond prison precincts, served to concentrate Georgian minds wonderfully.51 Although there was no concerted, national policy on the subject of prison design and management in this period—despite the passage of the Penitentiary Act 1779—the following two decades saw a wide-ranging and at times heated debate in Britain about the functions and architecture of prisons. The result was a veritable explosion of initiatives launched by county and borough authorities aimed at constructing “reformed” prisons on the Howardian model.52 As architectural historian Robin Evans has shown, designs for reformed prisons in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries sought to achieve a number of potentially contradictory objectives. The traditional emphasis on security meant that prison buildings—as noted above—were typically enclosed on a condensed pavilion or courtyard plan, while new ideas about “salubrity” emphasised the need for a more open and dispersed design to allow the free circulation or “perflation” of eddies of purifying air. And finally, the equally new requirement for prisoner reformation (as reflected in the neologism “penitentiary”) was generally taken to imply the end of the kind of communal wards described above, and their replacement by isolated compartments and individual cells. In fact, in the view of many reformers, the segregation of different categories of offender—transforming the reformed prisons, in Evans’ memorable  Howard, State of the Prisons. For the context, see Robin Evans, 142–81.  Siena. 52  Ignatieff; Robin Evans, ch. 4; DeLacy; Davie, ch. 1–3. 50 51

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phrase, into “atlases of vice with each of the numerous sectors cordoned off, screened and introverted”—and, further, the confinement of each inmate in the individual space of a cell, was the only way to achieve the twin objectives of personal soul-searching and close surveillance (or “inspection” as it was known), felt to be necessary for the “penitentiary” model to achieve its stated goals.53 Clearly, the prisoner of war hulks failed the reformers’ litmus test on just about every count, notably in their abject failure to ensure either the separation of different categories of inmates—no “atlases of vice” here— or the effective “inspection” of those battened down below decks. On the face of it, this was not a pressing issue for the prison ships; their essential purpose after all was to detain securely, not to reform. That being said, the lack of rigorous inspection highlighted the issue of security, for the risk of escape—or worse, of mass insurrection or break-out—was taken very seriously, particularly when it is remembered that the three principal hulk stations of Chatham, Plymouth and Portsmouth were all situated near strategic naval installations and major centres of population, not to mention possible invasion sites.54 As the French Wars entered their second decade, the problem showed every indication of getting worse, rather than better, with the arrival of ever greater numbers of prisoners of war. And to make things worse, some of the older prison ships were beginning to show their age, and rot at their moorings. This increased the risk that prisoners would be able to simply smash their way through the walls of their wooden worlds and make their escape, with who knew what consequences.55 There was also the issue of the conditions in which enemy captives were detained on the hulks. In the last of his great prison surveys, published posthumously in 1791, Howard had warned that “the mode of confinement and labour in the hulks [was] too severe for the far greater number of those who are confined in them”.56 Labour was not an issue in the case of the prisoner of war hulks, but “the mode of confinement” on the floating prisons most definitely was, particularly when the question was taken up by the French authorities and vaunted as new proof (if such were needed) of the barbarity and duplicity of perfide Albion. There were in fact repeated calls from Paris during this period for the complete abolition of the British  Robin Evans, 181, 276 (quotation at 276).  Knight, 445. 55  Chamberlain, Hell Upon Water, 57. 56  Howard, Account of the Principal Lazarettos, 219. 53 54

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prison ships. One letter addressed to the Transport Office in June 1811 claimed that most French prisoners detained in Britain were “crammed into the prison ships, where, denied air and exercise, they suffer the cruellest form of captivity, and see their numbers fall every day due to sickness, which is the inevitable result of the conditions in which they are kept, […] packed in all together in numbers twice that which the vessels are built to accommodate for a short campaign”. Such conditions, the letter concluded, were manifestly intolerable.57 This was no mere matter of semantics or diplomatic point-scoring, for allegations of prisoner mistreatment had the potential to derail sensitive ongoing negotiations with France over the exchange of prisoners.58 There was also the danger of mounting criticism at home, for as Renaud Morieux has shown, by the late 1790s the question of the treatment of prisoners of war had assumed a sufficient degree of domestic political importance that when criticism was aired, local and national authorities felt obliged to issue a rebuttal.59 The British strategy for deflecting French allegations veered between claiming that the prison ships were a regrettable, but necessary, evil and affirming that they were not an evil at all. On the first point, it was argued that the sheer number of prisoners arriving on her shores meant that, unlike France (in the fortunate position of having both fewer prisoners and a greater number of suitable “citadels” and other “strong places” in which to accommodate them), Britain was left with no alternative but to have recourse to the floating prisons, despite the “great inconvenience” and “expense” associated with their use. On the second point, the Transport Office vigorously defended its record on the treatment of prisoners, including on the hulks, in the face of what it termed the “vague” and “extraordinary” allegations of ill-treatment and neglect made by the French government, and repeatedly asserted that the rations issued to prisoners were perfectly adequate, medical care of the highest standard, and inspection procedures rigorous.60 There was no question, moreover, 57  AN, AF IV/1193. Marine: general correspondence (1811–1812), item 173: French Ministry of the Marine to TO, June 27, 1811. 58  Chamberlain, Hell Upon Water, 215. 59  Ibid., 220–21; Morieux, Society of Prisoners, 118–20. Morieux, “Patriotisme humanitaire”, para. 22–32. 60   TNA ADM 98/301: Correspondence, TO to French Ministry of the Marine, 1810–1813: fols. 32–38, TO to M. Rivière, Apr. 6, 1810; D° to d°, fols. 147–54, Aug. 12, 1810; AN, AF IV/1193. Marine: general correspondence (1811–1812), item 122: Ministry of the Marine, Report to the Emperor, Aug. 28, 1811.

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of accepting French claims that the number of invalids returned to France by the British reflected badly on prisoner conditions on the hulks, or worse, were part of a deliberate strategy to conceal the true numbers of French deaths in captivity by dispatching only those already close to death.61 In their defence, the Admiralty cited evidence of the low mortality levels on the prison ships—just 3 per cent for the year to July 1810, according to their calculations.62 By the latter years of the French wars, the picture regarding the treatment of prisoners was complicated by the publication of the first French captivity narratives, many of them written by former paroled army and navy officers, which deliberately set out to challenge the official British narrative on the subject of these “floating tombs”, as naval engineer Charles Dupin would famously term them.63 Indeed, the denunciation of the British hulks “became a passage obligé of French propaganda during this period”; their use seen not just as the unfortunate outcome of wartime expediency, but as part of a deliberate policy to annihilate French prisoners, or at least to cause them gratuitous suffering.64 The 1815 work of General René Martin Pillet is a case in point.65 General Pillet had been captured in Portugal during the Peninsular War in August 1808, and interned at Forton Prison in Hampshire, before being released on parole in 1810, first to nearby Bishop’s Waltham, and later, when he had attempted to escape from that town, to Ashburton in Devon. When in March 1812 he sought to escape from Ashburton also, he was sent under military escort to the hulks at Chatham. He would remain there until the peace of 1814.66 In his book, published on his return to France, Pillet railed against “the public papers in England [that] every year repeat, at four or five different dates, ‘[…] that the prisoners never were better’”. These “hypocritical declarations”, Pillet went on, had been commissioned by the government; their aim “to silence the cries of the French prisoners  See Le Carvèse, Part 1, 134–35.   TNA ADM 98/301: Correspondence, TO to French Ministry of the Marine, 1810–1813: fols. 32–38, TO to M.  Rivière, Apr. 6, 1810; D° to d°, fols. 147–54, Aug. 12, 1810. 63  Dupin, 27–28. 64  Morieux, Society of Prisoners, 205; Morieux, “Patriotisme humanitaire”, para. 39. 65  Pillet, L’Angleterre vue à Londres. An English translation was published in Boston in 1818 (Pillet, Views of England). 66  Chamberlain, Norman Cross, 149–50; TNA ADM 103/76: GEBCHFR, 1811–1812, prisoner n° 13587. 61 62

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and […] prevent persons of humanity from interesting themselves in their behalf”.67 The reality, he claimed, was very different: a “system of murder and cruelty” had been pursued by the Transport Office since the start of the French Wars, “with a fury and method, which almost exceeds belief”.68 While General Pillet’s book touches on conditions in the land depots (including at Norman Cross, where the Frenchman claimed to have personally “seen a spot of ground […], at where nearly four thousand men out of seven thousand confined in that prison were buried”),69 it reserves its most virulent criticism, as well as its most detailed passages of description, for the prison ships on the Medway.70 “The hulks”, Pillet wrote, were “moored in the midst of fetid and stagnant mud”; the air breathed by the prisoners “putrid, damp, and salt”. Indeed, he claimed, the noisome air “would be sufficient without ill treatment, or unwholesome food, to impair and destroy in a very short time the health of the most robust”.71 To make matters worse, the cramped conditions below deck, where prisoners were “hermetically shut up in winter for the space of at least sixteen hours”, left inmates “enfeebled and suffocated from absolute want of air”, and in some cases “never […] able to stand upright again”. The object of this treatment, Pillet concluded starkly, was “the destruction of the prisoners”.72 Pillet was one of a dozen or so French officers who, finding themselves confined on a British hulk, subsequently wrote about their experiences.73 The existence of a substantial body of literature on the subject has made this aspect of French captivity in Britain during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars better known than any other, and indeed has tended to overshadow other forms of confinement.74 At the same time, there has been tendency in the historiography of the hulks to privilege certain kinds of contemporary sources over others,75 with emphasis placed on works like those of Pillet, Sergeant-Major Philippe  Pillet, Views of England, 246.  Ibid., 235–36. 69  Ibid., 235n. 70  Ibid., ch. xliii–iv. 71  Ibid., 228. 72  Ibid., 228–29. 73  Lloyd, Prisoners of War, 82. 74  Le Carvèse, Part 1, 4–5. 75  A case in point is Bernard, 150–55. For an interesting early attempt to consider contrasting testimony on the hulks, both official and captive, see Branch-Johnson, ch. 6. 67 68

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Beaudoin, Lieutenant Pierre-­ Marie-Joseph de Bonnefoux, Louis Garneray and Lieutenant Séverin Mésonant,76 all of which accuse Britain of deliberate and gratuitous cruelty against their countrymen while held as captives, an experience which left their authors with a “burning desire for revenge” and a “hatred” for the “blackguards” of this “haughty” nation.77 The result is that testimony offering a different picture of conditions on the prison ships—like the 1812 letter from French officers detained on one of the other Chatham hulks, the Glory, praising the ship’s commander Lieutenant Tyte for his “kindness” and “benevolence”78—is often effectively all but silenced.79 This is not to suggest that Tyte was typical of the hulk commanders of his day, at Chatham or elsewhere. That being said, it would appear that Tyte’s case was not a wholly exceptional one either, even if there is undoubtedly much contemporary evidence also of culpable negligence, corruption and occasional brutality on the prison ships, including in the voluminous reports, legal papers and correspondence making up the Transport Office’s own files.80 Only recently, in fact, has the “fractured” and “composite” nature of many first-hand captivity narratives begun to be appreciated.81 While some historians may baulk at the suggestion that “the accuracy or inaccuracy of a particular memoir or a specific event recounted is less important than the values transmitted in these testimonies”,82 and point out that the majority of prisoner memoirs concerning the French Wars and the War of 1812 were written many years after the events depicted and reveal widespread evidence of both plagiarism and invention,83 it does not follow that works like those of Pillet should be written off as mere rag-bags of “vitriolic exaggerations” and “scurrilous misinformation”.84 Rather, as Linda Colley  Beaudoin; Jobbé-Duval; Garneray; Mésonant.  Jobbé-Duval, 222; Beaudoin, 657–59. 78  SHD, FF2, Archives centrales de la Marine, Prisonniers – Correspondance, listes, extraits mortuaires et certificats de décès, Français (1792–1838), Box 2/8/d: Prisoners on board the Glory prison ship to M. Rivière, July 5, 1812. 79  Wilkin & Wilkin, ch. 6; Daly, 373. 80  Branch-Johnson, 55; Lloyd, Prisoners of War, 91. 81  Forrest, “Prisonniers de guerre”; Kennedy; Calvet, 28–29; Colley (qtd. 93). 82  Dwyer, 234. 83  Rouanet, “Grognards face à la captivité”, 256; Calvet, 21. A well-known case of plagiarism and suspected invention is Louis Garneray’s Mes pontons. Neuf années de captivité (1851). See Richard Rose, “Foreword”, in Garneray, xiv–xxiii. 84  Harari, 303–4. Quotations from Lloyd, Prisoners of War, 262. 76 77

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has cogently argued, captivity narratives should be approached by ­historians like any other source material: “these are not writings that can be swallowed whole, but they can—and should—be sampled and sieved”.85 As more such “ego-documents” come to light and are subject to the kind of detailed study urged by Colley, what is striking is the diversity of the recollections and the contrasting images they provide of captivity during this period, though of course the surviving accounts are inevitably skewed towards the literate and the educated.86 When it comes to “sampling” and “sieving” testimony relating to the British prison ships, one of the problems, as noted above, is that many prisoner accounts were published years, and in some cases decades, after the events in question. They may therefore reflect that later cultural climate, as well as perhaps—to quote Colley again—the inevitable process by which we “convert life’s crowded, untidy experiences into stories in our own minds, re-arranging awkward facts into coherent patterns […], and omitting episodes that seem in retrospect peripheral, discordant, or too embarrassing or painful to bear”.87 One consequence of such “re-­ arranging” is a tendency noted by several scholars for memoirists to wish to avoid being seen merely as the passive victims of their captors. As a result, captivity narratives often choose to highlight agency rather than passivity; and defiance, pluck and patriotism in the face of adversity, rather than cooperation or negotiation with the enemy, or, indeed, moments of despondency. Such accounts thus helped, as Myra C. Glenn has argued, “to forge a national myth, one that blended into an almost seamless web belief in the virility and patriotism of its men and in the virtue, strength and resilience of the nation”.88 Glenn writes here of post-War of 1812 America, but the same point could be, and indeed has been, made for post-1815 France.89 For these reasons, there is a strong case for devoting particular attention to captivity narratives and testimony written at, or close to, the time of the events they describe. General Pillet’s L’Angleterre vue à Londres clearly falls into this category; so does another French work: Colonel Hippolyte Lebertre’s Aperçu du traitement qu’éprouvent les prisonniers de  Colley, 93.  Forrest, “Prisonniers de guerre”, 106; Kennedy, 8; Forrest et al., 22–24. 87  Kennedy, 8; Colley, 92. 88  Glenn, 80. 89  Wilkin & Wilkin, ch. 6. 85 86

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guerre français en Angleterre. The book was written in July and early August 1812 while its author was detained at Chatham on the prison ships Canada and Brunswick, and published in Paris the following spring.90 Colonel Lebertre had been brought to Britain following his capture during the invasion of Martinique in February 1809. He was subsequently released on parole to Arlesford, near Portsmouth, but having attempted to make his way to France, he was re-captured near Folkestone in April 1812, and, like General Pillet, ordered to be confined on the hulks at Chatham. Lebertre was detained on the prison ship Canada until August that year, at which point he was transferred to a second vessel, the Brunswick, along with 103 other French officers being held on different prison ships in the Medway, including Pillet. He would remain confined there until the general release of French prisoners two years later.91 Lebertre’s Aperçu or “survey” is framed as an open letter to John Wilson Croker MP, Secretary to the Admiralty. According to his own account, the French colonel had been stung into taking up his pen upon hearing of comments made by the minister during a debate in the House of Commons on June 26, 1812. Croker told the House that he had “visited the prison-ships at Chatham, in which the greatest cleanliness prevailed, the prisoners were well treated, carefully separated according to their several degrees, were in the highest spirits, had many pleasures to resort to, even that of billiards”.92 Lebertre was clearly indignant at what he called the “affrontery” of Croker’s speech. By blithely voicing such “lies” in parliament for all the world to hear, the MP had piled “insult and calumny” on top of the “barbarous treatment” to which the French officers were already subjected.93 Lebertre challenged the Admiralty man to find out for himself what things were really like on the Medway hulks, thereby rhetorically placing himself (Lebertre) on the side of experiential reality as opposed to the “inaccuracies” contained in the official reports, a strategic device also adopted by General Pillet, as seen earlier.94 To add weight to his words, Lebertre’s pamphlet adopted the unusual expedient of including a frontispiece with an engraving of the orlop deck  Lebertre.  TNA ADM 103/76: GEBCHFR, 1811–1812; ADM 103/44: GEB, Brunswick prison ship, French prisoners of war, 1812–1813; ADM 103/489: Register of Escaped French and American prisoners of war, 1812–1813; Abell, 75–76. 92  HC Debates, May 5–July 30, 1812, 793. 93  Lebertre, 3. 94  Ibid., 26–27. 90 91

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of the Brunswick, the same deck of which Pillet would write in 1815. The engraving, entitled “View of the Interior of the Brunswick”, shows a multitude of tiny hammock-cocooned bodies crammed into every free inch of space on the deck. Many appear awake, and the bodies of some are contorted, as if seeking sleep in vain. The perspective and effect are not dissimilar, perhaps intentionally, to that of the widely disseminated engraving of the Liverpool slave ship, the Brookes, produced a quarter of a century earlier.95 Like that earlier image, the engraving of the Brunswick’s orlop deck is “detached, abstract, formally enticing, [and] grammatically precise”,96 with its use of a cartographer’s scale and legend; and it offers a striking counterpoint to the impassioned condemnation of Lebertre’s accompanying “explanation”, with the latter’s reference to “a form of torture that even the cruellest tyrants have never imagined for their worst criminals”.97 Lebertre’s Aperçu, like Pillet’s L’Angleterre, resembles the testimonies of other “broke-paroles” detained on the hulks in its repeated expressions of indignation at the fact that French officers re-captured after having attempted to escape from their parole towns were considered by the Admiralty to have forfeited their right to the privileges normally accorded to military men of their rank.98 That as one 1812 petition of French officers put it, the “tiresome spirit of equality” at work in the Transport Office meant that “the general” was treated in the same way as “the drummer boy”; with prisoners of all kinds provided with no more than “that which cannot be refused by the thrifty hand of the [British] administration for the bare existence of the prisoners”.99 The British interpretation of what constituted fair treatment of prisoners of war was also vigorously challenged by the French authorities, who repeatedly asked for clarification on the treatment of their paroled officers, and privately expressed their exasperation at the “fuss” made by the British about parole violations.100 95  Published in Plymouth for the Slave Trade Abolition Society in December 1788 (see Webster, 246). 96  Wood, 207. 97  Lebertre, “Explication de la gravure” (n.p.). 98  Lloyd, Prisoners of War, 329–30. 99  SHD, FF2, Archives centrales de la Marine, Prisonniers – Correspondance, listes, extraits mortuaires et certificats de décès Français (1792–1838), Box 2/8/e: Petition by French paroled officers at Thame (Oxfordshire), May 1812, fol. 2. 100  AN, AF IV/1194, Marine: general correspondence (1813–1814), File 1 (1813), item 35: Report to the Emperor, March 24, 1813, fol. 3. For the context, see Daly, 370–72.

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Lebertre writes with feeling of his profound sense of injustice that officers like himself were detained on the prison ships alongside common soldiers, sailors—“and even negroes”.101 Another officer complained, in similar vein, that below decks on the hulks “all the prisoners are jumbled together, whatever their status and their rank; which means that an officer who is detained there must sleep next to the first man who comes along, however clean or dirty he is”.102 Significantly, Lebertre’s open letter ends with a request—described not as a favour but an “act of justice”—that he “be removed from the hulks and placed in a land prison, and accommodated and treated as [his] rank demands”. Perhaps in this context, Croker’s assertion in his Commons speech that the French prisoners on the hulks were “carefully separated according to their several degrees” was just as much a source of indignation to men like Colonel Lebertre as the minister’s remarks about prisoners’ supposed high spirits and access to the billiard table. It is likely that Lebertre’s open letter to Croker was completed sometime in July or early August 1812, and that the image of the Brunswick’s orlop deck, along with an appendix on hulk-related diseases, written by Piedmontese army surgeon Dr Fontana (also detained on the vessel), were added after the colonel was transferred there from the Canada on August 11. As noted, a hundred or so other French officers, including General Pillet, were brought to the Brunswick from other Chatham hulks on the same day.103 The Transport Office may quickly have come to regret its decision to concentrate the Chatham officer class in one place, for a little over a week after the arrival of the men on the Brunswick, 46 navy officers, along with 27 officers from the Armée de terre (among them Pillet, Lebertre and Mésonant) and 28 from the French privateer and merchant fleets, drafted a petition addressed to the French Minister of the Marine, Count Decrès.104 Depicting themselves as “unarmed” and “peaceful” while remaining “proud”, “courageous” and “unwavering” in their loyalty to the Emperor, the signatories expressed their indignation at the “vexatious ignominies” they faced at the hands of this “barbarous”,  Lebertre, 17–18.  Mésonant, 68. 103  TNA ADM 103/44: GEB, Brunswick prison ship, French prisoners of war, 1812–1813. 104  SHD, FF2. Archives centrales de la Marine, Prisonniers  – Correspondance, listes, extraits mortuaires et certificats de décès, Français (1792–1838), Box 2/8/d: French officers’ petition, Brunswick hulk, Chatham, Aug. 20, 1812. 101 102

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“cruel” and “pitiless” enemy. Cut off entirely from the outside world, and with food that was both coarse and insufficient in quantity, “everything”, they complained, was “privation and interdiction”.105 These conditions would prove short-lived. Later that year, following a dispute between the Brunswick’s French officers and the Transport Board over the latter’s refusal to allow the prisoners a supply of beer and spirits— justified by the former as “something absolutely essential, given the broken-­down state of our health”106—and with the Board apparently fearing a “combination to break through the rules, tending to insurrection and a consequent renewal of bloodshed”, it was decided that the officers “should immediately be removed to separate prison ships”.107 Seventy-six of the original group of 104 officers would be transferred to other hulks at Chatham in September and October 1812, and several others were dispatched to Norman Cross the following month. Lebertre and Pillet, however, both remained on the Brunswick.108 Both men continued to press the case of the French prisoners of war in the months that followed; an indication perhaps that despite the purportedly “inquisitorial” security measures put in place by the Transport Office on the hulks, there were still means by which information on the conditions and treatment of the French captives could reach those, both in Britain and in France, able and willing to give them a platform. By the spring of 1813, the manuscript of Lebertre’s Aperçu was with the printers in Paris.109 As for General Pillet, he addressed a new petition directly to Napoleon Bonaparte in May of the same year. Anticipating many of the elements concerning the conditions on board the hulks which would appear in his later published work, Pillet called on the emperor, “in the name of humanity, in the name of your paternal love for us, and in the name of your glory”, to order that an inquiry be conducted into the  Ibid., fols. 1–2.  Ibid., fol. 1 (added marginal note). 107  Qtd. Abell, 76. The mention of a risk of renewed “bloodshed” is probably a reference to an incident on the Sampson hulk, also at Chatham, in May 1811. A mass escape attempt and a series of confrontations between the vessel’s commander, Lieutenant Monnier, and the French prisoners, culminated in an order to fire on the latter, killing six and wounding a further six (see Anon., “Massacre des prisonniers de guerre”). The precise circumstances of these events remain to be elucidated. 108  TNA ADM 103/44: GEB, Brunswick prison ship, French prisoners of war, 1812–1813. 109  AN, F/18/40 (censorship), items 452–55: “Pièces et correspondances concernant L’Aperçu du traitement qu’éprouvent en Angleterre les prisonniers français”, Apr.–Nov. 1813. 105 106

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treatment of French prisoners of war in Britain. The petition was forwarded to Napoleon in July with an approving note added by Minister Decrès, but nothing further seems to have come of the initiative. Perhaps it was swallowed up in the events of 1814.110 During the same period, the general was also in contact with the radical British journalist and editor, Daniel Lovell. Lovell was at that time in Newgate Gaol, following a conviction for libel in a suit brought by the Transport Office the previous year. Lovell’s newspaper, The Statesman, had published a letter in March 1812, signed “Honestus”, which had accused Admiralty personnel of pocketing “a large part” of the money intended for prisoners of war at home and abroad, thereby “satiat[ing] the rapacity of those who are preying on the vitals of their country and amassing enormous sums [and] wealth from the distresses of a whole kingdom”.111 In August 1812, the courts found in favour of the Transport Office and the journalist was sentenced to eighteenth months in Newgate, with a fine of £500 and sureties of several thousand pounds to provide on his release.112 In a letter to Lovell dated May 19, 1813, Pillet expressed his fear that with his correspondent behind bars, “no one [would] henceforth raise a single voice in our behalf”, and shine a light on how the British sought “to murder her prisoners in detail, by adding to the tortures of a dreadful confinement, privations of all kinds”.113 It is clear then that the trend towards holding prisoners of war for the duration of a conflict threw into sharp relief a number of questions linked to their maintenance and the conditions of their imprisonment, including that of the conditions in which they were detained. However, the repeated failure of cartel negotiations between Britain and France after 1803 meant that there were ultimately few formal means to reach bilateral agreements on the subject. Voices could be and were raised on both sides on behalf of prisoners of war, but progress was often hamstrung (as in the cartel 110  AN, AF IV/1194. Marine: general correspondence (1813–1814), file 1 (1813), item 104: “Pétition de l’adjudant commandant Pillet et renseignements sur ce dernier” (July 1813); items 97–103: Draft decree for the creation of an inquiry on the conditions of French prisoners of war in England. 111  Honestus, “British Prisoners in France” [letter to the editor], The Statesman, March 19, 1812. 112  Goodwin, rev. Haigh, DNB, “Lovell, Daniel”. Lovell remained in prison until 1815, unable to pay the sureties demanded for his release. He died three years later. 113  Qtd. Pillet, Views of England, 30–31. See also Abell, 23–24.

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negotiations more generally) by mutual mistrust, bad faith and recriminations, creating the feelings of frustration and dismay expressed by Pillet, Lebertre, and many other French and American prisoners of war.

III For all its reliance on the prison ships in the early years of the French Wars as part of what might be termed a make-do-and-mend approach to the detention of prisoners of war, there was one decision made by the Admiralty during this period which represents a radical departure from previous policy: its decision in 1796 to construct a purpose-built prisoner of war depot at Norman Cross in Cambridgeshire. More than 9000 prisoners, mostly French, would be interned there between 1797 and the camp’s closure in 1814.114 The conception and design of Norman Cross is worth considering in some detail here, for it demonstrates a number of striking contrasts as well as certain similarities with the later Dartmoor project (which it preceded by eight years), as well as supplying a further example of the interplay of prisoner of war policy and prison design during this period. The history of Norman Cross war prison was the subject of a detailed study by Peterborough doctor and antiquarian Thomas James Walker in 1913,115 but it loomed small indeed in subsequent penal history. For a prison built to a “revolutionary” design for up to 7000 inmates, and which, moreover, can lay claim to being “the world’s first purpose-built prisoner of war camp”, this is a striking omission.116 In the last decade or so, however, major advances have been made in our understanding both of the site and the historical record, thanks to a collaborative effort by a team of historians, archaeologists and volunteers.117 The decision to build Norman Cross prison was taken shortly after the responsibility for prisoners of war was transferred to the Transport Office from the Sick and Hurt Board, and needs to be placed in the context of the progression of the military campaign on the Continent at that date. In 1795, French troops overran Holland, and it was reasoned that the clashes that were expected to follow between the Royal Navy’s North Sea fleet and the Dutch navy, now under French control, would lead to a new surge  Kirkor, 4.  Walker. 116  Mytum & Hall, 75; Chamberlain, Norman Cross, “Foreword”, 15. 117  Wessex Archaeology; Lloyd, Prisoners of War, 245–65. 114 115

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of prisoners in eastern England. The nearest sizeable facilities for detaining prisoners of war were the hulks on the Medway at Chatham. Chatham was well-defended, and additional hulks could be procured relatively speedily and cheaply, as seen earlier. That being said, the Medway was a long way from the ports of Yarmouth and Lynn where prisoners from the North Sea battles would most likely be disembarked, and the Kent hulks had the additional disadvantage of being situated close to the Essex coastline, thought to be at risk from a possible invasion. An inland war prison in eastern England was thus the preferred option—if not perhaps the cheapest or the most quickly available one. The rural Norman Cross site, near the market town of Peterborough, was chosen for its isolated location, while remaining within easy reach both of London and the North Sea ports (but not within too easy reach of the latter so as to facilitate escape by sea). It was also well-placed to source locally the prodigious quantities of food and water that would be needed to provision up to 7000 prisoners. With speed and economy being nevertheless important considerations for the Admiralty planners, it was decided to build the prison mainly in wood, using a prefabricated framework made in London at what has been described as “feverish” speed, and constructed on-site by a team of 500 carpenters working in shifts day and night, seven days a week. The first prisoners arrived at the prison on April 7, 1797, just four months after work at the site had begun.118 The conception and construction of Norman Cross in 1796–1797 came not only at a pivotal time in the military campaign against France and her allies, but also, as seen earlier, during a period of intense debate in Britain about the functions and architecture of prisons. With the emphasis in the war prisons firmly on security and control, it is not surprising perhaps that their configuration should reflect those priorities, and since the maximisation of security and control was also the defining feature of the previous generation of criminal prison designs,119 it follows that those earlier designs might be expected to have continued to influence Admiralty planners. In many ways, the design of Norman Cross reflected this logic, but as will be seen presently, not entirely. The layout chosen for the site resembled the dominant rectilinear form favoured by eighteenth-century prison architects, with the camp bisected by roads defined on each side by 118  Chamberlain, Norman Cross, 39–40; Lloyd, Prisoners of War, 246–47 (quotation at 247). 119  Johnston, 44.

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palisades which effectively divided the site into four distinct compounds or quadrants, each containing four free-standing accommodation blocks of two storeys and its own exercise yard.120 This basic pavilion-type layout had continued to find favour with the first generation of prison reformers, and indeed Howard’s “Plan for a Country Prison” in The State of the Prisons conformed to this traditional design, albeit with a number of distinctive Howardian twists.121 Howard’s close associate, William Blackburn, the most prolific prison architect of his generation, also used the pavilion-­ type plan on occasion, such as in his designs for the county gaols at Dorchester and Oxford in the late 1780s.122 For prison reformers, the pavilion plan, along with the similar courtyard plan, had the advantage of combining an emphasis on security with the possibility of classification as dictated by Evans’ “atlases of vice”, with different self-contained pavilions or courtyards devoted to distinct groups of prisoners. However, as noted earlier, such designs suffered from problems of salubrity, notably the lack of the free “perflation” of purifying air by which reformers set so much store (a particular problem for the enclosed courtyard-type prisons), and they were clearly not designed with the fashionable goal of “inspection” in mind either.123 Such traditional designs could be improved by pushing outwards and raising the boundary walls (where this was possible) and isolating them from the rest of the prison by an encircling path, from which patrolling turnkeys could inspect the different airing yards through paling fences, but by the late 1810s, a consensus had been reached in reforming circles that a more radical re-­ think was required, involving an entirely new type of prison plan; one which would allow an enhanced level of surveillance, without sacrificing the principles of security and classification associated with earlier designs.124 The preferred choice, as espoused by the influential Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline (founded in 1816), was the so-called radial plan, in which a variable number of elongated rectangular cell blocks stretched out from a central administrative hub like the spokes of a wheel or the sails of a windmill.125 In theory at least, this central hub or station,  Mytum & Hall, 82.  Howard, State of Prisons, 41–48. 122  Brodie et al., 49–50. 123  Johnston, 45. 124  Robin Evans, 143. 125  Johnston, 55. 120 121

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a circular or polygonal tower of several storeys, occupied around the clock by the governor and other prison staff, allowed both prison airing yards and cell blocks to be kept under “constant and unobserved inspection” by those within.126 Interestingly, we find at Norman Cross a number of the architectural features urged by the prison reform movement with a view to facilitating inspection. A sunken “silent walk” for patrolling sentries on the inside of the boundary wall was added following an unsuccessful mass break-out in September 1807. And in an effort to strengthen the prison’s somewhat flimsy physical defences, the original octagonal perimeter boundary, a wooden stockade fence, was replaced by a wall in brick at about this time.127 Perhaps the most intriguing design feature of the Norman Cross depot, however, and one, it would seem, that was unique to the prison,128 was the presence of a central inspection tower, positioned at the heart of the site where the roads bisecting the prison met. Constructed in wood and octagonal in form, the design of the four-storey blockhouse, as it was known, bears a striking resemblance to the kind of structure advocated by Jeremy Bentham in the late 1780s and early 1790s in his ill-fated proposals for a circular Panopticon prison. Bentham had envisaged that the Panopticon’s central “inspector’s lodge”, as he termed it, would be equipped with large windows, offering an uninterrupted view of the ring of cells which encircled it, while the lodge’s relatively small diameter would allow the governor and other prison personnel, in the space of a few strides, to keep all parts of the prison under observation. Bentham’s intention was to conceal prison personnel in the lodge behind a complex array of blinds, partitions, multi-level floors and tinted glass, so that prisoners would be unaware when they were being watched. This was an ingenious (as well as economical) means of creating an illusion of permanent surveillance; necessary, according to the philosopher, for inmates to undergo the long-term behavioural changes necessary to rid them of their criminal proclivities.129 Norman Cross’ wooden blockhouse was also fitted with large windows, but in this case there was no need for smoke and mirrors. On  Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline, Remarks, 34.  Mytum & Hall, 80; Chamberlain, Norman Cross, 45, 169; Walker, 154–55. 128  Lloyd, Prisoners of War, 247. 129  Jeremy Bentham, Letters I–VIII (1791), repr. in Bentham, Complete Works, 37–47. For the background, see Semple; Davie, ch. 3. This feature of the Panopticon was famously highlighted by Michel Foucault (Foucault, 200–2). 126 127

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the contrary, the presence of sentries in the tower, along with a number of swivel guns placed prominently in the upper floor windows, was intended to communicate to the prisoners an unequivocal message of omniscience and military might.130 It is not the intention here to provide an exhaustive history of Norman Cross depot during its seventeen-year existence, but rather to consider a number of other aspects of its design and organisation that bear on our discussion in this chapter of prisoner of war policy and debate on prison design. It will be recalled that the ground plan of the prison envisaged four distinct compounds, each with four two-storey accommodation blocks for prisoners and a communal airing yard; the boundaries of each compound marked by a wooden palisade. Each of these accommodation blocks, usually referred to in the contemporary literature as “prisons” (as would be their equivalents at Dartmoor) or by the French term “casernes”, were 100 × 22 feet (30.5 × 6.7 m), and built to house up to 460 prisoners.131 This in itself gives an idea of the scale of operations at Norman Cross, bearing in mind that each of the depot’s sixteen “prisons” was capable of accommodating as many inmates as the largest of Britain’s county gaols, bridewells and houses of correction at that time.132 Each block contained two high-ceilinged storeys, and internal partitions, rails and iron stanchions allowed hammocks to be slung every evening in three tiers on the lower floor and two on the higher (the latter reached by means of a stone staircase). Each prisoner, it has been calculated, had about two feet of hammock width.133 As naval historians Roy and Lesley Adkins point out with reference to warships of the Napoleonic era, “hammocks were the only viable method of providing somewhere to sleep for so many men in a confined space, with the added benefit that they could be rolled up and stored during the day”.134 The same advantages—if not necessarily the same constraints of space—also applied on dry land, and there were clearly sound financial reasons for packing in prisoners in this way, adding weight to a

 Mytum & Hall, 82.  Chamberlain, Norman Cross, 43; Lloyd, Prisoners of War, 247. 132  In Howard’s 1791 survey of English prisons, only London’s Newgate Gaol was listed as having a larger population (499) than the planned capacity for each of Norman Cross’ “prisons” (Howard, Account of Principal Lazarettos, 125). 133  Walker, 91. 134  Adkins & Adkins, Jack Tar, 188. 130 131

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well-­attested Transport Office reputation for parsimony.135 However, it is reasonable to surmise that for the Admiralty planners, there was another factor at work. Steeped as they were in naval custom and tradition, there was nothing more natural than that they should conceive of the accommodation blocks in the war depots as effectively landlocked warships, with similar sleeping arrangements to those on the lower decks of a ship of the line.136 The organisation of prisoner quarters on the hulks, as noted above, was approached in the same way. This was but one example of a broader phenomenon noted by historian Elodie Duché. “Arguably”, she writes, “the sea cemented a social world in detention, by constituting the common denominator of various British and French prisoners”.137 This was partly because such a large proportion of the French prisoners at Norman Cross were sailors. Figures for the country as a whole for the period 1803–1814 indicate that French sailors were slightly outnumbered overall by soldiers from Napoleon’s Grande armée,138 but these numbers were skewed somewhat by the late influx of prisoners captured in the land campaigns on the Iberian Peninsula. As late as 1810, Transport Office figures indicate that sailors constituted a majority (58 per cent) of non-ranking French captives in Britain, and this was probably the case also at Norman Cross until the final years of its operation.139 The vast majority of American prisoners at Dartmoor were also mariners.140 As Duché points out, however, the naval dimension of incarceration in Britain in these years went in fact much deeper than this. “Regardless of their corps”, she writes, “these captives experienced maritime life, culturally and administratively, during detention. […] Captives were clothed, fed and disciplined by a naval system of welfare, which thus percolated through inland depots, as much as littoral fortresses”.141  MacDougall, 222.  According to Rodger (400), ordinary sailors on naval warships were allotted a similar space for their hammock as the prisoners of Norman Cross. “In principle”, he writes, “every hammock [on a 74-gun ship of the line] was allowed fourteen inches width, which at sea, though not in port, would allow each man twenty-eight inches to sleep in a ship keeping two watches, with the hammocks slung starboard and larboard watches alternately”. See also Lavery, 206–7. 137  Duché, “Sea of Stories”, 58. 138  Le Carvèse, Part 1, Table 7, 23. 139  Daly, 363. 140  Dye, “Dartmoor” 1–2. 141  Duché, “Sea of Stories”, 58 (my emphasis); Morieux, Society of Prisoners, 289–90. 135 136

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The space allocated to French and later American prisoners of war by the Transport Office may have been no more niggardly on paper than for the country’s own naval seamen, and thus constituted a case of operational “percolation”, as it were, but it is important to bear in mind that conditions at sea were in fact very different: the realities of the watch system on a naval warship meant that sailors were rarely in their hammocks for more than four, or at most six, hours at a stretch.142 In contrast, in each of the Norman Cross prisons—as on the Brunswick’s orlop deck—close on 500 men were packed cheek by jowl from dusk until dawn; confined in buildings with no heating, no sanitation except of the most primitive kind, and precious little light or air. Clear evidence of the noisome, hothouse atmosphere at Norman Cross comes from the fact that inmates repeatedly pierced the prisons’ wooden walls and roof with a multitude of supernumerary ventilation holes in an effort to reduce the heat inside.143 In fact, such was the scale of unofficial perflation at Norman Cross that a report from the Transport Board commissioners in 1813 expressed the fear that “the innumerable holes cut through all parts of the buildings by the prisoners” for the purposes of admitting light and air were making the structures “extremely weak”. However, despite repeated threats from the prison’s agent that culprits would be put on short rations to defray the cost of the repairs, the destruction went on right up to the closure of the camp in 1814.144 Such destruction might serve a variety of purposes besides as a means of ventilation. In some cases, it might be an end in itself; a way for prisoners to assert some degree of agency over their rule-bound and physically curtailed lives. By undermining the very fabric of prison walls—intended by their designers to constrain inmates to behave in a certain way and physically prevent them from behaving otherwise—prisoners were crossing a powerful symbolic threshold as well as a material one.145 Usually, in fact, as in the example of the ventilation holes at Norman Cross, destruction of the prison fabric was not an end in itself, but a means to an end. There was for example a case reported at the Cambridgeshire camp in 1800 of wood being stripped from the accommodation blocks of the north-western quadrangle to furnish inmates with the raw materials for  Lavery, 201; Adkins & Adkins, Jack Tar, 196–98.  Chamberlain, Norman Cross, 44. See also MacDougall, 221–24. 144  Chamberlain, Norman Cross, 44. 145  Based on Morieux, Society of Prisoners, 223–25, 230–31. 142 143

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making toys for sale at the prison’s market. When it was discovered what was going on, all the prisoners in the four blocks making up the quadrangle were put on short rations to recover the £16 15s 8d needed to repair the damage.146 Most notoriously—and most problematically for the prison authorities—the destruction of the prison fabric might also prefigure an escape attempt. At Norman Cross, the wooden palisade fences had proved particularly vulnerable in that regard, as were the wooden hulls of the prison ships, particularly those of the older vessels. In other land depots—as at Dartmoor—prisoners seeking to escape could not simply smash their way through the walls of the prison, but had instead to tunnel under or clamber over the walls of accommodation blocks, cachots, hospitals or privies, as well as negotiate the boundary wall—or walls. Escapes were one occasion when the management of the war depots was placed under the microscope. With hostile enemy combatants on the loose, urgent questions were inevitably raised at the Transport Board (and perhaps in parliament and the press), not only about the adequacy of the security and surveillance measures in place, but also about the possibility of connivance from prison personnel and barracks soldiers. The government hoped that offering a finder’s fee for returned captives, together with harsh criminal sanctions (considerably strengthened in 1812) for those caught aiding and abetting prisoners, would limit the number of successful escapes.147 News of a break-out from a war depot would lead to the dispatch of a flurry of accusatory letters from the Transport Board in London to the hapless agent concerned, with the latter called upon to explain whether it was his depot’s physical structure or human error (or human cupidity) which had allowed one or several of his inmates to “run”. If there was a suggestion of complicity from members of the prison’s military garrison, that flurry of correspondence would extend to the army commanders responsible for the detachments ostensibly guarding the depot.148 A second occasion on which the administration of a war prison would come under close scrutiny was following a surge in mortality as a result of the spread of epidemic disease. Between November 1800 and May 1801, 848 French and Dutch prisoners as well as several members of the  Chamberlain, Norman Cross, 155.  Chamberlain, Hell Upon Water, 165–69; MacDougall, 480–527; Chamberlain, Norman Cross, 162–69; Daly, 378. 148  Morieux, Society of Prisoners, 328–33. 146 147

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personnel at Norman Cross died of typhoid fever, probably caused by a contaminated water supply.149 At the height of the epidemic, in January and February 1801, more than fifty prisoners were dying each week, in what was the deadliest outbreak of infectious disease at any of the British prison depots during this period.150 The Transport Office was at pains to make it clear that the high mortality at the prison was not the result of the neglect or ill-treatment of the prisoners, but rather (as Board commissioner Ambrose Searle, dispatched to the prison in January 1801, reported on his return) had “proceed[ed] merely from cold and a reduced state of the animal system”. In fact, Searle’s report sought to shift some of the blame to the prisoners themselves, stating that certain of their number had become vulnerable to disease as a result of selling their clothing and rations to finance a gambling habit. He added pointedly that “warm food and warm clothes should help the sick as long as it is not sold”.151 As seen earlier, this was no mere matter of semantics, for allegations of prisoner of war mistreatment had the potential to derail sensitive ongoing negotiations with France over the exchange of prisoners, as well as cause political discomfort at home.

IV A letter sent in early April 1810 from the Transport Board to the French Ministry of Marine needs to be interpreted in the same light as Ambrose Searle’s comments from the previous decade, coming as it did during a sensitive phase in cartel negotiations between the two countries, with a new round of talks about to start at Morlaix.152 The letter repeats the conventional British nécessité oblige defence of the hulk system, before stating, in what was a departure from custom, that a new (and expensive) programme of prison building had been launched by the Admiralty in order to reduce—and perhaps, in time, end—Britain’s reliance on the prison ships. With one new land depot for 6000 men now in service, and a second for 7000 in the pipeline, the Board stated confidently that when the building programme was completed, there would be “ample  Chamberlain, Norman Cross, 128; Mytum & Hall, 84.  TNA ADM 103/643: Norman Cross death certificates, 1797–1814, weeks ending Jan. 18, 1801–Feb. 1, 1801. 151  Qtd. Chamberlain, Norman Cross, 129–30, 157–58. 152  Ibid., 225. 149 150

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accommodation on Shore in this country for about 30,000 Prisoners of War”. If, the Board added, a successful exchange with France could be negotiated, it would be possible to “dispense with Prison Ships entirely”.153 Britain was indeed seeking to reduce its dependence on the hulks, and had being doing so since 1805, as seen earlier. If this could be presented in a favourable diplomatic light as a response to France’s legitimate concerns about the floating prisons, so much the better. It is striking though, that in the various internal communications on the subject of the prison ships around the time the Dartmoor project was launched, there is no mention either of French calls for their abolition or the need to address the conditions in which prisoners were detained on board. Instead, emphasis was placed firmly on the need to find accommodation for the growing number of prisoners of war and the fact that in the long run the new prison depot offered the twin advantages of security—avoiding the “impropriety” of concentrating large numbers of prisoners of war near sensitive naval installations—and economy. On the latter point, a Transport Board letter of 1806 conceded that the sum proposed for the construction of the Devon prison was a “large” one,154 but it was confidently predicted that its cost “would in fact be saved in the expense of prison ships, in less than three years after its completion”.155 A second Board letter from around the same time claimed that the construction of Dartmoor “would save the expense of seven or eight Third Rate Prison Ships”, reckoned at some £20,000–24,000 a year.156 A note added to the bottom of that second letter indicated that on June 27, 1805, approval had been given for the Dartmoor project to go ahead, paving the way for the meeting of Tyrwhitt, Alexander and Bouverie on Dartmoor ten days later with which this chapter opened. In many ways, 1805 represented a turning point in British policy with regard to prisoners of war; a recognition that the make-do-and-mend approach which had dominated Admiralty thinking up to that point 153  TNA ADM 98/301: Correspondence, TO to the French Ministry of the Marine, 1810–1813: TO to M. Rivière, Apr. 6, 1810, fols. 34–35. 154  The final cost of construction at Dartmoor was about £135,000, nearly twice the revised estimate submitted by Daniel Alexander quoted at the beginning of this chapter (James, 30). 155  TNA ADM 1/3774: TBLPW (supplementary), 1801–1808: TO to King George III (draft), Jan. 1, 1806, fol. 298. 156  TNA ADM 1/3774: TBLPW (supplementary), 1801–1808: TO to W. Marsden, June 26, 1805, fol. 251.

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(Norman Cross notwithstanding), a policy which involved concentrating large numbers of enemy combatants in expensive and insecure prison ships, had become untenable. There was no question of giving up the hulks altogether, unless, of course, an enduring exchange treaty could be signed with France and prisoner numbers reduced significantly, but the construction of a new prison, plus the subsequent refurbishment of an old one at Portchester Castle in Hampshire (the second project referred to in the 1810 letter cited above) would indeed increase considerably “on shore” capacity within the system.157 The Admiralty could have decided in 1805 to commission more prisons on the Norman Cross model, but significantly it chose instead to build a prison of a very different kind, despite the higher costs and later completion date which that implied. Indeed, in some respects, the Dartmoor project could be considered as the antithesis of both the Cambridgeshire camp and the hulks. The prison’s granite construction, coupled with its location in one of the most isolated locations Britain had to offer, offered the promise of new standards of security, while its innovative design, drawing on the latest thinking in prison architecture, would allow Dartmoor’s 5000–6000 inmates (or up to 10,000, as it turned out) to be kept under close “inspection”, while assuring high standards of salubrity and health. In short, the site chosen for the new war depot seemed to include in it, as Alexander had confidently predicted, “all that is required […] for the construction of a Prison”. But what exactly do prisoners of war “require”? The answer is not a simple one, as this chapter has demonstrated. One set of answers to that question would drive the design and construction of Dartmoor, as will be seen in the next chapter, but during the ten-year existence of the prison on the moor, other, conflicting, answers would also emerge. Those answers would come from many quarters: from Britain’s enemies abroad and from the government’s political opponents at home; and from the prison’s agent and the guards and other staff, military and civilian, on the ground. They would also, crucially, come from the prisoners themselves.

157  By the end of 1810, capacity in the inland war prisons stood at about 32,000 (calculated from Chamberlain, Hell Upon Water, 81). On Portchester Castle prison, see ibid., 88–91; Lloyd, Prisoners of War, 204–17.

CHAPTER 3

The Prison on the Moor: Conception and Design

From conception to completion, Dartmoor Prison was built in a little under four years. Compared with the four months in which the prefabricated wooden prison at Norman Cross was erected in 1797, this was an extraordinarily long period, coming as it did, it will be recalled, at a time when prisoner of war numbers in Britain were rising rapidly and the Admiralty was seeking to reduce its reliance on the prison ships. Indeed, during the period between the official decision to build Dartmoor in June 1805, and the arrival of the first 496 French prisoners in the afternoon of May 22, 1809, the prisoner capacity of the land depots remained static at about 18,000, which meant that room needed to be found on the prison ships for an ever greater proportion of the 5000–7000 new prisoners arriving in Britain each year.1 It is no coincidence in this context that between 1805 and 1808, twenty new hulks came into service in the ship depots of Chatham, Plymouth and Portsmouth.2 Admittedly, the four-year wait for Dartmoor was twice as long as planned (the original contract had optimistically promised completion by Christmas 1807), but it might be considered that even a two-year build was something of a luxury in the circumstances. Time should have been of

 James, 31–32; Chamberlain, Hell Upon Water, 81; Le Carvèse, Part 2, 123.  Calculated from Chamberlain, Hell Upon Water, 58–60.

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the essence, but evidently it was not.3 Historians of the prison have tended to conclude, with Clive Lloyd, that “the credit, or blame, for the creation of Dartmoor Prison, must go chiefly to […] Thomas Tyrwhitt”, with his “strange but genuine affection for bleak and lonely Dartmoor, dreaming that one day he would transform parts of that wasteland into a bustling Utopia of prosperous farms and homesteads”.4 Tyrwhitt himself later insisted that it was the Transport Board which had approached him in the spring of 1805, “to know if the Prince [of Wales] would grant government a spot of ground on the Forest of Dartmoor on which a Prison of War might be built”,5 though of course this does not mean that the Devon landowner had not already been involved in some discreet lobbying of his own. Tyrwhitt was keen to develop the nearby township he had established in the 1780s with a handful of other “improving” landlords around his seat at Tor Royal. He had named the settlement “Prince’s Town” (later Princetown), in honour of his long-standing employer and patron. Furthermore, as MP for the Devon borough of Portarlington and the holder of a number of senior royal and government positions in the region, including that of Vice Admiral of Devon and Cornwall, Tyrwhitt was well-­ placed to win support for the Dartmoor project where it mattered.6 It is likely that he emphasised the economic merits of the scheme to potential backers. In a letter to a fellow MP in 1810, he claimed that the prison would allow “the great saving of enormous sums flung away in filling up prison ships”, without sacrificing “the smallest inhumanity towards our Prisoners”.7 It is possible, moreover, that Tyrwhitt also had a hand in the choice of Daniel Asher Alexander for the commission. The two men had known each other since 1793 when the former had consulted Alexander about structural alterations to his residence at Tor Royal, and he had considered engaging the architect for other projects in Princetown, though nothing had come of the plan.8 The fact that twelve years later the very same architect would be employed to design a prison a few miles away from Tor Royal may be a coincidence, but the balance of probabilities is against it.  Lloyd, Prisoners of War, 274.  Ibid., 273. 5  BAOWMS, W1/2713: T. Tyrwhitt to S. Whitbread II, Apr. 26, 1810, fol. 1. 6  Lloyd, Prisoners of War, 273–74; Stanbrook, 6–7; Joy, 11–13. 7  BAOWMS, W1/2713: T. Tyrwhitt to S. Whitbread II, Apr. 26, 1810, fol. 4. 8  Sinclair, 9–10. 3 4

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In any case, Daniel Alexander would have been known independently to the Admiralty by this date. By 1805, he had established a considerable reputation following his involvement in a number of large-scale public works projects in the Capital, notably the construction of a complex of docks and warehouses on a 35-acre site at Wapping and Shadwell for the London Docks Company, for whom he had worked, in various capacities, since 1794. The docks were completed in December 1806. Other projects for the company would follow, along with commissions for bridges, lighthouses and churches, as well as additions to the Royal Naval Asylum at Greenwich.9 Dartmoor would be Alexander’s first prison contract, if not— as will be seen presently—his first experience of prison design. He would subsequently design and oversee the construction of the new county gaol at Maidstone, Kent (1810–1817). The project might be considered modest in scale compared to Dartmoor, with space for “just” 450 prisoners, but for the period it was considered “immense”. Its carceral population was divided into twenty-seven categories, each with its own ward and airing yard, accommodated in twelve wings radiating from one central hub and three subsidiary ones. It was reported that once completed, the prison “cover[ed] a greater space than probably any other in England”. Its final cost of more than £210,000 also made it very nearly Britain’s most expensive penal establishment to date.10

I Whatever role Tyrwhitt’s lobbying and connections had played in the choice of the site for the new war prison on Dartmoor, there is every indication that the members of the Transport Board were delighted with what one of their number called the “most eligible and healthy situation” it offered.11 The site was a reassuring seventeen miles distant from the naval dockyards at Plymouth, yet close enough that prisoners could be marched there in less than a day from the coast, and that military reinforcements could also be swiftly dispatched to the prison if required. The fact that the 390-acre plot could be leased at a nominal rent from the Duchy of 9  Ibid., 17–20; Peach, DNB, “Alexander, Daniel Asher”; Richardson, 77–80; Colvin, 1–2: Skempton et al., 13. 10  Robin Evans, 310; Brodie et al., 8, 68. Quotations from Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline, Report, 25. 11  TNA ADM 1/3774: TBLPW (supplementary), 1801–1808, fols. 255–58: TO to W. Marsden, Oct. 9, 1805.

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Cornwall,12 that access to the prison was afforded by a well-maintained turnpike road, and that there were ample quantities of stone, water and peat for fuel on-site or nearby were evidently also important considerations.13 If there were any dissenting voices at the Admiralty in 1805, if anyone for example had taken the view later to be expressed trenchantly by Devon antiquarian and folklorist Sabine Baring-Gould, that the Transport Office had settled on “the most inclement site that could have been selected, catching the clouds from the south-west, and condensing fog about it when everywhere else is clear”; that it was “exposed equally to the north and east winds”; stood “over fourteen hundred feet above the sea”; and that all in all the prison was built in “the ugliest as well as least suitable situation that could have been selected”, they have not left any record.14 Alexander’s own view, expressed in his testimony before a parliamentary committee on the future of the site, held in 1818, backed the official position that the concerns about the climate were unfounded. He affirmed (incorrectly) that the rainfall at the prison was barely higher than in Plymouth and that the prison was not beset by fog, but by “mere damps of clouds, floating vapours”, adding that “it floats about and crosses the North Hessary Tor, and the other Tors, in a most beautiful manner”.15 All in all, he concluded, “the place was remarkably healthy”, adding that on the twenty-two occasions he had travelled down from London to supervise the construction of the prison, “I never went there but I had a cold, and in two days after I lost it”.16 Other witnesses called to give evidence to the 1818 parliamentary inquiry were less sanguine. One of their number was Dr Andrew Baird, former medical inspector at the Transport Office, and a regular visitor to Dartmoor during its time as a war prison. When asked if he considered the prison’s situation “healthy”, he replied, with evident understatement, “I cannot say it is a situation I would make choice of. If I was asked the 12  The 99-year lease, signed in February–March 1806, would cost the government £4-17-6 for the first thirty years, £6-10-0 for the next thirty years and £9-15-0 for the remaining period (TNA TS 21: Treasury Solicitor: Deeds, Evidences and Miscellaneous Papers: Lease of land parcel of the Duchy of Cornwall to be used as the site for a war prison, March 10, 1806). See James, 30; Sinclair, 59. 13  James, 27; Joy, 11–12; RCP, testimony of D. Alexander, 479. 14  Baring-Gould, 261. 15  RCP, testimony of D. Alexander, 479. 16  Ibid., 477.

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question by Government, I should consider very much before I recommended it.” He added, echoing Baring-Gould’s remarks: “It is a very humid atmosphere; rain and very thick mists prevail; the great height it is above the level of the sea places it in the clouds almost, and in descending on to the moor, you leave Dartmoor enveloped in impenetrable mist […]; rain and this mist prevailed [there] nine months out of the year”.17 Other witnesses before the committee, though more diplomatic in their language, also emphasised the “severe” climate at the prison, and the persistently “damp” atmosphere.18 One told the committee that in the winter months the “very great fogs” which enveloped the prison meant that the number of guards on duty had to be doubled since “they cannot see the distance of half across this room”.19 Many prisoners, both French and American, would offer similar testimony in letters, diaries and memoirs, as would some of the staff and troops garrisoned at the prison. American seaman Nathaniel Pierce noted gloomily in his diary in early February 1815: “This day commences with disagreeable weather, and what we may call Dartmoor weather for never was their [sic] a place, I believe, so disagreeable […] as this”. A couple of weeks later, he returned to the subject with slightly better news: “Pleasant for Dartmoor. We always call it pleasant here when it does not rain, for it is very seldom we see sun moon or stars. The latter I have not seen since I have been in Dartmoor.”20 He had been at the prison since just after Christmas the previous year.21 Several witnesses referred, with perhaps understandable hyperbole, to Dartmoor’s “Siberian” or “Russian” climate. When Major Richard Betton, newly arrived at the prison for garrison duty with the Shropshire Militia, wrote to his brother in February 1812, he gave as his address: “Dartmoor Barracks, alias British Siberia”. He noted: The barracks and the prison are situated in an immense barren moor, 16  miles from Plymouth, no place near it except what is called Prince’s Town, which consists of 8 or 10 miserable hovels. The weather is generally,

 Ibid., Testimony of Dr A. Baird, 472.  Ibid., Testimonies of Col. Wood, 784; Dr W. Dykar, 492; Dr G. Magrath, 498. 19  Ibid., testimony of Capt. J. Bowen, 469. 20  Pierce, 29, 33. 21  Ibid., 25; TNA ADM 103/91: GEBDPUS, 1814–1815, prisoner n° 5977. 17 18

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nay continually, so wretched that you can scarcely see half a dozen yards before you.22

French prisoner Louis Catel, listed as a ship’s secretary, and among the first of his countrymen to arrive at the prison in May 1809, remembered Dartmoor as being “covered eight months of the year by a cloak of snow, enveloping an area of several square leagues”. Fellow countryman Emile-­ André Bodeau recorded that on one day in late May 1809, the temperature outside the prison was only 2.5 °C—much like that in December in most French départements, he added.23 It was here, Catel noted bitterly, in “what no one could deny is the most God-forsaken corner of England”, a place “where no human thought has dared to bring the slightest improvement”, that “British philanthropy” and its “humanitarian ideas” had chosen to conceive and build a prison.24 It is understandable no doubt that those like Catel incarcerated at Dartmoor should assume that the prison’s “terrible climate” was part and parcel of the “barbarities” deliberately inflicted by the British “with odious refinement” on the hapless inmates.25 Nothing, in fact, could have been further from the truth. The Admiralty considered that the prison’s location constituted a veritable health benefit for its inmates; a view that would continue to hold currency in official circles well into the twentieth century.26 It was also a point that was repeatedly stressed by the Transport Board in its responses to French complaints that, as one 1810 letter to the Admiralty put it, the prison was situated in the “unhealthiest corner of the whole of England”, where prisoners were forced to breathe “fetid and corrupted air”.27 Writing in 1816, the prison’s former medical officer, Dr George Magrath, expressed forcefully the official British view, arguing that despite the fact that in January and February the “Russian climate” on 22  Shropshire AO, Bright Collection, 807/553: R. Betton to J.N. Bright, Feb. 16, 1812; Anon., Army List September 1812, 74; [Untitled], Royal Cornish Gazette, Feb. 15, 1812. 23  Catel, vol. 1, 5–6; TNA ADM 103/93: GEBDPFR, 1809, prisoner n° 2310; Bodeau, 8. 24  Catel, vol. 1, 6. 25  Ibid., 7. 26  Lloyd, History Prisoners of War, 274. 27  See for example TNA ADM 98/301 TO to French Ministry of the Marine, 1810–1813, fols. 51–52: TO to M.  Rivière, June 7, 1810; fols. 147–54: TO to M.  Rivière, Aug. 12, 1810. Quotations from ADM WO 1/915: Prisoners of War. Abortive negotiations for exchange of prisoners of war, 1810–1812: M. De Moustier to Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, July 3, 1810, fol. 179a.

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Dartmoor was frequently accompanied by cold “almost too intense to support animal life”, in time the prisoners “became acclimated to the region in which they lived”, and from then on, their health was “seldom disturbed”. In fact, Magrath concluded, “the health of its [Dartmoor’s] incarcerated tenants in a general way, equalled, if not surpassed, any war prison in England or Scotland”.28 Five years earlier, Transport Board commissioner Ambrose Searle had portrayed the prison as a veritable idyll in a letter addressed to a fellow board member. Describing a visit to Dartmoor in mid-July 1811, Searle enthused over the “the pure air” and “the clear sunshine without a cloud”; the “ar[t]fulness and Industry of the Prisoners”; and the “progressive improvement” of the land around the prison. The market “for every species of food [was] cheap & abundant”, he went on, and “the near Bazar of the Prison” preferred by local farmers “to the more distant one, by a rough road, of Plymouth”. There was, moreover, no shortage of “both game & society who pursue it” on the surrounding moor. Dartmoor’s inmates were in no position to join the hunting parties of course, but the garrison’s “military Gentleman”, Searle noted, had “hounds and other dogs”, and found “ample employment for their guns in killing snipes and birds of most descriptions”. All in all, he affirmed, when the current building work then underway was completed, Dartmoor would be “not only the most capacious, but the most desirable (if men […] can admit the Epithet) of all our Depôts”.29 It can be imagined how Dartmoor’s inmates would have reacted to Searle’s “epithet”, particularly once the cloudless skies of July had given way to Pierce’s “Dartmoor weather” and its seemingly endless procession of fogs, rain, snow and ice, and to long hours spent crammed in one of the five (later seven) cold and dank stone “prisons”. As Clive Lloyd remarks, however, such conditions were “mainly brought about by ignorance and neglect”, rather than by any generalised policy of deliberate cruelty of the kind alleged by Louis Catel, a point which will be taken up in the following chapter.30

 Magrath, 252.  BAOWMS, W1/2714-1: A. Searle to Sir R. George, July 12, 1811, fols. 1–4. 30  Lloyd, Prisoners of War, 274. 28 29

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II Six years before Ambrose Searle’s visit, Dartmoor Prison was literally at the drawing board stage, at the offices of architect Daniel Alexander in the London docks. Alexander’s initial thoughts on the design for the prison are contained in a little-known letter, sent to the Transport Board on July 29, 1805.31 This was the letter cited at the beginning of the previous chapter in which Alexander had concluded that the site chosen by Tyrwhitt, Bouverie and himself at their meeting earlier that month included “in it all that is required (as far as Dartmoor can do) for the construction of a Prison”. Alexander had yet to draw up formal plans for the new war prison, or to cost the project—that would not come until September—but he had clearly already given some thought to its design. Intriguingly, those initial thoughts, presumably considered sufficiently advanced for the architect to wish to share them with the Transport Board, are for a prison design which is significantly different from the one which would subsequently be built at Dartmoor. The relevant passage is worth quoting in full: Of the Figure of the Building, I beg leave to suggest to the Consideration of the Board, a kind of Concentric Plan, with a Guard House in the Centre which will admit of the several Buildings containing the Prisoners and the Court Yards in which they will Walk, in the form of radii so as to be always under the Inspection of the Guard in the Center—to consist of 2 or 3 Stories, as the same Roof and foundation does for a Building of that kind, as would be required for one of only one story—with the Entrance to the Prison under or thro’ the House of the Governor of the whole—and an Hospital at one End, as far distant from the Entrance of the Prison as may be—the floors to be plaister (formed of the Lime from the Lophill Quay, and the Gravel dug from the Spot) laid on arched ceilings formed of hollow Bricks, altogether incombustible—Windows of Cast Iron in Stone frames, as cheap as any Wooden ones—Ventilation by means of Chimneys for Peat Fuel, and hollow Tubes laid into the Arches of the floors and Ceilings—the Walls whitewashed annually. A Boundary Wall, Fossé and Guard round the Outside—and a Garden for raising Potatoes and Vegetables.32

It is striking that just twenty days after his trip to Dartmoor to choose the location for the new prison, Alexander felt able to submit to the Transport Board a closely worded four-page report which considered, among other subjects, the legal title to the land; the nature of road access  BAOWMS, W1/2708: Daniel Alexander to TO, July 29, 1805.  Ibid., fol. 4.

31 32

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to the site; the local climate; the available contractors, workforce and building materials; the fuel supply; and the best means to adopt for victualling the future prisoners—as well as the indications, quoted above, on the prison’s design.33 Alexander was clearly conscious, as he stated in his letter, that “Time […] may be a great object with the Board”, and the alacrity of his response indicates that he was determined not to lose any. When it is recalled that in 1805 Alexander seemingly had no prior experience of prison construction or of prisoner of war depots, and probably only limited knowledge of Devon’s topography and economy (despite that earlier visit to Tor Royal), this was indeed an impressive achievement, lending weight to the assessment of architectural historian Howard Colvin that Alexander was both an “able and resourceful” representative of his profession.34 The above quotation from Alexander’s July 1805 letter leaves no doubt that his initial intention was for the prisoners, whether in their accommodation blocks or airing yards to be “always under the Inspection of the Guard in the Center”; the latter placed in a two- or three-storey “Guard House”. In fact, this early version of the Dartmoor design conformed very closely to the fashionable “radial” plan mentioned in Chap. 2, according to which a variable number of elongated rectangular cell blocks would fan out like the spokes of a wheel or the sails of a windmill from a central administrative and inspection hub or tower.35 The first fully radial design in Britain is believed to be William Blackburn’s plan for Liverpool Borough Gaol (1785–1789), in which six cell blocks fanned out from a central building. Alexander may in fact have drawn direct inspiration from Blackburn’s Liverpool design; a hypothesis arguably strengthened by the fact that the gaol had been used to house French prisoners during the Revolutionary Wars. It may also be significant that the two architects were near neighbours in Southwark in the late 1780s.36 Whatever the precise genealogy of Alexander’s design, by 1805 there were clearly a number of radial prisons of different configurations in existence which singly or collectively offered a template for the future architect of Dartmoor.37  Ibid., fols. 1–4.  Colvin, 71. 35  Johnston, 55; Brodie et al., 53, 56. Although David Sinclair seems to have been unaware of Alexander’s letter of July 1805, he correctly surmised that the architect’s original plan for Dartmoor had included “some sort of central inspection house” (Sinclair, 63). 36  Brodie et al., 56. Sinclair, 35, 62. 37  Brodie et al., 51–53; Johnston, 56–57. 33 34

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Alexander’s initial plan of July 1805 was thus perfectly in step with contemporary thinking on prison design, if not, as will be seen presently, with Admiralty specifications for a prisoner of war depot. It has remained a mystery up until now how an architect—albeit an “able and resourceful” one—with no prior experience of prison design should have been able to come up with a detailed plan for a war prison, so soon after learning of his commission. Newly discovered evidence is able to throw some light on this conundrum. It turns out that more than a decade earlier, in 1794, Alexander had been one of several architects to submit plans to the magistrates of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk for the construction of a new county gaol in the town. His tender was unsuccessful, and his gaol plan does not appear to have survived, but there is a fleeting trace of its existence in a letter sent to Jeremy Bentham in October 1794 by the writer and agriculturalist, Arthur Young, written from the latter’s Suffolk residence, Bradfield Hall. Young’s short letter informed Bentham that the previous day he had attended a meeting of the county justices in order to examine tenders for the construction of a new county gaol. The short list had been whittled down to two, of which “Mr Alexander” was one. Young noted that the other proposed designs “were rejected because they were not on the Panopticon principle”, adding that he considered that Bentham “should have the satisfaction of knowing how much yr ideas are approved”.38 Evidently, not only was Daniel Alexander experimenting with prison architecture a full eleven years before the Dartmoor commission, he was also visibly aware of Bentham’s revolutionary circular “glass lantern” design, published earlier that decade; and he appears—along with a second, unnamed architect39—to have incorporated elements of the philosopher’s “Panopticon principle” into his own plans for the Suffolk gaol.40 Whether his unsuccessful submission to the Bury magistrates in 1794 led Alexander to abandon the field altogether for the next decade is unclear. It is reasonable to assume, however, that he retained both specialist knowledge in prison design and an interest in the subject over the intervening  A. Young to J. Bentham, Oct. 10, 1794 (Bentham, Correspondence Volume 5, 92).  The second Panopticon-style design referred to by Young (also subsequently rejected) was probably submitted by architect Arthur Brown. It was one of two designs by this “otherwise unknown” architect (Robin Evans, 412), published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1800–1801 (Brown). 40  It is clear from another surviving letter addressed to Bentham that Alexander’s name was known to him as early as November 1792 (Bentham, Correspondence Volume 4, 404: B. Vaughan to J. Bentham, Nov. 7, 1792). 38 39

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Fig. 3.1  Dartmoor War Prison, 1805–1809, Axonometric, David Sinclair (used with permission)

period, and that this background contributed in some degree to his decision to put his name forward (or allow his name to be put forward) for the Dartmoor project. It also probably helps explain why just twenty days after that meeting with Tyrwhitt and Bouverie at Tor Royal, he was able to provide such detailed, cutting-edge suggestions for the future prison. Alexander’s revised design was submitted, with his estimation of costs, on September 18, 1805.41 As can be seen from the meticulous axonometric reconstruction of the prison as it would have looked in 1809 by architectural historian David Sinclair (Figs. 3.1 and 3.2), the central inspection  TNA ADM 1/3774, TBLPW (supplementary), 1801–1808, fols. 255–58: TO to W. Marsden, Oct. 9, 1805. 41

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Fig. 3.2  Dartmoor War Prison, 1805–1809, Axonometric (detail), David Sinclair (used with permission)

tower had been scrapped, but the other elements of the architect’s original radial plan were retained. Traces of that original radial footprint are still visible today from the air, despite the multiple demolitions, extensions and conversions of the intervening years (Fig. 3.3). The architect’s testimony before the parliamentary inquiry of 1818 includes a succinct description of his final design for Dartmoor, expressed in language reminiscent of the prison reformers.42 “The whole scheme”, he stated, “is comprised in a circular plot of ground, containing about twenty-two acres, which is subdivided into rays, in which rays the buildings are placed, so as to afford  Morieux, Society of Prisoners, 227.

42

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Fig. 3.3  Dartmoor Prison from the air, 2017 (detail) (Photo: Andrew Abbot CC BY-SA 4.0)

complete separation and ventilation to the whole”.43 Interestingly, in contrast to his initial plans for Dartmoor cited above, this later summary placed the emphasis on the “separation” and “ventilation” functions of the prison’s design, and makes no mention of “inspection”, even though in many ways the advantages said to accrue from the radial design in terms of surveillance were considered its principal raison d’être.44 This apparent omission was picked up by the committee. Later in his testimony, Alexander was asked: “From the manner in which the prison is built, could there be established any principle of general inspection?” The architect’s reply is revealing: “I think the prison was designed to meet that especial end, by the concentrality of its principle”.45

 RCP, testimony of D. Alexander, 475–76.  Robin Evans, 294. 45  RCP, testimony of D. Alexander, 475. 43 44

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This exchange goes to the heart of the hybrid nature of the Dartmoor design. Originally conceived by Alexander with classic radial-plan logic to include a Panopticon-style inspection tower at the heart of the prison, and to place the five rectilinear accommodation blocks and accompanying airing yards in such a way that they fanned out in a semi-circle from that central point, the prison was indeed “designed to meet” the “especial end” of inspection. Once Alexander’s “Guard House” had been taken out of the equation (at some point between late July and late September 1805), the prison was still characterised by “concentrality” in a spatial sense—given the retention of the fan-shaped positioning of the five “prisons”, but only in that sense. Interestingly, when asked by the committee “Is there any central building?”, Alexander replied, perhaps with deliberate irony: “No, the centre of the whole building is now a bath of water”— a reference to the prison’s complex water distribution system.46 Clearly, other priorities had taken the place of inspection.

III Building a prison for more than 5000 prisoners in one of the remotest and inhospitable corners of Britain was bound to throw up considerable challenges. Indeed, Alexander’s remark from late July 1805 that the prison’s “situation include[d] in it all that is required (as far as Dartmoor can do) for the construction of a Prison” could be read, with that ominous parenthesis, as a recognition on the part of the architect that the construction project was not likely to be a straightforward one. In fact, Alexander returned to the subject later in the same letter, listing a series of logistical issues linked to the project that he evidently considered a matter of concern. He warned the Transport Board that “Building with Moor Stone, tho’ cheap, is slow”; that there were “no workmen, but those on the Moor, called Moor hands, that can work the Moor Stone” and that it would “hardly be possible to collect 30 Men from all parts”. Bringing men from further afield would be an option, but that would run up against the problem that the chosen site was “distant from any accommodation for Workmen”. Turning to the question of engaging a contractor for the project, Alexander stated—with barely concealed regret—that since “London masons would be quite unacquainted with the Business”, there would be no option but to work with a local firm from Plymouth or Exeter. In  Ibid.

46

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addition, he noted, “the great Quantity of Rain will (I understand) reduce the power of working out of Doors, from 12 months to not more than four out of the Year”.47 As seen above, Alexander submitted his first detailed estimate of the work and costs involved at Dartmoor on September 18, 1805, and in response to Admiralty concerns at the “magnitude” of the sum quoted (£86,423 13s 4d), a week later he came up with a second, revised plan (or third plan, if his initial jottings of July are counted), in which it was proposed to reduce the area to be occupied by the prison from 23 to 15¼ acres. This would shorten significantly the length of the boundary wall, and the time required to build it. In a marked change of tone from his July letter, Alexander now described this question of the “quantity of walling” as “the only difficulty to be foreseen in the whole work”. He was now confident that if masons could be brought in from Yorkshire to supplement the “Cornish and Devon Moor Men”, “the major part of the scheme”— which included three of the five prisons, the hospital, kitchens and administrative buildings—could be completed by the end of 1806. The remaining two prisons, the soldiers’ barracks, petty officers’ prison and boundary wall would be added “in the year 1807”. The revised plan was costed at £70,146 4s 10d.48 A few days later, Alexander’s revised plans and estimate were forwarded to the Admiralty for approval. The accompanying letter from the Transport Board conceded that even the reduced costing for Dartmoor remained a “considerable” sum, but to sugar the pill they quoted the architect’s assertion that the prison could be built both more quickly and more cheaply than laid out in his estimate.49 Admiralty approval was quickly forthcoming and on October 18, an advertisement appeared in the Exeter Flying Post for tenders to build a “prison of war” for 5000 prisoners. Four ­tenders had been received by the closing date in December, and by January 1806 the lowest of them, submitted by the Plymouth firm Isbell, Rowe and Company, had been accepted (with the proviso that the Admiralty could “terminate the contract at any time on the proclamation of peace”). The  BAOWMS, W1/2708: Daniel Alexander to TO, July 29, 1805, fol. 2.  TNA ADM 1/3774: TBLPW (supplementary), 1801–1808, fols. 255–58: TO to W. Marsden, Oct. 9, 1805; D. Alexander to TO, Sept. 26, 1805, qtd. James, 28–29 (my emphasis). 49  TNA ADM 1/3774: TBLPW (supplementary), 1801–1808, fols. 255–58: TO to W. Marsden, Oct. 9, 1805. 47 48

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cost quoted was £66,815.50 There were further delays between January and early March as the details of the Duchy of Cornwall lease and Alexander’s contract were ironed out.51 It was not until March 20, 1806, in fact, that Thomas Tyrwhitt laid the foundation stone at the new prison, although some preliminary work on the site appears to have begun as early as November the previous year—with interruptions, as might be expected, for “hindering” weather, and roads which were passable for waggons only with difficulty.52 It will be recalled that Daniel Alexander’s revised plans for Dartmoor, submitted at the end of September 1805, had promised that the “major part” of the prison would be finished by the end of 1806 and the remainder during the course of the following year. The construction project should therefore have been in its final stages by October 1807, when Ambrose Searle visited the site and reported back to the Transport Board on progress. He began his report with the good news: the five buildings for receiving prisoners were “substantial”, the workmanship “well performed”, and the prisons’ slate roofs nearly finished. Other signs were much less encouraging: the buildings for the agent and the other prison officials were “very much behind: […] at best only bare walls, and some of them not half way up to the roof”; the soldiers’ barracks had not advanced beyond the foundations stage, and the guardhouses were “nearly in the same circumstances”. The iron palisade—designed to prevent inmates inside the prison compound from approaching the first of the two boundary walls—was “begun only”, while the external perimeter of the prison was marked only by “broken pieces of granite, possibly the fragments of those prepared for the buildings”.53 And so the list goes on: water conduits, privies and sewers were “not begun”; “masses of various materials” and workmen’s huts were strewn around the site; and the road leading to the prison was unfinished. Searle noted that the original timetable for the site had envisaged that the prison would be occupied by Christmas 1807, but stated that it would be “impossible, consistent with humanity towards the Prisoners to force them into those cold structures of massy stone in the Winter-season, or with their security from the Want of proper accommodation for the Guards”. The  Stanbrook, 10; Joy, 20.  TNA ADM 98/144: TBLPW, 1806: TO to D.  Alexander, Jan. 1, 1806; TO to C. Bicknell, Jan. 17, 1806, TO to D. Alexander Jan. 22, 1806; TO to C. Bicknell, March 7, 1806. 52  Stanbrook, 11; Thomson, 8. 53  TNA ADM 105/44: TB visitation reports, 1796–1814: A. Searle to TO, Oct. 2, 1807. 50 51

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best that could be hoped, the commissioner concluded, was that the prison would be ready the following summer.54 Searle was back at Dartmoor the following August to report on what had changed since his previous visit. Admittedly, there had been some progress since the previous autumn. The agent’s and surgeon’s quarters were now finished, as were the turnkeys’ houses, the prisoners’ cookhouse, the soldiers’ guardhouses and canteen and the petty officers’ prison. The five main prison buildings were also nearly finished, and the complex system of water courses, or “leats” as they were known, had been laid.55 Much still remained to be done though, notably in the soldiers’ barracks. There was also a great deal of debris to be cleared, and land to be levelled. Worryingly, some of the work that had been done over the previous year and a half was already in need of repair; including the pointing, which had suffered from frost and rain damage, and the guards’ stone steps leading up to the walls, some of which were broken.56 This was a reflection perhaps of the haste with which the construction work at the site had been carried out, and the numerous “holdups, snags and discontent” which had dogged the project during the eighteen months prior to Searle’s visit.57 In addition to the formidable logistical challenges mentioned earlier, work on the site was also repeatedly disrupted by conflicts over pay between the contractor and his team of Cornish masons,58 and with the Admiralty over who should bear the brunt of recent steep rises in the cost of timber caused by the blockade of the Prussian ports.59 At one point in 1806, relations between Isbell, Rowe and Co. and the Transport Office had deteriorated to such an extent that the contractors threatened to lay off their workers and pull out of the project altogether. A compromise was eventually reached, however, with the Admiralty agreeing to supply timber for the prison at a competitive price from the naval dockyards at Plymouth, in lieu of the more expensive imported variety.60 The presence of a stream of official and unofficial visi Loc. cit.  Sinclair, 83–84; Joy, 132. 56  A. Searle to TO, Oct. 2, 1807, loc. cit. 57  Lloyd, Prisoners of War, 275. See also Thomson, 7; Joy, 23. 58  The option of bringing in workmen from Yorkshire was dropped, as was a suggestion of Alexander’s that soldiers from the Devon militia be employed instead, an idea vigorously rejected by the regiment’s commanding officer (Stanbrook, 11). 59  Lloyd, Prisoners of War, 275; Stanbrook, 11, 14; James, 33. 60  Some of these large timbers, originally intended for repairing warships, were used in the construction of the roof structures at Dartmoor. Examples can still be seen in situ in the former N° 4 prison (Joy, 24–25; James, 36–37). 54 55

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tors at the site had not helped matters either, causing “great hindrance and delay” according to a report in the Exeter Flying Post in July 1807. It was decided that henceforth only those approved in advance by the clerk of the works would be allowed access to the site.61 One of the visitors who did gain admittance to the site was Plymouth-­ born watercolourist, Samuel Prout. He had been based in London for some years, but in 1805 ill-health had forced the twenty-two-year-old artist to flee the capital and return to his West Country home. He would remain in Plymouth until 1808.62 On two occasions during this period, in October 1806 and June 1807, Prout visited the Dartmoor site, and the detailed pencil and wash sketches he produced, now in the collections of Plymouth Museum and Art Galleries, offer a unique visual record of a Napoleonic war prison under construction.63 One of Prout’s sketches, dated June 2, 1807, depicts the five “massy” prison blocks seen by Searle that autumn fanning out from the central vantage point chosen by the artist, the buildings clearly in varying stages of completion. The sketch also offers visual evidence of the “various materials” the Transport Board commissioner later observed strewn around the site, which include massive blocks of granite, rubble, wooden planks and scaffolding. In the left foreground, workmen can be seen working on the prison hospital, hauling up stones with block and tackle, while on the right is one of the two massive polygonal structures that flanked the inner entrance to the prison.64 Prout’s sketch also features the horse-drawn tramway used by Alexander to bring stone downhill to the prison from the quarry specially opened for the purpose at Herne Hole, nearly half a mile away.65 The architect had already used cast-iron tramways at the London docks, and he later ­calculated that over £50,000 had been saved at Dartmoor by sourcing and transporting the building materials in this way.66 Searle’s conclusion at the end of his inspection of August 1808 was that the prison was “not fit for use during the present year”, but he recommended that the agent and surgeon occupy their quarters forthwith, in order to “hasten the Business now in hand and to furnish that due  Qtd. Stanbrook, 15.  Lockett, DNB, “Prout, Samuel”. 63  Stanbrook, 15; James, 35. A number of the sketches, including the one described here, are reproduced in Joy, 21, and Stanbrook, 11–13. 64  Details from Stanbrook, 13. 65  Joy, 20; Sinclair, 89. 66  Sinclair, 11, 59–60. 61 62

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preparation, which consisting of a great variety of articles, will be absolutely necessary for Use, and not obtained at the moment in so remote a situation”.67 By the middle of the following April, the Transport Board was losing patience. The prison had been “almost ready” for some six months. Hammocks, bedding and medical equipment had been ordered and the naval station at Plymouth informed (back in October 1808) that “a considerable number of prisoners will very shortly be removed to the Prison of Dartmoor”. A proposal to set aside and enclose land to the north of the prison for a “burying ground” had also been approved. Yet the prison was still without its full complement of turnkeys, the barracks was not finished, and the cement floors of the accommodation blocks needed attention, having purportedly been damaged by the action of the fog.68 The prison agent, Captain Isaac Cotgrave, appointed the previous September,69 received urgent instructions from the Transport Office on April 13, asking him “what number of prisoners can be immediately received at Dartmoor”. A second letter, sent the following day, hammered the point home, instructing Cotgrave to prepare the prison with “the utmost dispatch” for the reception of prisoners, and to report weekly on the progress of the building work, in conjunction with Alexander’s on-site surveyor. The date of May 1 was fixed for the arrival of the first prisoners, and the victualling contract was timed to begin on the same date. When that deadline came and went, it was announced on the 17 that 2500 French prisoners and their guards were to be sent “immediately” to the prison from Plymouth.70 The first 496 French prisoners arrived nearly a week after that, on May 22, 1809. By the 25, a further 1983 had joined them.71  TNA ADM 105/44: TB visitation reports, 1796–1814: A. Searle to TO, Aug. 22, 1808.  TNA ADM 98/149, TBLPW, 1808–1809: TO to D. Alexander, Oct. 24, 1808; ADM 98/225, TBLADP, 1808–1810, fols. 6, 8, 9, 16: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Oct. 3, 11, 14, Nov. 2, 1808; PAB, Edward Hawkins Coll., 413/153: TO to Capt. Hawkins, Oct. 14, 1808; Stanbrook, 18–19. 69  An article in the Morning Post gives the date of Cotgrave’s appointment as September 4, 1808 (“Ship News”, Morning Post, Sept. 7, 1808). The first entry in the letter book of correspondence between the Dartmoor agent and the TB is for September 20 (ADM 98/225, TBLADP, 1808–1810, fol. 1: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Sept. 20, 1808). 70  Ibid., TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Feb. 10, 25, 1809; Apr. 7, 13, 14, 18, 25; May 2, 13, 17, 1809; ADM 98/305, TO to Contractors, 1808–1810: TO to Messrs. Lindsey & Co., Apr. 18, 1809. 71  PAB, Edward Hawkins Coll., 413/170: Capt. J.  Rogers to Capt. Hawkins, May 23, 1809; James, 32. 67 68

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Fig. 3.4  “Description of the New Prison of War, Dartmoor”, The Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce, Manufactures, Fashions, and Politics, vol. 4, n° 21 (Sept. 1810), 161 (author’s collection)

IV The first detailed description and visual depiction  of Dartmoor Prison appeared in print in September 1810, some sixteen months after the arrival of its first inmates, in The Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce, Manufactures, Fashions, and Politics, usually known as Ackermann’s Repository (Fig. 3.4).72 This was not in fact the first published image of the prison. A “Prospective view of the War-Prison near Tor-Royal upon Dartmoor”, drawn by Samuel Prout, had already appeared—somewhat incongruously—in the Board of Agriculture’s General View of the Agriculture of the County of Devon (1808), written by Charles Vancouver.73 Prout had depicted the future prison (still then only half-finished in  Anon., “Description of New Prison”, 161.  Vancouver, facing p. 278. The text of the book makes no reference to the engraving.

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Fig. 3.5  “Perspective View of the War Prison near Tor Royal upon Dartmoor”, after Samuel Prout, in Charles Vancouver, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Devon (London: Richard Phillips, 1808), opposite page 278 (Photo: author)

reality) nestling in a picturesque landscape, dotted with craggy tors and moorland cottages; both a part of its landscape and separated from it by a dense ring of trees running right round the prison (Fig. 3.5). Although the title of the engraving refers (inaccurately) to the prison’s “Barracks for 2000 Men”, it had evidently been decided not to include the soldiers’ quarters in the published view, though whether this was because the barracks were felt to interfere with the composition or because the plans were not made available to the artist is not clear. The engraving from Ackermann’s Repository is considerably more detailed than the 1808 image (while eschewing both craggy tors and moorland cottages in favour of a sober, plain background), and came complete with a key indicating the major buildings and features of both prison and barracks. It is likely in fact that this plan was based on Alexander’s own architectural drawings of the prison, so it is a distinct

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possibility that the Transport Board had approved the publication.74 Whether or not this was the case, there is no mistaking the tone of the text accompanying the engraving, which reads like a paean to the Admiralty department: Here, under the humane arrangement and controul of the Transport Board, ably seconded by the resident agent, Isaac Cotgrave, Esq. an old post-­ captain, every comfort is administered to alleviate the prisoners’ unhappy lot, as far as the nature of circumstances will allow. Unbiassed by motives foreign to their duty, and the innate liberality and feeling of their hearts, these gentlemen (some of whom are well acquainted with French prisons, and have personally experienced what they are), pursue an undeviating system of philanthropy, honourable to themselves, and beneficial to the objects of their care and exertions.75

The Transport Board may have reasoned that some positive publicity on the prison would be opportune at a time when negotiations with France at Morlaix over a cartel agreement had reached a delicate stage (and had prompted those French comments cited earlier about Dartmoor being situated in the “unhealthiest corner of the whole of England”).76 The engraving of the prison and accompanying description in Ackermann’s Repository afford a useful starting point for the detailed examination of Alexander’s design, and for exploring what Morieux refers to as “the spatial economy of the prison”; namely, “the spatial boundaries between spaces of incarceration and spaces of recreation, as well as […] the interstitial spaces between the inside and the outside of the prison”. Prison walls, by simultaneously enclosing, protecting and filtering, constitute powerful symbolic as well as material barriers, and can thus be approached by considering their impact (intended and real) on the behaviour of prisoners.77 Dartmoor’s design will be examined from this perspective.

 Sinclair, 73; Kelly, 36.  Anon., “Description of New Prison”, 161. 76  For the context, see Chamberlain, Hell Upon Water, 224–27. 77  Morieux, Society of Prisoners, 223–24 (quotations at 223). See also Morin & Moran; Hancock & Jewkes. 74 75

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Entitled simply “Dartmoor Prison and English barracks”, and, like the article, unsigned, the 1810 engraving offers a quasi-perspective view of the site from the west, placing the reader’s line of sight in front of and above the main entrance. The prison buildings have been numbered in the order that they would have been seen by a visitor to the site. The first numbered buildings are the houses of the agent (n° 1) and surgeon (n° 2), which flank the well-known stone entrance arch to the prison (n° 20). David Sinclair observes that in choosing this particular design for the arch at Dartmoor, Alexander was rejecting both the classical rusticated gateway with columns and decorated quoins and the mock-medieval castellated form, in favour of a design “reminiscent of a modern, single span Stonehenge, a haunched arch, formed like all Alexander’s stone arches, of five massive stones held together by size”.78 The arch (Fig. 3.6) bears the inscription Parcere subjectis, taken from Book 6 of Virgil’s The Aeneid, which has been variously translated as “Spare/pity/ mercy the vanquished”.79 While the Transport Office no doubt intended the motto to reflect the lofty Enlightenment duty of care for enemy prisoners, the objects of this solicitude may have interpreted the use of Virgil’s words as deliberately ironic or even mocking. This was certainly the view of French prisoner Alexandre Lardier, who described the inscription as “arrogant”.80 Alexander’s design for Dartmoor eschewed the recommendations of his contemporaries in the prison reform movement, in choosing to distance the agent-governor from the prisoners. This was presumably (as the architect later explained to the 1818 parliamentary committee) because it was “manifest” that, for security reasons, the prison’s governor “could not live in the midst of enemies”.81 Thus, the quarters of both Captain Cotgrave and the prison surgeon, Dr William Dykar, were set into the outer boundary wall; the prison’s two highest-ranking officers serving as it were as symbolic sentinels for the prison’s “grand entrance”, as the article calls it.82

 Sinclair, 81.  Barton & Brown, 480. 80  Lardier, vol. 1, 192. 81  RCP, testimony of D. Alexander, 476. 82  Anon., “Description of New Prison”, 163. 78 79

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Fig. 3.6  Entrance arch, Dartmoor War Prison, Daniel Alexander, 1805–1809 (Photo: Steve Taylor ARPS/Alamy)

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On crossing this important threshold, the visitor would then enter the first of several enclosed spaces. It comprised a small, walled courtyard, named “the Agent’s Square” (n° 19) in the plan, and in addition to the two afore-mentioned houses, it contained a number of buildings occupied by junior prison personnel, such as clerks and assistant surgeons (n° 4). Interestingly, Alexander’s design places the gatehouse (n° 8)—a conventional marker of a prison’s outer boundary—at the far end of this courtyard, on the other side of a section of the “Military Way”, a path thirty feet wide which ran right round the inner precincts of the prison, for most of its length placed in between Dartmoor’s two curving boundary walls. In a sense, then, the Agent’s Square was in a spatially liminal position; both inside and outside the prison, exterior to the cordon sanitaire provided by the patrolling military guards and the inner boundary wall and symbolised by the gatehouse. It was almost as if a modest Georgian squire’s courtyard residence had been bolted onto the outside of the prison, and the latter’s external perimeter pushed outwards to envelop this excrescence, giving the prison’s footprint a shape resembling a lightbulb. Upon leaving the Agent’s Square at the far end via a gate, and crossing the Military Way, visitors would be confronted by a new set of tall iron gates, set into what was in effect the inner boundary wall, through which access was offered into a second, larger, courtyard, rectangular in shape and sloping downwards. It is referred to in the key as a “detached space” (n° 18), but was generally known at Dartmoor as the Market Square.83 These gates were guarded by the afore-mentioned gatekeeper’s lodge to the left, abutting onto a massive polygonal structure several storeys high. These buildings were used partly by the keeper, and partly as a tack room and for the storage of tools. The polygonal tower was capped with a cupola-shaped look-out box, used for surveillance when the market was in operation.84 A second, identical building and tower (n° 9), used as a provision store, flanked the gates to the right.85 The gates opening onto the Market Square represent a second major threshold at Dartmoor, for they mark one of the external boundaries of the space in the prison accessible to prisoners (at least when the market was in operation).

 Ibid.  Sinclair, Fig. 23, 68. 85  Anon., “Description of New Prison”, 161. 83 84

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The Market Square constituted a liminal, inside-outside space in its own right, for it was here that a market was held every morning (except Sundays) for prisoners to buy or barter for goods, including foodstuffs and clothes brought for sale by local farmers and traders from Plymouth and Tavistock. On market days, the prisoners would enter the square by the gates at the lower (and, from the perspective of the engraving, more distant) end, while outsiders entered through the gates at the upper (or nearer) end, next to the gatekeeper’s lodge.86 As the authorities were well aware, however—and as will be seen later in the book—the Market Square was also a place where forged banknotes might be exchanged, illicit items bought and sold, and even, potentially, where prisoners might assume a disguise, mingle with the market traders and make their escape. There was equally the potential for altercations between prisoners and the local population. It was thus considered important to devote extra resources to the surveillance of this complex space; hence those two look-out boxes placed at the upper end of the market square, which supplemented the “inspection” provided by the sentries on the ground (indicated in the plan alongside sentry boxes) and in a series of wall-top bastions, to be described presently. The long, rectangular market square was flanked to the left by the large hospital block (n° 10), in its own walled-in enclosure, constructed on an H-shaped plan, and with the matron’s quarters and dispensary (n° 7) facing the main building, set into the inner boundary wall. Predictably, the Repository article states proudly that Dartmoor’s prison hospital is “kept in the most exact state of cleanliness and order”, but follows that remark with what seems at first to be further praise for the Transport Office, but which then segues into a barbed rebuke: “Medicines, wine, &c. are furnished unsparingly. No regimental hospital or medicine chest in the British service is so liberally supplied with the most costly drugs: in fact, many of them are withheld from our own troops, but profusely granted to our enemies.”87 On the other side of the Market Square was a smaller U-shaped building, the misleadingly named petty officers’ prison (n° 11).88 It comprised a central building on two floors of 115 × 25 feet (35 × 7.5 m), and  James, 38.  Anon., “Description of New Prison”, 162. 88  The use of the epithet “petty” is probably a corruption of the French petit, a reference to the name the French prisoners gave this building, the Petit Cautionnement, or “Little Parole”, rather than to the rank of “petty officer”. 86 87

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two smaller wings at right angles, also of two storeys, measuring 70 × 25 feet (21 × 7.5 m).89 Originally intended for ships’ captains, chaplains, army officers and civilians, it was provided with its own courtyard and small bathing pool.90 Many of the military personnel detained in this building were either awaiting release on parole, or “broke-paroles” of the kind referred to in the previous chapter; considered by the Transport Office to have “forfeited [their] claim”, as one French officer at Dartmoor was told in October 1809, to the “indulgence” of conditional release in one of the parole towns.91 The petty officers’ prison was also used on occasion as a hospital annexe and would later be converted into a barracks. Were our hypothetical visitors to proceed down the slope to the end of the Market Square and exit by the lower gates (the fourth such portal, counting the entrance arch, all perfectly aligned with each other),92 they would find themselves in the “deepest” part of the site,93 the Prison-Yard (n° 17); on the edge of a vast semi-circular area, occupying more than five acres,94 its external boundary delimited by an eight-foot (2.4 m) wrought-­ iron palisade fence topped by lamp standards, designed to prevent prisoners approaching the curving inner boundary wall to which it ran parallel. Here, as a later visitor put it, “the prison, properly so called, is reached”.95 This area, sloping downwards towards the rear of the prison, was occupied by the five “massy” prisoner accommodation blocks (n° 14) observed in 1807 by Ambrose Searle and Samuel Prout, at that time in varying stages of completion. As previously noted, the five buildings fanned out at 45-degree intervals in classic radial-plan style from this central point or axis, and were numbered clockwise from the left. These five “prisons” were each 170–180  ×  33–34  feet (52–55  ×  10–10.5  m) in size, somewhat larger than those at Norman Cross, and have been compared in form to barns, warehouses or stables, 89  TNA ADM 103/635: Register of deaths of prisoners of war, 1793–1831, fols. 282–83: “Specification of the Petty Officers Prison … 25th March 1813”. 90  The prison’s two pools were seemingly little used, probably due to the ubiquity of “Dartmoor weather” (Sinclair, 65). 91  TNA ADM 98/308, TBLPW, 1808–1811, fol. 41r: TO to M. Pagelet, Oct. 10, 1809. 92  Carrington, 142. 93  Cf. Thomas A.  Markus’ comment that, in prisons, staff “occupy the shallow, outer zones”, whilst inmates “are in the deepest spaces, and increasing depth signifies decreasing power” (Markus, 15). 94  Calculations based on Sinclair’s scale “Plan from an 1827 Survey of Dartmoor Prison” (Sinclair, Fig. 23, 68); Lloyd, Prisoners of War, 276. 95  Carrington, 142.

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with a single large open space on each of their three storeys. Small windows, barred and (somewhat) shuttered,96 but unglazed, were placed at wide intervals along both sides of each structure, providing only very limited light and air to those within.97 The buildings were unheated, and tallow candles and oil lamps provided the only light source after dark, along with the glow from small cooking stoves acquired by some of the prisoners, the flues of which snaked to nearby windows.98 American prisoner Benjamin Browne, a ship’s clerk from Salem, later wrote that the prisons “seemed to be admirably adapted to the purpose for which they were erected, viz., to keep their tenants secure, and to make them as uncomfortable as possible”.99 Browne’s countryman, New Jersey seaman Lewis Clover, noted that the layout of the internal space on each prison storey reflected the organisation of the prisoners into “messes” of six to eight men. Each mess, Clover explained, […] occup[ied] room sufficient to sit around one of their chests, which usually served as a mess-table. One row or tier of these messes were ranged next to the walls on each side, and two rows down the centre, back to back, as it were, leaving two avenues, or thoroughfares, the whole length of the building. The entire arrangement resembled the stalls in a stable, more than any thing else I can compare it to.100

Browne recalled that the ground-floor space allocated to his own mess was “so dark that I could not read but a short time in each day, when the sun was slanting its light into our hole”.101 Initially, only the lower two storeys of each prison were intended for continuous occupation, with space for about 500 prisoners on each floor, their hammocks slung every twenty-eight inches (as per Admiralty guidelines) in tiers, using the same system of wooden beams, iron rails and 96  Alexandre Lardier notes that the shutters were “flimsy”, and many were damaged and did not shut properly (vol. 1, 190). 97  RCP, testimony of D. Alexander, 475; Stanbrook, 25; Sinclair, 64. 98  Stanbrook, 25; Thomson, 63. Stanbrook notes that “… in the surviving Prison N° 4 […] scorch marks together with hammock ringbolt marks are still visible on the roof timbers” (ibid.). These are the same naval timbers referred to above (note 60). 99  Browne, 167; TNA ADM 103/89: GEBDPUS, 1814, prisoner n° 3598. 100  Clover, “Reminiscences”, Vol. 23, 6, 517; TNA ADM 103/90: GEBDPUS, 1814, prisoner n° 5392. 101  Browne, 172.

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stanchions as in other prisoner of war depots.102 Browne noted that “the hammocks were hung one above another, and, when the prisons were very full, sometimes in three tiers. It was necessary, therefore, that we should have a pretty good understanding, each with his neighbor, about turning in, as, when the lower hammock was occupied, one wishing to get into the upper one would have to tread on the tenant of the lower.” He added that he had “known very many ludicrous incidents attend this launching of hammocks, but never a serious one, though it was an operation not unattended with danger”.103 It was noted in Chap. 2 with regard to Norman Cross that the practical advantage of the hammock from the point of view of the authorities derived partly from the fact that it permitted large numbers of prisoners to be confined in a given space cheaply and easily. Indeed, so closely were prisoners packed in, French prisoner Louis Catel recalled, that if during the night a recumbent inmate made a sudden movement, it sent an “electric shock” right down the line.104 Hammocks also had the advantage over fixed beds or cots in that they could be rolled up and stored—or aired— during the day, allowing the resulting open space to serve as a day room; a particularly important consideration for a prison with a climate like Dartmoor’s, where inclement weather kept inmates indoors for long stretches during the autumn and winter months. The third storey of each prison, known as the “cockloft”, and occupying the roof space, was lit with industrial-style clerestories, and was intended by Alexander as an exercise area for the prisoners in case of bad weather. However, at the beginning of September 1809, with the prison only occupied for a little over three months, Cotgrave was instructed by the Transport Office “with the utmost dispatch” to make the necessary alterations for the cocklofts to be converted into prisoner accommodation. With prisoner numbers at Dartmoor having already topped 4000, and a further 1000 set to arrive later that month, it had evidently been decided that the existing capacity of 5000 was not going to prove sufficient for long.105 When the alterations were complete, each of the five  Sinclair, 64, 66.  Browne, 168–69. 104  Catel, vol. 2, 121. 105  TNA ADM 98/225 TBLADP, 1808–1810: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Sept. 2 & 14, 1809; ADM 103/94: GEBDPFR, 1809. Numbers would indeed reach 6000 by the end of September 1809 (ADM 103/95: GEBDPFR, 1809–1811). 102 103

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prisons could accommodate—if that is the right word—up to 1500 inmates, ratcheting up the total capacity to 7500.106 If our visitors were to cross the Prison-Yard, walk down the right side of Prison N° 3 (the building facing the gates to the market square end­on), make their way to the left of the “pool of water” for the use of the prisoners (n° 16), and then skirt one of the four airing sheds for drying hammocks and bedding (n° 15), they would then reach the first of Dartmoor’s three perimeter structures: the eight-foot wrought-iron palisade. The palisade, which enclosed the half-circular space of the Prison-­ Yard to the rear, was conceived—as noted earlier—to prevent prisoners from approaching the first of the two boundary walls, whilst allowing sentries on that wall a clear view of (and potentially a clear aim on) the prisoners below.107 Beyond the palisade was a space coloured green on the Repository map, known as “No-Man’s Land”. Daniel Alexander would later state that this area was “dug up and planted with potatoes”, though US prisoner Josiah Cobb recalled rather a “well-sodded” area; its “luxuriant covering of green” every spring offering a welcome “contrast to the monotonous, dull and heavy appearance of the stone buildings”.108 After this “No-Man’s Land” came the fourteen-foot inner boundary wall and finally the lower, outer perimeter wall, ten feet in height, and referred to rather disparagingly in Transport Office sources as the “dwarf wall”.109 The latter was later raised to twelve feet, which even then was rather low by the standards of the new prisons of the time.110 In between the prison’s two walls ran the “Military Way”. As noted above, such paths were a common feature of criminal prison designs in this period, allowing patrolling guards to inspect the airing yards through paling fences and/or inspection peepholes.111 At Dartmoor, the Military Way’s function was not so much one of surveillance as of logistics, for it was intended to afford the soldiers of the prison’s garrison quick and safe access from the two guardhouses (n° 13), to platforms and bastions set about every sixty metres into the inner boundary wall (via those broken stone steps referred to earlier). The bastions were designed, Alexander  Joy, 20, 32.  Lloyd, Prisoners of War, 276. 108  RCP, testimony of D. Alexander, 475; Cobb, vol. 2, 179. 109  RCP, testimony of Capt. J. Bowen, 468. Re-built in many places, this outer perimeter wall is the only part of the prison’s outer defences still surviving (Joy, 23). 110  Robin Evans, 143. 111  Ibid. 106 107

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explained, “so as that the centinels could flank themselves every way, and [thus] guard the prison in proportion with a fewer number of men”.112 In this sense, it has been suggested, Dartmoor “resembled a military fortress turned inside-out”, with “the enemy expected to come not from outside, but from within”.113 The design adopted by Alexander offered certain advantages in this regard, since what he later referred to as the “separation” of the prison buildings inherent in his radial design meant, as Basil Thomson noted in his 1907 history of Dartmoor Prison, that “the sentries on the walls [had] a clear view of the yards between”.114 It should be remembered, however, that Alexander’s radial design for Dartmoor had originally been chosen with a very different set of objectives in mind: intended above all to maximise surveillance in an outward direction from a central observation point, rather than inwards from the wall-top platforms. The prison’s military guards were about 550–600 in number in 1810, housed in the walled barracks enclosure situated to the south of the prison. The garrison at the prison was drawn from different militia regiments, posted to “exile” on Dartmoor for two or three months at a time before being relieved (probably in both senses of the word) by a new detachment of troops.115 One former military commander at Dartmoor barracks, Colonel Thomas Wood of the East Middlesex Militia, stationed at the prison in 1814–1815, gave evidence before the 1818 parliamentary committee cited earlier in this chapter. In his testimony, Colonel Wood described the duties of the military guards at the prison, a third of whom would be on sentry duty at any given time. When asked if that number could be reduced, given the proximity of the barracks to the prison, he replied that it could not, stating that the guard had to “be of sufficient strength to furnish sentries sufficient to enable them to communicate with each other on the walls, and to prevent any person in dark and wet nights from passing between their posts”. He added that “the greatest degree of vigilance [was required] on the part of the sentries to prevent escapes”, but that “notwithstanding every possible care, a prisoner would succeed occasionally in getting away”.116 This was despite the fact that in 1809 a  RCP, testimony of D. Alexander, 475.  Morieux, Society of Prisoners, 225. 114  Thomson, 11. 115  Anon., “Description of New Prison”, 163. 116  RCP, testimony of Col. Wood, 483. 112 113

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system of bells and wires had been fixed to the boundary walls to alert sentries to a possible escape attempt.117 The device was particularly useful, Wood explained, “in a very dark and blowing night”, when the sentry might not otherwise discover a would-be escaper.118 The barracks compound contained a 20-room building with quarters for officers (n° 1); three barrack blocks for the ordinary soldiers, with communal sleeping rooms each accommodating forty-four men (n° 7); offices (n° 11); a hospital (n° 2); guardroom (n° 3); magazine (n° 4); cooking-house (n° 8); coach-houses and stables (n° 9); washhouse (n° 10); and canteen (n° 12); the latter including a “tap room” fitted with 7 tables and 17 seats. The entrance to the barracks was flanked by the house of the “barrack-master” (n° 5), the logistics officer responsible for the supply of the garrison. His stores (n° 6) were located on the other side of the entrance to the barracks, which faced the southern perimeter of the main prison, opposite the petty officers’ prison.119 Some of the details mentioned above come from a letter of March 1809, signed by the garrison’s barrack-master, George Cleather, in which it was noted that certain “deficiencies” in the construction of the barracks still remained unresolved. The barracks would not in fact be completed until mid-December that year, along with the rest of the initial programme of building work at the prison, a full two years behind schedule.120

V “Prison buildings”, observes Renaud Morieux, “were constant works-in-­ progress”. This was partly, as he points out, because inmates constantly sought to subvert the aims of prison architecture, exploiting the latter’s weak points in order to effect an escape, enter an unauthorised space, damage official property, or perhaps merely to resist attempts to impose a resented prison rule-book. This forced prison architects and engineers in turn to adapt their designs in an effort to (re)assert control over their buildings.121 In the case of Dartmoor, there were other forces at work also,  Stanbrook, 31.  RCP, testimony of Col. Wood, 483. 119  Anon., “Description of New Prison”, 163. 120  TNA ADM 103/635: Register of deaths of prisoners of war, 1793–1831, fols. 378–80: G.  Cleather to D.  Alexander, March 17, 1809; ADM 98/131: TBLPW, 1809–1810. To public offices, TO to Commissioners for the affairs of barracks, Dec. 15, 1809; Stanbrook, 29. 121  Morieux, Society of Prisoners, 230. 117 118

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notably the need to adapt repeatedly to the pressure of numbers. The 1809 modification of the cocklofts referred to earlier is a case in point, illustrating how the architect’s intentions might be subverted not only by the behaviour of inmates, but also by the decisions of Admiralty officials. Other adaptations would follow during the following six years, in response to pressures of various kinds; each altering subtly, but significantly, the spatial economy of the prison. A useful way of addressing these changes is to jump forward from the 1810 engraving from Ackermann’s Repository to examine a second illustration of the prison, dating this time from the final months of the war prison’s existence (Fig.  3.7).122 This engraving was published in 1815

Fig. 3.7  “View of Dartmoor Prison, from a drawing taken on the spot by J.J. Taylor, one of the prisoners, 1815” (US Library of Congress)

122

 See Fig. 3.7 for reference.

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together with a pamphlet written by Scottish-born Philadelphia cartographer and publisher, John Melish.123 The full title of the work was A Description of Dartmoor Prison, with an Account of the Massacre of the Prisoners Designed as an Accompaniment to the View of Dartmoor Prison, Drawn by J.J. Taylor, One of the Prisoners. At the beginning of the sixteenpage pamphlet, Melish explains that the engraving “exhibits a very complete view of the Prison and adjacent country; and the references annexed to it render it intelligible within itself”, before adding that due to what he refers to as the “uncommon degree of curiosity” generated by “the late extraordinary circumstances” at the prison, it had been decided to add “a more extensive descriptive account […] than could be exhibited on the Plate”.124 As the title of the pamphlet makes clear, the “extraordinary circumstances” in question are the events of April 6, 1815, when members of the prison garrison opened fire on a group of American prisoners allegedly trying to escape, killing nine and wounding a further fifty. The TaylorMelish engraving, “View of Dartmoor Prison, From a drawing Taken on the Spot by J.J. Taylor, one of the Prisoners”, its title held aloft in striking fashion by a representation of a prisoner in regulation yellow Transport Office dress, was one of numerous plans of the prison published in 1815–1816, onto which were superimposed details of the massacre of April 6. These will be studied in detail in Chap. 7 of the book. The particular value of the Taylor-Melish plan for our present purposes derives from its combination, unique for the period, of a detailed plan of the prison (with key) on the one hand, and an accompanying commentary on the other. Together they offer vital clues to the architecture and configuration of Dartmoor Prison in 1815. Based on the information provided by Melish, it is likely that “J.J. Taylor” was twenty-four-year-old Philadelphia seaman, Jacob Taylor. According to the prison’s General Entry Books, he arrived at Dartmoor on April 2, 1813, one of fourteen sailors captured in the Bay of Biscay the previous month from the merchant vessel, the Charlotte. The young mariner was part of the very first group of 250 American prisoners to be landed at Plymouth from the prison ship Hector that morning, and marched the seventeen miles from there to the prison. Taylor would remain at Dartmoor for a little over two years until his liberation on April 20, 1815.125  Melish. On Melish, see Ristow.  Melish, 2. 125  TNA ADM 103/87: GEBDPUS, 1813–1814, prisoner n° 236; James, 88. 123 124

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When comparing the 1815 Taylor-Melish engraving with the Repository plan drawn five years earlier, the most notable difference is undoubtedly the presence of two additional prisons in the semi-circular Prison-Yard, bringing the total number to seven. These new prisons were slightly smaller than the older structures but otherwise identical, and were slotted into the gaps between Prisons 1 and 3 on the left, and 4 and 5 on the right. This would give Dartmoor a theoretical capacity of over 10,000.126 The decision to build the new prisons had been made in August 1811, following the visit by Transport Board commissioner Ambrose Searle the previous month, described earlier. This may have been a response, not only to the inexorable rise in the number of French prisoners of war at the national level (over 49,000 by June 1811, up 10 per cent on the previous year),127 but also to concerns expressed by the Transport Board the previous autumn that overcrowding at Dartmoor had contributed to an outbreak of epidemic disease that had struck the prison in the winter of 1809–1810.128 Searle’s comment from July 1811, cited earlier, that with the new buildings Dartmoor would become “not only the most capacious, but the most desirable […] of all our Depôts” needs perhaps to be interpreted in this light. It was decided that the new prisons should be built “with the assistance of such of the prisoners as are disposed to work”; to be supplemented by ninety-five French masons and bricklayers recruited specially from the Plymouth prison ships. All would be hired at the standard rate of 6d per day.129 The new buildings were reportedly ready to receive prisoners by October 1812.130 A second striking contrast between the engravings of 1810 and 1815 is the presence of a series of new internal walls in the Prison-Yard. The first of these walls to be built, two in number, effectively cut off the central accommodation block, Prison N° 4131 and its yard, from the two groups of three prisons and their respective yards to either side, comprising Prisons 1–3 (and N° 1 yard) to the left of the engraving, and Prisons 5–7

 The two new prisons would thus become numbers 2 and 6 (Joy, 32).  Account of the Number of French Prisoners of War [1811]. 128  Stanbrook, 37. On this epidemic, see Chap. 4. 129  TNA ADM 98/226, TBLADP, 1810–1811, TO to Capt. Cotgrave, fols. 89v–90r (Aug. 8, 1811); ADM 99/210: TBMPW, Sept. 12 & 24, 1811; Stanbrook, 42; Thomson, 60. 130  Stanbrook, 45. 131  Prison N° 3 in the original configuration of the prison. 126 127

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(and N° 7 yard) to the right.132 Dividing prison airing yards into several smaller units by means of walls was not unusual in itself. It was in fact a familiar practice in criminal gaols in this period, and was usually resorted to by prison authorities in order to segregate different categories of inmates, such as when an older building needed to be adapted to the new demands of “reformed” penal doctrine, or as a means of dealing with a rising prison population. With the exception of the conventional military distinction between officers and men, as evidenced by the separate petty officers’ prison, segregation does not seem to have been seen as an issue at Dartmoor during the first three years of the prison’s existence, and the original layout of the site had allowed for free communication between each of the individual prisons.133 So what had changed? A key turning point may well have been what was variously described in the British press as “a serious commotion”, “a riot” and an “insurrection” among the French prisoners at Dartmoor on the evening of September 13, 1812, following an altercation with the prison’s agent over the bread ration. The Examiner was one of several newspapers to place the events at the prison in a narrative that stressed the irrational demands of hot-headed French prisoners (who “had worked themselves up to the highest pitch of rage”) in the face of the purportedly reasonable approach adopted by the British authorities. The latter, faced with a temporary shortage of bread, had sought to issue ship’s biscuit instead, a proposal “indignantly spurned” by the French (despite the fact, notes the journalist, probably briefed on the subject by the Transport Office, that the ration offered was “precisely the same as that which is served out to our own sailors and marines”).134 According to the press, the “undaunted” prisoners had refused to withdraw, even when faced with armed soldiers on the walls, and had hurled both “contumelious” insults and, at some point, stones. A scuffle had ensued, and the bayonet of one of the soldiers had been briefly seized by the one of the prisoners. The situation had been judged serious enough by Cotgrave for a messenger to be sent to Plymouth to call for military assistance. Three six-pounder cannons and their gun crews were dispatched to the prison the following day, and order was reportedly quickly restored.135 132  Cobb, vol. 2, 179. The gates leading from the three yards into the Market Square were numbered in similar fashion. 133  Lloyd, Prisoners of War, 284. 134  “Provincial Intelligence”, The Examiner, Sept. 20, 1812, 596–97. 135  “Insurrection of the French Prisoners at Dartmoor Depot”, Morning Chronicle, Sept. 17, 1812; “Naval Intelligence”, London Courier and Evening Gazette, Sept. 16, 1812;

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Whether or not there was any truth in press reports that the French prisoners at Dartmoor “even had in contemplation to fire the prison and effect an escape” and/or “were for seizing the depot of arms at Tavistock” (as the Morning Chronicle subsequently reported),136 the events of September were swiftly followed by calls from local military commanders to strengthen security at the prison. On the 24 of that month, the Transport Board forwarded to the Admiralty two letters from the Deputy Quarter-Master General, containing suggestions from the commander of the Army’s western district, Major General Erskine.137 The original letters do not appear to have survived, but they evidently concerned a scheme to strengthen the defences at the prison. Interestingly, in their accompanying letter, the Transport Board explained, rather defensively, that there had never been any intention “to build a strong fortification for the security of the Prisons” at Dartmoor. The iron palisade fence “was only intended to prevent the Prisoners breaking loosely out, and injuring the Masonry Work, as also from communicating with the Sentinels”; and the inner boundary wall, with its bastions and sentry boxes, was “thought sufficient to […] prevent any irregularities among the Prisoners in the Day and to prevent escapes by sudden Surprise in the Night”.138 As for the outer perimeter wall, it was “only intended as a cover to the Military Way in order to prevent strangers and Work people from having any interference with the Sentinels”. The view of the Transport Board was that “nothing but a strong Military Guard surrounding the Prison” could prevent escapes, clearly an impractical proposition.139 It appears, however, that the Admiralty took the Army’s concerns seriously; or at least seriously enough to dispatch Transport Board commissioner James Bowen to Dartmoor, to discuss with local military commanders the possibility of reinforcing the prison’s “fortifications”.140 There is no evidence that any major structural changes ensued from these “Serious Insurrection of the French Prisoners at Dartmoor Depot”, The Star, Sept. 17, 1812; “Disturbances at Dartmoor Prison”, The Kentish Gazette, Sept. 22, 1812; “Provincial Intelligence”, The Examiner, Sept. 20, 1812, 596–97. 136  See previous note for reference. 137  TNA ADM 98/120, TBLPW, 1809–1820. To the Admiralty, 1812–1813: TO to J.W. Croker, Sept. 24, 1812. 138  Loc. cit., fol. 2. 139  Loc. cit., fols. 2–3. 140  TNA ADM 98/120, TBLPW, 1809–1820. To the Admiralty, 1812–1813: TO to J.W. Croker, Oct. 16, 1812, fol. 1.

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discussions, but the prison garrison was significantly strengthened, leading the petty officers’ prison to be vacated in December and January, in anticipation of the building’s conversion into an extra barracks block the following year. The new barracks would be capable of accommodating some 800 soldiers. The outer “dwarf” wall was also raised to twelve feet around this time, and a third, eastern guardhouse (n° K on the plan) and several sentry boxes added.141 By February 1813, the new walls that would isolate Prison N° 4 from the rest of the Prison-Yard were under construction.142 The decision to sub-divide the space occupied by the prisoners in this way was evidently linked to the security concerns raised the previous autumn. Captain Cotgrave stated later that year that “raising the outer walls 12 feet high and dividing the Prison Buildings into three separate yards, so that little more than three thousand Prisoners are now in one yard, when nearly 9 thousand were together before” had rendered “the chance of escapes impracticable unless by treachery”. The result, he confidently predicted, was that no “weak part is left to them to escape”.143 Significantly, on February 15, Cotgrave was granted permission to confine in Prison N° 4, when the new dividing walls were finished, a particularly troublesome group of French prisoners known as the “Romans”. In his evidence to the 1818 parliamentary inquiry, Dr William Dykar, former prison surgeon at Dartmoor, gave what was evidently the view of the authorities on this group of prisoners, describing them as “men of most depraved and vicious habits”, constantly selling or gambling away their provisions and clothing. As a result, Dykar went on, they were left “totally destitute of food, and entirely naked”.144 The place of the Romans in the prisoner community at Dartmoor will be examined in more detail later in the book,145 but it can be noted that this group of inveterate gamblers was believed not only to undermine the disciplinary regime of the prison with what a report of 1813 called their “most shocking and detestable sense of 141  Lloyd, Prisoners of War, 276–77; Stanbrook, 54–55; ADM 98/227, TBLADP, 1812–1813, TO to Capt. Cotgrave, fol. 146 (Dec. 28, 1812); TNA ADM 103/635: Register of deaths of prisoners of war, 1793–1831, fols. 282–83: “Specification Descriptive of a Building Called the Petty Officers’ Prison”, March 25, 1813; fols. 384–85: “An Account of Articles delivered to Mr George Cleather”, March 25, 1813. 142  ADM 98/227, TBLADP, 1812–1813, TO to Capt. Cotgrave, fol. 160, Feb. 15, 1813. 143  Cotgrave, “Answers and Remarks”, fols. 463–64. 144  RCP, testimony of Dr W. Dykar, 491. 145  See Chaps. 5 and 6.

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depravity” and “most detestable and abominable vices”,146 but also to pose a health risk to themselves and to the prison’s other inmates. Indeed, in Dr Dykar’s view, it was only their confinement in the cockloft of Prison N° 4 that had prevented the Romans’ “filthy” condition from spreading disease among the rest of the prisoners.147 Thus, from the point of view of the prison authorities, the Romans posed both a moral and a physical threat to the prison, and their segregation in N° 4’s cockloft wholly justified. Returning to the 1815 Taylor-Melish engraving, a third new wall can be identified, running straight as a die, from the middle of the cookhouse (n° 8) abutting the front end of Prison N° 4, to the end of the funnel-­ shaped airing yard, the “neck” of which was located opposite the three gates into the Market Square (n° I). A shorter stretch of wall can also just be made out, running from the back of the same building to join the iron palisade fence opposite one of the wall-top bastions. In fact, the wall seems to have constituted one continuous barrier, running length-wise down the middle of the building and out the other side, effectively dividing prison and prison-yard alike into two equal halves.148 This wall was added later than the other two described above, and followed the decision, taken shortly after the arrival of the first Americans at the prison in April 1813, that they too would be placed in Prison N° 4, alongside the Romans—or rather beneath them, for the latter were confined to the third-floor cockloft.149 Evidently, the Americans, like the Romans, were considered a security risk. They had gained a reputation on the Plymouth hulks—deservedly or otherwise—for obstreperousness combined with an indefatigable determination to escape, and there were fears in the Admiralty of a general uprising among the prisoners there if the conditions of overcrowding on the American prison ships were not eased.150 With a semblance of calm having been restored to the French part of the depot since the previous autumn, it had evidently been considered prudent to separate the purportedly troublesome new arrivals from the existing prisoners. There was thus a certain bureaucratic logic in placing the 250 Americans in the only segregated area which Dartmoor offered, though it was probably not a logic 146  BAOWMS, W1/2716: “Report of the TB on the prisoners who call themselves Romans”, n.d. [1813], fol. 2. 147  RCP, testimony of Dr W. Dykar, 491. 148  Melish, 3. 149  Lloyd, Prisoners of War, 285. 150  Thomson, 97; Lloyd, Prisoners of War, 284–85.

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that would have been comprehensible to the new arrivals, convinced in all likelihood that they were being collectively punished for no other reason than their nationality, and denied the privileges (including access to the market) granted to the prison’s French detainees. In addition, there may well have been resentment among the existing occupants of N° 4 at the Yankee invasion of what they had come to consider their private space.151 It is not surprising perhaps in these circumstances that relations between the two sets of prisoners in Prison N° 4 should have been less than cordial. Certain of the Americans at least clearly shared the official British view of the Romans cited earlier. One former prisoner recalled them as “the most abject and outcast wretches that were ever beheld […], too wicked and malicious to live with their other unfortunate countrymen”; another referred to “an indescribably vicious and filthy lot, subsisting on the garbage heap and stealing everything they could lay their hands on”.152 Matters came to a head on the morning of July 5, 1813, when the two groups clashed violently in the airing yard outside N° 4. According to one American account, some twenty prisoners on each side were injured in the mêlée; “some stab[b]ed, some knocked down by clubs and stones”. This witness added that “the fight lasted only a few minutes when the guard rushed in and drove the Frenchmen off and took the wounded men to the hospital”.153 Cotgrave blamed the Americans’ “riotous conduct” for the events of July 5, and ordered that one of their numbers be placed in the prison’s cachot.154 A subsequent Transport Office investigation was more sympathetic to the Americans, noting that they had been “unavoidably” forced to share the same building as the Romans, adding that the former had “expressed their abhorrence at being so situated”.155 Between late August and mid-October 1813, the Romans would gradually be transferred to the Plymouth hulks (following the recommendation of the Transport Board inquiry), where they would remain until the peace of

 Ibid.  Andrews, 24; Massachusetts HS, Jacob Reeves papers, 1809–1835, Ms. N-779: J. Allen, “Life at Dartmoor Prison, 1813”, 2. 153  Ibid., 8. See also Andrews, 35–37. 154  ADM 98/227, TBLADP, 1812–1813, fol. 241: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, July 7, 1813; Thomson, 102. 155  BAOWMS, W1/2716: “Report of the TB on the prisoners who call themselves Romans”, n.d. [1813], fol. 6. 151 152

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1814.156 In the meantime, Cotgrave was authorised (on July 22) to physically separate the warring occupants of Prison N° 4 by constructing a wall dividing the building and the airing yard down the middle. Even the cookhouse attached to the end of the building was split in two and modified accordingly.157 In referring to this dividing wall, Melish writes that it had indeed originally been intended to separate the French and American prisoners within Prison N° 4, but that the building had “latterly [been] used as a place of confinement for those with whom the Prisoners did not wish to associate and sometimes, for such of the Prisoners as were not sufficiently obedient to Captain Shortland, and his subalterns”.158 Melish does not specify the identity of “those with whom the Prisoners did not wish to associate”, but this is probably a reference to a petition of February 1814 submitted by the American prisoners to the new agent, Captain Thomas Shortland (appointed the previous November),159 “to have the black prisoners separated from the white”. The reason given by the signatories of the petition, according to the account of former prisoner Charles Andrews, was that “it was impossible to prevent these fellows from stealing, although they were seized up and flogged almost every day”.160 An order of October the previous year had already resulted in Dartmoor’s “Black Men and Men of Colour” being transferred from the American to the French prisons,161 but evidently in the view of some at least of the American prisoners, that measure did not go far enough. The wisdom of the request seems to have convinced the Transport Board, for from February 1814 onwards until the departure of the Americans the following year, all prisoners of colour (some 18 per cent of the total) would be automatically assigned to Prison

156  TNA ADM 97/129: Miscellaneous correspondence concerning prisoners of war, TO to J.W. Croker, June 30, 1813; ADM 98/227, TBLADP, 1812–1813, fol. 256: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Aug. 21, 1813; ADM 98/249: TBLAPL, 1812–1813, fol. 191–92: TO to Capt. R. Pellowe, Aug. 21, 1813; Stanbrook, 55. The last Romans left Dartmoor on October 16, 1813 (Lloyd, Prisoners of War, 287). 157  TNA ADM 98/227, TBLADP, 1812–1813, TO to Capt. Cotgrave, fol. 246: July 22, 1813; Andrews, 37; Stanbrook, 55. 158  Melish, 3. 159  TNA ADM 98/228, TBLADP, 1813–1815, fol. 16: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Nov. 20, 1813. 160  Andrews, 69–70. 161  TNA ADM 98/228, TBLADP, 1813–1815, fol. 8: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Oct. 23, 1813.

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N° 4 for the duration of their time at Dartmoor.162 They would subsequently be joined there, according to one American account, by “a few whites who have been driven from the other prisons by their bad conduct, and are compelled to take up with such accommodations here, as they can find, or the blacks will allot them”.163 These may well have been the same prisoners referred to by Melish as not having been “sufficiently obedient to Captain Shortland” and his officers, though whether the transfer of men in that category to Prison N° 4 was at the initiative of the agent or of the prisoners (or both) is not clear. The implications of the fact that “black and white [American] sailors at Dartmoor organised themselves almost reflexively by race”164 will be examined later in this book, but it is important for the present discussion to emphasise that, in this case at least, segregation seems to have sprung— directly or indirectly—from the racism of white prisoners, and perhaps also from the intolerance of the latter with regard to certain kinds of “bad conduct” among their fellow (white) inmates.165 In other words, walls, at least those of the symbolic kind, could be constructed from below as well as imposed from above; a further illustration of the fact that the original intentions of the prison architect could be subverted on the ground by a multiplicity of actors. There is a final difference worthy of note between the Ackermann’s plan of 1810 and the Taylor-Melish engraving of 1815: what is referred to in the latter as the “Cachot or Black Hole” (n° L). As noted in the previous chapter, all war depots—including the hulks—were equipped with a cachot or black hole to punish serious infringements of the prison rules.166 War prison cachots came in various shapes and sizes, but what they generally had in common was that they were cramped, poorly ventilated, unheated and dark; and usually without any furniture or bedding.167 Like the Agent’s Square, Dartmoor’s cachot was in a sense both of the prison, and not of it. It was the only building on the entire site situated in between the iron palisade fence and the inner boundary wall—literally beyond the pale. Only the northern guardhouse and the “Dead House” or mortuary (which features on neither of the two plans discussed here) were more  J. Jones, 67; Dye, “Dartmoor”, 3.  Cobb, vol. 2, 43. 164  Bolster, 103. 165  Fabel, 171. 166  Morieux, Society of Prisoners, 221–222. 167  MacDougall, 356–58; Chamberlain, Hell Upon Water, 356–58. 162 163

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distant in that direction. There were of course clear security benefits to placing a prison within a prison away from the rest of the inmates, and in close proximity to a guardhouse. However, recalling Morieux’s point that prison walls constitute “symbolic” as well as “material barriers”, it could be argued that the cachot at Dartmoor involved social (and judicial) as well as physical distancing. Those prisoners who attempted to escape or committed a serious violation of the rules were held to have forfeited their right to be treated as simple prisoners of war (just like the officer “broke-­ paroles” discussed in the previous chapter), and were thus exiled, albeit temporarily. Hidden from the collective life of the prison and its combination of obligations and duties, they were subjected—as will be seen later in the book—to a parallel set of rules with a grim logic all of their own. As early as March 1810, less than a year after the arrival of the first prisoners at Dartmoor, Agent Cotgrave was complaining to his superiors that the small stone structure originally intended for the purpose and located in the hospital enclosure, was unequal to the task. The condition of the mortar was reportedly so poor that on several occasions prisoners had managed to “break through” the cachot’s walls, and “mix with the other prisoners, which they can do without being observed by the sentinels”.168 A short-term solution had been found by confining prisoners undergoing punishment in one of the prison guardhouses or sending them to the Plymouth hulks, but in August-September 1810, Cotgrave obtained permission to build a larger, more solid structure at the prison. Work began in December, and as for the construction of the two new prisons, French prisoners were employed for the purpose.169 The new cachot was significantly bigger than the former structure, but still small.170 It was rectangular in shape, perhaps 45 × 25 feet (35.7 × 7.6 m) in size,171 and about 15 feet or 4.5 metres high at the centre of the vaulted space. The building had no windows, just a couple of small openings for ventilation of a few inches square, placed under the eaves. Two solid, iron-­ plated wooden doors were designed to keep the prisoners in and light and sound out, and a floor of massive granite blocks was laid to prevent those  TNA ADM 98/152, TBLPW, 1810: TO to D. Alexander, March 29 & 31, 1810.  TNA ADM 98/152, TBLPW, 1810: TO to D. Alexander, Aug. 9, 1810. Stanbrook, 36; Joy, 40. 170  There is no known plan of the original cachot, but Catel may be referring to this building when he gives its dimensions as 20 × 20 ft. (6 × 6 m) (Catel, vol. 2, 149–50). 171  Joy, 40. 168 169

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inside from tunnelling out.172 The systematic use of handcuffs was recommended as an extra security measure.173 From February 1812, the agent was directed to provide floor mats for the cachot, with the proviso that if these were destroyed, prisoners would have to sleep in their hammocks directly on the granite flags.174 The cachot building at Dartmoor may have been divided into individual cells, as at Norman Cross,175 but if so, there is no record of how many cells there were or their dimensions.176 Even though conditions in the punishment cells of criminal prisons at this period could be even harsher than this,177 there is no reason to question Ron Joy’s description of the prison’s cachot as “a terrible place indeed”, particularly during the bitter cold of a Dartmoor winter.178

VI We cited earlier Renaud Morieux’s observation that “Prison buildings were constant works-in-progress”, a concept which suits the present case perfectly. By the end of 1812, seven and a half years after the launch of the Dartmoor project, the main structures which had featured in Daniel Alexander’s hybrid architectural plan for the prison were all in place. So were a number of bolt-on additions, including Prisons 2 and 6, and the new cachot building. A constant stream of smaller construction projects, alterations and running repairs would follow during the remaining three and a half years of the war prison’s existence: to make good the damage done by prisoners or by Nathaniel Pierce’s “Dartmoor weather”; to adapt to swings in prisoner numbers; or to try to correct (or anticipate) blind spots identified in the prison’s array of security measures. Thus, as

 Ibid., 40–41; Stanbrook, 36.  TNA ADM 98/226, TBLADP, 1810–1811, fol. 10r: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Aug. 9, 1810. 174  TNA ADM 98/227, TBLADP, 1812–1813, fol. 19: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Feb. 4, 1812. 175  Chamberlain, Norman Cross, 160. See also MacDougall, 356–58. 176  James indicates that up to 60 prisoners could be incarcerated in the cachot at any one time (James, 43). A letter of July 1813 refers to 54 prisoners being held there at that point (TNA ADM 29/249, TBLAPL, 1812–1813: TO to Capt. Pellowe, July 20, 1813). Short of Dartmoor’s cachot possessing Tardis-like properties, it is difficult to see how either figure is consistent with an internal division of the available space into individual cells. 177  Sinclair, 67. For examples, see Neild, 202, 269, 465. 178  Joy, 41. 172 173

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Elizabeth Stanbrook’s detailed, year-by-year history of the prison makes clear, Dartmoor would never in reality be truly “finished”.179 Throughout the nearly nine years of the prison’s existence, the principles of “separation” and “ventilation” which Alexander would (misleadingly) identify in 1818 as the guiding principles of his design were indeed reflected in the seven self-contained prison buildings fanning out in the Prison-Yard, though it should be remembered that the ventilation principle evidently did not extend to the interiors of those structures—still less to the cachot, the inside of which must have veered between noisome summer inferno and winter ice-house. “Separation” at the prison had in fact been taken further than Alexander had intended, with first that tripartite sub-division of the Prison-Yard and then the length-wise partition of Prison N° 4. All of which functioned to compromise a third principle mentioned by the architect in his evidence to the 1818 parliamentary inquiry: that of “concentrality”. Erecting walls could obey a number of logics, but maximising “inspection” was not one of them. In this sense, Dartmoor was never merely “a military fortress turned inside-out”. If it had been, every design feature at the prison would have been thought out in order to ensure maximum visibility and maximum firepower from those boundary wall bastions. This was clearly not the case, for, as seen earlier, the Transport Board resisted calls in 1812 from Army commanders to strengthen the “fortifications” of the prison in order to improve security. In fact, the architectural evolution of Dartmoor Prison was just as beset by contradictions as the “reformed” prison designs discussed by Robin Evans in the previous chapter. The modifications in and around Prison N° 4 in 1813–1814 are a case in point. In fact, they resulted in just the same kind of “atlases of vice” as in the new-look criminal prisons of the period, with “numerous sectors cordoned off, screened and introverted”. In an early study of the history of prison reform in England, the aptly-­ named D.L. Howard argued that Daniel Alexander’s design for Dartmoor Prison was “far better […] than any county gaol or house of correction in England, with the exception of the model prison erected at Gloucester in 1791 on Howardian principles”, adding that “if it had been erected in a more kindly part of the country” and had made “provision for separate confinement”, “it would have approached the ideas of the reformers of the time”.180 Dartmoor did indeed feature some notable improvements on  Stanbrook, passim.  Howard (D.L.), 24.

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previous designs, as David Sinclair points out, including the use of tarmacadam for the Prison-Yard, the ingenious sanitation system via fast-­ flowing “leats”, and the well-spaced buildings. Even the cachot, he argues, “grim though it may have been, […] did not involve any of the tortuous conditions familiar with earlier punishment places”.181 At the same time, the combination of bitterly cold weather, unheated buildings and the close packing of up to 500 inmates on each floor of the seven prisons (including in the cocklofts, thanks to that Transport Board decision of 1809) ensured that, irrespective of any well-intentioned features of the regime in place, the prisoners at Dartmoor experienced real, and sometimes deadly, hardship during the time they were incarcerated at the prison. The article accompanying the 1810 engraving published in Ackermann’s Repository had claimed, it will be recalled, that “every comfort” at Dartmoor was “administered to alleviate the prisoners’ unhappy lot, as far as the nature of circumstances will allow”; and that the “gentlemen” of the Transport Office “pursue[d] an undeviating system of philanthropy, honourable to themselves, and beneficial to the objects of their care and exertions”. The next chapter will investigate those claims, exploring the nature of the “system of philanthropy” put in place at Dartmoor and identifying the various actors involved. It will be asked whether that system was indeed pursued in an “undeviating” manner, and with what consequences—“beneficial” or otherwise—for the nearly 25,000 prisoners detained at the prison between 1809 and 1816.

 Sinclair, 92–93.

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CHAPTER 4

A “Fair Matter for Public Discussion and Enquiry?”

“I wish that you could have been with me yesterday at Dartmoor”, Transport Board commissioner Ambrose Searle wrote to Board chairman Sir Rupert George on July 12, 1811, from nearby Tavistock. Searle recalled with evident pleasure “the pure air, the clear Sunshine without a Cloud, the ar[t]fulness and Industry of the Prisoners; in short the whole time was truly amusing and delightful”. It was in this letter, cited in the previous chapter, that Searle had affirmed that when the two new prisons were added to the existing five, Dartmoor would be “not only the most capacious, but the most desirable (if men […] can admit the Epithet) of all our Depôts”. He added: “When so completed, it will easily receive, & without the least crowding, full 9000 prisoners. An immense advantage at this Crisis!”1 Searle closed his letter by informing his colleague: “I mean to set off for Plymouth presently, & shall be glad to find all things there as well as I found them on the once despised moor. Time and good facts will finally subdue all prejudices which have been raised for the most part by some good people at leisure”.2

1 2

 BAOWMS, W1/2714-1: A. Searle to Sir R. George, July 12, 1811, fol. 1.  Ibid., fol. 2.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Davie, French and American Prisoners of War at Dartmoor Prison, 1805–1816, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83891-1_4

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I Searle’s letter raises a number of issues that will be at the heart of the discussion in this chapter. The idyllic portrait of his visit to Dartmoor Prison in July 1811—where metaphorical clouds were seemingly just as absent as real ones—recalls a comment made by barrister and circuit judge Eric Stockdale, in a 1983 article on the history of prison inspection. Referring to early twentieth-century Home Office prison reports, Stockdale observed that many of them “resembled the night-watchman’s traditional cry, ‘Ten o’clock on a fine Summer’s night, and all’s well’, at a time when, in truth, all [was] far from well”.3 William Branch-Johnson came to much the same conclusion regarding the value of Admiralty reports for a study of the prisoner of war hulks, drawing attention to the frequency of stock phrases like “the prisoners are very healthy” and “the Ships upon the whole in tolerably good order”.4 Nineteenth-century commentators often made similar complaints about official prison reports, like the Morning Chronicle correspondent of 1828 who remarked that the annual reports coming out of the General Penitentiary at Millbank, London, offered meagre fare; “contain[ing] generally a mere statement of the number of prisoners received and with an account of their health and conduct”. He added that for the first seven years after the opening of Millbank Penitentiary in 1816, if the official reports were anything to go by, “no occurrence of any particular nature seem[ed] to have taken place”; certainly nothing to reveal what he called “the secrets of this prison house”, that “terra incognita in which few besides those who inhabit it have ever set foot”.5 One of Dartmoor’s most vociferous critics, Royal Navy captain and radical MP, Lord Thomas Cochrane, would also rail against official secrecy in a speech he gave on the floor of the House of Commons in June 1811. Cochrane had gained an early reputation in the Navy for personal courage, seamanship and leadership, but had latterly made enemies at the Admiralty with a series of outspoken public attacks on corruption and inefficiency in naval administration.6 His remarks in the Commons on June 14 would have done nothing to placate those enemies. “Having received many letters, stating the condition of Prisoners of War at Dart-moor to be truly  Stockdale, 227.  Branch-Johnson, 50. 5  Publicola, “Prison Discipline – The Penitentiary and Hulks”, Morning Chronicle, Jan. 9 & 15, 1828. 6  Lambert, DNB, “Cochrane, Thomas”. See also Fisher, “Cochrane, Thomas”. 3 4

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deplorable”, Cochrane told the House, he had “determined to investigate the subject”. He visited a number of parole towns in the region, and establishing that “the complaints had some foundation”, determined to visit Dartmoor himself. He had evidently expected, as a naval captain, and one, moreover, as he put it, who had “contributed to place many individuals into this depot”, to be granted admittance, but he was to be disappointed. On Transport Board orders, Cochrane was permitted merely to glimpse the inside of the prison through a grating. “This caution, I confess”, he told MPs, “produced a conviction in my mind that there existed some hidden motive for unusual secrecy”.7 Searle’s letter, written less than a month later, dismissed Cochrane’s recent allegations in parliament (which had included the charge that the site for Dartmoor Prison had been chosen principally to enrich one Thomas Tyrwhitt) as “laughable”.8 Though not an official report as such, Searle’s letter follows the pattern noted by Stockdale and Branch-Johnson: a robust affirmation that the prisoners of war in the Board’s charge were well-provided for in every respect, and that allegations of ill-treatment, negligence or cruelty, from whatever quarter, were entirely without foundation, the result of “prejudices” spread about by carping “good people at leisure”; armchair critics, ill-acquainted with the reality on the ground, or worse, intent on besmirching the name of His Majesty’s government and military in order to further their own agenda, or perhaps that of an enemy power. We quoted earlier in this book Linda Colley’s point that captivity narratives need to be approached, not as “writings that can be swallowed whole”, but as sources that “can—and should—be sampled and sieved”.9 That argument could be applied with equal force to the correspondence and other documents emanating from the Transport Office relating to the management of Dartmoor Prison, the study of which will form the centrepiece of this chapter. That is not to suggest that the Board’s commissioners, agents and other personnel were systematically duplicitous, nor, as has sometimes been affirmed, that their treatment of foreign captives was unremittingly “appalling”, and/or marked by “indifference” and

 HC Debates, “French Prisoners of War”, Lord Cochrane, June 14, 1811, cc. 634–35.  BAOWMS, W1/2714-1: A.  Searle to Sir R.  George, July 12, 1811A.  Searle to Sir R. George, July 12, 1811, fol. 2. 9  Colley, 92. 7 8

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“impotence”.10 That being said, it is equally misleading to read official accounts at face value, and conclude that the Transport Office consistently “maintained a benevolent attitude towards the prisoners”; always treated them “fairly” and “with considerable forbearance”; and “obviously had the affairs of [their] fellow men at heart”.11 The reality was more complex than either strand of this traditional historiography suggests. While “benevolence” was clearly in evidence in the decisions made by the members of the Transport Board, other factors also came into play, including the fear of retaliation against British prisoners detained overseas, concerns about the spread of epidemic disease, and security and financial considerations—not to mention bureaucratic inertia and failures of communication.12 When approaching statements like “Ten o’clock on a fine Summer’s night, and all’s well” with a view to the “sampling” and “sieving” urged by Colley, it is important therefore to consider what precisely “fine” and “well”—or their equivalents—signified in the particular circumstances in which they were used. Language was a key battleground in this period, with rival participants in debates on penal policy seeking to marshal both moral argument and empirical data in order to carry conviction, and cement, so to speak, their own definitions to terms like “discipline”, “severity” and “rigour”; thereby ruling out of court the definitions proposed by others. This was true not only, as I have argued elsewhere,13 of the wide-ranging and at times heated debate around criminal prisons in this period, but also, arguably, of the debates around the treatment of prisoners of war. In this respect, what was at stake was the ownership of Searle’s “good facts”. Once certain “facts” (and their owners) could be firmly attached to the label “good”, other, rival facts could be rhetorically dismissed, and those voicing them as either ignorant or maliciously mendacious. In the following discussion, the account of Dartmoor Prison provided in the voluminous records of the Transport Office, and by its critics at home and abroad, will be examined from this perspective, that of a contest to “own” the narrative about the prison and its inmates. Before turning to that analysis, however, it will be necessary to explore in some  Daly, 375–76. Quotations from Bernard, 155; Masson, 169.  Chamberlain, Hell Upon Water, 28, 31, 52n (my emphasis); Dye, “American Maritime Prisoners”, 299–300. 12  Morieux, Society of Prisoners, 318. 13  Davie, 543–44. 10 11

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detail the framework of management and oversight put in place by the Transport Office in its war depots during this period.

II The Transport Office came into existence on July 4, 1794, part of an attempt to streamline a hitherto cumbersome service for chartering merchant ships for military use, principally (as an 1808 source put it) for “the conveyance of Troops and Baggage, Victualling, Ordnance, Barrack, Commissariate, Naval and Military Stores of all kinds”.14 The Transport Office was run by a board of commissioners, headed by a chairman, and met five (occasionally six) days a week. During its 22-year existence, there were 2 chairmen, 14 commissioners (5 naval officers and 9 civilians) and 2 secretaries. The Board’s administrative status was somewhat ambiguous: it was headed by a naval officer, served the army and answered to the Treasury. From June 1795 until the Transport Office’s abolition in 1816, the Board was chaired by Captain (later Sir) Rupert George (the addressee of Ambrose Searle’s letter quoted at the beginning of this chapter). His role reflected the board’s complex status. Described as “shrewd and sure-­ footed”,15 George worked closely with the Treasury, the secretary of state for war, the home and foreign secretaries, as well as the Victualling, Ordinance and Navy Boards. In September 1795, the Transport Board’s workload increased considerably when it took over responsibility for prisoners of war from the Admiralty’s Sick and Hurt Board. By the time Dartmoor Prison received its first prisoners in May 1809, the Sick and Hurt Board had been abolished altogether and its remaining duties, including that of the naval medical service, had also been transferred to the Transport Office. The latter now consisted of three divisions: a branch relating to the transport service, a branch for sick and wounded seamen and a branch for prisoners of war.16 As the wars progressed, the Board’s duties with regard to the last of those divisions occupied a growing share of its time, and indeed at times dominated business. Those duties were multiple. They included organising transport for prisoners from their place of capture to the depot where they were to be detained, and their “victualling” and clothing once they  Knight, 109–10; Parliamentary Papers, 1808, qtd. Condon, 80.  Knight, 110. 16  This paragraph draws heavily on Sutcliffe, 8, 40–43. 14 15

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were there. Contracts with national and local firms for the supply of those items and for the construction and maintenance of the war depots needed to be drawn up and subsequently supervised, and staff at all levels recruited and paid. In addition, there were cartels to be negotiated and (if successful) organised, and prisoners exchanged, transferred and placed on parole. In addition, there was a vast quantity of correspondence to be treated. A small army of Transport Office clerks17 handled letters from government departments and the different branches of the military; from parliament (to which the board was accountable for the substantial sums voted each year for its prisoner of war division)18; from foreign princes, ministries, embassies and their agents; and from interested parties of all kinds, seeking information or offering unsolicited (and not necessarily welcome) advice. There were letters regarding depot personnel past, present and future, both military and civilian; and contractors, suppliers, bankers and lawyers to be paid, mollified and cajoled. To which should be added, finally, the sizeable correspondence emanating from the prisoners themselves, their families and friends; whether foreign captives confined in Britain’s war depots and parole towns, or British soldiers, sailors and civilians detained overseas.19 A major part of this correspondence (and a key source for this book) involved letters to and from the Transport Board’s agents in its war depots. A Transport Office return of January 1813 lists twenty-two agents in all, of whom thirteen were in charge of war depots on British soil. With the exception of the agent for Dover, all of the latter were naval captains or lieutenants.20 Agents were at the head of a sizeable staff (up to 34 in the case of Dartmoor), including hospital personnel, clerks, stewards, turnkeys and labourers, and were expected to work closely with the local military commander responsible for the garrison of the depot.21 They also 17  Twenty-seven clerks were listed in January 1813 for the TO’s prisoner of war division, up from just 11 in January 1807 (TNA ADM 1/3764: TBLPW, 1813, fols. 78–79). 18  TNA ADM 1/3768, TBLPW, 1815: “An Account shewing the annual amount of money voted by parliament for the service of prisoners of war … [and] annual amount of payments actually made”, March 3, 1815. From 1806 until 1813 the sums voted rose substantially each year, reaching a peak of just over £1m, before falling slightly in 1814. 19  Chamberlain, Hell Upon Water, 30. 20  TNA ADM 1/3764, TBLPW, 1813: “A Return of the agents for prisoners of war at the Places undermentioned”, Jan. 1, 1813. 21  TNA ADM 1/5122/16: Statements of the staff and work of Plymouth dockyard … and of Dartmoor Prison, 1814, fol. 478: “Statement of the Number of Officers employed at Dartmoor Prison”; Thomson, 12–13.

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served as the Transport Board’s representative on the ground, liaising with the agents of other war depots and military facilities, with legal officers and local elected officials. Much of their time was taken up with the local contractors and businesses of various kinds involved in provisioning up to 10,000 prisoners, and maintaining the buildings and other structures on the site. Agents were expected to remain in close contact with their Transport Board superiors by letter; with orders, circulars, requests for information and the occasional reprimand passing in one direction, and returns, requests, explanations and justifications in the other. That near constant flow of orders and requests received from London would then need to be relayed by the agent to the rest of his staff, to other interested parties, and, where appropriate, to the prisoners. The agent was also the conduit for requests and demands from prison personnel and inmates alike. As the purveyor and interpreter of information, requests and demands in both directions, the agent thus had considerable discretionary power over the daily lives of both prisoners and staff, a point which will be examined in more detail in later chapters of this book.22 Dartmoor’s agent in the 1813 returns is named as Captain Isaac Cotgrave, R.N. He had been appointed in September 1808, after having specifically requested by letter that he be considered for the position.23 It was his second Transport Office posting: he had previously served for five years as agent to Mill Prison, Plymouth (1803–1808). That earlier appointment had come at the end of a naval career stretching back to the early 1760s, and had included a brief period during the Revolutionary Wars when he had been a captive of the French navy. Cotgrave would subsequently condemn the “horrid and barbarous” treatment to which he and his crew had been subjected whilst in enemy hands.24 His appointment as agent at Mill Prison followed closely on his promotion to the rank of post captain in 1802, possibly as a result of the attention he had attracted for his role in the abortive British naval raid on the French harbour of Boulogne the previous summer, which had earned him praise from Nelson.25 When Isaac Cotgrave was appointed as agent for prisoners of war at Plymouth, he was fifty-six.26 The naval career of this “old post  Chamberlain, Norman Cross, 29–33; James, 52.  Stanbrook, 15. 24  Duncan, vol. 3, 349–50. 25  Harris, 464, 466. 26  TNA ADM 98/212: TBLAPL, 1803–1805, fol. 1: TO to Lieut. Clements, June 6, 1803. 22 23

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captain”, as Ackermann’s Repository would call him, still had ten years to run, but they would be spent uniquely on dry land. He served as agent at Dartmoor between September 1808 and his retirement in November 1813. He died the following May.27 Cotgrave was succeeded by Thomas G. Shortland, like his predecessor a naval post captain. Coincidentally, the two men had both “made post” in 1802, the announcement of their promotions appearing together in the Naval Chronicle.28 In other respects, however, their backgrounds were very different. Shortland, unlike Cotgrave, came from a Navy family (both his father and elder brother were naval officers), and although he had entered the service at about the same age as his predecessor, he had risen much more rapidly through the officer ranks, achieving the career-­ changing promotion to captain at the age of just thirty-one, after some seventeen years at sea. Shortland’s family connections may have facilitated his swift rise, but he had also shown himself to be an able commander in the field.29 He held the position of agent at Dartmoor for two and a half years until the prison’s closure in February 1816. It was the first of several administrative posts, the last of which, that of resident Commissioner in Jamaica, he occupied at the time of his death from fever in 1827 at the age of fifty-six.30 In 1809, all Transport Office agents posted to the war depots were issued with an exhaustive manual of Instructions for Agents […] Respecting the Management of Prisoners of War at Home, covering every aspect of a war depot agent’s duties, from the paperwork to be filled in on the reception of prisoners to arrangements for victualling, mustering, clothing and exercising the depot’s captive population. There was also guidance on how to prevent escapes, and punishments for would-be escapees.31 Significantly, agents were ordered to keep a close watch on the military guards or 27  ADM 98/228, TBLADP, 1813–1815, fols. 14, 16: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Nov. 16, 1813, Nov. 20, 1813; ADM 6/352/27: Admiralty, Certificates and other papers relating to charity applications, fols. 111–15: Margaret Cotgrave, widow of Capt. I. Cotgrave, R.N.; Stanbrook, 58. 28  Naval Chronicle, 531. 29  Laughton, revd. Lambert, DNB, “Shortland, Thomas George”; Marshall, vol. 2, 1, 482–88. 30  Shortland’s other posts were as Captain-superintendent of the ordinary at Plymouth (1816–1819) and Comptroller-general of the Preventive Boat Service (1819–1822). He was appointed Resident commissioner in Jamaica in 1825 (Laughton, revd. Lambert). 31  Instructions for Agents, 1–31.

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“centinels” at each depot for signs of “neglect”, and report any soldier found conversing with the prisoners while at his post. Clearly, the Transport Board considered the military personnel at their depots a potential security risk, and strove to limit soldiers’ role in the management of the prison. There were further rules for the employment of staff (and, in specific circumstances, of prisoners), the keeping of accounts and registers and the functioning of the prison hospital and market. The Instructions go into considerable detail on the minutiae of different aspects of prison management, referring for example to allowances of coals, candles and lamp-­oil for prison staff; the hiring of prisoners as barbers (one for every 300 inmates, at 3d per day); the inspection of hammocks; and the ban on both “spirituous liqueurs” and the keeping of pigs and poultry within the prison.32 The Instructions for Agents made it clear that prisoners were “not to be struck with the Hand, Stick, Whip, or any Weapon whatever”, but were, “on all Occasions, to be treated with Humanity”. In this spirit, “just Complaints [were] to be attended to”, and “real Grievances redressed”. Behaviour judged “disorderly” was to be punished by up to ten days in the prison cachot on two-thirds rations, though it was stressed that no punishments should be administered without the knowledge of the Transport Board.33 This was part of a broader pattern: throughout the Instructions for Agents, the emphasis was on the necessity for agents to seek authorisation from the Board before acting, whether to punish disorderly prisoners, hire staff or repair buildings. All agents were required to swear an oath to this effect and enter into a bond to the sum of three times their annual salary.34 In this sense, the 1809 Instructions for Agents can be seen, as Renaud Morieux has argued, as part of an attempt to subject both guards and prisoners “to a more thorough and systematic regime of surveillance” than hitherto; the aim being both to “prevent the jailors’ punishments from getting out of hand”, and to avert the development of “informal solidarities and corruption which brought these two groups together”.35 Similar priorities would feature in the report of the parliamentary committee on penitentiaries chaired by George Holford MP, which met two years later, in 1811.36  Ibid., 23–24.  Ibid., 24. 34  Ibid., 12–13, 30. 35  Morieux, Society of Prisoners, 296. 36  Report from the Committee on the Laws Relating to Penitentiary Houses. It was this committee which finally scuppered Jeremy Bentham’s hopes to win official approval for his 32 33

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The “Regulations which all the Prisoners of War in Depôts are bound to observe”, issued by the Transport Office in 1807, were also more extensive and more detailed than previous versions, with eighteen articles.37 They were in a sense a mirror image of the later Instructions for Agents and covered much the same ground. As might be expected, the emphasis was on obedience, with thirteen of the eighteen articles mentioning punishments for different violations of the rules.38 All orders given by the depot agent or his staff were thus to be “attended to and immediately executed by the Prisoners without any Dispute, Reply, or Hesitation whatever”. Just as prisoners were “not to be struck with the Hand, Stick, Whip, or any Weapon whatever”, so the prisoners in their turn were forbidden “to strike, or even to menace or insult any Officer, Turnkey or other person employed in the Prisons or Prison Ships” and “to fight, quarrel or excite any Tumult or Disorder in the Prisons, or Prison Ships or in the Places where they may be allowed to take the Air”. Punishment in both cases might involve a spell in the cachot on reduced (usually two-­ thirds) rations, and in the former (more serious) case, prisoners forfeited their turn to be exchanged and might also “suffer[-] such other Punishment as the Commissioners may think proper to direct”.39 An escape attempt brought a ten-day sentence of solitary confinement in the cachot on two-thirds rations, with the other occupants of the would-­be escapee’s prison “room”40—considered guilty by association— also put on reduced rations until the “expenses” resulting from the escape attempt had been repaid (this punishment was maintained if the escape was successful, which must have been particularly galling for those left behind, and may have been a source of friction).41 Gambling away, selling or losing one’s clothes and bedding, possessing a weapon or making Panopticon project, and led to the construction of Millbank Penitentiary (1812–1816). 37  Appendix 35 of Instructions for Agents contains a French version of the 1807 prison regulations, but no English equivalent. A copy of the latter, dating to c.1814, turned up in the TO files at the UK National Archives, and it is this document that will be cited in the following discussion (Prison Regulations). 38  Morieux, Society of Prisoners, 296. 39  Prison Regulations, arts. 1–2. 40  This seems to have corresponded, in the case of the land depots, to the relevant floor of the prison in question, though on occasion the whole population of a particular “prison” were punished. 41  Indeed, it is probable, as Catriona Kennedy points out, that the likelihood of such reprisals was one motivation for prisoners to collude with their captors to prevent escapes (Kennedy, 121).

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articles ­forbidden for sale in the prison market, would also send the offending prisoner to the black hole for a varying numbers of days. Significantly, the seriousness with which the sale of clothes and/or bedding for the purpose of gambling was regarded by the authorities was reflected in the fact that no maximum limit was stipulated with regard to time to be spent by offenders in the cachot. At the other end of the punitive scale were those violations considered less serious by the authorities, and which therefore resulted in a loss of full rations, but no solitary confinement. These included failing to answer to one’s name at roll call (or giving a false name), refusing to clean one’s prison block, or damaging government property.42 The Transport Board was at pains to point out that prisoners of war were not to be confused with common criminals,43 yet many of the regulations for the prisoner of war depots and prison ships described above turn out to resemble closely those found in the criminal prisons of the period, where punishment for violation of the rules also generally took the form of dietary privation and solitary confinement, either singly or in combination. At London’s Millbank Penitentiary, for example, the prison rules stipulated that prisoners were to be punished “by being closely confined in a dark or any other cell, or by being fed on bread and water only, or by both such punishments, according to the degree and circumstances of the offence”.44 Another parallel with the criminal prisons was the rule allowing for the co-option of prisoners to serve as “inspectors”. Generally referred to as “wardsmen” or “monitors” in gaols, houses of correction and convict prisons, in the present case, two prisoner-inspectors were chosen for each floor of Dartmoor’s different prisons, and paid 3d per day to ensure “the preservation of good order and to see that the established regulations of the prison are attended to”. The names of those infringing either directive were to be reported to the agent.45 Not all of the regulations for the prisoner of war depots resembled those of criminal prisons like Millbank. A striking example is Rule n° 14: In each prison, or Prison Ship, the Prisoners are to name three or five from among them to examine the Provisions furnished by the Contractor for the  Prison Regulations, arts. 3–16.  Morieux, Society of Prisoners, 211–12. 44  Rules and Regulations of … Millbank, 86–87. 45  Prison Regulations, art. 17. 42 43

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purpose of giving their Opinion whether the Articles are good, and whether they have their regular Allowance conformably with the undermentioned Table of Rations, […] and if it shall appear to the said prisoners appointed for this purpose, that there is any Cause of Complaint with regard to the said Provisions, or in any other Case whatsoever, they are respectfully to inform the Agent, who will remedy it if the Complaint is well founded.46

All prisons of course had the equivalent of the Transport Board’s “Table of Rations”, and the Millbank regulations also contained a procedure for complaints “if a Prisoner has reason to think that any […] rule is not properly observed on the part of the officers of the prison”.47 However, there is a crucial difference between including in the rules a hypothetical avenue for complaint and nominating a self-selected group of prisoners to serve effectively as arbiters of the adequacy of the rations issued—albeit arbiters in a system which left the agent with the last word. Interestingly, an appendix included at the end of Instructions for Agents offers a differently worded version of Rule n° 14, seemingly intended for display in the prison depots. On the subject of the examination of provisions by prisoners, it is noted: The Utmost Care is to be taken, that the Contractors do not impose on the Prisoners, by delivering Provisions inferior in Quality, or less in Quantity, than they are bound to do by their Contracts, for which Purpose a certain Number, chosen by themselves, is to be permitted to inspect every Species of Provision, on its Coming into the Prison, in order that they may be convinced that Justice is done to them.48

The wording here is significant. The risk of contractors issuing provisions “inferior in Quality, or less in Quantity” is openly acknowledged, and the prisoners’ powers of “inspection” are symbolically extended to all food entering the prison. Moreover, it is clear that maintaining the consent of the prisoners is seen as a necessity: “Justice” not only needs to be done, but needs to be seen to be done. The regulations concerning the prison market offer a further example of how the regime at the prisoner of war depots functioned in ways which departed significantly from the criminal prisons of the period. Rule  Ibid., art. 14.  Rules and Regulations of … Millbank, 89. 48  Instructions for Agents, Appendix 36. 46 47

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numbers 7 and 8 state that “such prisoners as have the means may be enabled to purchase such articles or clothes as they may wish for” and could also “during market hours […] sell articles of their own manufacture”.49 It was noted in Chap. 3 that the prison’s market square constituted a liminal, inside-outside space; both of the prison and not of it. This status relates not only to the fact that the market brought the prisoners into direct contact with the outside world, but also because it embodied a principle increasingly absent from the criminal prisons: that prisoners with the means to do so could effectively buy themselves preferential conditions. Although there were differences of opinion on this issue, notably with regard to the remuneration of prison labour,50 reformers of the period of whatever stripe would have considered as wholly unacceptable the notion of placing a daily market within the walls of the prison, not to mention permitting inmates to profit, not from having applied themselves with commendable zeal to officially sanctioned forms of penal labour, but from “sell[ing] articles of their own manufacture” at the most profitable price they could obtain. Seen from this perspective, the regime put in place by the Transport Office in its war depots may be considered a hybrid one, with one foot in conventional early nineteenth-century penal practice, and the other in a different, more contractual conception, blending prisoner rights and obligations, in which (in theory at least) “just complaints” were “attended to”, “real Grievances redressed” and “Justice” seen to be done.51 Returning to Rule n° 14 of the Transport Board’s prison regulations, an earlier version of the same rule exists, dating to 1780, which, while virtually identical in its wording to the 1807 text, has an interesting extra sentence tacked onto the end. After noting that the agent will address the complaint if well-founded, the rule goes on: “If the Agent should neglect this part of his duty, the prisoners are to give information thereof to the Commissioners, who will not fail to do them justice in every respect”.52 This sentence was later dropped, possibly because of concerns in the late 1790s among members of the Transport Board that the “committees” for  Prison Regulations, arts. 7–8.  See Robin Evans, 295–309. 51  Morieux, Society of Prisoners, 296–97. 52  “Report from the Committee on the Health of the Prisoners … 1780”, Appendices 15–16, 784–85. The rules are printed in French and Spanish (but not English). I have thus used here the virtually identical English wording from an undated version of the rules reproduced in Chamberlain, Norman Cross, 158–59. 49 50

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examining the quality of the provisions (as they were termed at this date) were becoming the unofficial mouthpiece for prisoner demands on a broader range of issues.53 Perhaps, given this context, it was decided that it would be imprudent to continue to allow provisions committee members to leapfrog the agent and appeal directly for redress to the Board’s commissioners. The result of the change was effectively to close down an avenue of complaint for prisoners; one which had been widely resorted to by foreign captives in the eighteenth century to draw attention to ill-­ treatment, and, according to one researcher, had “more often than not […] led to the launching of investigations, and also to an improvement of the prisoners’ situations”.54 The sources available for the study of Dartmoor Prison between 1809 and 1816 reveal that if the hope at the Transport Board was that “time and good facts [would] finally subdue all prejudices which [had] been raised” against official policy, as Ambrose Searle had confidently predicted, that hope would remain a dead letter. Whether the passage of more time would have changed things is a moot point, but there was certainly no shortage of facts emanating from the Transport Office. They were no doubt considered “good facts” by those producing them, but they were never permitted to monopolise the debate, despite the strenuous efforts made by the Board to monitor communications in and out of the war depots, including a new rule stating that “all letters sent by the Prisoners, or addressed to them, must pass through the Agent’s Hands”.55 The following discussion will examine three examples of communications which succeeded in passing elsewhere than through the hands of Dartmoor’s agent, all emanating from the prisoners themselves.

III In March 1813, with the help of a complicit sentry, a number of French officers smuggled a letter out of Dartmoor Prison.56 It was addressed—in French—to Whig MP Samuel Whitbread II, and appealed to his “benevolence” and “feelings of humanity” in requesting that he assist “8500 poor devils” at Dartmoor in putting their case before parliament. The letter was signed, “in the name of all the prisoners”, by three formerly paroled  Ibid., 159.  Morieux, Society of Prisoners, 90. 55  Prison Regulations, art. 13. 56  Thomson, 90. Thomson incorrectly dates the letter to May 1813. 53 54

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French officers, Étienne Bontrouche, Pierre Corsant and Henri Lengrand; respectively a merchant navy captain, an army quartermaster and a cavalry lieutenant.57 Whitbread was perhaps a logical choice. He was known for his reforming zeal and humanitarianism, had participated in several debates on the prisoner of war question and had on occasion been critical of the Admiralty. He was also known to favour opening peace talks with France. In addition, although his relations with his fellow Whigs were fractious, he has been described as “one of the half-dozen dominant figures in the House [of Commons] after 1807”.58 Accompanying the letter was a four-page petition (also in French and with the same signatories), alleging ill-treatment of the prisoners at Dartmoor on a number of counts at the hands of the prison’s “tyrannical administration”.59 The central allegation concerned the behaviour of the agent and surgeon during a bout of epidemic disease that had struck the prison that spring, and which would kill over ninety inmates before it ran its course at the end of April.60 In the view of the authors of the petition, the inaction of Agent Cotgrave and the refusal of Dr Dykar to admit certain of the sick prisoners into the prison hospital had resulted in unnecessary deaths. As many as 600 “scabious and injured” men, it was claimed, had been refused proper medical attention, and been forced to remain in their prisons, thus contributing to the further spread of disease.61 The crisis was exacerbated, the petition alleged, by the overcrowded conditions in the prisons (with just 15 inches of space for each hammock); the occupation of the two “barely finished”, “damp and noisome” prison buildings;62 and by the refusal of Captain Cotgrave to countenance the evacuation of the “considerable number” of disabled, old and incurably sick prisoners, said to be “dying daily” at the prison.63 57  BAOWMS, W1/2718: E. Bontrouche, P. Corsant & H. Lengrand to S. Whitbread II, March 18, 1813; TNA ADM 103/309: GEBPLFR, 1814; ADM 103/95: GEBDPFR, 1809–1811; ADM 103/512: Alphabetical List of prisoners of war, Dartmoor, 1809–1816; ADM 103/302: GEBPLFR, 1812–1813. 58  Fisher, DNB, “Whitbread, Samuel II”. 59  BAOWMS, W1/2717: “Petition of French prisoners against medical arrangements and their treatment at Dartmoor”, March 18, 1813. 60  TNA ADM 103/640: Dartmoor death certificates, 1809–1816, certificates for March– April 1813. 61  For a similar allegation with regard to the US prisoners, see Andrews, 29–30. 62  These were the two extra accommodation blocks (prisons 2 and 6), added in 1811–1812. 63  BAOWMS, W1/2717: “Petition of French prisoners against medical arrangements and their treatment at Dartmoor”, March 18, 1813, fols. 1–2.

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Further allegations followed, including the use of bayonets by soldiers from the prison garrison to enforce the exclusion of sick prisoners from the hospital; unjustified taxes levied by prison staff on the sale of “small beer”; poor quality rations; arbitrary restrictions on the prison market; a failure to respect the rules regarding the exchange of prisoners; and an illicit trade in prison clothing involving prison staff. On the latter point, the prison agent was once again singled out personally for censure. “Captain Cotgrave”, it was stated, “was unavailable whenever it came to making any kind of complaint” about prison supplies; and he “never went inside the prisons to discover for himself the extortion practiced by his subordinates”. The petition finished by calling on parliament to set up a special committee to investigate the allegations, the members of which would thereby be afforded the opportunity to “penetrate the interior of the prisons, where the men chosen to be heard by the committee would give further information on the wrongs heaped upon us”.64 By the end of April, the Transport Board was evidently aware of the prisoners’ “representation”, and had started to make arrangements for a Plymouth naval captain and Mill Prison’s surgeon, Dr George Magrath, to investigate the complaints. A week later, however, the board changed its mind, now convinced that there was no foundation to the allegations, and the naval commander-in-chief in Plymouth, Admiral Calder, was informed that “in consequence of a communication we have received from Dartmoor on the subject, we do not think it necessary to take any further measures in the business at present”.65 What seems to have caused this volte face at the Transport Board was a letter received from Cotgrave a few days earlier, in which the agent at Dartmoor had described the signatories to the petition as “Men who would Destroy both Government and Country”, adding that Bontrouche, Corsant and Lengrand were all broke-paroles, with a history of “improper conduct”, including theft, forgery and attempted escape.66 Cotgrave added: “My conduct being called in question by Enemies of the Country of that Description, prays upon my Mind extremely; after having faithfully served my Country upwards of Fifty Two  Ibid., 2–4.  TNA ADM 98/227, TBLADP, 1812–1813, fols. 110, 113: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Apr. 30, 1813, May 7, 1813; ADM 98/249, TBLAPL, 1812–1813, fols. 108, 115–16: TO to Dr Magrath, Apr. 30, 1813; TO to Admiral Calder, May 7, 1813; TO to Dr Magrath, May 7, 1813. 66  TNA ADM 1/3764, TBLPW, 1813, fols. 489–90: Capt. Cotgrave to TO, May 3, 1813. fols. 489–90. 64 65

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Years, but […] it will give me great Pleasure to meet any Enquiry into my Conduct”.67 Five days later, on May 8, 1813, Cotgrave submitted a thirty-­ page, point-by-point rebuttal of the petitioners’ allegations, backed up in places by testimony from other members of the civilian staff and garrison, and repeating his earlier charge that the Frenchmen’s claims were “calculated by artifice to subvert all established order and Regulation prescribed by our Government” and “by Art and Invention to destroy all legal authority of the Agent”.68 When the Board forwarded Cotgrave’s letters and accompanying documentation to the Admiralty later that month, it was clearly expected that the matter would go no further.69 It looked then as if the Frenchmen’s petition was going to join what its authors called the other “requests addressed in vain to the Admiralty and the Transport Office” on the subject.70 However, for reasons which remain unclear, in late May or early June 1813, official policy changed a second time, and Cotgrave received instructions from the Board that he was to give his full cooperation to a new committee set up by the Admiralty to investigate the complaints made by the prisoners.71 The allegations were evidently now being taken seriously enough to warrant an inquiry with more gold braid than its previous incarnation, for the three-man investigating committee included a rear admiral and a lieutenant-general. Dr Magrath was retained to provide independent medical expertise for the committee.72 The official record of the committee’s inquiry does not appear to have survived, but fortunately an undated copy of the twelve-page report has  Loc. cit., fol. 490.  Cotgrave, “Answers and Remarks”, fol. 441. 69  TNA ADM 1/3764, TBLPW, 1813, fols. 439–40: TO to J.W. Croker, May 19, 1813. 70  BAOWMS, W1/2717: “Petition of French prisoners against medical arrangements and their treatment at Dartmoor”, March 18, 1813, fol. 1. There is a reference in the TB correspondence to a letter sent “clandestinely” to the Board in October 1812, which may be relevant here. The Board instructed Cotgrave to “make brief observations on the material points as you shall judge fit, in order to refute [this] calumny”. A subsequent note mentioned that Dr Dykar was the subject of the allegations (TNA ADM 98/227, TBLADP, 1812–1813, fols. 121, 128: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Oct. 24, Nov. 10, 1812). 71  TNA ADM 98/227, TBLADP, 1812–1813, fol. 231: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, June 8, 1813. 72  The three other members of the committee were Rear-Admiral Sir Thomas Byam Martin, second-in-command of the Plymouth naval station; Lieutenant-General Edward Stephens, commander of the Plymouth garrison; and John Hawker, a Plymouth magistrate (Anon., “Article V”, 401–2). 67 68

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come to light among the Whitbread papers at Bedford Archives Office.73 The opening lines of the report immediately set the tone for what follows: “We observed in passing through the three first prisons, that the Men there had a very striking Appearance of good Health, and with the Exception of the fourth [prison], which contains the Prisoners who call themselves ‘Romans’, their Health is universally good”.74 After a long digression on the “Romans”,75 the report stated that the prison hospital was “clean and wholesome to the greatest degree”, and the diets provided for sick inmates “ample and so various, as to admit of humouring the Appetite of the Patient, as their Feelings and Propriety may dictate”.76 The report proceeded to heap “unlimited Praise” on Dartmoor’s surgeon, Dr Dykar “for his humane and unremitting Attention to the Care and Comfort of the Sick”, despite the challenging circumstances in which he was forced to work; notably the way in which “every sort of Artifice” was practiced by “dextrous Imposters” among the prisoners in order to fraudulently gain access to the prison hospital. For the commissioners, there was no doubt that “the Charge against the Surgeon in the Prisoners’ Petition [was]destitute of truth”.77 After similarly dismissing the petitioners’ allegations with regard to the distribution of clothing, overcrowding and prisoner rations,78 the report turned its attention to the allegation of ill-treatment of the wounded and sick by the soldiers of the prison garrison. The members of the committee categorically denied that the soldiers had behaved with “wilful and wanton cruelty” towards the prisoners. On the contrary, the report praised their “forbearance” which had “been proved in a most satisfactory way and [did] them the greatest credit”. In a significant passage (to be examined in detail presently), the report went on: That the prisoners have been occasionally pricked with a Bayonet, is not to be wondered at, and it is only to be attributed to the good humour of the Soldier and the good management of his Arms, that serious Accidents do not arise from the tumultuous way in which the Prisoners mob them, when 73  BAOWMS, W1/2716: “Report of the TB on the prisoners who call themselves Romans”, n.d. [1813]. 74  Ibid., fols. 1–2. 75  To be considered in detail in Chap. 5. 76  Ibid., fol. 6. 77  Ibid., fols. 6–7. 78  Ibid., fols. 8–9.

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in the Execution of their Duty, as Guards to the Officers of the Depôt, when they go within the Rails of the Prison.79

Only one of the prisoners’ complaints was upheld, in fact: the tax of one penny a gallon levied by prison staff on the sale of small beer was judged unjust.80 Otherwise, the committee concluded that the allegations contained in the petition were “without any foundation in truth; on the contrary, they have been treated with every degree of kindness and compassion, which humanity deserves, and their Captivity claims”.81 There was one final remark to be made by the three-man committee: “we consider the Petition to be the Fabrication of the three Subscribers to it, unsanctioned by the desire or by the feelings of the Body of the Prisoners, and those three persons appear to be of the most disreputable Character”.82 There is in fact an inherent tension in the report between, on the one hand, an attempt to single out these three men and distinguish them from the “desire” and “feelings” of “the body of the Prisoners”, and, on the other, a tendency to condemn the latter en masse as a disorderly rabble. The extract quoted above is particularly revealing in this respect, indicating as it does, firstly, that the soldiers of the garrison had indeed—as the petitioners alleged—used bayonets on the prisoners, though the language used (“pricked”, “occasionally”) seeks to minimise its importance. Even more significant for our purposes, however, is the passage which follows this one, which describes “the tumultuous way in which the Prisoners mob them [the soldiers], when in the Execution of their Duty, as Guards to the Officers of the Depôt, when they go within the Rails of the Prison”. Here, there is no question of a few isolated troublemakers, but a generalised pattern of disorder, indicated by the use of the ideologically charged words “tumultuous” and “mob”. In this context, it is revealing that while Cotgrave stated that he conversed “daily” with “the respectable part of the Prisoners”, the report conceded that the agent “does not visit the Prisons so often as he would wish, and as may be expected, […] because of the inconvenience and insult to which he is exposed”.83

 Ibid., fols. 10–11.  Ibid., fol. 10. 81  Ibid., fol. 12. 82  Ibid. 83  Ibid., fol. 5; Cotgrave, “Answers and Remarks”, fol. 443. 79 80

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All of which would seem to imply the existence in June 1813 of significant, perhaps endemic, hostility towards Cotgrave and the prison personnel, both civilian and military. It is reasonable to assume, moreover, that those tensions would have been exacerbated in the context of the outbreak of epidemic disease in which the petition had been framed, with the hospital at Dartmoor effectively under siege from prisoners seeking medical treatment, and large numbers of inmates branded as “dextrous Imposters”, and refused admittance by the prison surgeon. Conditions at the prison hospital would necessarily have been very different when the committee members visited the prison in June. By that point, the numbers of weekly deaths in the prison had fallen to a third of the level at the peak of the epidemic, and a party of “invalids” had already been selected by Dr Baird and left the prison for France.84 We turn now to a second case-study of illicit prisoner complaint at Dartmoor: a letter dated September 29, 1814, and probably smuggled out of the prison shortly afterwards. Addressed to the American Secretary of State, James Monroe, the document survives in the collections of the US National Archives in Washington, D.C.85 The context in which this letter was written is significantly different from that studied above. The first American prisoners, it will be recalled, had arrived at the prison in April 1813, and in May had been placed together in Prison N° 4, cut off from the rest of the inmates to either side by a pair of internal partition walls. In the meantime, the French contingent had left, following the armistice of April 1814, with the last inmates departing at the end of June.86 For the next twelve months, until Napoleon’s Cent Jours brought the return of the French, Dartmoor would be a uniquely American depot. In fact, by the summer of 1814 it had become the only American depot on British soil, with the Admiralty having decided that it would be prudent to concentrate its American prisoners in one single, high-security location. Stapleton Prison, near Bristol, had been the initial choice of the Transport Board (and appears to have been the prisoners’ own preference), but for 84  TNA ADM 103/640: Dartmoor death certificates, 1809–1816, certificates for June– July 1813; ADM 98/249, TBLAPL, 1812–1813, fol. 128: TO to Capt. Pellowe, May 25, 1813. 85  US National Archives, Washington, D.C., RG 45–566, Rolls and Lists of prisoners of war, 1812–1815, Box 2/4: Box 2/6: American prisoners, Dartmoor Prison, to James Monroe, Sept. 29, 1814. 86  ADM 98/228, TBLADP, 1813–1815, fols. 86, 88, 93: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, June 10, 13, 15 & July 1, 1814; James, 106.

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reasons that remain unclear, but which may, once again, be linked to the political influence of Thomas Tyrwhitt, official policy changed and it was subsequently decided to send all the American prisoners to Dartmoor.87 The first of the new wave of prisoners arrived in June from Stapleton, Norman Cross and from the hulks at Chatham, Portsmouth and Plymouth. By August 1814, the number of American prisoners at Dartmoor had risen to three times that at the beginning of the year, and by December to more than five times, to reach a total of about 5700.88 The fourteen-page letter bears the signatures of the thirteen members of the “Committee for the internal arrangements of the prison”, chaired by New York privateer seaman, Walter Colton. It opens with the conventional language of petitions of this kind, evoking the “aggravated distresses” and “wretched situation” faced by American prisoners of war at Dartmoor. The signatories of the letter—all mariners, principally from privateer, letter of marque and merchant vessels89—then move on to remind Secretary of State Monroe (while stating that it is not necessary to do so) how, with “avidity our seamen flew to arms on the declaration of war, and boldly encountered all dangers to revenge the usurpation of our Maritime Rights”. A case of “shew[ing] future Tyrants of the Ocean that, though strong, they cannot conquer the free and independent citizens of a virtuous government”.90 This stance has been shown to have been deeply ingrained in US maritime popular culture in this period, and for many of the common sailors who made up the American naval forces in the War of 1812, the frequently repeated phrase “free trade and sailors’ rights” not only encapsulated what many believed they were fighting for, but also reflected their firm conviction that mariners were citizens too; and, moreover, citizens who had a key role to play in both the defence and the identity of the “virtuous” young republic.91 As Dan Hicks has noted in this regard, those Americans taken captive during the War of 1812 were confronted by what he calls “the prisoners’ dilemma”; namely the fact that their understanding of the war meant that they regarded their detention not as a legitimate consequence of the fortunes of war, but as the action of an arbitrary, tyrannical power. How  Dye, “American Maritime Prisoners”, 305–6.  See 240n, for the calculation for December 1814. Other figures from James, 111. 89  Eight of the 13 signatories fell into this category. In addition, there were 4 former Royal Navy seamen and a quartermaster from the US Navy (Dye database). 90  American prisoners, Dartmoor Prison, to James Monroe, fol. 1. 91  Gilje, Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights, 263; Jones-Minsinger, 478–79. 87 88

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could they peacefully submit to their British captors in such circumstances?92 This understanding of their status as prisoners of “a heard-hearted, cruel and barbarous race”, as one Dartmoor captive put it,93 can be seen in the language adopted in the letter, with its references to “the unexampled humiliations and wretchedness of all those citizens which chance or superior force has thrown into the hands of this nation of unprincipled plunderers”. Turning to Dartmoor, the petitioners recount how, on arrival at the prison, they and their countrymen had been […] indiscriminately thrown into prisons already gorged with human misery, […] compelled, for a long time, to drag out a miserable existence amid the loathsome stench of crowded prisons, with scarcely food sufficient to support existence, with barely cloathes sufficient to hide our nakedness, much less to repell the piercing blasts of a winter’s wind, subject to the capricious orders of an unfeeling keeper without, and the licentious conduct of unprincipled wretches within.94

Thus far, the narrative developed in the document corresponds closely to what might have been expected from a complaint letter or petition of this kind, penned by American sailors. However, at the top of the third page, the letter takes an entirely different—and no doubt for Monroe, unexpected—direction: that of condemning the actions (or rather the lack of them) of US agent for prisoners of war in London, Reuben G. Beasley.  Based on Hicks, 212.  Waterhouse & Torry, 140. The authorship of this work has been the subject of ongoing debate, with at least two possible candidates suggested, in addition to Waterhouse himself, who was a well-known New England physician and scientist, and co-founder of Harvard Medical School (Viets; Agnew). Ira Dye offered convincing evidence that the first-hand testimony for the journal came from seaman, Henry Torry (the only one of the suggested authors known to have been at Dartmoor), who later passed on his account to Waterhouse (Dye, “American Maritime Prisoners”, 315–16). The latter’s biographer writes that the original testimony which forms the basis of the Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts was subsequently “embellished [by Waterhouse] with spread eagle nationalism, pious moralizing, and judgmental ethnic observations” (Cash, 383). In a letter to Thomas Jefferson of June 1816, Waterhouse wrote that that he had “worked up” the “raw material” of the original author “into one uniform warp, woof and coloring” (B. Waterhouse to T. Jefferson, June 18, 1816, Founders Online, NA, Jan. 18, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/ Jefferson/03-10-02-0097 [accessed 18 Feb. 2020]). For simplicity’s sake, Torry will be cited as the unique author of the journal in this book. As Agnew states, however (14), this attribution must remain tentative. 94  American prisoners, Dartmoor Prison, to James Monroe, fol. 2. 92 93

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There follow eleven pages of closely written, detailed allegations against the prisoners’ countryman, ending with an “earnest” request that for the benefit of the prisoners at Dartmoor, present and future, Beasley “may be removed from this important office and another appointed in his place”. It was “impossible”, the petitioners added, that “the duties of the office” could be “worse conducted” than by the present incumbent.95 Reuben Gaunt Beasley, formerly the American vice-consul in London, had become de facto the country’s sole official representative in Britain, following the recall to Washington of the country’s more senior diplomatic staff in 1811–1812.96 He was officially recognised by the Transport Board as the agent for American prisoners of war in Britain in November 1812.97 Possessing a character that has been variously described as “flawed”, “proud” and “austere”, Beasley divided his time between prisoner of war affairs, reporting to Secretary of State Monroe on political and diplomatic matters and handling US commercial interests in Britain. Like John Mitchell, his counterpart stationed at the British prisoner of war station at Halifax, Nova Scotia, Beasley was hamstrung by a lack of clear orders from his own government, coupled with a tendency for the British authorities to regard his activities with deep suspicion. In addition, like all the prisoner of war agents on both sides of the conflict, Beasley regularly experienced the fallout from deteriorating diplomatic relations between the two belligerent nations, which resulted in restrictions being placed on his access to the prisoner of war depots in Britain, and the retention or censorship of letters addressed to him by his countrymen.98 The American agent would later complain that the letters sent to him by prisoners via the Transport Office generally arrived “in large bags full at a time, and at irregular and distant intervals”, often with several letters from the same correspondent, in which a later letter would complain of its author having received no reply to a previous one. Beasley’s answers to those letters, he claimed, “were subject to similar delay and the risk of being detained or lost”. He added that letters “often” went astray.99  Ibid., fol. 13.  Smith, 137; Dye, “American Maritime Prisoners”, 300; Taylor, 365–66. 97  TNA ADM 98/291: To US agent in Britain, 1812–1816, TO to R.  Beasley, Nov. 13, 1812. 98  Jones-Minsinger, 481–82; Dye, “American Maritime Prisoners”; Taylor, 366. 99  USS Constitution Museum, Boston, Ira Dye Collection, Series V (microfilm): NARA T168, Consular Letters from London (Beasley Letters), 1812–1816, R.  Beasley to J. Madison, Nov. 28, 1816. On this letter, see J. Jones, 141–44. 95 96

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This context may help explain Beasley’s seeming remoteness as far as the US prisoners at Dartmoor were concerned. But only up to a point, for as Alan Taylor has remarked, the US agent “saw little point in hearing complaints from the prisoners when he could do so little to redress them”.100 A stance confirmed by the man himself, who later observed: “had I visited the depots myself once a month, the prisoners would not have been better served”.101 Beasley much preferred in fact to concentrate his efforts on working through conventional Anglo-American diplomatic channels in London, rather than trying to fight his way through a dense thicket of Transport Office red tape in order to organise possibly futile visits to the depots—and where in any case he risked facing a hostile reception from the prisoners. Beasley clearly believed that his time in London was well spent, and he later expressed his “regret” that he “should have been the subject of so much animosity among the prisoners, in whose behalf I had exerted myself as much from feeling as duty”. A case, in his view, of “strong prejudices” fed by “misinformation and misrepresentation”.102 The evidence from the surviving prisoner journals and indeed from Beasley’s own letters paints a different picture. It would seem that during the whole of his four-year tenure as agent for American prisoners of war, the American agent only made three requests to visit in person the prison ships and war depots where his countrymen were held captive, all during a six-month period in 1813. He visited the Chatham hulks in February and Dartmoor in September. Beasley also met the prisoners at Stapleton at around this time. There are numerous accounts of his visits to Chatham and Dartmoor, and all agree that his visits were brief and his questions cursory. On neither occasion apparently was he able to offer much in the way of practical assistance.103 Beasley may have considered that his hands were tied. The prisoners clearly saw things differently, as is revealed by the detailed account given in the 1814 prisoners’ letter of the agent’s visit to Dartmoor the previous September. He had interviewed a number of prisoners one after the other in one of the prison offices; perhaps, as he later explained was his method,  Taylor, 366.  See note 99 for reference. 102  Ibid. 103  TNA ADM/120: TBLPW, to the Admiralty, 1812–1813, fol. 27: TO to J.W. Croker, Feb. 3, 1813; Dye, “American Maritime Prisoners”, 300; Jones-Minsinger, 485; Andrews, 51; NA, RG 94–127, Box 7, Folder 2: R. Beasley to Gen. Mason, Oct. 28, 1813. 100 101

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by arranging to talk to “the most respectable and intelligent of the Prisoners and especially those from whose letters of complaint had been received”.104 He asked each prisoner he talked to for details of where they were born, when they had been captured, and from what kind of vessel. Although Beasley may well have been seeking information for his superiors in Washington on the burning issue of impressment,105 the prisoners were clearly shocked that his questions did not include any enquiries after their health or conditions. In fact, the agent had appeared to regard “the miserable beings that surrounded him with all the indifference of an unconcerned spectator”. According to the petitioners, “his whole conduct in this instance was marked more with the appearance of a master of an English press-gang, than a man sent to ameliorate the sufferings of upwards of three thousand of his unfortunate countrymen”.106 If Beasley had indeed exerted himself “as much from feeling as duty”, as he would later claim, he had evidently failed to communicate that empathy to the prisoners.107 The conclusion of the prisoners’ letter left no doubt that they considered themselves abandoned by the American agent; left “without any information of the present and the cold cheerless uncertainty of the future” to “drag a miserable existance through one of the most inclement Seasons ever Known in this Country, perishing for the want of foods, and shivering at every blast for the want of Cloaths”.108 The winter of 1813–1814 on Dartmoor was indeed one of the most “inclement” on record, with the middle two weeks of January reputedly the coldest in living memory. By January 19, there were snow drifts of up to ten feet; the water-courses in the prison had frozen solid; and the Plymouth road was impassable. Even the prison’s own provision stores (of vital importance when the prison was cut off from the outside world) remained inaccessible until a working party of 200 prisoners, guards and civilian volunteers had spent a whole day clearing a path through the snow.109 Prisoner Charles Andrews recalled that “the prison walls, by being continually damp, had become like solid ice, and the prisoners [were] obliged to keep [to] their hammocks, for being allowed no fire, had no other means to keep themselves warm”. For once, the overcrowding in  See note 100 for reference.  Jones-Minsinger, 484. 106  American prisoners, Dartmoor Prison, to James Monroe, fols. 3–4. 107  Jones-Minsinger, 484. 108  American prisoners, Dartmoor Prison, to James Monroe, fol. 4. 109  Lloyd, Prisoners of War, 290; Stanbrook, 60. 104 105

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the prisons worked to the prisoners’ advantage: “Were not the hammocks placed so near together as to communicate the animal heat from one man to another”, Andrews affirmed, “the prisoners must inevitably have frozen”.110 According to Andrews’ account, in December 1813, with still no news from Beasley since his visit in September, a new letter was sent to the American agent, apparently with the approval of Captain Shortland (newly appointed as governor-agent of the prison), requesting that the US government send supplies of food and clothing to the prisoners in Dartmoor, “to prevent her citizens from perishing for want in a foreign prison”. The request came with an ultimatum: unless relief for the American prisoners at Dartmoor was forthcoming soon, they would offer their services “en masse” to the British, and send copies of all their letters addressed to Beasley to the US congress, “which would most undoubtedly cast all the blame on him”.111 Whether or not the timing was coincidental, a letter from Beasley reached Dartmoor at the beginning of February 1814 (“the first scrap in writing any prisoner in England had ever received from him”, Andrews noted bitterly), announcing that the American prisoners were to be granted a daily allowance of 1½d for the purchase of tobacco and soap (later raised to 2½d). In April, new clothes were also provided from US government funds for the American prisoners, replacing the hated Transport Office yellow with blue.112 Put together with the fact that some prisoners who had served in the Royal Navy prior to the conflict received back pay and prize money at about this time, a considerable amount of money was now flowing into the prison, up to £2500 a month, according to one modern estimate.113 And with the market now accessible to the Americans for the first time, it became possible for inmates to buy or barter extra food and clothing in return for cash or prisoner manufactures.114 The daily allowance may have been “Beasley’s most important contribution to the welfare of the American prisoners”,115 but there clearly  Andrews, 61–62.  Ibid., 63. 112  Ibid., 67, 83; Dye, “American Maritime Prisoners”, 305; ADM 98/170, TBLPW, circular, 1808–1815, fol. 179: Jan. 25, 1814; ADM 98/228, TBLADP, 1813–1815, fol. 62: TO to Capt. Shortland, March 25, 1814. 113  Dye, “American Maritime Prisoners”, 305; Fabel, 176–77. 114  Dye, “American Maritime Prisoners”, 305; Thomson, 115. 115  J. Jones, 82. 110 111

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remained a strong conviction among the prisoners at Dartmoor, as evidenced by their letter of September 1814, that a man sent by their government “expressly to hear and redress our complaints” had in reality “totally neglect[ed] the sacred duties of that important office, and become the traficker in the miseries of his countrymen by withholding from them the necessaries allowed by their country, [and] by treating all their complaints and requests with silent contempt”.116 That this was not an isolated complaint against the American agent is confirmed by a second Dartmoor letter written by the American prisoners, also dating from September 1814, and also surviving in the collections of the US National Archives. The letter was addressed this time both to Secretary of State Monroe and to General John Mason, US Commissary General of Prisoners of War, and bears the signatures of twenty-two members of a second prisoner committee, chaired by Marblehead privateer lieutenant Neil C.  Lemon, recently transferred to the depot from the Chatham hulks.117 The letter also concerns above all complaints against Reuben Beasley, but is both shorter and more wide-ranging than the first, with the focus on the agent’s treatment of US seamen in general, rather than on those at Dartmoor in particular. There are references, for example, to Beasley’s refusal to offer assistance to seamen calling on him in London, or to provide funds to help prisoners released from a Chatham hulk.118 That being said, the overall charges against the agent are similar: that he had “refus[ed] to assist the citizens of the United States, confined in this part of the world with his advice and endeavours, to render their disagreeable situation more comfortable”, and thus was “unfit [… to] be entrusted with an office the duties of which have been fulfilled in a manner so disgraceful to such an Enlightened Nation and Government as ours”.119  American prisoners, Dartmoor Prison, to James Monroe, fol. 11.  US National Archives, Washington, D.C., RG 45–566, Rolls and Lists of prisoners of war, 1812–1815, Box 2/4: “Representation from the Committee of Prisoners at Dartmoor against Mr Beasley”, to James Monroe and Gen. John Mason, September 1814; TNA ADM 103/89: GEBDPUS, 1814, prisoner n° 2723. Lemon was also one of the signatories of the petition of September 29, discussed earlier in the chapter. 118  “Representation of Prisoners at Dartmoor against Mr Beasley”, fols. 1–2. 119  Ibid., fols. 3–4. Similar complaints against Beasley were made by a group of American officers on parole in Ashburton (Devon) in a letter addressed to US Navy Secretary, William Jones, in July 1813 (USS Constitution Museum, Boston, Ira Dye Collection, Series VIII, Box 3, Folder 109: American prisoners, Ashburton, to W.  Jones, July 15, 1813), and by American prisoners on the Chatham hulks, also in July 1813 (To J. Madison from American prisoners of war, July 20, 1813 (Abstract), in Kreider et al., 453–54). 116 117

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Interestingly, both of the US letters discussed above refer to an exchange of letters with Samuel Whitbread II, probably towards the end of 1813, on the subject of the legal and administrative status of Americans who had served in the Royal Navy before the outbreak of the War of 1812.120 In each case, it was stressed that Whitbread had only been solicited when it was discovered that “nothing could be expected of the conduct of Mr Beasley” on the subject. This episode adds further weight to the evidence of the letters themselves that the behaviour of the American prisoners at Dartmoor conformed to the pattern noted by Elizabeth Jones-Minsinger; namely a realisation on their part that “self-reliance was the best avenue for the redress of their grievances”, and that the elected prisoner committees were the key to obtain that redress, rather than the US agent.121 Ironically, Beasley himself might have encouraged that development. In his letter of February 1814 (as reported by Charles Andrews), the former had encouraged the American prisoners at Dartmoor “to appoint a committee, by which means you can convey to me any intelligence through the Board of Transport”.122 In fact, as shall be seen in the following chapters, committee rule was already well-established at the prison by this date, probably closely modelled on the experience of US inmates on the prison hulks.123 The committees would indeed become an important conduit for “conveying intelligence”, but just not to Beasley, or at least not only to him.

IV Samuel Whitbread II was also involved, albeit tangentially, in a final contested narrative relating to Dartmoor to be considered here; one which concerns on this occasion not testimony emanating from the prisoners themselves, but rather press coverage of, and international reaction to, a major health crisis at the prison, along with subsequent efforts by the Transport Office to minimise the impact of hostile commentary concerning the prison and its regime. On Sunday July 28, 1811, an article was published in the radical weekly, The Independent Whig, recalling the newspaper’s efforts earlier that year to call “the Public Attention to the 120  “Representation of Prisoners at Dartmoor against Mr Beasley”, fol. 3; American prisoners, Dartmoor Prison, to James Monroe, fol. 6. 121  Jones-Minsinger, 485. 122  Andrews, 67. 123  Fabel, 177.

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situation and conditions of the French Prison at Dartmoor”.124 The hope had been that the paper’s intervention in the debate on the subject would “excite the notice of the Legislature” and “lead to an investigation of the facts […] which, for the honor and credit of the Country, as well as for the sake of humanity and justice, should never have been suffered to exist”. The article acknowledged the value of Lord Thomas Cochrane’s speech in the Commons the previous month—cited earlier in this chapter—but lamented the fact that further inquiry into the matter had been “stifle[d]” by the government, and that “the bare word of a Minister” and “the varnished representations of interested individuals” (a reference, no doubt, to Thomas Tyrwhitt) had been sufficient to “divert the vigilance of the Legislature”. The Independent Whig went on to repeat its charge against the government that the latter had forsaken “the common duties of humanity” in building a prison on a “noisome and pestilential” site, thereby favouring “speculative” private interests over the health and welfare of the prisoners of war in its care. In fact, the article alleged, it was well-known “that the prison was built for the convenience of the town, not the town for the prison”, in order to “force” a market on Princetown, whose inhabitants were “solitary, insulated, absorbed, [and] buried in their own bogs”. Thus “arose the dreary, deadly walls of Dartmoor Prison”, where “six or seven thousand human beings, deprived of Liberty by the chance of War [… were] thrust into a noisome receptacle, consigned to linger out probably many tedious years in misery and disease”.125 Interestingly, on the same day as this article was published, a letter on the subject of Dartmoor Prison appeared in the pages of The Examiner, signed “Humanitas”.126 Regretting, like the Independent Whig, that the matter had been “too hastily dispatched” in parliament the previous month, the letter levelled the same charge of recklessness against the government for having chosen such an “insalubrious” a site for Dartmoor. And as someone residing “not far from Dartmoor”, Humanitas claimed to know what he was talking about. He described how, while riding over the moor on horseback in autumn, “torrents” of rain and cold air had forced 124  “Dartmoor Prison”, The Independent Whig, July 28, 1811, repr. in TNA ADM 97/109: Correspondence from legal officers, 1811–1812: Charles Bicknell to TO, Sept. 19, 1811, fol. 1. 125  Ibid., fols. 2–3. On this case, see Daly, 374; Abell, 238–41; Thomson, 80–84. 126  Humanitas, “Lord Cochrane” [Letter], The Examiner, n° 187, July 28, 1811, 488–89.

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him to dismount and warm his hands, “to prevent them from freezing”.127 “Mr Whitbread” (who had contradicted Lord Cochrane on this point)128 could not, Humanitas asserted, be expected to appreciate the reality on the ground. Not that this was his fault, the correspondent conceded graciously. After all, an MP’s parliamentary duties would no doubt keep him in the Capital “excepting in one of two or three months in the finer season”. Thus, Whitbread would naturally be unaware of the “abundance of rain” that lashed the region for most of the year, and of the treeless, stony mountains separated by “the gutters or valleys that nature has made between them, [which] are full of the most horrible swamps”.129 The Examiner letter proceeded to make a number of claims of suspiciously high mortality at Dartmoor, including the assertion that “five or six hundred [had] perished only the winter before last”, before concluding that the best solution would be to abandon “a place never designed by nature for the abode of man”.130 There had indeed been a sharp rise in the number of deaths at Dartmoor during the period mentioned by Humanitas. Between November 1809 and the following April, some 400 French prisoners died of a particularly virulent form of typhus fever. At the height of the epidemic in early February 1810, more than forty prisoners were dying at Dartmoor every week, the cause of death in most cases noted simply on the weekly returns as “fever”.131 The psychological toll of this invisible killer on the prisoners was also considerable. French physician, Emile-­ André Bodeau, assisting in the prison hospital,132 later recalled the “terror” that had “gripped the prisoners” at the beginning of 1810.133 The words of French inmate “P.G.”, writing in his diary on January 12, give an indication of the atmosphere in the prison at that time. “Death”, he wrote, “has already mown down close to 700 men over the last two and a half months, and still it continues to wreak havoc. The moment when the  Ibid., 488.  HC Debates, “French Prisoners of War”, S.  Whitbread II, June 14/18, 1811, cc. 638–39, 698. 129  Humanitas, 488–89. 130  Ibid. 131  TNA ADM 103/640: Dartmoor death certificates, 1809–1816, certificates for Nov. 1809 to Apr. 1810; ADM 103/623: Register of French Deaths, Dartmoor Prison, 1809–1816; Account of the Number of French Prisoners of War [1811]. 132  Bodeau might have been one of the “skilful Medical Men among the French prisoners” whom Dr Dykar was instructed to employ at the hospital in December 1809 (TNA ADM 98/116, TBLPW, To the Admiralty, 1810: TO to J.W. Croker, Jan. 23, 1810). 133  Bodeau, 14. 127 128

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disease first strikes is almost the same as the moment of death, such is the short interval between the two. I’ll consider myself very fortunate if I manage to escape it.”134 The unusually high number of suicides in the prison during this period—including two in one week in January—may offer further evidence of the strains caused by the outbreak. That was certainly Dr Bodeau’s view.135 Indeed, the Plymouth coroner was called to the prison so frequently during this period that he submitted a request to the Transport Office in February 1810 for the government to defray the jurors’ expenses. In the letter accompanying his request, he observed: “I have taken more Inquests at the prison since it has been compleated than I did during the whole time I have held the Office [… for this parish] which is nearly fourteen years”.136 It was the deadliest epidemic in Dartmoor’s history, carrying off in six months more than a quarter of all of those who died during the whole six and a half years of the prison’s existence.137 Every morning, according to the account of French prisoner Alexandre Lardier, coffins were brought into the hospital wards, and those who had died during the previous night removed after the casket lids had been nailed down in the presence of the remaining patients. Lardier, evidently shocked by the practice, speculated that witnessing this grim daily ritual had “hastened the death of more than one poor soul” in Dartmoor’s hospital.138 The dead were subsequently buried without ceremony in shallow, communal graves in the burial ground known as “dead man’s land” just outside the prison walls, beyond the northern guardhouse.139 When Transport Board medical inspector Dr Andrew Baird visited the prison at the end of January 1810, he found “a scene of sickness […] more serious because more generally diffused thro’ the Prisoners than anything 134   Le Havre Municipal Archives, France, Ms. 53Z15: Diary of P.G., Dartmoor, 1809–1810, fol. 11: Jan. 12, 1810. 135  TNA ADM 103/640: Dartmoor death certificates, 1809–1816, certificates for Nov. 1809–Apr. 1810; Bodeau, 14. 136  TNA ADM 97/108, TO, Correspondence from legal officers, 1808–1810, Plymouth coroner’s office to TO, Feb. 17, 1810, fol. 2; Stanbrook, 34. The TB subsequently agreed to the coroner’s request (loc. cit., Charles Bicknell to TO, Feb. 24, 1810). 137  Lloyd, Prisoners of War, 283; TNA ADM 103/623: Register of French and American Deaths, Dartmoor prison, 1809–1816. 138  Lardier, vol. 1, 219–20. Lardier stated, however, that in other respects the prison’s medical officer and his staff were “honourable” men, treating their patients with “humanity” (ibid., 219). 139  Joy, 41; James, 39–40.

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I have before experienced, whilst the crowded [prisons] and want of space for further accommodation of the sick present most awful difficulties”.140 Baird added that with nearly 800 prisoners suffering from the disease, “it is utterly impossible for any Medical Man with only one assistant and all communication with the sick made thro’ the medium of an interpreter to discharge the duty arising therefrom”.141 Baird was ordered back to Dartmoor a week later with three medical colleagues, including Mill Prison’s Dr Magrath, to carry out a full medical inspection of the prison.142 Their report confirmed Baird’s diagnosis of typhus, noting that the disease had first made its appearance in the prison in September, with the arrival of a group of prisoners from Plymouth, some of whom were already showing symptoms of fever. The report repeated the Transport Board inspector’s earlier request for additional medical staff at the prison, and also affirmed that, with over 600 patients in the hospital suffering from fever, and more set to arrive, it was imperative to make more hospital beds available as soon as possible.143 The floor space between the hospital beds had already been filled up with mattresses and when that became insufficient, one of the five prisons had been converted for medical use. The report recommended that the petty officers’ prison also be converted as soon as possible into a “comfortable hospital”.144 No new medical treatments were suggested, but the four men did advise the rebuilding of the structures that had been pulled down the previous year intended for airing hammocks and bedding, so that the prisons could be better ventilated. The physicians also expressed their regret that the cocklofts intended by Alexander for affording the inmates exercise in bad weather had been converted into extra prisoner accommodation. The cumulative effect of these changes, they stated, was a close, noisome 140  BAOWMS, W1/2711: Dr Andrew Baird to TO, Jan. 30, 1810; TNA ADM 98/225–29, TBLADP, 1808–1810: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Feb. 2, 1810; ADM 98/151: TBLPW, 1809–1810, TO to Dr Baird, Jan. 25, 1810. 141  Dr Baird to TO, Jan. 30, 1810, loc. cit. 142  BAOWMS, W1/2711: Dr Baird et  al. to TO, Feb. 6, 1810; fol. 1; TNA ADM 98/225–29, TBLADP, 1808–1810: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Feb. 2, 1810. 143  Dr Bodeau put the figure for January 1810 at 1000 (Bodeau, 14). 144  Lardier, vol. 1, 218; Dr Baird et al. to TO, Feb. 6, 1810, loc. cit., fols. 1–2. On April 14, 1810, it was ordered that the petty officers’ prison be “cleared of the sick” and prepared for use as a barracks (ADM 98/225, TBLADP, 1808–1810: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Apr. 12, 1810).

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atmosphere inside the prisons, conducive to the spread of disease. Further recommendations followed, including building separate kitchens for each prison (to limit prisoners’ exposure to the elements), and fitting each prison with fireplaces.145 The main recommendations of Dr Baird and his colleagues were put into effect (though the Board evidently drew the line at fitting fireplaces), and two medical assistants, one of them French, were provided for Dr Dykar for the duration of the crisis. The seriousness with which the situation was regarded by the Transport Board is indicated by their instruction issued to Cotgrave on February 17 that he provide them with daily updates on the numbers of sick prisoners at Dartmoor until further notice.146 Only in April 1810 did the weekly mortality levels at the prison return to single figures.147 Looking back on this period several years later, Baird recalled of the typhus outbreak that “great exertions [had been] necessary in subduing it; it was not till considerable mortality had taken place, that we were able to subdue it”.148 Interestingly, even before the typhus epidemic at Dartmoor had been “subdued”, the Transport Board was seeking to forestall any criticism of its handling of the health crisis. Responding to a letter of January 22, 1810, from the Admiralty which had mentioned an allegation made by a certain “W.W.” that “700 Sick Prisoners at Dartmoor [were] attended by one Surgeon and one Assistant”, the board riposted that they had instructed Dr Dykar the previous month to “employ as many skilful Medical Men among the French prisoners” as he judged necessary; a statement that appears to contradict Dr Baird’s evidence of staff shortages at the hospital, quoted earlier.149 In any case, the letter went on, “the sickness prevalent at Dartmoor [had not] been under all the circumstances extraordinarily great, many of the Sick having been recently received from the

 Dr Baird et al. to TO, Feb. 6, 1810, loc. cit, fols. 1–2; Stanbrook, 34–35.  TNA ADM 98/225, TBLADP, 1808–1810: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Feb. 17 & 19, March 22, 1810; ADM 98/151: TBLPW, 1809–1810, TO to Dr Baird, Feb. 7 & 10, 1810; ADM 98/116, TBLPW, To the Admiralty, 1810: TO to J.W. Croker, Jan. 23, 1810, Feb. 9 & 16, 1810; Kelly, 135. 147  TNA ADM 103/640: Dartmoor death certificates, 1809–1816, certificates for March– April 1810. 148  RCP, 175. 149  TNA ADM 98/116, TBLPW, To the Admiralty, 1810: TO to J.W. Croker, Jan. 23, 1810, fol. 1. 145 146

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West Indies”.150 The same double argument—minimising the severity of the outbreak and blaming the epidemic on the arrival of prisoners infected elsewhere—reappeared in a number of government statements in parliament on the question in June 1811.151 That this official explanation for the typhus epidemic differed markedly from the account provided by the Transport Board’s own medical experts was not allowed to muddy the waters. On this occasion, therefore, it was not a case of the kind discussed earlier in this chapter, when an official report blithely affirmed that “all was well”, but rather that the report affirmed the contrary, but was subsequently, as the Independent Whig might have put it, “stifled”. No doubt the Board would have justified its silence on the matter by its wish to avoid providing ammunition for its enemies, taking the view (as the Morning Post put it in its presentation of the Commons debate on Dartmoor) that “such statements, though they are easily refuted at home, are yet expected to cause serious mischief abroad”.152 A second strategy was pursued by the Transport Board that summer, following the publication of the articles in the Independent Whig and The Examiner: that of seeking legal advice from the Attorney General, Sir Vicary Gibbs, on whether there might be grounds for prosecution for libel.153 Gibbs agreed that both articles were libellous. The case against the Independent Whig was, he judged, the strongest, “but if the statement of deaths in the other [The Examiner …] is, as I conceive it, unsupported by the fact, this is equally mischievous”. He suspected, however, that the members of a jury would “perhaps think the question whether Dartmoor be or not a fit place for a War prison fair matter for public discussion & Enquiry & may think that these writers have not in their manner of treating the subject so far exceeded the bounds of propriety that they ought to be convicted as libellous”. On this basis, the Attorney General advised against proceeding with either case.154 The matter rumbled on for at least a further month, with the Transport Board evidently keen to proceed with a libel suit. Although Gibbs subsequently changed his mind on the  Loc. cit., fols. 1–2.  “House of Commons”, Morning Post, June 17 & 19, 1811; Account of the Number of French Prisoners of War [1811]. 152  “House of Commons”, Morning Post, June 17, 1811. 153  Abell, 240–41; Thomson, 82–83. 154  TNA ADM 97/109: Correspondence from legal officers, 1811–1812: Correspondence relating to prosecution of the Independent Whig and The Examiner for libel, Aug.–Sept. 1811: Opinion of Sir V. Gibbs, Aug. 10, 1811. 150 151

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wisdom of prosecution, the case against the Independent Whig and The Examiner never reached the courts.155 As Basil Thomson observed, it may well be no coincidence that the Transport Board’s initial contacts with the Attorney General on this subject coincided with a letter dispatched to Commissioner Rivière at the French Ministry of the Marine in which the issue of prisoners’ conditions at Dartmoor was raised.156 The “ill consequences” which particularly preoccupied the Board with regard to the Independent Whig and Examiner may thus (following the logic of the Morning Post) have concerned international, rather than national, opinion, in a context in which the long-­ running negotiations with France at Morlaix over prisoner exchanges had reached a particularly delicate stage.157 In its letter to Rivière, dated August 12, 1811, the Transport Board affirmed, in response to earlier French allegations of ill-treatment at Dartmoor,158 that Dartmoor Prison had been built “at a great expense” in “one of the most salubrious Countries of England […] on a plan calculated for insuring the health and comfort of those confined in it”.159 Significantly, the letter added that the British negotiator at Morlaix, Colin Alexander Mackenzie, had been dispatched to Dartmoor, where he had obtained a certificate signed by “some of the Principal Prisoners”, attesting to “the general attention and good treatment” received by the French inmates in the prison hospital. The document was presented to Mackenzie’s opposite number on the French delegation. Attached to the letter was a return of the numbers of sick prisoners and deaths at Dartmoor, which indicated, according to the Transport Board, that the proportion of deaths at the prison during the previous year had been “little more than two out of the 100”; a figure, it claimed, significantly lower than that for the hulks or indeed for the prison depots as a whole. The Board expressed its hope that “the evidence of Facts” and “authentic proofs” such as these would champion over what it

155  Loc. cit., C. Bicknell to Mr Dixon, Sept. 5, 1811, and to TO, Sept. 19, 1811; Thomson, 82–83; Abell, 241. 156  Thomson, 83–84. 157  Chamberlain, Hell Upon Water, 225–26. 158  See AN, AF IV/1193. Marine: general correspondence (1811–1812), item 173: French Ministry of the Marine to TO, June 27, 1811, fol. 4. 159  TNA ADM 97/109: Correspondence from legal officers, 1811–1812: Correspondence relating to prosecution of the Independent Whig and The Examiner for libel, Aug.–Sept. 1811: TO to M. Rivière (extract), August 12, 1811.

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described as the “vague assertions” proffered by the French.160 The loyalist British press trumpeted that the matter of the “salubrity” of the Devon prison could now be “set […] at rest”, and that “nothing [could] be a better answer to the charges of the French Government, than the manner in which the French Prisoners are treated at Dartmoor Prison”.161 The French, however, remained unconvinced, and accused the British of using the exchange negotiations to stifle debate on the treatment of prisoners.162 In fact, criticism of what the Independent Whig had called “the baneful system” employed by the Transport Board for the management of the prisoners of war in its care would never be truly stifled, or the issue “set at rest”, either at home or abroad. The debate about the salubrity of Dartmoor rumbled on in the letters pages of The Examiner into the autumn of 1811,163 and the following year, as seen earlier, a highly critical article was published in The Statesman, signed “Honestus”, accusing the Board and its agents of feathering their nests at the expense of the prisoners of war nominally in their care, condemning the latter to dress in rags and subsist on poor quality and inadequate rations. Was it any wonder in such circumstances, Honestus asked, that the British were less than fully committed to establishing an exchange of prisoners? As a result, negotiations with the French on a prisoner exchange were doomed to failure, and soldiers and seamen held by Britain’s enemies condemned to “eternal Banishment” overseas.164 After once again seeking advice from the Attorney General, the Board decided this time that the authors of this “most gross and unfounded calumny” should be prosecuted, leading to the subsequent conviction and imprisonment of the Statesman’s editor, Daniel Lovell.165

 Ibid.  Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, Dec. 12, 1811, qtd. Thomson, 85; Morning Chronicle, Dec. 12, 1811. 162  AN, AF IV/1193. Ministry of Marine: general correspondence (1811–1812), item 172: French Ministry of the Marine to TO, Report to the Emperor, Dec. 11, 1811, fol. 2; AF IV/1194. Ministry of Marine: general correspondence (1813–1814), items 97–103: Draft decree for the creation of an inquiry on the conditions of French prisoners of war in England (July 1813); Kirkor, 11–12. 163  See Kelly, 140–42. 164  Honestus, “British Prisoners in France”, [letter to the editor], The Statesman, March 19, 1812. 165  TNA ADM 97/110: Correspondence from legal officers, 1812: C.  Bicknell  to TO, Nov. 20, 1812, “Case”, fol. 13. 160 161

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Francis Abell calculated that for the whole six and half years of Dartmoor’s existence, the average annual mortality rate was closer to 4 than 2 per cent.166 It is clear that this figure was neither as high as that claimed by the prison’s critics (such as the Examiner correspondent quoted above), nor as low as that announced by the Transport Board. Whether the 1485 deaths at the prison between 1809 and 1816 should therefore be considered as an “exceptionally high” figure or as “not horrendously high”, to quote two contrasting modern assessments,167 depends on the benchmark chosen. Basil Thomson argued that for “a population composed of men only between the ages of twenty and forty, […] the death-rate should [have been] merely nominal”.168 Even though the age-­ range of the prisoners at Dartmoor was in fact broader than Thomson suggests,169 his point is nevertheless a valid one. A crude calculation based on the numbers of deaths at Dartmoor expressed as a proportion of the total number of prisoners recorded in the prison’s General Entry Books gives a mortality rate of 9.66 per cent for the French prisoners (1809–1814). The distorting effect of multiple registrations noted by Ira Dye170 means that the true figure was probably in fact somewhat higher than this, perhaps between 10 and 11 per cent.171 The death rate for US prisoners (1813–1815) was considerably lower, at about 4 per cent; the result, in all  Abell, 450. See also James, 194.  Masson, 66; Daly, 374. Total number of deaths calculated from TNA ADM 103/623: Register of French and American Deaths, Dartmoor prison, 1809–1816. 168  Thomson, 84 (my emphasis). 169  Dye states that the youngest US prisoner was 9  years old and the oldest 68 (Dye, “Physical and Social Profiles”, 221). 170  Each time an inmate was moved within the system (to another war depot, to an external hospital to a civil prison, etc.) and then back again, another record was generated, ascribing him a new registration number (Dye, “American Maritime Prisoners”, 298). 171  TNA ADM 103/623: Register of French and American Deaths, Dartmoor prison, 1809–1816; ADM 103/92–97: GEBDPFR, 1809–1814. If multiple registrations of the kind mentioned in the previous note functioned to inflate the total number of French prisoners listed in the Entry Books by 5 or 10 per cent the overall mortality figure would be respectively 10.2 or 10.7 per cent. It seems unlikely that such double registrations concerned a higher proportion of prisoners than this. It should be noted that both the unadjusted and adjusted estimates proposed here are less than half the mortality rate (22.76 per cent) calculated for Dartmoor for the period 1809–1814 by Patrick Le Carvèse (Le Carvèse, Part 2, 138). Although Le Carvèse’s mortality totals, obtained from French government records, are very close to those listed in the Admiralty registers, the improbably low figure he gives for the total number of French prisoners held at Dartmoor (4952) functions to artificially boost the death rate for the prison. 166 167

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likelihood, of the shorter period spent at the prison in their case, together, perhaps, with the lower prevalence of epidemic disease.172 A detailed study undertaken for this book of 5760 French prisoners recorded in the first three of Dartmoor’s General Entry Books (May– September 1809) reveals, however, a significantly higher mortality rate for that cohort than for French captives as a whole: 14 per cent. This figure is probably a reflection of the deadly impact on the first arrivals at the prison of the typhus epidemic of 1809–1810 discussed earlier, coupled with the fact that this group comprised those inmates most likely statistically to spend a prolonged period at the prison. In fact, nearly two-thirds (65.5 per cent) of the cohort were confined on the moor for the full five-year period separating their arrival at the prison and the peace of 1814. The remaining fifth (20.5 per cent) were exchanged, released or transferred in the intervening period—or (in rare cases) escaped from the prison.173 Whatever definition of Thomson’s “merely nominal” mortality one chooses to adopt, a prison regime in which, for some cohorts at least, one inmate in seven admitted through its gates failed to leave through them, clearly does not match it. The explanation for the high level of mortality at the prison between 1809 and 1816 involves a range of factors, some of which relate directly to the design and policy decisions described in the previous chapter, or to failures by the Transport Board to implement the recommendations of its own inspectors, as seen in this one. Dr Baird was in no doubt that the “the crowded state” and “dirtiness of the prison” had contributed to the severity of the outbreak of typhus in 1809–1810, and he argued, probably rightly, that more rigorous standards of “cleanliness, ventilation, and good order” would have limited its impact.174 Whatever the truth of Baird’s claims, other factors are likely to have come into play to account for the high mortality at Dartmoor in these years, in the form of a variety of structural features of the war prison’s regime, some of them intended by the Transport Board, some of them not. Quite clearly in the former category was the recurrent use of dietary privation and solitary confinement (sometimes over extended periods) as a means of punishment at the prison. As noted earlier, the Admiralty was by no means unique in resorting to such methods to discipline prisoners, but when combined with the impact of  Dye database; Dye, “Dartmoor”, 4.  Calculated from TNA ADM 103/92–94: GEBDPFR, May–Sept. 1809. 174  RCP, 175–77. 172 173

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further privation resulting from the corruption or dishonesty of victualling contractors (and sometimes of prison staff), the erratic supply of clothing and bedding to inmates, not to mention the puzzling decision to leave the prison blocks unheated (even during Dartmoor’s “Siberian” winter), the cumulative effect on prisoners’ health could be devastating, particularly when placed alongside the profound psychological impact of incarceration.175 Was the Transport Board unaware of, or indifferent to, this reality? It was argued in the previous chapter that there is no valid case for endemic indifference on the part of the Transport Board in its treatment of prisoners of war, any more than there is of ubiquitous solicitude. Some ignorance of conditions on the ground is perhaps to be expected, given the numbers of prisoners of war for which the Board was responsible—numbers which were rising steeply every year between 1809 and 1813—and the complex logistical problems involved in accommodating, victualling and guarding several tens of thousands of enemy combatants.176 The Board did intervene when it discovered evidence of wrongdoing from contractors (including at Dartmoor, as will be seen below), and did on occasion reprimand or (more rarely) discipline or dismiss venal or brutal agents, staff and military personnel. That being said, it is reasonable to assume that much wrongdoing did not reach the ears of the Board’s chairman and commissioners in Whitehall, and that when it did, there was a tendency, at least in the first instance, to deny or downplay the veracity of a complaint—particularly when it emanated from the prisoners themselves. The 1810 article from Ackermann’s Repository cited in the previous chapter, it will be recalled, stated that “every comfort [was] administered to alleviate the prisoners’ unhappy lot, as far as the nature of circumstances will allow”. But just how far did “the nature of circumstances” allow “comfort” to be administered? “Comfort” is of course an elastic word, one that requires a context—in other words it requires “circumstances”. The Transport Board clearly believed that the regime provided at Dartmoor was consistent with the level of comfort appropriate for prisoners of war. Indeed, they regularly pointed out that it was superior to the minimum standard required (and to that provided by their enemies, though the latter vigorously contested that claim). Hence their genuine pride in the system in place. That commissioners like Ambrose Searle were  Calvet, 26–27.  Le Carvèse, Part 2, 148.

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unable to see beyond the apparent “ar[t]fulness and industry of the Prisoners” and comprehend the broader implications of the regime at the prison for the lives of its captive population, reflects their narrow, unbending conception of just what “comfort” for prisoners of war should entail; a conception which in turn was anchored (an appropriate metaphor in the circumstances) in a distinctive naval administrative culture; to which should be added the military, logistical and financial pressures bearing on a country engaged in a long-drawn-out war. From the perspective of Sir Rupert George’s desk, “comfort” meant clear rules consistently applied; it meant a meticulously designed table of rations providing food in sufficient (but not too sufficient) quantities and the regular (but not too regular) supply of clothes and bedding; and it meant an orderly and secure physical environment from which it was impossible—or at least very difficult—to escape. Which in turn entailed dissuasively harsh punishments for those who challenged those rules or threatened the security of the prison. In many respects, that framework was an immensely restrictive and punitive one; and it was one, as seen earlier, that could result in considerable suffering and in death. However, what historian Reginald Horsman has called “the paradox of Dartmoor Prison” in these years is that the very same restrictive and punitive framework also delegated responsibility for significant aspects of daily life in the prison to its inmates—or to certain of their number—in a way that would have been unthinkable in a criminal prison of the same period.177 The following chapter will explore the characteristics and limits of that paradoxical autonomy granted to the prisoners of Dartmoor.

 Horsman, 12–17. See also Budiansky, 306.

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CHAPTER 5

Hierarchy, Solidarity and Conflict: Dartmoor’s Hybrid Regime

On Sunday January 8, 1815, Dartmoor prisoner Benjamin “Frank” Palmer wrote in his diary: “As I have nothing new to write to day & nothing having transpired, I will give you an a/c how the day passes, that you could have been with me yesterday at Dartmoor”. Palmer, a twenty-one-­ year-old seaman from Connecticut, had been in captivity for a little over a year, and at the Devon prison since the previous October.1 He proceeded to describe the day in question, and is worth quoting at length: Day light appears & with it you hear the sound of gamblers who have been up through the night. As you must know that the gamblers have carried the day. The most of them drunk and some fighting, some cursing & some quarreling; they wake up all the prisoners. The next enquiry is whose cater it is, that is who stands cook for the day. ‘It’s mine’, answers a voice half stifled by the hammock, from which it proceeds well. Then turn out, the horn blows for bread. He turns out the rest of us. Lay untill breakfast is ready, which consists of a pint of shag warm tea and some dry bread. This meal being over, we soon pursue some employment. Some writing some reading, & some playing cards. Pass the time away untill dinner is announced, which consists of some most miserable Soup. We soon set down & devour our scanty meal & often rise with as good an appetite as we had before we 1  TNA ADM 103/90: GEBDPUS, 1814, prisoner n° 3944; Dye, “American Maritime Prisoners”, 317.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Davie, French and American Prisoners of War at Dartmoor Prison, 1805–1816, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83891-1_5

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sat down. However, obliged to be satisfied, we turn away & take a book or the chequerboard to turn our thoughts to some other subject. Night comes on & with it noise & tumult enough for Bedlam itself. Thus, we pass away day after day & a mere repetition of the same occurs […].2

Frank Palmer’s is one of twenty or so published or manuscript captivity narratives concerning Dartmoor War Prison known to exist, in the form of diaries (as here), memoirs or letters, penned by American or, more rarely, by French prisoners confined at the prison during the period 1809–1816. Several have already been cited. A study of this immensely—and unusually—rich and detailed body of first-hand carceral testimony will form the centrepiece of this chapter and of the next one, examining together for the first time the narratives of US prisoners like Frank Palmer and those of their French counterparts with whom they, albeit intermittently, shared the confines of the prison on the moor. When placed alongside the surviving official sources relating to the prison, it will allow us to explore in some depth the dynamics of what Lewis Clover, another US mariner confined at Dartmoor, termed this “world in miniature”.3 Dartmoor was of course a miniature world of a very particular kind. One undoubtedly striking particularity was the prison population’s overwhelmingly male character. In fact, women were not entirely absent from the prisoner of war depots of this period, even if it was exceptionally rare for them to be counted among the captive population.4 Dartmoor’s complement of staff included two women, a matron and a sempstress; and officers’ wives and other female visitors, not all of them on official business,5 would occasionally have been seen around the prison, though generally at a considerable distance from the prisoners.6 There were some opportunities for closer contact, however, as will be seen later in the book, notably at the prison market, and possibly at theatrical productions put on by the prisoners. As far as the presence of women within Dartmoor’s carceral population is concerned, evidence is scanty to say the least. There are a few scattered  Palmer, 134–35.  Clover, “Reminiscences”, vol. 23, n° 6, 518. 4  Lloyd, Prisoners of War, 188ff.; MacDougall, 157–64. 5  In May 1810, the TB received a complaint that certain Dartmoor turnkeys had been “harbouring women” in their quarters (ADM 98/225, TBLADP, 1808–1810, TO to Capt. Cotgrave, May 3, 1810). 6  Lloyd, Prisoners of War, 188. 2 3

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references to the subject during the first few months of the prison’s existence, indicative of the practice of the period for some women (sometimes with their children) to accompany their menfolk on campaign.7 In late May 1809, the Transport Board learnt that two French women, along with a small boy, had arrived at the prison with a group of prisoners sent from Plymouth. Mill Prison’s agent, Captain Rogers, was firmly reminded that, in line with Admiralty policy,8 neither women nor children were to be sent to Dartmoor “for any reason”.9 The two women are named in the Entry Books as Maria Possesseur and Térèse Pichasky. The former had been taken prisoner at sea in June 1803 off the Caribbean island of St. Vincent with her husband, Joshua, listed as a soldier. Their son François had been born in 1804 or 1805. All three arrived at Dartmoor on May 23, 1809.10 Little is known, on the other hand, about the status and history of Térèse Pichasky, beyond the fact that she was taken prisoner during the evacuation of St Domingue in December 1803 and was placed on a transport ship in Jamaica the following September, bound for Britain. She arrived at Dartmoor the day after the Possesseur family, on May 24, 1809.11 Despite the apparent intransigence of the Transport Office on the subject of prisoners “not connected with the naval or military service of the enemy” (repeated in instructions given to Agent Cotgrave in August that year),12 both women and the boy remained in the prison throughout 1809, and, in Pichasky’s case, for nearly the whole of 1810 as well, possibly spending some of that time in the prison hospital.13 Whether the  MacDougall, 157 and note 3.  MacDougall cites (ibid., 157) a TO circular of 1803 which stipulated that all French prisoners “not connected with the naval or military service of the enemy, nor seafaring persons” were to be allowed (at their own expense) to return to their own country immediately. See also Instructions for Agents, art. V. 9  TNA ADM 98/244: TBLAPL, 1809: TO to Capt. Rogers, May 27, 1809. 10  TNA ADM 103/92: GEBDPFR, 1809, prisoner numbers 501–2 (J. & M. Possesseur), 569 (T. Pichasky), 799 (F. Possesseur). 11  TNA ADM 103/92: GEBDPFR, 1809, prisoner n° 569; ADM 103/281: GEBPLFR, 1803–1804, prisoner n° 4515). 12  TNA ADM 98/225, TBLADP, 1808–1810, TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Aug. 30, 1809. Cotgrave was ordered to compile a list of women and children in the prison, noting for each, “to which prisoners they belong”. Arrangements were to be made “immediately” for their departure to France by cartel. 13  Joshua and Maria Possesseur and Térèse Pichasky all have the annotation “hospl” added in faint pencil next to their names in the Entry Books. The Possesseurs left the prison for France in March 1810; T. Pichasky at the end of December that year (TNA ADM 103/92: GEBDPFR, 1809; ADM 103/294: GEBPLFR, 1810, prisoner numbers 28, 101–3). 7 8

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women and child escaped detection during this period, or (more likely) were allowed to stay on for some other reason, is unclear, but Dartmoor was evidently not unique in this respect.14 There is only one subsequent mention of women prisoners at Dartmoor, this time from early July 1815, when four women arrived at the prison over several days with the second wave of French prisoners. On that occasion, however, perhaps because of the chaotic international situation, there was no official order to send the women away, and Agent Shortland was instructed that the women be victualled like the other prisoners.15 For most of Dartmoor’s prisoners, then, carceral life, with what Clover termed its “jealousies, envyings and strife”, involved almost uniquely homosocial interactions and relationships.16 The starting point for examining the dynamics of those interactions and relationships in this chapter will be an argument made earlier; namely, that the regime put in place by the Transport Office in war depots like Dartmoor may be considered a hybrid one, with one foot in conventional early nineteenth-century penal practice, and the other in a different, more contractual conception of incarceration, one which blended prisoner rights and obligations. It was a conception that (on paper at least) offered inmates a measure of autonomy or even, arguably, of self-government.17 Indeed, one reading of testimonies like those of Frank Palmer cited earlier, encountered in the secondary literature on Dartmoor War Prison, leads to the conclusion that the agent, turnkeys and garrison soldiers were but a distant presence in the lives of the prisoners, and that the prison effectively ran itself. It has thus been suggested by some researchers that “there was no close supervision of life within Dartmoor. That life was essentially devised by the prisoners themselves”; or that the latter “were left almost completely to themselves to organize the prison, maintain discipline, and fill their time as they chose”.18 It will be argued in this chapter that such statements fail to take into account the multi-layered framework of rules at work in the prison. In fact, French and American prisoners detained at Dartmoor during the period 1809–1816 were governed by no less than three sets of regulations. The first two comprise what Justin Jones  See MacDougall, 158–64; Chamberlain, Norman Cross, 84.  TNA ADM 98/228, TBLADP, 1813–1815, fol. 117r: TO to Capt. Shortland, July 3, 1815; Stanbrook, 70. 16  Clover, “Reminiscences”, vol. 23, n° 6, 518. 17  Hicks, 214. 18  Fabel, 188; Budiansky, 308–9. For the same point, see also Horsman. 14 15

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refers to as the “constraints and policies set out by the British government” and “the self-imposed regulations created by the various elected bodies of prisoner committees”.19 It will be suggested here that Jones’ first set of rules needs itself to be divided in two, since the Transport Office regulations of 1807–1809 discussed earlier drew on two very different (and potentially contradictory) logics: one that might be termed “carceral-­ punitive”, the other “contractual”. The aim of this chapter is firstly to examine how these three sets of rules were applied and interpreted on the ground by the various actors involved, and secondly to establish what space(s) those rules allowed for agency among the French and American prisoners confined at the prison.

I As Dan Hicks observes, “the main concern of British authorities was not to transform their captives but to contain them. More than anything else, what they wanted from their prisoners was quiescence.”20 Secure containment was thus the first and most fundamental function of the war prison from the Admiralty’s perspective—and had been a key factor in the decision to build a war depot on Dartmoor in the first place. Although, as seen earlier in the book, the principle was not applied consistently, this thinking had informed certain of the design features of the prison, based on the model of a “military fortress turned inside-out”; with both defensive and offensive features turned inwards towards the “inspection” and control of an internal enemy from the vantage point of the raised perimeter wall. As might have been predicted, however, the containment of up to 10,000 inmates proved less than complete, despite the array of security measures deployed at the prison, and escapes did occur. That being said, only a small fraction of Dartmoor’s prisoners successfully broke out; perhaps a hundred or so in all during the prison’s six-and-a-half-year existence, which corresponds to an average of between one and two escapes per month.21 This may be considered more of a trickle than a flood in the context of a  J. Jones, 69.  Hicks, 215–16. 21  This estimate was calculated by adding the figures for escapes from the sample of 5760 French prisoners studied for this book and those listed in Dye’s database of 6559 US prisoners. The total was then adjusted for the missing French prisoner population at Dartmoor during the period 1809–1816 to give an approximate overall number (TNA ADM 103/92–94: GEBDPFR, May–Sept. 1809; Dye database; Kirkor, 5). 19 20

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prison population running into the thousands, but, as noted earlier, each successful escape placed the whole of the depot’s personnel—agent, turnkeys and garrison—under the microscope, with the agent issued with urgent orders by the Transport Board to verify the security and surveillance measures in place at the prison, and if the latter had not proved deficient, to investigate the possibility of assistance from complicit prison personnel. The reality of prison break-outs, despite the “the greatest degree of vigilance” purportedly exercised by prison turnkeys and guards to prevent their happening,22 made it not only vital to redouble those efforts; it also placed intense—and unremitting—pressure on the agent to maintain an accurate, up-to-date record of who, exactly, was in the prison at any given time, so that any unauthorised absences could be identified quickly, and action taken. The prison’s General Entry Books played a vital role in this regard. Prisoners generally arrived at Dartmoor in the evening in groups of several hundred at a time, after journeying on foot under military escort from Plymouth; a wearying seventeen-mile march over difficult, hilly terrain. US prisoner Joseph Valpey recalled arriving at the prison in October 1814 after an exhausting march in the rain over “exceeding bad” roads. Many of the members of his party, Valpey noted, were without shoes or stockings and were regularly “pricked” by the bayonets of the accompanying soldiers to chivvy them on their way.23 Valpey’s countryman, John Allen, also remembered during his journey to the prison the previous year the soldiers being ordered by their officers to “prod the lagging ones with the sharp poin[t]e of the bayonet”, but added that “when the officers were on ahead”, the soldiers “conversed with the prisoners, at times joking about the variety of clothes the sailors wore” and “banter[ed] us with many questions, such as when the U.S.A. would give in and become colonies of His Majesties government again”. The party encountered a few local people on the road to the prison, mostly farmers’ wives on the way to local markets in Tavistock and Plymouth. “Their opinion of us”, Allen wrote, “was not flattering and some of them wished us in a hotter place than this”.24

 See above, 82.  Valpey, 12. 24  Massachusetts HS, Jacob Reeves papers, 1809–1835, Ms. N-779: J. Allen, “Trip from the Jason Prison Ship to Dartmoor”, 1813, 2–4. 22 23

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The registration process for new arrivals would usually take place the following morning (after “a Cold and disagreeable Night” on the floor of one of the prisons, in Valpey’s case, and “sour looks and jeering remarks” from the French inhabitants of his “already crowded” prison, in Allen’s), either in the airing yards next to the prisons or in one of the clerk’s offices.25 “Each man”, US prisoner Benjamin Browne later recalled, was “measured, […] critically examined, and his face peered into to discover any mark by which he might be distinguished; this and his complexion, were likewise recorded”. Further details were taken down of his age, place of birth, the vessel on which he was serving at the time of capture, and the “station” he had occupied on board.26 Browne was registered on the morning of October 1, 1814, along with the rest of the crew of the US privateer, Frolic, captured in the West Indies in January 1814 by the British brig-sloop HMS Heron. Browne and the others had arrived at the prison the previous evening, after an uncomfortable journey by ship from Portsmouth, and a night spent in the Plymouth hulks.27 Listed as a clerk from Salem, Massachusetts, Browne is described in the prison register as twenty-one years of age, 5 feet 5½ inches (1.66 m) tall, of slender build, oval face and pale complexion; with black hair, hazel eyes and no distinguishing marks. He is listed as US prisoner number 3598.28 There was both a practical and symbolic significance to the fact that Article n° 1 in the 1809 Instructions for Agents concerned the rules for filling in the Entry Books.29 The number given to each prisoner at the moment of registration—“to stand invariably against his Name during the Time he may remain in your Custody”30—represented his new identity; an identity composed no longer just of name and rank, but, as seen above, of de-materialised numbers, and a concise physical description, including skin colour and distinguishing marks such as scars and tattoos.31 It is no coincidence that a similar classification system was in use in the Australian penal colonies in this period for newly arrived transported convicts.32 In both cases, the prisoner’s body was enlisted to provide objective  Ibid., 5; Valpey, 12; J. Jones, 60, 62.  Browne, 161–62. 27  James, 158–60. 28  TNA ADM 103/89: GEBDPUS, 1814. 29  Instructions for Agents, 1–2. 30  Ibid., 2. 31  Hicks, 551. 32  Oxley, Convict Maids, 21; Oxley, “Convict Indents”. 25 26

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a­ nthropometrical evidence to confound attempts by inmates to conceal their identity. The assumption was that “imposition” (as the Instructions for Agents put it)33 was the default behaviour for both convicts and prisoners of war; resorted to in the latter case not only with a view to facilitating escape (or preventing its subsequent discovery), but also in order to obtain fraudulently prison supplies, back pay, prize money or private funds. In either case, it was reasoned, the detailed but concise physical description of a prisoner, what French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon would later term a “portrait parlé” or spoken portrait,34 offered a valuable—and easily portable—tool for penetrating beneath the obfuscation and mendacity, and establishing a prisoner’s “true” identity.35 The Entry Books were thus “live records”, to borrow Hamish Maxwell-­ Stewart’s felicitous phrase,36 not left to gather dust on a shelf, but constantly revised and updated, as prisoners were admitted, exchanged, transferred or released, or if they escaped (with an extra note in red added if “retaken”)—or died.37 Intelligence regarding prisoners bringing with them a reputation for disorderly or troublesome behaviour was also pencilled in next to their names. For Lieutenant Neil C. Lemon, for example, who would subsequently chair one of the prisoners’ committees behind the September 1814 letter to the US authorities on the subject of Agent Beasley, it was noted in red against his name: “One of the three privateer men who escaped from custody at Barbados with a small vessel, but were retaken and confined at Dominique whence they again escaped on board a scoop, and it is reported they murdered the Master thereof. Vide list from Chatham”.38 For a second signatory of the September 1814 letter, privateer captain Niel McKinnon, it was stated that he should be “particularly watched”, since he had been “most forward” in “rising” the crew of a transport ship before arriving at the prison.39 Along with the morning roll-call, the Entry Books thus embodied the war prison’s administrative power over the prisoners, a daily reminder to prisoners of their subaltern captive status.

 Instructions for Agents, 2.  Bertillon, Appendix B, 249–58. See Cole, ch. 2. 35  James, 75. 36  Maxwell-Stewart, 416–17. 37  Dye, Records. 38  TNA ADM 103/89: GEBDPUS, 1814, prisoner n° 2723. 39  Ibid., prisoner n° 3023. 33 34

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Dan Hicks has argued that the registration process and the roll-call— along with the initial march to the depot, and government-issue prison dress—should be considered as performing a ritual function, “designed […] both to mark the captives as prisoners, visibly and tangibly, and simultaneously to demonstrate the captors’ power over them”.40 Unsurprisingly, rituals like registration and roll-call were deeply resented by prisoners. Frenchman Alexandre Lardier offers a vivid illustration of this point in the former case, describing how, on arrival at Dartmoor, he and his countrymen had been subjected to […] a sort of inspection of our dress and physique, with our names and particulars written down in a register. He [Captain Cotgrave] made those of us whose appearance displeased him turn round and round in every direction, as if dancing a pirouette. He would then shrug his shoulders and give a pout of disgust […]. For those whose appearance he considered acceptable, he gave a condescending nod of approval […]. To think of French officiers being inspected and mocked by this orang-utan without spitting in his boorish face!41

US privateer seaman Henry Torry, shortly to be transferred to Dartmoor from the hulks at Chatham, used a different metaphor in a diary entry of July 1813, stating how he and his countrymen “dread[ed] to be again placed in rows, on board of a ship, or in a prison yard, to be stared at by the British vulgar, just as if we were Guinea negroes, exposed to the examination of some scoundrel negro merchants, commissioned to re-stock a plantation with black cattle”.42 Although Torry’s remarks evidence a distaste for slavery, it is significant, as Hicks points out, that “the prisoner clearly objected not merely to being treated like a slave but also to being associated conceptually with enslaved ‘negroes’”.43 It is not surprising in this context that other American captivity narratives should repeatedly express resentment at the constant counting, measuring and examining undertaken by the British authorities.44

 Hicks, 216.  Lardier, vol. 1, 194. 42  Waterhouse & Torry, 112. Torry arrived at Dartmoor on October 9, 1814 (TNA ADM 193/90: GEBDPUS, 1814, prisoner n° 4648). 43  Hicks, 219. 44  Ibid. 40 41

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The daily roll-call was perhaps the most resented of all of the official actions of this kind, perhaps because of its recurrent impact on the daily lives of prisoners, and it no doubt contributed to the feelings noted in a letter written by American privateer lieutenant Perez Drinkwater to his brother in May 1814, after three months spent at Dartmoor. Associating the actions of the British prison authorities with those of the various creeping insects which plagued the prisoners, Drinkwater wrote bitterly: We have plenty of creepers here to turn us out in the morning. Them and the English together don’t let us have much peace day nor night for they are both enemies to us and likewise to peace, and the more they can torment the human race the better they are pleased.45

The Instructions for Agents stipulated that prisoners were to be mustered “by name” twice a week, and “counted over daily”, with guards posted at the doors of each prison to count the prisoners as they filed out.46 Agent Cotgrave evidently interpreted those instructions as requiring a roll-call every morning at first light for all of Dartmoor’s inmates in front of their prisons. In winter, the thirty- to forty-five-minute count, often in sub-zero temperatures, would have been a particular ordeal, notably for those in poor health. A number of incidents were reported of prisoners collapsing from exposure during the procedure, in some cases with fatal results.47 In early 1813, Cotgrave seems to have bowed to pressure from the prisoners and ordered that the daily roll-call take place at 10am instead. Cotgrave may have come to regret the decision, for he subsequently noted with disapproval that the new time “did not make them turn out with any greater quickness than before” and he threatened to re-instate the dawn reveille if things did not improve.48 Whether he made good on that threat is not clear, but it would seem that when Captain Thomas Shortland took over as agent later that year, the dawn roll-calls were abandoned definitively.49 45  P. Drinkwater to E. Drinkwater, May 21, 1814, repr. in “Life in Dartmoor: A Military Prison during the War of 1812. Perez Drinkwater’s Narrative of Experience as a Prisoner of War”, Boston Daily Globe, March 31, 1885; TNA ADM 103/87: GEBDPUS, 1813–1814, prisoner n° 937. See also Felknor. 46  Instructions for Agents, Article VI. 47  Joy, 37. 48  Cotgrave, “Answers and Remarks”, fol. 462 (“Notice”, dated Feb. 1, 1813). 49  Joy, 37.

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There was still lingering resentment, however. Benjamin Browne recalled one occasion in late October 1814, when the prisoners were counted out no less than three times during the morning and early afternoon. During the second turn-out, guards searched the prisoners’ quarters. “Whether the intention was to worry and annoy us, I do not know”, he wrote, “but it certainly had that effect”.50 The precise background to these events is unclear (Browne claimed to have had no idea what the guards were looking for in the prisons),51 but the general context of autumn 1814 is that described in the previous chapter, marked by a rapid increase in the carceral population at Dartmoor from the early summer onwards (following the Admiralty decision to concentrate all US prisoners of war in one location), and the dispatch of those two letters of complaint to the American government in Washington at the end of September. Significantly, between late August and October that year, Shortland referred repeatedly in his official correspondence with the Transport Board to the “disorderly”, “turbulent” and “riotous” behaviour of the American prisoners, and requested (without success) the appointment of an extra turnkey to help maintain order.52 The repeated suspension of the prison market during this period (a policy described by Browne as Shortland’s “usual means of punishing us”)53 further attests to the deterioration in relations between the agent and the American prisoners. The fact that a series of large-scale escape attempts (involving tunnels dug under the floors of three of the prisons) had been foiled that summer,54 and the inmates placed on two-thirds rations to make good the damage, may help explain the evident tension in the prison. Working parties outside the prison were also stopped in September, following the escape of two prisoners.55 Recalling this period, Charles Andrews stated that “there was scarce a day, but some dispute or strife took place, between the turnkeys or guards and the prisoners, and kept a continual alarm”.56 Evidently, the

 Browne, 260–61.  Ibid., 260. 52  TNA ADM 98/228, TBLADP, 1813–1815, fols. 122, 124, 125, 127, 130–31, 150–51: TO to Capt. Shortland, Aug. 25, 26, 27, 30, Sept. 12, Oct. 27, 1814. 53  Browne, 259. This practice will be discussed in detail in Chap. 6. 54  See Chap. 6. 55  Thomson, 146–62; Stanbrook, 64; TNA ADM 98/228, TBLADP, 1813–1815: TO to Capt. Shortland, Sept. 8, 22, 1814. 56  Andrews, 122–23. 50 51

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roll-call was a significant cause of such “dispute” and “strife”, and a daily reminder of the constraints of captive status at Dartmoor.

II A further daily reminder of that status was the Transport Office-issue yellow prison dress.57 The use of distinctive, often colourful, prison clothing was a well-established practice by this period. The Penitentiary Act 1779 had stipulated that convicts be issued with “a coarse and uniform Apparel, with certain obvious Marks or badges affixed to the same, as well to humiliate the Wearers as to facilitate the discovery of escapes”.58 Some prison authorities, as at Gloucester County Gaol in the 1790s, opted for a vivid, two-coloured “harlequin” dress to achieve this double purpose, similar to the red and orange garments issued to French convicts in the same period.59 The clothing issued by the Transport Office to prisoners of war confined in Britain was just one colour: sulphur yellow. The distinctive hue was chosen not only for the reasons noted above, but also reportedly to prevent an illicit trade in prison garments with local tradespeople.60 The items issued to each prisoner comprised a coarse woollen jacket, waistcoat and calf-length pantaloons, stamped with the government broad arrow symbol and “T.O.”, printed in what one prisoner called “staring” black letters.61 A conical woollen hat of the same colour, two shirts, two pairs of stockings and a pair of wooden-soled canvas or “list” shoes completed the outfit. Benjamin Browne later regretted that he “did not procure a suit of this clothing, to bring home and deposit in a museum” or donate to “a travelling menagerie”.62 Another prisoner compared the effect to that of “a swarm of bees”.63 Although some captivity narratives claimed that the yellow garments were “rejected by all who could do without them”,64 it would appear that  Hicks, 220.  Qtd. Davie, 76. 59  Ibid., 129; Ignatieff, 124; Pierre, 32–37. 60  James, 60–61; Chamberlain, Norman Cross, 90. 61  Browne, 230. 62  Ibid. 63  New York State Archives, Ms. BD11128: Thomas B. Mott, War of 1812 songs and ballads, fol. 38: “A Hunting Song”. See also Andrews, 43; Clover, “Reminiscences”, vol. 23, n° 6, 519. 64  Browne, 230. 57 58

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despite complaints about the quality—“badly made and badly stitched” was one French prisoner’s succinct assessment65—and the apparently random sizes of the garments issued, many prisoners accepted to wear them, faute de mieux.66 The “toto” garments, as the French inmates called them,67 were supposed to last eighteenth months, and shirts and shoes nine, but evidently many items wore out well before then.68 In 1813, in the face of complaints from French prisoners, Captain Cotgrave insisted that he was perfectly within his rights (according to the 1809 Instructions for Agents)69 to refuse new clothes to prisoners if he did not consider that they were “in want”, and he asserted that submitting to their demands for more frequent replacements would be tantamount to issuing clothing “at the discretion of the French prisoners”. Not only would this fly “wantonly” in the face of regulations, but it would also enable prisoners “to sell their Clothing, and procure money at our Government’s expense”—a tacit reference to the illicit trade in prisoner clothing and bedding at Dartmoor described in Chap. 4, involvement in which was subject to severe sanction.70 It was noted earlier that the 1813 Transport Office inquiry held in the wake of the French prisoners’ complaints rejected the allegations that prison staff had profited from an illicit trade in prison garments, while acknowledging, that some inmates were left without adequate clothing while others were issued with several sets of garments. The committee report blamed this on prisoners “assuming the names and personating each other”, but it reasonable to assume that on occasion there were clerks willing to divert supplies to those inmates with the means to pay, perhaps depriving other (more impecunious) prisoners in the process. Interestingly, the 1813 report states that this “evil” trade in prison clothing “has been guarded against of late, by taking a description of their persons”, a

65  Le Havre Municipal Archives, France, Ms. 53Z15: Diary of P.G., Dartmoor, 1809–1810, fol. 7: Dec. 13, 1809. 66  Cobb, vol. 2, 14; Little, 233–34; J. Jones, 89–90. 67  Catel, vol. 2, 123; Lardier, vol. 1, 168. 68  J. Jones, 90; Stanbrook, 25. 69  Instructions for Agents, Article XX. 70  TNA ADM 1/3764, TBLPW, 1813: Capt. Cotgrave to TO, May 8, 1813, fol. 456; Morieux, Society of Prisoners, 323.

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reference perhaps to the use of the physical data from the General Entry Books to establish the identities of prisoners suspected of involvement.71 Whatever the precise causes of the shortages, the supply of prison clothing at Dartmoor remained a subject of rancour among prisoners of all nationalities throughout the period. It is striking in this respect that the three surviving letters of complaint penned by prisoners in 1813–1814 discussed in the previous chapter, one French and two American, all refer to the inadequacy of the clothing issued by the Transport Office. One undated piece of doggerel circulating in the prison around this time claimed that thanks to Cotgrave’s actions (or lack of them), the prison’s inmates had “not more than Adam had, to hide/His Nakedness from Eve his Bride”. Despite the poetic hyperbole, the bitterness was real enough, with one couplet expressing the hope for Cotgrave that “[…] when you die to Hell you’ll go,/For cheating Yankee Sailors so”.72 Unsurprisingly, the battle to keep warm in the face of the “Dartmoor weather” was a particular preoccupation. Thus, when Niel McKinnon wrote to a fellow countryman in Flanders in September 1814 requesting “pecuniary aid”, he explained that his clothes had been stolen, and that, given his poor health, “the inclemency of the winter at this place renders it […] absolutely necessary to be warmly clad”.73 In another letter, written in November that year, a second privateer captain, Richard Hamilton, told his mother that the conditions at the prison were such that inmates were forced to make improvised garments from their government-issue bedding of hammock, straw-filled paillasse and blanket: The horrors of Dartmoor is a task that I am inadequate to paint. The distress that prevails is almost incomprehensible; the bleak situation and ruinous state of the prison obliges us to make use of our blankets, hamacs and other articles of covering to prevent the weather from beating upon us.74

71  BAOWMS, W1/2716: “Report of the TB on the prisoners who call themselves Romans”, n.d. [1813], fol. 8. 72  New York State Archives, Ms. BD11128: Thomas B. Mott, War of 1812 songs and ballads, fol. 44. 73  Oberlin College, Special Collections, Orrin W.  June War of 1812 Collection: Capt. N.A. McKinnon to J. Lawrence, Sept. 30, 1814, fols. 1–2; TNA ADM 103/89: GEBDPUS, 1814, prisoner n° 3023. 74   Mariners’ Museum, Norfolk, Vancouver (Canada), Hamilton Letters, CK79(7): R. Hamilton to Mrs Hamilton, Nov. 26, 1814, fol. 1. See also Clarke.

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Hamilton added that were his liberty restored to him, “I would take great care that they never should again get possession of me, […] for I would rather sacrifice my existence than again be dragged to this place as food for vermin”.75

III When prisoners at Dartmoor complained of possessing “barely clothes sufficient to hide our nakedness” (as one of the US petitions put it in September 1814), this was often paired with a reference to “scarcely food sufficient to support existence”. In other words, in the minds of Dartmoor inmates, to quote again that doggerel aimed at Isaac Cotgrave, “clothes and grub” were often closely linked in prisoners’ minds, and the author of the verse was in no doubt that in both cases “what we get’s but very small”.76 In fact, these two issues illuminate rather different aspects of daily life at the prison, for the daily supply of carefully measured rations of bread, meat, fish and vegetables gave a role to the prisoners (albeit a limited one) in the inspection and approval of provisions supplied to them.77 In addition, the food was prepared by cooks chosen from amongst the captive population, not by members of the prison personnel, with that choice once again delegated to the inmates themselves. In this sense, the subject of prisoner of war rations represents a bridge, so to speak, between the “carceral-punitive” aspects of prison life dictated purely by Transport Office writ, and those “contractual” aspects in which there was a measure of autonomy for Dartmoor’s inmates. Admiralty regulations stipulated that all prisoners in confinement in Britain were to be issued with the same daily ration of bread, meat or fish, and vegetables (principally potatoes, turnips and “greens”).78 The “Table of the daily Ration of Provisions” annexed to the 1809 Instructions for Agents, stated that prisoners were to be provided daily with 1½ pounds (680 g) of bread, and half a pound (227 g) of beef, except on Wednesdays and Fridays when meat was replaced respectively by one pound (454 g) of pickled herrings and the same amount of cod. The fish was issued with  Ibid., fols. 1–2.  Thomas B. Mott, War of 1812 songs and ballads, loc. cit., fol. 45. See also “A Song”, in Valpey, 35. 77  Instructions for Agents, Article VIII. 78  This concerned prisoners “in health”. Sick prisoners were allowed rather a rather more generous ration (Instructions for Agents, Appendix 14). 75 76

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potatoes, whereas on other days prisoners were supplied with half a pound of green vegetables or turnips, one ounce (28 g) of barley, a quarter of an ounce (7 g) of onions and a third of an ounce (9 g) of salt to accompany the meat (the fish apparently being considered salty enough not to warrant any additional issue).79 At Dartmoor, the bread was baked in ovens located near the prison, using flour supplied by contractors, while the meat, fish and vegetables were brought by waggon and then prepared by the prisoner-­cooks referred to above (known as coqs in the French prisons) in the kitchens, or cookhouses as they were known, attached to the front end of each prison. Large copper “boilers” were used for cooking; each capable, one prisoner recalled, “of holding more than a large sized bullock, a cart load of turnips and cabbages, and two or three bushels of barley”.80 At midday, the sound of a horn from the cook-house announced that the day’s rations were ready for collection. The food for each mess was collected in a wooden bucket by a prisoner nominated each morning for the task.81 Then, according to one account, “each prisoner, being also furnished with a wooden spoon, sets round the bucket, on the wet floor, and makes a fierce attack”.82 Opinions varied as to the quality of the food. The official Table of rations stipulated that prisoners were to be issued with “good and wholesome fresh Beef, not Bull Beef”, fish of “good and sound” quality, bread “of whole Wheaten Meal”, and vegetables “good in their respective Kinds”.83 Louis Catel recalled with irony the “delicious” “dish-water-­ coloured” broth, “dreadful” bread and meat “as tough as old boots”.84 Other prisoners were more sanguine. David A. Neal considered that the provisions could “[not] be complained of”; Josiah Cobb and Frank Palmer remembered bread that was very “very palatable” and “generally of a very good quality”; and Frenchman Emile-André Bodeau complimented the prison’s “very good” drinking water.85 Seaman Lewis Clover, who arrived at Dartmoor from the Chatham hulks in October 1814, also recalled that the food was “good enough”, but added, significantly: “what there was of  Ibid., Appendix 13.  Cobb, vol. 2, 42. 81  J. Jones, 91–93; Stanbrook, 26–27. 82  Andrews, 41. 83  Instructions for Agents, Appendix 13. 84  Catel, vol. 1, 159, 171–72. 85  Neal, 115; Cobb, vol. 2, 13 (“very palatable”); Browne, 203 (“generally of a very good quality”); Bodeau, 9. 79 80

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it”.86 In fact, complaints about the “scanty” and “always insufficient” rations, “lacking in quantity”, “barely enough to keep us alive”, and the resulting “cravings” and “gnawings” of hunger, were a constant refrain in the captivity narratives of both French and American prisoners at Dartmoor.87 Cobb later recalled how he would try to eke out the meagre bread ration: As soon as I received my bread in the morning, I cut it into three equal parts; the one I ate at eight o’clock, the other at twelve, and the last from four to six, accordingly as I could tough it out. I never deviated from this rule, except once, to know the meaning of a full meal, and again to see how it would seem to fast twenty-four hours.88

Finding that the “fast” left him with “an increased appetite on the following morning, and a greater desire to devour all”, Cobb did not repeat the experiment.89 Other prisoners systematically ate their day’s rations at one sitting, leaving them, Clover wrote, “almost frantic from starvation” by the following day. “Those who possessed a little money”, he added, “fared somewhat better”.90 Writing in his diary on December 14, 1814, Frank Palmer was evidently feeling keenly the lack of that “little money”: I find my money is at its lowest ebb. We have formerly purchas’d our potatoes & cooked our own meals as the soup from the coppers is not fit to eat & likewise made our own coffee out of Barley finding that much cheaper and equally as good, but I fear we shall not be able to purchase Molasses or Coffee for the ensuing month. Alass Poverty, thou hideous monster why wilt thou Stare us thus daringly in the face?91

86  Clover, “Reminiscences”, vol. 23, n° 6, 518; TNA ADM 103/90: GEBDPUS, 1814, prisoner n° 5392. 87  J. Jones, 94. Quotations (in order) from Catel, vol. 1, 160; Pariset, 19; Massachusetts HS, Jacob Reeves papers, 1809–1835, Ms. N-779: J.  Allen, “Life at Dartmoor Prison”, 1813, 1; Bunnell, 137; Waterhouse & Torry, 172; Cobb, vol. 2, 236. 88  Cobb, vol. 2, 234–35. 89  Ibid., 235. 90  Clover, “Reminiscences”, vol. 23, n° 6, 518. On this point see also Massachusetts HS, Jacob Reeves papers, 1809–1835, Ms. N-779: J. Allen, “Life at Dartmoor Prison”, 1813, 6–7. Catel noted also that for many prisoners, the lunchtime soup was “the last meal of the day” (Catel, vol. 1, 172). 91  Palmer, 116.

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French prisoner “P.G.” also felt keenly both hunger and the lack of money as Christmas 1809 approached. He wrote in his diary: December 18th, 1809. The Christmas festivities are almost upon us. Celebrations are being organised on all sides. Everyone is joining in and making plans to do something special on that day. But I am friendless. The reason is perfectly simple—I don’t have any money. I have been suffering from hunger for two days now. My God, it’s awful to have nothing to eat except bad bread and water, and not enough even of that. Phew! I’ve just received 6d and eaten some potatoes, simply cooked in water, without even a pinch of salt to improve the taste. No matter, they were delicious, proving that of all the cooks, hunger is the most skilful and the best.92

By Christmas Day, the hunger pangs had returned: December 25th, 1809. My health is improving by the day, but Dame Hunger won’t leave me alone, not even for one minute. It feels as if I have been singled out for her special favours. If only she knew how much pain she is causing me with her relentlessness, I am sure she would desist.93

Less than two weeks later, the Frenchman returned to the subject: January 7th, 1810. I’ve sold a pair of trousers, and until I’ve spent all of the 5 shillings that I got for them, at least I won’t be short of bread to satisfy my appetite. I’m sure you’re thinking that selling one’s clothes is a sign of a debauched life, but don’t judge me harshly! On the contrary, you should excuse and feel sorry for me. If you don’t, I would be justified in concluding that you have never felt the pangs of hunger, and that you are judging me after eating your supper, sat in front of a good fire. But I have eaten, and have calmed the hunger that was devouring me.94

While such “devouring” hunger may not have been the intended consequence of the Transport Office’s daily Table of rations for prisoners of war, Ian MacDougall quotes a memorandum of 1811 which states that the scale adopted was one “which we are by experience convinced is on as

92  Le Havre Municipal Archives, France, Ms. 53Z15: Diary of P.G., Dartmoor, 1809–1810, fol. 8: Dec. 18, 1809. 93  Ibid., fol. 8: Dec. 25, 1809. 94  Ibid., fol. 10: Jan. 7, 1810.

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low a scale as is consistent with the health of prisoners”.95 Historians have tended to concur with the Transport Office assessment. Patricia Crimmin for example states that the diet for prisoners of war was “monotonous and dietetically unbalanced, but it compared favourably with that of civil prisoners in British jails and not unfavourably with the fare of British seamen”.96 In similar vein, MacDougall states that there was “[no] drastic difference (wine and spirits apart) in the amounts and kinds they [prisoners of war] were provided with by the Transport Board compared with what they had been accustomed to before capture, at least when in camp, barracks or billets or on shipboard”.97 How then should we interpret the widespread, and indeed vehement, complaints from prisoners of war held at Dartmoor and elsewhere about both the quality and (particularly) the quantity of the food provided by the authorities?98 Historian Paul Chamberlain has recently contended that a combination of Anglophobia, imperfect memory recall and obstreperousness are largely responsible for the frequency and tone of such complaints.99 While there seems little doubt that prisoner grievances on the subject need to be seen in part as a response to the daily privations, frustrations and humiliations of captivity,100 and that, as seen earlier in the book, captivity narratives could be a means for their authors to settle old scores with the British, it would be premature to write off prisoners’ complaints as mere bloody-mindedness, polemical point-scoring or amnesia. Indeed, the Transport Office’s own files offer plentiful grist to this particular mill, with many thousands of pages of official correspondence and legal papers detailing action taken against contractors all over the country found to have supplied sub-standard and/or insufficient quantities of bread, meat and fish to prisoners of war confined in Britain. True, as Chamberlain argues, this substantial body of material could be interpreted as an indication that “there was an effective procedure in place to monitor and maintain the standard of rations issued to the prisoners”.101 It could be countered that this same material also provides ample evidence to support the contention that the Transport Office’s monitoring and  Qtd. MacDougall, 241.  Crimmin, 22. 97  MacDougall, 248. On this point, see also Springer, 78. 98  Hicks, 223; J. Jones, 94; Taylor, 367. 99  Chamberlain, Norman Cross, 100–2. 100  MacDougall, 248. 101  Chamberlain, Norman Cross, 93. 95 96

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maintenance procedures were not equal to the task. With over 40,000 prisoners to be fed on a daily basis by 1810 (involving the supply of upwards of 45 tons of beef and 190 tons of bread every week), it is surely inconceivable that news of every case of contractor “rascality”, as MacDougall terms it, reached the ears of the Board’s commissioners in London and led to official intervention, however “humane” the latter’s intentions may have been.102 It is significant in this context that MacDougall’s own detailed study of the behaviour of the contractors supplying the Scottish war depots concluded that “few, if any, of those contractors were altruists concerned for the welfare the prisoners; on the contrary, maximum profit and minimum concern appeared all too often to be their guiding lights”.103 The evidence for Dartmoor points in the same direction. It will be recalled that the inquiry commissioned by the Transport Board in 1813 into French allegations of prisoner ill-treatment conceded that “the quality of the Provisions has no doubt varied, and at times not [been] so good as intended”. This was in fact something of an understatement: problems with the quality or quantity of rations (in particular the bread) supplied to Dartmoor were more or less constant during the prison’s six-year existence, lending weight to Basil Thomson’s contention that “the contractors [at Dartmoor] cheated whenever they could do so undetected”.104 Certainly, there is plentiful evidence of attempted fraud at the prison, with the Transport Board frequently resorting to hefty fines (or “mulets” as they were known) in an attempt to enforce the terms of the contracts signed with victuallers. On the numerous occasions when that tactic failed, the contract in question was “vacated” and a replacement sought.105 In two instances, in 1811–1812 and 1814, the Board went as far as taking legal action against Dartmoor’s fraudulent contractors.106 In one case heard at Exeter Assizes in 1814, several six-month prison sentences as well as heavy fines were handed down following evidence that bags of flour  MacDougall, 258; Rodger, 501.  MacDougall, 258. See also Hicks, 223–24. 104  Thomson, 16. 105  See TNA ADM 98/305–7: TO to contractors, 1808–1816. 106  TNA ADM 105/60: Prisoners of war, miscellaneous papers, 1795–1820: TO v. Twynam, Hageman & Drake, 1814; ADM 97/113: Correspondence from legal officers, 1815–1817: TO v. Twynam, Hageman & Drake, 1814; ADM 97/112: Correspondence from legal officers, 1814: TO v. Rowe, 1811–1812; Stanbrook, 56–57, 87–88; “Devon Assizes”, Morning Chronicle, Aug. 13, 1814. 102 103

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used for baking bread for the prison had been adulterated with china clay and other “deleterious articles”.107 The effects of such contractor fraud on prisoners often worked in tandem with other factors, thus aggravating its impact. These factors included the frequent use of cuts in rations (usually to two-thirds) by the prison authorities as a punitive sanction for rule-breaking; the practice of some prisoner-cooks to skim off (in some cases literally) a portion of their fellow inmates’ food ration for themselves or for resale; and finally the sale by some prisoners of their own rations to provide funds for gambling.108 True, inmates were able on occasion to supplement the Transport Office fare by purchasing food from the prison market, but it is important to remember that only those with the wherewithal to pay were able to benefit from such supplements to their diet. Furthermore, there were periods, sometimes lasting several months, when, for various reasons, Dartmoor’s agents either closed the market altogether or denied access to it for certain categories (or nationalities) of inmates. Thus, for nine  months between May 1813 and March 1814, the American prisoners were confined to their own compound in the centre of the Prison-Yard, and barred from access to the “all the privileges of the market which were allowed the French”.109 Only against this complex background is it possible to comprehend the character of the privations suffered by Dartmoor’s prisoners during their incarceration, which in turn explains the potency of the issue of food (particularly bread) as a source of tension, collective action and sometimes violence, at the prison, as will be seen later in the book. The French prisoners’ petition of 1813 cited in the previous chapter claimed that “provisions often vary in quantity and we are always coerced into approving them”.110 Cotgrave categorically rejected the suggestion that the prisoners’ representatives were being coerced into silence, citing a number of “surveys” carried out (as required by the 1809 Instructions for Agents), by himself, the prison surgeon, clerk and duty guard, which had failed to find any evidence of the inadequacies in the provisions pinpointed by the prisoners.111 In fact, Cotgrave claimed, “far from their being 107  ADM 105/60: Prisoners of war, miscellaneous papers, 1795–1820: TO v. Twynam, Hageman & Drake, Petition of R. Fox, master miller, 1815. See also Stanbrook, 87–88. 108  Fabel, 173; J. Jones, 92–93. 109  Thomson, 115; James, 104; Andrews, 24, 26, 72 (quotation at 72). 110  BAOWMS, W1/2718: E. Bontrouche, P. Corsant & H. Lengrand to S. Whitbread II, March 18, 1813, fol. 3. 111  Cotgrave, “Answers and Remarks”, fols. 450–52.

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delicate in making complaints”, the prisoners were constantly airing their grievances, and what is more used “artifice” and “fraudulent means” in order to justify their rejection of the provisions supplied to the prison. To back up this claim, he cited an incident from May 1813 when the provisions committee from one of the French prisons had rejected a consignment of 225 pounds of “good and wholesome” bread on the grounds that the bread had been “broken” during transport. Cotgrave alleged that the prisoners in question had resorted to mixing “the sweeping of the Bread in the Cook Rooms and stale Pieces of Bread […] amongst the returned Bread” in order to justify rejecting the ration, and thus be able to receive an additional supply “by unfair means”.112 The agent backed up his argument by appending to the survey a testimonial signed by eight French maître coqs from the different prisons at Dartmoor, all stating (in French) that, contrary to the claims of their countrymen, “the complete ration” had been issued on that day.113 Clearly, in Cotgrave’s opinion, “the Prisoners [had] received every item allowed them by Government, and of a good quality”.114 Cotgrave’s “Answers and Remarks” do not, however, tell the full story. That document, it should be stressed, was intended uniquely to refute what its author considered to be a series of vexatious allegations on the part of the French prisoners. The reality was more complex. For not only in fact had the agent himself frequently alerted the Transport Board to the deficiencies in the provisions supplied to Dartmoor,115 but it is also clear that certain of the surveys conducted by him following a complaint by the prisoners had ended up confirming the basis of the inmates’ grievances, not refuting them, prompting the Board to take action against the contractor responsible for the sub-standard supplies.116 Unfortunately, the small number of surviving provisions surveys for Dartmoor makes it difficult to reach any general conclusions about either the frequency of  Ibid., fols. 452–53.  Ibid., 453. 114  Ibid., 450–51. 115  In August 1810, the TB congratulated Cotgrave for “the Endeavours exerted by you to cause the Contractor to fulfil his contract in a proper manner” (TNA ADM 98/226, TBLADP, 1810–1811, fol. 13r: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Aug. 28, 1810). 116  See TNA ADM 97/112: Correspondence from legal officers, 1814: TO v. Rowe, 1811–1812, surveys Feb. 8 & 9, 1811; TNA ADM 98/226, TBLADP, 1810–1811, fols. 50v, 68v: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Feb. 13, May 15, 1811; ADM 98/306, fols. 17, 39, 40, 49: TO to Joshua Rowe, Feb. 19, May 15/21, July 27, 1811; Stanbrook, 44. 112 113

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prisoner complaints or the extent to which those complaints were acted upon. That being said, two things can be stated with confidence: first, that the prisoners charged with inspecting the incoming provisions were not (contrary to the claim of the 1813 French petition) systematically cowed into approving sub-standard rations, and second, that, in some cases at least, those complaints led to action on the part of the Transport Office. This conclusion does not alter the general point made earlier that the issue of food (particularly bread) was a significant source of tension and conflict at the prison, but it does confirm that the system of inspection of rations by prisoner-nominated committees was not an entirely empty shell, although admittedly it was a system that  depended ultimately on the goodwill of the prison authorities. This meant that official goodwill could be unilaterally withdrawn, and all prisoner complaints dismissed as either erroneous or malicious. In the spring of 1813, Captain Cotgrave had chosen precisely that course of action, but the subsequent chain of events—a letter of complaint from the French prisoners calling into question several aspects of the regime at Dartmoor, and then an official inquiry—reveals that it was a strategy that carried its own risks.

IV On December 12, 1814, Frank Palmer noted in his diary that the cooks employed to provide for his prison had been “turned out of office, having been detected in skimming the coppers & sundry other crimes”, and that a jury trial had been organised to judge their guilt.117 In his entry for the following day, Palmer recorded that the prisoner jury had returned a guilty verdict on several of the men, and a punishment of eighteen “stripes” handed down. Only the head cook was acquitted, a verdict which brought an angry reaction from certain of the prisoners, who, Palmer recounts, headed for the cook’s berth, and “demanded the culprit […]. His messmates refused to deliver him up; they talked of knives &c, but it has mer[e]ly ended in talk.” Palmer added: “I fear it is not settled yet”.118 Despite the evident risks attached to the position of cook (one prisoner described how they were “always suspected, watched and hated”), the fact that the four or five men chosen for the job in each prison “receive[d] for

 Palmer, 116–17.  Ibid., 117. See also Valpey, 16 for a similar case.

117 118

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their labour the skimmings and slush of the kettles”, plus 3d a day from the prison authorities, meant that there was no shortage of volunteers.119 Besides the cooks, only the members of each prison’s elected “committee” were allowed access to the prison kitchens while the food was being prepared, presumably to check that the “skimmings” and “slush” levied did not exceed the customarily accepted quantities.120 It has been suggested that Dartmoor had the most elaborate system of prisoner committees of any of the British war depots,121 with the twelve men elected in each prison block responsible for distributing the various remunerated positions within its purview (including the cooks, but also the barbers, the “sweepers” and the “criers”); for inspecting the provisions coming into the prison; and organising written communications with other depots and (in the American case) with their agent in London.122 Each committee operated according to a set of written rules, and thanks once again to Frank Palmer’s diary, we have a record of the rules adopted in one of the American prisons at Dartmoor in October 1814. The fourteen articles listed by Palmer (who is described as the committee “secretary”) include fines for gambling (or, in the case of shopkeepers, for allowing gambling in their shops), for taking down lights, fouling the prison, making a noise after 10pm, washing in the well, lighting a fire inside the prison between dusk and dawn and refusing to serve as a juryman. Stiffer penalties were generally imposed for a second or subsequent offence, and if a committee member broke the rules, the fine was doubled. Corporal punishment could be imposed for those found guilty of “Treachery, Theft, or uncleanliness123 […], according to the Degree & Nature of the offence & as the Jury Shall determine”. The regulations also stated that the committee’s decisions were final and that it was in their power to determine whether a particular offence merited a jury trial or not. It was further noted that monies collected in the form of fines would be used to defray the expenses of paper, pens and ink used by the committee and to remunerate the criers. Anyone unable to pay his debts would also be subject to a jury trial. Finally, one of the twelve committee members was charged with  Waterhouse & Torry, 161; Cobb, vol. 2, 41; Browne, 177–78.  Cobb, vol. 2, 41. 121  Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront, 178. 122  Browne, 178–79; Fabel, 178. 123  Jones-Minsinger (487) notes that the severe penalties imposed by the prisoner committees for “uncleanliness” reflected a fear that bad hygiene contributed to the spread of the hated lice, or even of smallpox. 119 120

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responsibility for receiving and paying out money (and instructed to keep written accounts); three nominated to oversee the preparation of food in the kitchens and two to inspect the provisions.124 Concerning the jury trials like the one described above by Palmer, Benjamin Browne noted that they “were conducted with a good deal of order and decorum in an odd way”; with the committee members acting as judges, “seated together, with very grave and sagacious looks”. He goes on: “It was rather a grotesque sight, at first, to see judges with tarpaulin hats, short jackets, or in short sleeves and duck trousers—to see jurymen in the same habiliments—and lawyers squirting tobacco juice out of one corner of their mouths in the midst of an eloquent harangue”.125 For all the “odd” and “grotesque” character of the proceedings, Browne conceded that for those convicted, the punishment was “often tremendously severe”,126 with between twelve and twenty-four lashes of the cat-o-nine-­ tails the standard sentence, similar to that given in the Royal Navy in the period.127 Most trials concerned cases of theft (whether of money or of food—including, in the latter case, “skimming” by cooks), though as noted above public order offences were also harshly treated.128 In one case of theft reported by Alexandre Lardier, a French prisoner found guilty of stealing the “considerable” sum of 150 guineas was sentenced to 100 lashes, given in three instalments; the assumption being that the full sentence given without interruption would have been too much for his body to take.129 After the punishment, the offender’s head was half-shaven and he was then attached to the railings of the market square, with placards on his chest and back indicating his name, rank, offence and punishment. Lardier adds that prisoners condemned in this way were subsequently expelled from their salle or room, and had to “seek refuge” elsewhere in the prison.130 There is evidence that homosexuality among the inmates was also subject to punitive intervention from the prisoner committees. Palmer noted in his diary on April 4, 1815: “Last night 3 Frenchmen were Detected in  Palmer, 244–46.  Browne, 179–80. 126  Ibid., 179. 127  Cobb, vol. 2, 137. On Royal Navy practice in this period, see Dacam, 89. 128  J. Jones, 76–77. 129  In the Royal Navy, particularly severe sentences of flogging were similarly often spread over several days (Dacam, 90). 130  Lardier, vol. 1, 227–28. 124 125

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the Act of buggery and this morning they were flog’d severely”. Interestingly, Palmer adds that the three men were “turnd in to [Prison] No 4 among the Negroes”, confirming the testimony quoted in Chap. 3, that, on occasion, “whites” were “driven from the other prisons by their bad conduct, and […] compelled to take up with such accommodations here [in N° 4], as they can find, or the blacks will allot them”.131 Josiah Cobb claimed that “there had been but two or three instances of this heinous sin being committed, on account of the serious penalty immediately following the conviction of the offender”.132 Does this mean that homosexuality was rare at Dartmoor, as has been suggested for other land depots?133 We quoted in Chap. 3 the Admiralty report of 1813 which spoke darkly of the Romans’ “most detestable and abominable vices”. Dr Dykar’s subsequent testimony that “in cold winter nights” the inhabitants of the Capitole “lay in the upper part of the [N° 4] prison in fifties and hundreds, upon one another’s laps” probably carried the same implication.134 Cobb too claimed that such homosexuality as did occur at the prison was confined to a particular, marginal group of prisoners.135 However, given the general tendency of both authorities and prisoners to vilify certain categories of prisoners, such remarks should probably be treated with caution. On the Chatham hulks, French army lieutenant and broke-parole Séverin Mésonant claimed that the “vice” was “more widespread” than theft, and a fellow countryman of his, held at Portchester Castle Prison, similarly described homosexuality there as “rampant”.136 Interestingly, Henry Torry’s memoir records how some of his fellow prisoners at Dartmoor, “men, once respectable, give examples of vice that I cannot describe, or even name; and I am fearful that some of our young boys, may carry home to their hitherto pure and chaste country, vices they never had any idea of when they left it”.137 On the face of it, such remarks would suggest that homosexuality at Dartmoor was more common than Cobb’s “two or three instances”, though Torry’s censorious stance may  Palmer, 176; Cobb, vol. 2, 43.  Cobb, vol. 2, 246. 133  MacDougall, 306–7. 134  BAOWMS, W1/2716: “Report of the TB on the prisoners who call themselves Romans”, n.d. [1813], fol. 2; RCP, testimony of Dr W. Dykar, 491. 135  Cobb, vol. 2, 246. He is referring here to the “Rough Allies”, to be discussed presently. 136  Mésonant, 74; J. Quantin, cited in Lloyd, Prisoners of War, 192. On attitudes to homosexuality among US mariners in this period, see Gilje, To Swear Like a Sailor, 32. 137  Waterhouse & Torry, 174. 131 132

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not make him the most reliable of observers either. A number of elliptical references in the Transport Board correspondence to “improper practices” or to “abuses alleged to prevail among prisoners” may reflect official concern on the subject.138 It has been argued that the governing committees set up by American prisoners during the War of 1812 “sought to approximate the civil society found on American soil, or least that found on American sailing vessels […], incorporat[ing] ideas of customary sailors’ rights and justice nurtured over generations of experience at sea”.139 It is significant in this context that the punishments meted out by the prisoner courts—including, as seen earlier, the use of corporal punishment—were similar in kind to those administered on naval vessels.140 Indeed, in many respects, the committee trials resembled military court martials, complete with prosecutors (chosen from among the committee members) and defence counsel, a role for which particular prisoners gained a reputation, and thus a steady stream of clients.141 The surviving evidence for the French conseils or councils at Dartmoor— though much less detailed than for the American committees—suggests a similar organisational structure, with a président and conseillers or councillors filling the roles, as Louis Catel put it, of “administrator, judge, investigating magistrate and policeman”, and with recourse to a jury trial for the most serious offences.142 The close resemblance between the US prisoner committees and the French conseils at Dartmoor suggests the presence of a transnational politico-naval culture at the prison. Alexandre Lardier explicitly placed the prison’s conseils in the tradition of the recent history of his country, comparing the election of the councillors to the way in which officers were nominated by the ordinary soldiers of the French revolutionary army. “We know what they accomplished and what became of them”, Lardier added; “they became marshals, dukes and princes, thanks to the popular vote”. He went on to state that the Dartmoor conseils “could not be praised highly enough” for perpetuating this noble revolutionary tradition.143 Catel also considered the French committees a 138  TNA ADM 98/226, TBLADP, 1810–1811, fol. 27v: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Nov. 19, 1810; ADM 98/227, TBLADP, 1812–1813, fol. 10: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Jan. 16, 1812. 139  Jones-Minsinger, 486. 140  Fabel, 159. 141  J. Jones, 76–77. 142  Catel, vol. 1, 151. See also Lardier, vol. 1, 226–27. 143  Lardier, vol. 1, 226.

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testament to the rule of “merit”, just as American memorialists vaunted the committees’ “democratical” and “municipal” principles.144 The harshest punishment meted out by the prisoners was reserved for those considered guilty of “treachery”. This group was comprised principally of prisoners who had opted to give up their captive status for military service with the British; or had informed on their fellow prisoners about a forthcoming escape attempt or some other prohibited activity. In such cases, due process might be replaced by a more informal—and grimly permanent—form of collective justice.145 Josiah Cobb recounts one such case from the end of December 1814, concerning six US prisoners who had chosen to enlist in the Royal Navy and had served on HMS Pelican, before giving themselves up to the authorities as American citizens once the Treaty of Ghent had been signed in December 1814. Given the delays involved in shipping the Americans out of Dartmoor, there was a real possibility that those returning to captivity in this way might be recognised by a former fellow prisoner.146 On the occasion discussed by Cobb, the men in question had in fact made little effort to hide their identity, and “after becoming some little merry” one evening had been heard boasting that their “carousing” was being financed by back pay obtained on the Pelican during the celebrated capture of the US brig, the Argus, in August 1813. According to Cobb’s account, the other prisoners could not bear that the six “should openly boast of fighting against their own countrymen, and publicly riot upon the spoils of the vanquished”, who had included the badly wounded (and now late) young commander of the Argus, “the gallantly remembered” William Henry Allen.147 Two of the carousers were “seized and stamped in the forehead and across the cheeks, with Indian ink pricked into the surface of the skin, with the word traitor”, and a third was tattooed “with the initial T on the one cheek, and termination R on the other”.148 The same events were referred to by a number of other American prisoners, including Charles Andrews, who noted that the decision to tattoo the three men had been taken after other options, including putting them  Catel, vol. 1, 151; Browne, 177; Cobb, vol. 2, 137.  J. Jones, 77. See also Fabel, 179–80. 146  Jones-Minsinger, 501. 147  Allen died of his wounds in Mill Prison hospital on August 18, 1813, and was buried in St Andrews Church, Plymouth. The surviving members of the Argus crew arrived at Dartmoor in September–October that year (Dye, Fatal Cruise of the Argus, 287–92). 148  Cobb, vol. 2, 250. See also J. Jones, 77. 144 145

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to death and “flogging them as severely as they could bear”, had been rejected.149 Similar punishments were meted out by both US and French prisoners in other prisoner of war land depots and on the hulks; though, according to one American account, “some thought the punishment was too severe, and which we had no right to inflict”.150 Alexandre Lardier recalled an encounter with a fellow countryman tattooed in this way shortly after his arrival at Dartmoor. He spotted a prisoner in the yard with what looked like “a broad black line forming a half-circle across his forehead, from one temple to the other”. Intrigued, Lardier had later sought out the man and discovered that the line was in fact a series of tattooed words, making the phrase: “J’ai vendu mes frères le 8 août 1809” (“I sold out my comrades on 8th August 1809”). Lardier learnt subsequently that the man had been punished for having informed the authorities about an escape plan in another prison, and had then been sent to several different depots before arriving at Dartmoor.151 As with jury trials and flogging sentences, the resort to shaming bodily disfigurement has a long history in state penal codes, both civil and military.152 The striking parallel between the punishments meted out by prisoners at Dartmoor and those associated with “drumming out” ceremonies for US army deserters in the same period are thus worthy of note, with shaving (or half-shaving) of the head and tattooing of the letter “D” on the body, face or forehead, all practiced. Similar rituals could be found in the British army at this period.153 The mimicking of official sentences by Dartmoor’s captive population reflects a well-attested characteristic of what has been described as the “counter-theatre” of prison culture.154 While other forms of prisoner-administered justice seem to have been generally tolerated by the prison authorities,155 a line was evidently drawn 149  Andrews, 141–42. See also Waterhouse & Torry, 181; Thomson, 106–8; Stanbrook, 66–67; Dye, “Tattoos”, 528. 150  Waterhouse & Torry, 94–95 (quotation at 95). For French cases, see Mésonant, 77; Anon., “Massacre des prisonniers de guerre”, 143–44; Garneray, Floating Prison, 238n. A second tattooing case at Dartmoor, on January 17 or 18, 1815, is recorded in a number of US sources (Pierce, 27; Valpey, 18–19; Selman, 71). 151  Lardier, vol. 1, 194–96. 152  Schaffner, 65–67; Le Breton, 28–30. 153  Whitehead, 261–62; Burroughs, 570. 154  Morieux, Society of Prisoners, 319. 155  Lardier, vol. 1, 225–26. However, in December 1815, the TB reprimanded Shortland for not having a prevented a prisoner flogging which was “so severe as to render the prisoner a fit object for hospital treatment”. A few days later, the agent was instructed to inform the

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at what Shortland called the “abominable transaction” of facial disfigurement,156 probably both for reasons of the permanent stigma involved, and because it targeted those whom Andrews termed Shortland’s “friends”, namely men who had given up their captive status to serve with the British forces.157 Thus, on learning of the incident cited above at the end of December 1814, the Dartmoor agent acted swiftly to identify those responsible and four American prisoners were placed in the prison cachot.158 As for the Pelican men, they were sent to Plymouth where they re-volunteered for the Royal Navy.159 In March, on the orders of the Transport Board, the four Dartmoor men from the cachot were brought before a grand jury at the Exeter assizes, charged with having “tattoo[ed] on the face several of their fellow prisoners […] with the letters T and R”. Shortland, Dr Magrath and seven prisoners—including two subjects of the prisoners’ exactions—were called to give evidence. However, owing to “the heavy press of business on the calendar”, it was decided to postpone the trial until the next assizes, and the case against the four men seems to have been subsequently dropped.160 A key question which follows from the previous discussion is the extent to which—if at all—such spontaneous expressions of informal justice were approved, tacitly or otherwise, by the elected prisoner committees. It was noted earlier that forced tattooing did not meet with the approval of all. The case reported by Frank Palmer of the prisoner-cooks condemned to be flogged following a committee-run trial illustrates that an “official” prisoners that only he was authorised to inflict punishments in the prison (TNA ADM 98/229, TBLADP, 1815–1817, fols. 29–30: TO to Capt. Shortland, Dec. 6, 11, 1815; ADM 98/262: TBMPW, Sept.–Dec. 1815: TO to Capt. Shortland, Dec. 9, 1815). 156  Andrews, 138–39; Fabel, 180; Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront, 184–85. Quotation from Stanbrook, 66. 157  Andrews, 142. 158  The Dartmoor Entry Books record that John Hogabets (or Hogaberts), Joseph Jackson, Samuel Robinet and Cornelius Saunders were sent to Exeter Gaol on March 9, 1815 (TNA ADM 103/87: GEBDPUS, 1813–1814, prisoner n° 338 (Hogabets); TNA ADM 103/88: GEBDPUS, 1814, prisoner n° 1536 (Jackson), n° 1738 (Saunders), n° 2113 (Robinet). The four men remained confined there until March 26, on which date they were returned to Dartmoor. They were released between late April and early June 1815 (ADM 103/91: GEBDPUS, 1814–1815, prisoner nos. 6550–3). 159  Dye, Fatal Cruise of the Argus, 296. 160   TNA ADM 97/113: TO, Correspondence from legal officers, 1815–1817: C. Bicknell to TO, March 13, 1815; W. Eastlake to C. Bricknell, March 20, 1815; ADM 103/87–88: GEBDPUS, 1813–1814; Browne, 244.

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sentence (or in this case the lack of one) might equally provoke hostility in some quarters. Henry Torry’s account of the events leading up to the tattooing of the three men in late December 1814 throws some interesting light on this question. Taking up the narrative at the point where Cobb had referred to the “carousing” and “boasting” of the former crewmen of the Pelican, Torry describes how a group he terms the “Rough Allies” had “seized” the men, […] and kicked and cuffed them about unmercifully; and they took one of them, who had talked more imprudently than the rest, and led him to the lamp iron that projected from one of the prisons, and would in all probability, have hanged him thereon, had not Shortland rescued him by an armed force.161

Earlier in his memoir, Torry describes how these Rough Allies meted out their own version of justice, independently of the committee system: They assumed to themselves the office of accuser, judge and executioner. They appear to have little principle, and as little humanity, and many of them are given up to every vice; and yet these ragamuffins have been allowed to hold the scale and rod of justice. These rough allies make summary work with the accused, and seldom fail to drag him to punishment.162

Indeed, on one occasion there is evidence that the Rough Allies directly challenged the authority of the committee in one of the Dartmoor prisons, sequestering its chairman and threatening him with a flogging, before being thwarted by a group of prisoners loyal to the committee, among them the chairman’s son.163 The Rough Allies (or Alleys)164 have been variously described by historians as “extra-legal regulators”, “a criminal gang” and specialists in “various types of knavery”.165 References to their actions are scattered 161  Waterhouse & Torry, 181. See also Palmer, 127 on this incident (though he makes no mention of the role of the Rough Allies). 162  Waterhouse & Torry, 162. 163  Browne, 224–26. On these events, see also Fabel, 180–81. 164  Various origins for the moniker have been suggested, including the “rough” neighbourhoods from which many of their members purportedly originated. An anglicisation of the French term “Raffalés”, which designated similar unruly groups on the French hulks, is also a possibility (Lloyd, Arts and Crafts, 276). 165  Jones-Minsinger, 491, Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront, 183; Fabel, 180.

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throughout the US Dartmoor captivity narratives.166 The tenor of those remarks is unwaveringly hostile. According to Benjamin Browne, here was “as rascally a set of devils as ever escaped drowning”. In fact, he claimed, “three quarters of the misery and privations we endured here, were owing to these human brutes [… who] were continually prowling about the prisons, day and night, seeking what they might steal and devour”.167 Josiah Cobb describes the Allies in similar terms, as “riotous, disorderly, filthy, [and] thievishly inclined”. He goes on to explain how, whenever there was a “sudden collection of a crowd, or a quick gathering for whatever purpose”, the word “keno” would be shouted out by one of the Rough Allies, and this signal would soon be “reverberating and echoing throughout the prisons”. At which point, “the dirty, the tattered, the half-naked, the hideous, were seen with begrimmed faces and stooping postures, pushing out from every hole and corner, wherever they might be, and scudding towards the scene of disorder with hasty strides”.168 Prison roll-call was seen as the perfect opportunity to “make a keno”, and it was a regular practice among the American prisoners, notably in bad weather. According to one account, it involved “rushing in on the Soldiers and heaving them into the mud”.169 One historian of Dartmoor has described the Rough Allies as “the American equivalent of the ‘Romans’”.170 In fact, with the exception of this remark made in passing, there has been little attempt in previous scholarship to explore the similarities and differences between these two groups of prisoners—a reflection perhaps of the tendency for the respective historiographies of the French Wars and the War of 1812 to follow parallel, but rarely intersecting, trajectories. Louis Catel provides the most detailed discussion of the Romans, and, interestingly, he situates them in in a broader prisoner hierarchy. Catel distinguishes six groups in all: (1) les lords, (2) les laborieux, (3) les indifférents, (4) les minables,171 (5) les

 J. Jones, 113.  Browne, 223. 168  Cobb, vol. 2, 152–53. 169  Pierce, 28–29 (quotation at 28). 170  Stanbrook, 55. 171  The French adjective from which this noun derives suggests both shabby-looking and useless. 166 167

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kaiserlics172 and (6) les romains.173 Significantly, only the first two groups are evoked with unequivocal approval. The first was comprised of the French officers confined in the prison, chiefly junior officers (of which Catel was one), or more senior “broke-paroles”, sent to the war depot as punishment. This was the group most likely to have access to external funds. Details of those funds are sparse, but a surviving letter (which concerns, by coincidence, a shipmate of Catel’s) indicates that the sums involved might be substantial. The letter was written in April 1810 by a fellow prisoner to a Normandy family member of French privateer second captain, François Ledrenay, following the latter’s death at the height of the typhus epidemic that January. It lists various sums of money that were owed to the captain at the time of his death (or perhaps held in keeping for him), amounting in all to £282 14s.174 Presumably, Ledrenay had belonged to that category of French prisoners later referred to by Charles Andrews as “gentlemen of large fortunes, […] able to support themselves in a genteel manner, though they were prisoners”. Seen with Andrews’ censorious eye, here were men who “seem[ed] easy under it [confinement], liv[ing] well and mak[ing] money to lay up” from forgery or from the manufacture of hats, hair and bone-work; apparently content to “drink, sing and dance […] when their house is on fire over them”.175 Ledrenay certainly had the financial means to conform to the portrait sketched by the American; whether he did so is unknown. The second of Catel’s groups, les laborieux, concerned those prepared to work for the British or produce articles for the prison market (perhaps at the behest of one of the “manufacturers” referred to above) in order to provide themselves with an income, which, although “modest”, was considered sufficient for their needs. The third group, as their name implies, are described by the French memoirist as passively indifferent to their fate: 172  A pejorative term dating to the period of the French Revolution, used to describe a soldier of the armies of the German states or Austria, or a French émigré supporting the coalition ranged against the revolutionary army. 173  Catel, vol. 2, 122–28. See also Thomson, 45; Lloyd, Arts and Crafts, 277. 174  Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris, France, Pièces relatives au Consulat et au Premier Empire, Généalogie, biographie et papiers de personnalités parisiennes ou d’historiens de Paris (series 30), fols. 112–17: Unknown correspondent to Mme Sebire, Granville (Normandy), Apr. 21, 1810; TNA ADM 103/93: GEBDPFR, 1809, prisoner n° 2305. Ledrenay died in the prison hospital, aged 38, on January 29, 1810, the cause of death listed as “fever” (ADM 103/640: Dartmoor death certificates, 1809–1816, week ending Feb. 2, 1810). 175  Andrews, 53–54.

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“those who did nothing, resigning themselves philosophically to the rations and supplies provided by the British government”. Interestingly, the members of each of the three categories below les indifférents in the hierarchy are described as compulsive gamblers, ready to exchange their clothes and rations for money to feed their habit. His depiction lends weight to the claim that gambling was widespread among French prisoners of war; a way, it has been suggested, for them to forget the mind-­ numbing boredom of captivity and avoid thinking about the future.176 However, while les minables drew the line at selling anything more than their rations and shirt, les kaiserlics were also ready to part with their shoes.177 The final group, les romains, were reckoned to comprise anything between 250 and 700 individuals at Dartmoor. Having sold most or all of their clothes and bedding, they were left with nothing but rags, or perhaps a blanket pierced with a hole and worn poncho-style or tied around the neck. Inside their cockloft quarters in Prison N° 4 known as the Capitole, they might dispense even with those rags. Food came from scraps salvaged or stolen from the prisons or cookhouses, begged or stolen from market traders, or occasionally bought with money sent to their members by family or friends.178 Alexandre Lardier provides the following portrait of this group: This large conglomeration of prison pariahs was characterised by a level of neglect and indigence such as I had never seen on the prison ships. They were the epitome of all that is ugly and cynical. […] In the corner of the airing yard, you would see a hundred or so of these wretched souls, seeking a ray of sunshine, crowded together, pushing against each other, and half-­ bent over to keep warm; dressed in rags or in nothing, and with pallid, filthy skin. They would taunt both les Anglais and those prisoners who, by taking on some kind of work, had found a way of relieving their destitute state.179

None of the surviving American captivity narratives delineates explicitly the social hierarchy at Dartmoor in the same way as Louis Catel does for the French prisons. This does not mean that a similar hierarchy was absent in the former case, but rather that its contours need to be reconstructed  Morieux, Society of Prisoners, 322.  Catel, vol. 2, 122–24. 178  Ibid., 127–28, 130; Lardier, vol. 1, 209; RCP, 195: testimony of Dr W. Dykar, Apr. 24, 1818. 179  Lardier, vol. 1, 209–10. 176 177

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from often fleeting comments in the US sources. Josiah Cobb’s memoir is something of an exception to this generalisation, however, and is thus worth quoting at length: These prisons were a complete epitome of an overcrowded city, as impressed upon the visiter at his first walks through them. Here were trades and occupations of every kind carried on—a mixed population, made up from all nations of the earth—and every grade of society was here as distinctly marked as in towns and cities. None of the better classes mixed with those beneath them, who in their turn let no opportunity slip whereby they could vent their scorn at those who aimed at gentility, without having the means of carrying it out; and these again had to submit to the taunts of those of a still lower grade, for trying to ape their betters.180

He adds, in what may be considered a sketchy social ranking à la Catel: Here were those of thrift, ingenuity, industry and honesty, as also those who were more willing to rob than to work, to frolic than to learn, to fight than to play—whose every aim was to pounce upon the weak and unwary, that were unable to defend themselves, either by friends or bodily strength.181

Massachusetts seaman George Little was in no doubt that “the loafers and rough-alleys [at Dartmoor] greatly overbalanced the better disposed”.182 Little was unusual in the extent to which he used such derogatory language to describe his countrymen. Although he acknowledged that some of Dartmoor inmates were “an honour to the profession of a seaman”, he considered that “for the most part [the prisoners] were a perfect set of outlaws and desperadoes, having no doubt been selected from the most miserable haunts of vice in all the seaports within the United States”.183 Little also alleged that any officer seeking to keep himself apart from the other prisoners was “almost sure to be mobbed”, and if he had a reputation as a disciplinarian, was “generally tied to the whipping-­post and flogged”.184 Little was speaking here about the situation before the establishment of the US prisoner committees, more than  Cobb, vol. 2, 184.  Ibid., 185. 182  Andrews, 44; Little, 233. 183  Ibid., 233–34. 184  Ibid., 233. 180 181

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six months before his own arrival in June 1814, so it is difficult to know what faith to place in his assertion that officers viewed as martinets were routinely flogged on entering the prison.185 That being said, his testimony may be taken to support Cobb’s statement that relations were strained between the “better classes” of the American prisoners at Dartmoor—presumably chiefly officers (some 10 per cent of US inmates at the prison)186— and some at least of the ordinary mariners. The locus classicus of these strains at Dartmoor were the actions of the Rough Allies and the Romans. Here, as Renaud Morieux notes, was “an alternative world, where money, social norms, and even one’s own survival were devalued as meaningless”187; or, as Lardier puts it, a world peopled by men who had “fallen into a state of indifference more abject than that of a brute animal, living not from day to day, but from quarter-hour to quarter-hour”.188 It was also a world with little respect for prison officialdom. When the four-man committee of inquiry referred to in the previous chapter attempted to inspect the Romans’ cockloft quarters in the summer of 1813, they were, they reported subsequently, “hustled in the most audacious manner”, despite being accompanied by an escort of fifty soldiers.189 An incident from 1810, reported by Lardier, is also revealing in this respect. Angry at a decision taken by Cotgrave to punish collectively the French prisoners by placing them on reduced rations, the Romans carried off a horse being used to pull a cart of building materials around the Prison-Yards. They sequestered the animal on an upper floor of one of the French prisons, and threatened to cut its throat unless Cotgrave rescinded the order. The agent had  reportedly been left with no choice but to comply.190 In early 1813, seeing that the threat of short rations and the cachot had failed to stamp out the illegal traffic in prison supplies involving the Romans, Captain Cotgrave had resorted to posting a public notice,  Andrews, 44–45; TNA ADM 103/88: GEBDPUS, 1814, prisoner n° 1367.  Dye, “Physical and Social Profiles”, 235. 187  Morieux, Society of Prisoners, 326. 188  Lardier, vol. 1, 166. 189  BAOWMS, W1/2716: “Report of the TB on the prisoners who call themselves Romans”, n.d. [1813], fol. 5. 190  Lardier, vol. 1, 220–22. This episode may be the origin of the widely cited anecdote, recounted by Louis Catel, that the Romans attacked two refuse cart horses with knives and subsequently dragged the wounded animals to the Capitole and proceeded to eat them alive (Catel, vol. 2, 137). 185 186

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addressed to “the Prisoners in General”. He called on them to bring an end to “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”. If this appeal to what he called “the well-­ conducted of the prisoners” failed, he went on, he would, “on the first appearance of a recurrence of this odious and abominable practice […], without any exception, prevent any person from keeping shops in the prison, and I will stop the market”.191 When this ploy had also failed to stamp out the sale of provisions by the prisoners, Dartmoor’s agent had resorted to trying to force the Romans to consume their own rations at bayonet point.192 In a private letter to Samuel Whitbread II written shortly after these events, Transport Board chairman Sir Rupert George noted that the prison authorities had also tried introducing a beer ration at Dartmoor in an attempt to provide some sustenance for those prisoners who had sold their rations. When it was discovered that the trade in food and clothing—and now beer—had continued unabated, the scheme was abandoned.193 There are a number of intriguing similarities here with the Rough Allies. Cobb’s description of the Allies as “riotous, disorderly, filthy, [and] thievishly inclined”, resembles closely the language used to evoke the Romans in the French sources. Thus, a raid by the Romans on one of the prison kitchens in August 1809—in which a group of guards which tried to intervene were overpowered and dispossessed of their weapons—could plausibly have been attributed a few years later to the Rough Allies.194 Similarly, the description provided by Charles Andrews of the mêlée outside Prison N° 4 in July 1813—when the Americans were attacked with “desperate fierceness” by the Romans and “mangled in a most shocking manner”195—recalls a number of actions launched by the Rough Allies against shopkeepers or others whom they felt deserved their brand of improvised justice. A final parallel between the two groups deserves our attention. Both the Rough Allies and the Romans seem to have functioned with a 191  TNA ADM 98/227, TBLADP, 1812–1813, fols. 53, 58: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Apr. 18, May 6, 1812; Cotgrave, “Answers and Remarks”, fols. 459–60. 192  “Report of the TB on the Romans”, loc. cit., fols. 4–5. 193  BAOWMS, W1/2720: Sir R. George to S. Whitbread II, Aug. 21, 1813, fol. 2–3. 194  Catel, vol. 1, 167–68. See also Thomson, 49–50. 195  Andrews, 36.

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pyramidal organisation, rather than the more common elected committee structure. Neither leader is named in any of the prisoner accounts, but both are described in some detail; and as might be expected from the foregoing discussion, neither is painted in a very flattering light. The leader of the Rough Allies is presented as something of a criminal mastermind; a well-educated, “artful, plausible fellow”, who had escaped prosecution before the war for murder and piracy and possessed a gift for oratory and counterfeiting.196 In contrast, his French opposite number, known as le Général, appears in prisoner accounts as an object of ridicule: a hulking Marseillais nicknamed Gribouille,197 with a similarly over-sized estimation of his own talents and importance.198 On the occasion of the 1809 raid referred to above, Catel’s account describes how the plundering of the kitchens had been preceded by a military-style procession, with Gribouille at its head. The leader of the Romans is described as wearing on that occasion a modified version of the government-issue yellow “toto” uniform, with hat, waistcoat, jacket and trousers all adorned with ornamental braid and piping made from straw, and armed with a tin sabre—a literal tin-pot general. Behind him followed some twenty other Romans, carrying the French tricolour, and banging tin cans and bowls or playing what Catel describes as a “discordant” tune on trumpets, flutes and tin whistles; their music bearing a striking—if “bizarre”—resemblance to a military march.199 Clearly, both the Romans and the Rough Allies posed a major challenge to the authorities at Dartmoor, offering a striking reminder of the structural weakness of prison government: that maintaining internal order depended ultimately on the cooperation of the prisoners.200 In a prisoner of war depot like Dartmoor, where a carceral population of up to 10,000 had to be policed by a prison staff of a few dozen, aided by several hundred itinerant and often poorly trained soldiers, that structural weakness existed in a particularly acute form. This did not mean that authority at the prison was without teeth, but it did mean—if that metaphor may be pursued—that the bite of the authorities only reached so far. It was thus able to prevent neither that “odious” traffic in government-issue supplies by  Ibid., 224–25.  An ironic proverbial usage in nineteenth-century French referred to being “fin comme Gribouille” (as subtle as Gribouille). The fictional name derives from one meaning of the verb “gribouiller”, to mix everything up. 198  Lardier, vol. 1, 223; Catel, vol. 1, 166. 199  Catel, vol. 1, 166–71. 200  Morieux, Society of Prisoners, 312. 196 197

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prisoners, nor the repeated attempts at fraud by the prison victuallers. Neither was it able to prevent acts of violence between prisoners (whether spontaneous, self-inflicted or committee-approved), nor acts of defiance on the part of inmates towards their British captors.

V There remains a final aspect of the social dynamics at Dartmoor to consider in this chapter. It is one which illustrates perhaps better than any other the complex, hybrid regime in place at the prison. We cited earlier in the book the words of Jeffrey Bolster that, “black and white [American] sailors at Dartmoor organised themselves almost reflexively by race”, and that segregation sprang, directly or indirectly, from the racism of white prisoners.201 The ramifications of those statements need to be examined in more detail. Ira Dye calculated that approximately 1200 or 18.4 per cent of the total US captives held at the prison on the moor between 1813 and 1815 were comprised of men of colour, usually described in the General Entry Books as “black”, “mulatto” or “creole”.202 Charles Andrews made his own count on the spot on one day in March 1815, and arrived at a similar proportion of non-whites: about 17.5 per cent; a figure which corresponded, he reckoned, to 1000 individuals out of a total of 5693.203 It has been argued that Atlantic seafaring offered a working environment where a man’s colour “might be less of a determinant of his daily life and duties than elsewhere”.204 Indeed, it has been suggested that this may explain why free blacks were statistically over-represented in seafaring professions at this period compared with their numbers in the wider population of the United States.205 The emphasis on a rigidly hierarchical division of labour and status on board, coupled with a sense of solidarity among seamen in the face of those in positions of authority, meant that while “racial boundaries certainly existed [at sea, …] they were often secondary to those established by the institution of the ship”.206  Bolster, 103; Fabel, 171.  Dye, “Physical and Social Profiles”, 235, Table 2; Bolster, 234. Dye notes (223) that similar proportions of seamen of colour were to be found at the prisoner of war depots of Chatham (20.2 per cent) and Portsmouth (18.9 per cent). 203  Andrews, 162. 204  Bolster, 74–75, 102 (quotation at 75). 205  Dye, “Physical and Social Profiles”, 224. 206  Bolster, 75. 201 202

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Robin Fabel’s data, based on a sample of 955 black mariners held at Dartmoor, indicates that their geographical origins were more diverse than those of the white prisoners (most of whom were from New England) and included a number of former slaves born in Africa, and a contingent from the West Indies, as well as a hundred or so men from the southern states, some of whom were also probably ex-slaves.207 That diversity of origin notwithstanding, the experience of Dartmoor’s prisoners of colour at the prison had some unifying features. As seen earlier, following the white prisoners’ petition of February 1814 referred to by Charles Andrews, the black inmates were effectively segregated en masse from their white compatriots; confined to the upper two storeys of Prison N° 4 at the centre of the Prison-Yard, in the quarters formerly occupied by the French Romans until the latter’s removal from the prison the previous year.208 By the end of September 1814, with the departure of the French contingent at Dartmoor, and the near simultaneous arrival of a new wave of American captives (including several hundred blacks),209 Prison N° 4 had been entirely evacuated by the white prisoners—with the exception, as noted earlier, of a number of inmates “driven from the other prisons by their bad conduct, and […] compelled to take up with such accommodations here, as they can find, or the blacks will allot them”.210 Prison N° 4 would retain that status until the departure of the last American prisoners in July 1815. Racial segregation at Dartmoor—as in other prisoner of war depots211— was then driven from below rather than imposed from above, though the authorities at the prison apparently needed little convincing to accede to the white prisoners’ demands. This does not necessarily mean that the British concurred with the petitioners’ complaint (as reported by Andrews) that “it was impossible to prevent these [black] fellows from stealing, although they were seized up and flogged almost every day”;212 it may simply have been a matter of choosing the path of least resistance with a view to obtaining quiescence from their captive charges. In fact, thieving was endemic at Dartmoor among all categories of prisoners, as Andrews  Fabel, 169, 171; Dye, “Physical and Social Profiles”, 233.  Thomson, 114. 209  By the end of September, there were nearly 500 African American prisoners at Dartmoor (Bolster, 107). 210  Cobb, vol. 2, 43. 211  Segregation along racial lines was also established at the North American land depot for US prisoners of war at Melville Island, Halifax, Nova Scotia (Jones-Minsinger, 48). 212  Andrews, 69–70. 207 208

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conceded,213 but theft was clearly seen by the white prisoners—or certain of their number—as being “natural” behaviour for blacks, and thus “impossible to prevent”, despite the frequent resort to the cat.214 The view that African American prisoners were somehow naturally predisposed to dishonesty (unlike the majority, who, while “commonly honest, when reduced to extreme necessity, […] resort to the commission of crimes”)215 was a common view of the period on both sides of the slavery divide, and reflects the potency of the dogma of white supremacy, which, as Alan Taylor has shown, was an integral part of US prisoner nationalism in this period: “White prisoners”, he writes, “insisted that the ultimate ‘British cruelty’ was to treat them as if they had the dark skins of an inferior race. In asserting a national distinction from the British, white Americans also insisted on their racial distinction from African-Americans in the same prisons.”216 In his 1997 monograph, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail, Jeffrey Bolster affirmed that the sequestration of Dartmoor’s seventy-six black prisoners in Prison N° 4  in February 1814 not only “greatly relieved” the prison’s white contingent (as Andrews put it),217 but “suited the blacks as well”.218 Bolster’s latter point is difficult to establish with certainty, since, as will be seen presently, the sources relating to the new tenants of Prison N° 4 (and indeed to the history of the prison more generally) derive principally from narratives authored by white prisoners of war.219 That being said, there is no reason to doubt Bolster’s contention that given the atmosphere of tension—and, if Andrews is to be believed, of violence—which characterised the relationships between the two groups of prisoners, possibly going back to the previous autumn,220 there were decided advantages to the blacks’ new cockloft home, particularly since the latter, though cramped, was lighter and airier than the rest of the

 Ibid., 44. On this point, see also Fabel, 171.  Bolster, 106. 215  Andrews, 44. 216  Taylor, 370–71. 217  Andrews, 70. 218  Bolster, 105–6 (quotation at 106). 219  Guyatt, “Dartmoor Prison”. 220  In October 1813, it will be recalled (above, 92), Cotgrave had been ordered to move all “Black Men and men of colour” from the American to the French prisons. 213 214

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accommodation offered by that building, as indeed Daniel Alexander had originally intended.221 An intriguing, though fragmentary, official source uncovered during the preparation of this book in the Transport Office files at the UK National Archives offers some support for Bolster’s thesis. It consists of a scribbled note, apparently dating to early October 1814 and probably penned by Captain Shortland, written on the back of a Transport Board table of rations.222 It begins by listing the number of American prisoners at Dartmoor “on this day” as being 4458, of which 703 are noted as being “Blacks and men of colour”. The note goes on to state that: They [the American prisoners] were represented as being, in general, much more refractory than the French prisoners, and among them [are] a number of desperate characters. As a proof of their truculent and unruly disposition, they had not only persecuted the poor blacks to such a degree that they had begged to be removed into a separate prison; but their conduct was so bad that the whole of the petty officers had requested permission to live with the blacks in preference to their own.223

The manuscript breaks off at that point. It is possible of course, as Andrews would claim, that it was the white prisoners’ petition which had prompted the decision by the prison authorities to segregate the prison’s black inmates, but this fragmentary document opens up other possibilities: that it was in fact “the poor blacks” themselves who had requested (“begged”) their move to the cockloft of  Prison N° 4; or perhaps that both groups of prisoners had approached Captain Shortland on the subject. Whatever the precise background to the racial segregation of Dartmoor’s US prisoners of war, there are clear grounds for arguing that a more complex sequence of events was at work than has generally been suggested.  Bolster, 105–6.  TNA ADM 1/5122/16: Statements of the staff and work of Plymouth dockyard … and of Dartmoor Prison, 1814, 422v: “The return of prisoners of war on this day” [n.d., c. Oct. 10, 1814]. The very same figures can be found in a table prepared by Shortland which survives in another TO file at TNA, dated October 10, 1814 (ADM 1/3767, fol. 37: TBLPW, 1814, TO to J.W. Croker, Nov. 2, 1814, “A Report of the Number of American Prisoners of War confined at Dartmoor Prison on the 10th of Oct. 1814”). The two documents are seemingly in the same hand. 223  TNA ADM 1/5122/16: Statements of the staff and work of Plymouth dockyard … and of Dartmoor Prison, 1814, 422v: “The return of prisoners of war on this day”, [n.d., c. Oct. 10, 1814]. 221 222

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A number of the US captivity narratives highlight the fact that what Benjamin Browne referred to as “the negro-prison” did not possess the committee form of government found in the other prisons at Dartmoor.224 This was, Browne stated with evident distaste, and with language customarily used to describe the British, “an exception to the democratical form of government; this was under a regal, or rather despotical form.” He went on to explain that power at Prison N° 4 was concentrated in the hands of a “powerful”, “muscular” and “athletic” “black man” of nearly seven feet, known as “King Dick” (or “Big Dick”). This man, it was claimed, had “usurp[ed] the sovereign sway” from the prison’s elected committee, and since then had “ruled the poor blacks with an arbitrary an authority as any despot could”. Browne went on to describe the ruler of Prison N° 4 as a man of “commanding aspect, shrewd mind, and an expert boxer. These qualities rendered him very formidable to the poor beings with whom he was surrounded, and contributed altogether to his gaining a sway over them, and very much to its continuance.”225 “King Dick” is one of the few individuals (Captain Shortland aside) to be consistently singled out by name in the US prisoner journals, and he has attracted a considerable degree of interest among historians, as well as from contemporary playwrights and novelists.226 It is believed that “King Dick” was Richard Crafus (or Craftus, Cephus, Cephas, Seaver or Seavers). He is described in the General Entry Books as a 23-year-old seaman from the port of Vienna, Maryland; 6 feet 3¼ inches (1 m 91 cm) tall, and of “stout” build. He belonged to the most commonly recorded age-group among US prisoners,227 but his height, if not quite the “nearly seven feet” claimed by Browne, meant that he would nevertheless have towered over the majority of the US seamen at Dartmoor.228 Crafus’ ship, the Requin, a privateer schooner from Baltimore, had been captured off Bordeaux, France, in March 1813. The Entry Books record that twelve men from the ship arrived at Dartmoor during a three-day period in October 1814, Crafus arriving with the last group on 9th.229  Lipke, 11.  Browne, 181–82. 226  Horsman, 14; Lipke, 1, 8. 227  Dye, “Physical and Social Profiles”, 221. 228  Dye states that US seamen at Dartmoor averaged 5 feet 6½ inches (1  m 70 cm) in height. Since black mariners were on average slightly smaller than their white counterparts, the contrast within Prison N° 4 would have been even more marked (ibid., 226, 223). 229  TNA ADM 103/90: GEBDPUS, 1814, prisoner n° 4603; Dye database. 224 225

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References in the captivity narratives to Crafus’ exceptional height and strength are common. “By far the largest, and I suspect the strongest man in the prison” was Henry Torry’s verdict; while Josiah Cobb referred to him as an “Ethiopian giant, of six feet seven inches in height, with a frame well proportioned, and [he] has strength far greater than both height and proportions together”.230 Like Browne, these same authors emphasise the “despotic” character of Crafus’ rule over Prison N° 4. Torry refers to a “black Hercules” who “commands respect”, and whose “subjects tremble in his presence”. Doing his rounds of Prison N° 4, according to Torry’s account, dressed in bearskin cap, and wielding a “huge” club, Crafus threatened any man found “dirty, drunken, or grossly negligent” with a “beating”. If they were “saucy”, he adds, they were sure to receive one. The memoirist goes on to describe Crafus as “this ruler of the blacks, this king Richard the IVth”; “a man of good understanding [who …] exercises it to a good purpose”.231 In similar fashion, Cobb describes how Crafus drew “[m]ost tightly […] the cords of despotism around his good subjects”; his word was supreme, his authority absolute and punishment was swift.232 Echoing Browne’s words about the fate of the “poor beings” who challenged Crafus, Cobb stated that there was no option for those who “fall under his displeasure” but to “submit to his will and his harshness”, while conceding that without the “sway this man of might holds over his sable brethren”, Prison N° 4 would have descended into anarchy.233 Although Reginald Horsman is correct in affirming that the Dartmoor diarists and memoirists do not write of “King Dick” with the same “animosity” they direct at the Rough Allies, only Torry’s portrait of Crafus really deserves Horsman’s epithet “favourable”.234 And even then, it should be noted, Torry’s remarks are followed by a passage in which he states that the “faculties [of African Americans] are commonly found to be inadequate to the comprehension of the moral system”. This may make the “barbarity” of the Crafus regime a necessary evil, Torry implies (as does Cobb, above), but he adds that it “ought never to be allowed, where the whites have the control of them”.235 In short, here was a temporary case of black self-government—with, admittedly, some positive  Waterhouse & Torry, 164; Cobb, vol. 2, 43–44.  Waterhouse & Torry, 164. 232  Cobb, vol. 2, 44. 233  Ibid. 234  Horsman, 14. See also Lipke, 12–13. 235  Waterhouse & Torry, 164–65. See also Bolster, 113. 230 231

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consequences in keeping “anarchy” at bay (Browne went as far as to claim that “many of the more respectable [white] prisoners preferred to mess in N° 4, on account of the superior order of that prison”, echoing Shortland’s remark, cited above)236—but it was a situation that was considered tolerable only because it was confined to the exceptional circumstances of wartime confinement. Indeed, given the tenor of the remarks quoted above, it is quite possible, as Nicholas Guyatt has recently argued, that a reluctance on the part of Dartmoor’s white prisoners to collaborate on equal terms with their black fellow captives within the prisoner committee structure was a contributory factor, perhaps indeed the principal one, in their decision in February 1814 to petition to have the black prisoners sequestered.237 It is an intriguing possibility, but with so little known of the background to that petition, it must remain an open question. Jeffrey Bolster interprets this key episode in Dartmoor’s history somewhat differently, arguing that the African American contingent at Dartmoor “established their own mode of group discipline and government”, based on a practice well-established in black quarters of New England towns, as well as in New York, where, since the mid-eighteenth century, the local population had gathered once a year to elect or otherwise choose a “king”; a custom seen as a parallel to, and in some respects a parody of, the orthodox Yankee electoral system from which African Americans were excluded. The “king” chosen by the community was often a man of exceptional physical prowess, and there is evidence that informal corporal punishments were administered in his name.238 It was this tradition, Bolster argues, that was adopted at Dartmoor. While white memoirists, conditioned by stereotypes of blacks as both childlike and barbaric, assumed that Crafus ruled by “despotic” force, the reality, according to Bolster, was that he was “at the head of a self-regulating black collective, one thousand men strong”; capable of “negotiat[ing] with [both] prison authorities and white sailors from a position of strength”. Seen from this perspective, Prison N° 4 was a place valued by Dartmoor’s prisoners of colour because it offered a carceral space where the whites did not “have the control of them”.239 It is not inconceivable that the opportunity to put in place a “self-regulating collective” contributed to the decision of  Browne, 182.  Guyatt, “Dartmoor Prison”. 238  Bolster, 108–10. 239  Ibid., 110–13. See also Taylor, 371. 236 237

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Dartmoor’s prisoners of colour (if my earlier interpretation of Shortland’s fragmentary note is correct) to “beg[-] to be removed into a separate prison”. Once again, this hypothesis is purely speculative, but is a plausible part of the background to segregation in February 1814, either alone, or in combination with some of the other factors noted above, emanating from both sets of prisoners. There is little direct evidence of the attitude of the prison authorities at Dartmoor to either “King Dick” or the unusual mode of government in place at Prison N° 4.240 Cobb claimed, somewhat improbably, that Crafus was “frequently” given permission to leave the prison, roam about the surrounding countryside “for hours” and visit Princetown, “return[ing] at his will”.241 While it is unlikely that Crafus was a “great favourite with the authorities at the depot” and “allowed greater indulgence than any other within the walls”,242 it is reasonable to assume that his value for the smooth running of the prison was recognised by Captain Shortland and his officers—just as the authorities recognised the value of the committees, French and American, which governed the other prisons. The reality on the ground required that Dartmoor’s agent used every means possible to secure the quiescence of up to 10,000 disgruntled and at times unruly prisoners. It has been seen in this chapter that a fluctuating and unstable hybrid regime was the result, comprised of both punitive and contractual elements. Additional fluctuations and instability—and inequalities— flowed from the economic and cultural life of Dartmoor’s “world in miniature”, complexifying the picture ever further. Here too, as will be seen in the following pages, it turns out that Prison N° 4 had a key role to play.

 Lipke, 7.  Cobb, vol. 2, 41. 242  Ibid. 240 241

CHAPTER 6

The Porous Prison: Commerce, Culture and Escape

“While parole zones were ‘open’ prisons”, writes Renaud Morieux, “even prisons with stone walls were permeable to the outside world. Prison-ships or purpose-built prisons such as Dartmoor embodied the same fantasy of absolute separation between subjects and enemies. But no prisons […] are ever completely shut off from surrounding societies, however hard their governors try to insulate them.”1 In fact, as far as Dartmoor was concerned, “permeability” was an enduring feature of the life of the war prison during the whole of its six-and-a-half-year existence. Some of that porosity was quite clearly unintended and indeed severely sanctioned when those responsible were apprehended. The prison break-out is perhaps the most obvious aspect of prison life which falls into this category, along with the traffic in illicit goods, letters, counterfeit money—and in information. In some cases, that traffic was itself closely bound up with escape attempts. The authorities quickly discovered to their cost (and frustration) that the stone walls of the prison on the moor were literally “permeable to the outside world”. French prisoner Alexandre Lardier later claimed that “not a single day passed at Dartmoor without holes being made in the walls and a few prisoners managing to escape”. He added that over time the structure of the prison became so “riddled with holes”, that had the war carried on much longer the whole structure would have been 1

 Morieux, Society of Prisoners, 355.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Davie, French and American Prisoners of War at Dartmoor Prison, 1805–1816, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83891-1_6

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in danger of collapsing.2 That is an exaggeration no doubt, but with an average of one or two inmates escaping from the prison every month, it must have seemed at times to the agent, turnkeys and garrison soldiers as if they were presiding over a Swiss cheese rather than a prison. True, as Lardier acknowledged,3 breaking through (or under) the prison walls at Dartmoor was only the first of the many obstacles facing the escaping prisoner, but it quickly became apparent to the authorities that despite the prison’s isolated location and “Siberian” climate, those obstacles were not insurmountable ones. In the case of Dartmoor, “insulating” the prison from the surrounding society represented an even greater challenge than in a conventional carceral institution given that the prison’s porosity was not uniquely illicit and subject to official sanction, for, as in other prisoner of war depots in Britain, the outside world was literally invited into the heart of the prison six days a week, in the form of a prison market; held, to begin with, every morning, and later extended to last most of the day.4 As seen earlier in this book, in permitting the presence of both outsiders and commercial transactions within the prison walls, the regime put in place by the Admiralty at Dartmoor was seriously out of kilter with recommended practice in the country’s criminal prisons. In fact, a carceral regime in which prisoners were permitted to mingle freely, not just with each other, but also with local tradespeople and visitors (albeit in a confined space and under surveillance), and to buy and sell goods to complement the prison fare or provide themselves with extra income, drove a coach and horses through orthodox penal doctrine in any number of ways. To which of course it could be retorted that the inmates of prisoner of war depots were not criminals and should not be treated as such. However, even for a regime the principal goals of which were containment and quiescence rather than punishment or “reformation”, the presence at Dartmoor of this liminal, inside-outside space at the heart of the prison (both spatially and, arguably, structurally as well) threw up a whole raft of dangers and challenges for the prison authorities, which will be examined in this chapter. It will also be shown that the prison market was the nexus of Dartmoor’s cash economy, offering to some a valuable supplement to their diet or the welcome opportunity to dress more warmly, and to others entrepreneurial  Lardier, vol. 1, 239–40.  Ibid., 240. 4  Chamberlain, Hell Upon Water, 140–42; Stanbrook, 33. 2 3

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opportunities to sell craft work to local people and visitors, or food and services to their fellow inmates in the prison barracks. In this sense, there were two markets in the prison: the first, “outer” market situated beyond the confines of the Prison-Yard in the Market Square, open to the outside world and closely watched; and the second, “inner” market, largely autonomous, involving uniquely transactions between inmates at stalls or “shops”, set up near the individual prisons or in some cases inside them. On offer in the latter case were both staple items bought in the Market Square by prisoner-middlemen, and a range of other items fashioned by prisoner-entrepreneurs.5 The first, outer prison market was of major economic importance for the region’s farmers and tradespeople. The war depot presented them with a valuable and literally captive market for the sale of their goods, and a supply of sought-after articles crafted by prisoners from raw materials salvaged from their daily lives, acquired legally from other market traders and prisoners, or illegally from government-issue supplies or even prison buildings.6 The economic value of the prison market for the towns and villages around Dartmoor was recognised by the prison’s agent and by the Transport Board, as was the market’s critical role—on a social and psychological level as well as an economic one—in the daily life of the depot’s prisoners. This gave the prison authorities valuable leverage over their captive charges. Thus, as has been seen, the decision by the agent to shut off access to the market for the prisoners (or certain of their number) could function as a form of collective punishment; a way for the agent and the Transport Board to pursue a range of disciplinary objectives, notably those of containment and quiescence mentioned above. In December 1809, Captain Cotgrave obtained approval from the Board to stop the market and put the whole of the French prisoners on short allowance in order to recoup the cost of repairing some oil lamps “wilfully broken” by them, and for other unnamed “depredations”. A similar order was given in December 1810 in order to force the prisoners to give up some pistols in their possession, one of which had been stolen from the prison sempstress.7  Morieux, Society of Prisoners, 339–40; Lloyd, Arts and Crafts, ch. 2–3.  Stanbrook, 56; Morieux, Society of Prisoners, 338. 7  TNA ADM 98/225, TBLADP, 1808–1810, TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Dec. 7, 1809; ADM 98/226, TBLADP, 1810–1811, fol. 39r, 41r, 69r: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Dec. 28, 1810; Jan. 7, 1811, May 18, 1811. For similar cases, see ADM 98/225, TBLADP, 1808–1810, TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Aug. 11, 1809; ADM 98/227, TBLADP, 1812–1813, fol. 12: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Jan. 22, 1812. 5 6

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The money to feed the prison economy (both licit and illicit) came from a variety of sources: personal funds supplied to individual prisoners; back pay and prize money (notably for former Royal Navy sailors among the US prisoners); and from various forms of employment offered by the prison authorities and by fellow prisoners inside Dartmoor and, in the former case, outside its walls. Historian Reginald Horsman has stated that “there was no need for boredom for anyone [at Dartmoor] with a little money”.8 That generalisation should perhaps be treated with some caution. Josiah Cobb remarked that each prisoner of war was engaged, whatever the method adopted, in an effort to relieve “his mind […] from the anxiety it was labouring under, by the uncertainty of knowing when he would be set at liberty, and be on his way to his much thought of home”.9 For some prisoners, no doubt, such “relief” remained elusive, whatever their financial status. US privateer captain James Fairfield alluded to this distinction in a letter sent to his wife Lois in April 1815. “I have not suffered since I have been a prisoner for Cash”, he wrote, “but greatly for liberty and comfort, as our situation in this place is very disagreeable”.10 Just how disagreeable life at Dartmoor could be for its inmates can be gauged from one of the few letters to have survived penned by one of the prison’s French captives. Its author was a twenty-five-year-old light infantryman named Étienne Lochet. He had been captured in January 1812 at the second Siege of Ciudad Rodrigo in Portugal, during Wellington’s Iberian campaign. The Frenchman arrived at Dartmoor via the Plymouth hulks in October that year, still suffering from a musket ball injury to his right elbow sustained during the siege.11 Lochet wrote to his parents the following April, heading his letter “five years of misery”, a reference presumably to the interval since their last meeting. Noting that several letters he had sent to them had elicited no reply, he wondered if “these five years have erased me from your memory. Could it be that you have abandoned me at precisely the moment when I am most in need of your help?” Referring to the injury that had left him lame in the left arm, Lochet exclaimed in frustration, “What can I do in this state? Nothing! I can’t  Horsman, 15.  Cobb, vol. 2, 161. 10   Brick Store Museum, Kennebunk, Maine, Captain James Fairfield Collection, 1784–1820, Folder 1: J. Fairfield to L. Fairfield, Apr. 25, 1815. 11  TNA ADM 103/396: GEB, St Isidoro prison ship, French prisoners of war, 1811–1812, prisoner n° 36,955; ADM 103/97: GEBDPFR, 1812–1814, prisoner n° 10,284. 8 9

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even keep myself clean.”12 Lochet would remain at Dartmoor for a further two years, until his release and return to France in June 1814.13 Despite the likely prevalence of such sentiments, and indeed of the daily struggle at Dartmoor against hunger, disease and the prison’s disciplinary regime, the importance of the services provided by prisoners for their fellow inmates to which Horsman refers cannot be gainsaid. Indeed, for some—perhaps many—prisoners, the intensity of the feelings of anger, frustration and humiliation, and the toll taken by those daily struggles, must have made the search for ways to relieve the monotony of prison life all the more important. This did not necessarily involve any financial outlay of course. Crowding up to the gates to talk to fresh arrivals,14 or trying to gain snippets of war news from snatches of conversations overheard among turnkeys, guards or at the market were all popular; as was visiting another of the prison’s barrack blocks or tracking down a former comrade or near neighbour from back home.15 According to the account of a French prisoner who spent nearly five years confined at Dartmoor, such activities offered a fleeting impression of normality, albeit one accompanied by the constant presence of the prison’s “gigantic” walls.16 Similarly, an American prisoner noted in his diary on December 14, 1814, that he had “made a Tour through all the prisons for to pass a way the Te[d]eous time which goes heavily here in Confinement”. On 26, he again “made a Tour through Number one, three and five prisons for to See my Acquaintanc[es] and hear the News”.17 A good many activities and services available at the prison did cost money though, whether it was a stake to join a card game or a bet, or a few pennies to buy pens, ink and paper to write a letter, diary or poem, pick up a novel or a bible, pay a “washerman” at sixpence per dozen or a barber. For those with a little more to spend, there was the possibility of signing up for a series of lessons in one of the prison’s many “schools”, which taught everything from boxing to mathematics, fencing to Spanish, 12  Maine-et Loire departmental archives, France. Letters from soldiers of the army of Napoleon I, 1795–22, Ms. 1  J 2891: E.  Lochet to his parents, Dartmoor Prison, Apr. 27, 1813. 13  TNA ADM 103/97: GEBDPFR, 1812–1814, prisoner n° 10,284. 14  Bates, 73. 15  Chamberlain, Hell Upon Water, 139. 16  Catel, vol. 1, 160. Catel arrived in Dartmoor on May 25, 1809, and left on May 23, 1814 (TNA ADM 103/93: GEBDPFR, 1809, prisoner n° 2310). 17  Valpey, 16–17.

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navigation to dancing. There were also musical concerts, lectures, plays and sermons to attend. All—with the exception perhaps of the sermons— depended for their existence on the money circulating in the prison; a reflection of the extent to which commercial transactions permeated virtually every aspect of prison life—licit and illicit, economic and social, political and cultural. If Dartmoor was a porous prison, it was one that soaked up prodigious amounts of money.

I The existence of markets accessible to local tradespeople, visitors and inmates within prisoner of war depots such as Dartmoor was, as noted earlier, something of an anomaly in the carceral landscape of early nineteenth-­century Britain. Their presence was justified by the Admiralty as a means of increasing the range of “necessary and wholesome Articles of Aliment or Clothing” for sale to inmates, while at the same time guarding against anyone (including prison personnel) exploiting a monopoly position to extort the prisoners.18 To this end, agents were instructed to “take Care that the Prisoners be not imposed upon, either in the Price or the Quality of any Articles they may purchase”, and a notice was ordered to be posted, warning local farmers and traders that “Any Person who may be detected in such Mal-practices, is to be immediately turned out of the Prison, and on no Pretence whatever to be re-admitted”.19 The 1810 article from Ackermann’s Repository discussed in Chap. 3 offers a very positive view of the functioning of the prison market at Dartmoor in which the benefits appear to accrue above all to the prisoners. Provisions, the article states, were “sold at a moderate price” at the prison’s “well-supplied market”, while prisoners could sell the fruits of their own “ingenuity and industry”, enabling them in turn “to indulge in many trifling luxuries”. And the “indefatigable” Captain Cotgrave was on hand to root out any “exorbitant prices and extortion”, excluding “for ever” any traders caught selling “articles of inferior quality”.20 This illustration of Smithian economics implies of course that prisoners’ essential material needs were fully met by Admiralty largesse. This was a doubtful claim to say the least, but the Ackermann’s article, possibly written with  Instructions for Agents, art. XXXI.  Ibid.; Appendix 37: “Rules to be Observed at the Market”, art. IV. 20  Anon., “Description of New Prison”, 162. 18 19

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the complicity of the Transport Board, was not about providing a warts-­ and-­all account of Dartmoor Prison, but rather was part of an attempt, against a background of that ideologically charged debate about the prisoner of war question discussed earlier in the book, to depict the prison as a modern and humane institution.21 Some twenty to thirty farmers and tradespeople made the journey to Dartmoor each market day. Captain Cotgrave confirmed in May 1813 that, in line with Transport Office guidelines, he himself set the prices for the different goods, aligned with those of the market at Tavistock, and the sums were then chalked by the market clerk on each sack or crate. The agent added that he adapted the market’s opening hours to fit the arrival times of the different tradespeople, and shut it only when all their produce had been sold, in some cases as late of 5 or 6 o’clock in the evening.22 Produce was brought by pack-mule over distances of up to fifteen miles, from farms near the towns of Tavistock, Oakhampton and Moreton Hampstead as well as from Plymouth, joining on the roads and tracks leading to Princetown the heavily laden waggons of the prison’s victuallers, carrying the meat, flour, fish and vegetables to make up the prisoners’ official rations.23 Such was the scale of the victualling trade at the British war depots that the closure of the majority of their number at the end of the French wars in 1814 represented “a business calamity which hit both the small cottage workers and smallholders, and the contractors who supplied the [prisoners’] daily rations”.24 Dartmoor’s suppliers and traders were spared such a fate, however: the arrival of a large American contingent in 1814, just as the French were leaving, meant that business at the prison was able to carry on uninterrupted for a further year.25 There is evidence that this news would not have been greeted with universal acclaim in the towns and villages around the prison. In times of economic scarcity in particular, when trade slumped and food prices rose sharply, the prodigious quantities of grain and other supplies being eaten up (literally) by the prisoner of war depots could become a source of resentment, and occasionally of public disorder.26 Such was the case at the nearby market town of Tavistock, in the autumn of 1812. A letter of  Morieux, Society of Prisoners, 341.  Cotgrave, “Answers and Remarks”, fols. 454–55. 23  Thomson, 66; Andrews, 24. 24  Lloyd, Arts and Crafts, 30. 25  Ibid. 26  Crimmin, 22, 24. 21 22

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complaint addressed to a local MP condemned “the daily passage of waggons full of corn to the French Prisons and Plymouth”, whilst the Poor of the town “with money in their hands can hardly procure a Peck and that at an enormous price”. What it any wonder in such circumstances, asked the correspondent, that there were “murmurs and even threats of seizures” in the town?27 For similar reasons, it was being “confidently” predicted in Plymouth in January 1816 that the departure of the last French prisoners from Dartmoor would lead to a welcome drop in food prices in the city.28 There was no question of course in reality of a meeting of equal commercial partners in the prison’s marketplace.29 Frank Palmer ruminated bitterly on the matter in his diary in March 1815: Yankee tars support innumerable shoals of Farmers, market Women & Jews—who has [sic] subsisted during the War entirely on the outgoings of these Prisons, chargeing what prices they chose for their Produce & Goods, knowing they had no competitors in the Market, & that the Prisoners could not be supply’d elsewhere. They have fat[te]ned on the hard earnings of American Prisoners.

His only consolation, he went on, was that, with the war over, “their race is run. They may now return like the Bear to their homes & suck their Claws & Pay their Taxes as they can.”30 The unpublished account of fellow US prisoner, Virginia seaman John Allen, who spent three months at Dartmoor in 1813, also evokes commercial malpractice at the market. He recalled that “while most of the dealers were fair, there was a certain set who like vultures cheated every chance they could get. Some of them gave light weight and short count vegetables that were bought by the dozen.”31 The French prisoners’ petition of March 1813 referred to in Chap. 4 offers telling evidence of this structural imbalance. The petitioners claimed that Captain Cotgrave had arbitrarily cut short the market opening times, 27  Essex AO, James Brogden Correspondence, 1795–1842, D/DSe 11: J.  Darke to J. Brogden, Dec. 4, 1812. James Brogden (c.1765–1842) was MP for Launceston (Cornwall) from 1796 to 1832. 28  “Embarkation of French Prisoners at Devil’s Point, Plymouth-Dock”, Taunton Courier and Western Advertiser, Jan. 11, 1816. 29  Morieux, Society of Prisoners, 341. 30  Palmer, 168. 31  Massachusetts HS, Jacob Reeves papers, 1809–1835, Ms. N-779: J.  Allen, “Life at Dartmoor Prison”, 1813, A; TNA ADM 103/87: GEBDPUS, 1813–1814, prisoner n° 165.

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effectively granting a monopoly on food sales to what they called “a few favoured rogues”, while at the same time “ruining” the trade in the articles manufactured by the prisoners.32 The agent strenuously denied the charges.33 However, it turns out that the concerns expressed by the French petitioners were shared by the Transport Board. In February 1811, Cotgrave was reprimanded by his superiors for having allowed French prisoner Pierre Reboulet exclusive rights over potato sales in the prison.34 Dartmoor’s agent was reminded by the Board of his duty to ensure that prisoners were not “imposed upon at the Market”, and that “neither potatoes, nor bread, or any article [was] to be sold by any Prisoner or other person exclusively”. The same letter also emphasised that the market was to be “kept open from 9 o’clock until 12 in the forenoon”; an indication perhaps that, as the French petition alleged, the official market trading hours had not always been respected at the prison.35

II Cotgrave’s rebuttal of the allegations contained in the 1813 French petition offered an additional justification for not submitting to the prisoners’ demands with regard to the market; that it would allow them to “detain the market People to suit their private purpose and to establish improper correspondence”.36 The agent’s concerns reflect a long-standing recognition at the Admiralty that the mingling of prisoners and outsiders in the marketplaces of prisoner of war depots offered the potential for illicit goods and information to circulate and escapes to be planned.37 Various strategies were adopted at Dartmoor in an effort to minimise the risk, though with mixed success, as will be seen presently. Admittance to the Market Square was limited to certain times of the day, and the architectural layout of the prison allowed prisoners, tradespeople and visitors to be 32  BAOWMS, W1/2717: “Petition of French prisoners against medical arrangements and their treatment at Dartmoor”, March 18, 1813, fol. 3. 33  Cotgrave, “Answers and Remarks”, 454–55. 34  TNA ADM 103/512: Alphabetical list of prisoners of war, Dartmoor Prison, 1809–1816, prisoner n° 10,318. 35  TNA ADM 98/226, TBLADP, 1810–1811, fols. 49r, 50r, 51r-v, 52v: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Feb. 6–19, 1811. In April, the Board wrote to Cotgrave again, asking whether the official market hours were now being respected (ibid., fol. 59r: Apr. 9, 1811). 36  Cotgrave, “Answers and Remarks”, 455. 37  Lloyd, Arts and Crafts, 25.

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funnelled through guarded access points; situated in the gated railings separating the lower end of the Market Square from the Prison-Yard in the former case, and through the gates from the Agent’s Square at its upper end in the latter. Further sentries took up stations while trading was in progress; placed on the ground in the Market Square, in the boundary wall bastions ringing the prison, and in the two look-out boxes on top of the polygonal structures at the upper end of the market.38 The 1809 Instructions for Agents stipulated that tradespeople were “to be strictly searched at the Gate” for “spirituous Liquors, Knives, or Weapons of any Kind” and for newspapers and “political Publications”.39 Article III of the Market Rules also made it clear that visitors attending the market were to remain within the confines of the Market Square, and “on no Pretence” were to venture into the Prison-Yard or “have any private Communication with the Prisoners, or to deliver or receive any Letters”. And when the market was over, visitors were to leave the Prison “immediately”.40 Further articles forbade “charging more than the Market-Price of the Neighbourhood”, paying in “base Money” and purchasing government-issue clothing or bedding from prisoners. Anyone detected infringing the latter rule was to be detained in the guardhouse until a magistrate could be summoned.41 All of this looked reassuringly orderly on paper, but the reality on the ground at Dartmoor’s marketplace, as in other prisoner of war depots, was something much more slippery: an “entangled” space, where “goods, people and ideas flowed in multiple directions”.42 This made it nigh on impossible for the authorities to police the various transactions and comings-and-goings of people and goods, as prisoners “pass[ed] and repass[ed]” between the Prison-Yard and the Market Square “to lay in the necessary articles for their business stocks”.43 There are a number of descriptions of the public market at Dartmoor in the surviving US captivity narratives. Perhaps the most detailed is to be found in John Allen’s account, referred to earlier. Describing the market as a welcome break in the “routine of prison life”, Allen notes that the  See Chap. 3.  Instructions for Agents, art. XXXI; Appendix 37: “Rules to be Observed at the Market”, art. I–II. 40  Ibid., Appendix 37, art. III. 41  Ibid., art. IV, VI. 42  Morieux, Society of Prisoners, 338–39. 43  Cobb, vol. 2, 45. 38 39

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farmers and their wives arrived early in order to lay out their wares on trestle tables set up for the purpose in the Market Square. Once the produce had been inspected and the prices fixed, the gates were opened.44 His account continues, filled with ethnographic detail as he describes the “busy” and “most picturesque” scene: The women wore woollen skirts with girdles and had an old fashioned straw hat or colored handkerchief tied over their head. The men wore heavy boots, trousers tucked into the tops, many smoking pipes or long hand made cigars. Some had beards and some smooth faces. The prisoners [were] dressed in all kinds of clothes, some with the yellow suits made by the [Transport] department, others garbed in all kinds of styles, long sleeves almost up to the elbow, trowsers varying in length from brushing the ground to reaching nearly to the knee, faded, patched. All mingled in the general confusion. […] When the stock had been sold, the market people made a straight line for home, either Okyhampton, Plymouth or Tavistock, anxious to pass the Moor, before the Pixeys could get them.45

Fellow prisoner Henry Torry brings the same blend of othering ethnographic curiosity and condescension to his discussion of the question of the “very rude” language employed by the market people at Dartmoor. “They do not speak near so good English as our common market people do in America”, Torry opined, adding: “I am fully of opinion with those who say that the American people, taken collectively as a nation, speak the English language with more purity than the Britons”.46 Perhaps, he mused, it was the “the bible that has preserved the purity of our language in America”.47 Several of the US prisoner narratives single out for comment the Jewish clothes dealers from Plymouth who frequented the market; their accounts often drawing on familiar anti-Semitic tropes to portray the men as both physically grotesque and grasping.48 It is significant in this respect that the only positive words to be found about the Rough Allies in Josiah Cobb’s otherwise intensely hostile memoir relate to the so-called pranks played by 44  Massachusetts HS, Jacob Reeves papers, 1809–1835, Ms. N-779: J.  Allen, “Life at Dartmoor Prison”, 1813, B–C. 45  Ibid., C. 46  Waterhouse & Torry, 161. 47  Ibid. 48  Cobb, vol. 2, 45–48; Waterhouse & Torry, 160–61, 174, 180; Palmer, 168.

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these prison “rowdies” on the Jewish tradesmen, which included tying strings to their produce, which were then pulled from a distance to make it look as if the items were moving of their own volition. Cobb adds that for all the “amusement” generated among by-standers by “the hobbling, bouncing and jumping about” of the shoes, hats and handkerchiefs, such “frolics” were regularly the pretext for attempted thefts of the items in question.49

III The most detailed descriptions in the Dartmoor captivity narratives, however, concern not the public market, but the prisoner-run “shops” of the inner market, set up in the prison yards, or in the mess-berths of their proprietors. According to one estimate, by early 1815, there were between sixty and eighty such little businesses in each of the three prison yards.50 Perhaps the physical proximity of these shops to the daily life of the prison barracks made them a more obvious choice of subject matter for the memoirists than the public market. Benjamin Browne, for example, offers the following description: He who had money might do well enough at Dartmoor: for there were cook-shops and stalls of every kind and degree kept by the prisoners, from those which were dignified with the names of taverns, down to the humble vendors of coffee and plum-gudgeons. At these taverns might be found meats, roast and boiled, and stewed and fried; pastry-cakes, fruits, wine and liquors; and they were well patronized, and profitable to their keepers. The cries of ‘hot plum-gudgeons! Hot freco! Lobscouse, nice and hot! Hot coffee, hot coffee! Burgoo, nice burgoo!’ were continually resounding through the prisons.51

“Plum-gudgeons” were cone-shaped fishcakes the size of a tea saucer and sold for a penny, while “freco”, a meat, potato and barley stew (of which water was, “by an almost infinite degree, the predominant ingredient”) went for 2d a pint. A superior meat stew, called “lobscouse”, also

 Cobb, vol. 2, 46–48.  C. Andrews, cited in Lloyd, Arts and Crafts, 43. 51  Browne, 208–9. See also Little, 234; Clover, “Reminiscences”, vol. 23, n° 6, 518; Palmer, 161; Cobb, vol. 2, 29–30. 49 50

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known to British mariners, cost 4d.52 The French prisoners could buy a similar stew called “ratatouille”, made from meat, potatoes and peas.53 “Burgoo”—the price of which is not given—was oatmeal gruel, mixed with butter or black treacle, the latter known in the prison as “trickles”. Burgoo too was served on Royal Navy warships.54 Selling “coffee” made from burnt peas or “shaved” burnt crusts of bread was a popular occupation, for it required little outlay, and was much in demand.55 “Not a very palatable dish”, was one prisoner’s verdict on this ersatz beverage. “But yet”, he conceded, “in chilly cold weather it was better than water from the spring, to moisten one’s bread”.56 Browne observed that the fires from the coffee sellers could be seen dotted around the yards as soon as the prison doors opened every morning. For those customers who could not wait that long, coffee was also available inside the prisons, brewed on little charcoal stoves; the latter equipped with a flue to convey the smoke out through the windows.57 Browne returns a few pages later to Dartmoor’s shops, listing the beerand coffee-shops, the green-grocers and the shops selling items manufactured in the prison: bone ships, straw hats, list shoes and toys. The most common kind of shops, he notes, were the grocery shops, selling glasses of rum, tobacco, butter, snuff, tea, coffee and “trickles”. These shops “would cut candles, split crackers, halve a glass of rum, or accommodate you in any way, according to your means, in Dartmoor”.58 All depended, then, on having the necessary funds. David A. Neal, a ship’s clerk from Salem, conceded that “[a] large number of the prisoners lived well enough”, before adding “but many really suffered from hunger”.59 Another US prisoner described how “the hungry prisoner” could be “seen to traverse the alleys, backwards and forwards, with a gnawing stomach, and a haggard look; while he sees the fine white loaves on the tables of the bread-seller, when all that he possesses cannot buy a single loaf”.60 As seen earlier, Frank Palmer found himself in just such a position in December  Browne, 209–10; Macdonald, 190.  Catel, vol. 2, 146. 54  Browne, 209–10; Macdonald, 34, 191. 55  Browne, 210. 56  Cobb, vol. 2, 167. 57  Browne, 210. 58  Ibid., 213. 59  Neal, 115; TNA ADM 103/90: GEBDPUS, 1814, prisoner n° 3911. 60  Waterhouse & Torry, 172. 52 53

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1814. With money “at its lowest ebb”, he was forced to stop cooking his own meals and making his own coffee from barley, leaving him just the unpalatable government-issue “soup from the coppers”. Some of the items hand-fashioned by the prisoners were also available for sale in Dartmoor’s public market. Restrictions were placed by the authorities, however, on which goods could be sold to civilians. The 1809 Market Rules referred to earlier stipulated that the sale of “Woollen Mittens or Gloves; straw Hats, Caps or Bonnets; obscene Pictures, Images or Toys, and Articles made from Prison Stores” were all “strictly prohibited”.61 Interestingly, this list changed over time. The relevant article of the official prison regulations, discussed earlier, dating to about 1814, is broadly similar to the Market Rules quoted above, but shoes and “Plaited Straw” have been added to the list of proscribed items.62 The ban on the prison manufacture of goods such as these reflected long-standing concerns at the Admiralty that the large-scale, low-cost production of such items by prisoners of war represented unfair competition and a threat to the viability of certain local trades and industries. The result was that the Transport Board and parliament were faced with vociferous protests from a phalanx of disaffected workers, tradesmen and their representatives in the vicinity of the various war depots, all incensed that their livelihoods were seemingly under threat from privileges granted by the Admiralty to the prisoners of Britain’s enemies.63 The manufacture of articles made from plaited straw, principally hats and bonnets, was a particular bone of contention.64 It was initially permitted at Dartmoor, but in February 1811, the Board issued Captain Cotgrave with instructions to seize all supplies of straw plait at the prison, “in consequence of the representation of the straw manufacturers to government”.65 The fact that the agent was issued with a second order to this effect at the end of the following year would suggest that it had proved difficult to quash this illicit trade, despite the risk for those involved of being sent to the cachot on reduced rations.66 According to Charles Andrews, plaited  Instructions for Agents, Appendix 37, art. V.  Prison Regulations, art. 8. 63  Based on Morieux, Society of Prisoners, 344–46. 64  Ibid., 345–46; MacDougall, 277–81; Chamberlain, Norman Cross, 111–12. 65  RCP, testimony of Capt. James Bowen, Apr. 15, 1818, 468–69; TNA ADM 98/226, TBLADP, 1810–1811, fol. 47r: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Feb. 1, 1811. 66  TNA ADM 98/227, TBLADP, 1812–1813, fol. 141: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Dec. 12, 1812; ADM 1/3767, TBLPW, 1814, Prison Regulations, art. 8. 61 62

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straw was still being traded at Dartmoor in 1814, for he noted that when the Americans’ sequestration in Prison N° 4 came to an end in March of that year, some US inmates were hired by French entrepreneurs at a penny a day to make straw hats and bonnets.67 The trade was evidently a lucrative one. One French prisoner recalled that some of his compatriots engaged in the manufacture of straw goods employed up to 500 “workers” at a time, allowing these industrialists to purchase all of the “little luxuries” that the prison had to offer.68 Part of the difficulty in stamping out the trade at Dartmoor derived no doubt from the fact that it benefited both prisoners and guards, with the latter bribed into supplying the raw materials and then smuggling the finished items out of the prison. According to Alexandre Lardier (to whom we owe the information about the French straw magnates), it was at night that this illicit trade took place. A time and a place would be agreed upon, and the plaited straw in various stages of manufacture would change hands through the railings. Lardier recalled that the soldiers from the garrison would leave their cartridge pouches in the guardhouse so that they could hook the straw onto their belts.69 Indeed, so well-established was the trade in the British war depots that in 1812 the Transport Office toyed briefly with the idea of taxing the bundles of straw coming into the prison, rather than attempting to ban them.70 Not all of the articles made by the prisoners at Dartmoor were subject to official sanction. On the contrary, the prison authorities actively encouraged the pursuit of various approved trades and manufactures in the war depots; the assumption being that, in their absence, idle hands would turn their attention to more devilish forms of behaviour, including the planning of escapes.71 There were clear benefits to such work from the prisoners’ point of view too, both, as Josiah Cobb observed, as a way of lessening the misery of captivity, and also as a means for prisoners to generate funds, which “thereby”, as Lewis Clover put it, “added to their comfort”. The result was what Clover called a “multifarious manufactory”, with prisoners

 Andrews, 73.  Lardier, vol. 1, 263. 69  Ibid., 263–64. 70  Morieux, Society of Prisoners, 346. 71  Chamberlain, Hell Upon Water, 138. 67 68

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engaged in the construction of an “endless variety” of “queer” and “trifling article[s]”.72 Perhaps the best-known manifestation of this “economy of scavenging, recuperation and recycling of ‘waste’”, as it has been called,73 were the items made by prisoners from the beef and mutton bones left over from their rations or scavenged from the cook-houses. Articles ranged  from quickly fashioned needles, toothpicks, dice and dominoes to highly intricate work that was anything but “trifling”: clocks, inlaid jewellery boxes, ships, and—in the case of Dartmoor—elaborate working models of a guillotine and a French trial scene.74 The work of the French prisoners at Plymouth’s Mill Prison so impressed Dr George Magrath that he sent one bone model to the wife of a medical colleague, and proposed to send his brother, Thomas (also a physician), some further examples. Such work, he wrote, reflected “the ingenuity, patience and industry of the french character”, and was a way for the prisoners “not only [to] procure themselves comforts, but [to] lighten the chains of captivity”.75 Josiah Cobb’s memoir describes how, over a period of between two and three months, two American sailors gradually accumulated the tools and raw materials necessary to build a miniature ship-of-the-line, selling their daily meat ration at a penny a time to provide the funds for their purchases. When the miniature ship was finished, claimed Cobb, even “the most experienced seaman could not detect the want of a rope, nor one out of place or proportion, every thing from the keel to the truck, being reduced to an exact scale”.76 Such bone-work models could fetch considerable sums. Catel states that a six-inch bone frigate could sell for £25 to £30 and particularly fine models for over £100.77 Their popularity was a reflection, as Elodie Duché has argued, both of the potency of maritime subjects as a vehicle for prisoner artistry, and of the enduring demand for nautical tales and images in the local community.78 72  Cobb, vol. 2, 161; Clover, “Reminiscences”, vol. 23, n° 6, 519. On this point, see Gilje, To Swear Like a Sailor, 259. 73  Morieux, Society of Prisoners, 342. 74  See the examples reproduced in Abell, facing pages 173, 176, 251, 256. On these bone models, see also Lloyd, Arts and Crafts, ch. 5; Chamberlain, Hell Upon Water, 142–46. 75  G. Magrath to T. Maclear, Sept. 13, 1813, qtd. Carson, 10. 76  Cobb, 161–62. 77  Catel, vol. 1, 145–46. Abell cites (176, 218) the cases of two bone ship models in this period selling for similar sums: £26 and £40. 78  Duché, “Sea of Stories”, 49. On this subject, see also Gilje, To Swear Like a Sailor, 254–61.

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IV Alongside this legitimate prison economy at Dartmoor was a parallel, illegitimate one; one which showed scant regard for Transport Board regulations concerning what could and could not be bought and sold, or could and could not enter and leave the prison. It is clear that considerable sums of money changed hands at Dartmoor as in other prison depots for the purchase and sale of proscribed items and for assistance in escaping.79 That being said, establishing the precise contours and scale of the prison’s traffic in goods, information and—on occasion—in men remains a difficult task. By their very nature, such movements and transactions are shadowy affairs and generally leave few traces in the historical record (for the protagonists involved, it was no doubt a case of the fewer traces left the better). It is reasonable to assume that much, perhaps most, activity of this kind went undetected, or at least unreported; part of what criminologists refer to as the “dark figure” of crime: those “offences committed of which there is no record because no-one bothered to, wished to, or was able to report a particular offence”.80 It is clear from the Dartmoor evidence studied earlier that fraud among the victualling contractors and the illicit trade in rations, clothing and bedding among the inmates were both taken very seriously by the prison authorities, and resulted in regular (if ultimately ineffective) intervention by both the agent and the Transport Board. Certain other aspects of the parallel economy at the prison on the moor also met with a vigorous response on the part of the authorities—again, with mixed success. Other proscribed trades, in contrast, were subject to only limited or intermittent attention, and were therefore more likely to remain in the shadows; part of that “dark figure” of crime referred to above. The trade in straw plait clearly falls into the latter category; that concerning “spirituous Liquors” was evidently a similar case. Whereas the sale of beer to the prisoners (generally the weaker, “small” variety) was authorised—and indeed, for a time, institutionalised, with a tax of a penny a gallon levied for the benefit of the prison clerks81—that of spirits was officially proscribed. However, there is  Stanbrook, 38–39; James, 49.  Emsley, 24. 81  See Chap. 4. The small or “common” beer had been on sale to the prisoners since June 1811. In the first three months of 1813, sales generated over £70 in profits, a considerable sum. Following the criticism of the practice by the TB inquiry of July 1813, the official monopoly on beer sales was abolished (TNA ADM 98/226, TBLADP, 1808–1810, fol. 79 80

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plentiful evidence to back up Lardier’s claim that “those who had money or goods to trade in exchange had no difficulty getting hold of it”,82 and that, like for the trade in straw goods, it was the soldiers of the garrison who served as the principal intermediaries.83 Thus, small casks of Dutch gin or rum might replace the lengths of straw on the sentries’ belts as they did their night rounds.84 John Allen also recalled that it was “at or near the close of day when the light was getting dim that some of them [the guards] would break the rules and smuggle in to us such forbidden things as liquor, candles, etc.” He added that “at these times we learned many things that were happening on the outside”.85 Fellow US prisoner David A. Neal confirmed that “intoxicating liquors […] were clandestinely introduced [into the prison] in any required quantities”, adding that the trade was “apparently not objected to by the officers who on their tours of inspection could not help seeing them spread out for sale”.86 A belated attempt was made by Captain Shortland to address the issue in December 1814, after a report from Dr Baird had expressed concern at the “great degree” of drunkenness in the prison. Interestingly, the strategy adopted to deal with the problem included not only a crackdown on smuggling, but also (on the doctor’s suggestion) the issue of a weekly ration of two hogsheads of strong beer per prison; in the hope, presumably, of weaning inmates off the more “intoxicating” spirits.87 Other illicit trades prompted a more vigorous official response at Dartmoor. Perhaps the best documented example is the production and 76r-v TO to Capt. Cotgrave, June 22, 1810; ADM 98/227, TBLADP, 1812–1813, fol. 112: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, May 4, 1813; ADM 98/228, TBLADP, 1813–1815, fol. 3: TO to Capt. Shortland, Oct. 9, 1813). 82  Lardier, vol. 1, 264. 83  TNA ADM 98/228, TBLADP, 1813–1815, fols. 164,169: TO to Capt. Shortland, Nov. 30, Dec. 14, 1814. 84  Lardier, vol. 1, 264. 85  Massachusetts HS, Jacob Reeves papers, 1809–1835, Ms. N-779: J.  Allen, “Life at Dartmoor Prison”, 1813, 4. A TB communication of August 1809 referred to the “clandestine traffic” in candles at the prison (TNA ADM 98/225, TBLADP, 1808–1810: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Aug. 12, 1809). Attempts to limit this trade were probably linked to efforts to “prevent the prisoners from having lights in the nigh[t]time”. Their use was described in October 1812 as “attended with the greatest danger and most alarming consequences” (ADM 98/227, TBLADP, 1812–1813: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Oct. 20, 1812). 86  Neal, 113. 87  TNA ADM 98/228, TBLADP, 1813–1815, fols. 171, 175: TO to Capt. Shortland, Dec. 16, 29, 1814.

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circulation of forged banknotes and coin. It had been recognised since the inauguration of paper currency in Britain in 1797 that the production and circulation of forged banknotes represented a major threat to the stability of the country’s banking system. As a result, tracking down forgeries and forgers became a major priority for the Bank of England, and when it was discovered that French prisoners of war were implicated, for the Transport Office also.88 Francis Abell’s early history of prisoners of war in Britain affirmed that forgery was “a prominent Dartmoor industry” during this period, adding that the Transport Board decision in February 1810 to order a clerk to inspect all banknotes used by prisoners in the public market reflected the scale of the counterfeiting operation at the prison.89 Support for Abell’s assertion comes from an unlikely source: the captivity narrative of US prisoner, Charles Andrews. He affirms that a “very lucrative” French forgery operation was at work at Dartmoor, producing Bank of England notes with a face value of £150,000. The counterfeit notes, he added, “made so perfect an imitation, that the cashier could not discover the forgery; and very much doubted the possibility of such imitation.”90 There is no official source to back up of Andrews’ estimate, but it does imply that a counterfeiting operation of some importance was at work in the prison.91 A formidable arsenal of draconian penal sanctions was available to the criminal courts to combat forgery, a reflection of the seriousness with which the crime had been viewed by the British State since the seventeenth century.92 The punishment for a convicted forger was the gallows, while those found to have passed or uttered counterfeit notes or coin were customarily sentenced to a period of imprisonment or to be transported to the penal colonies of Australia.93 As Paul Chamberlain notes, however, in the case of sentences of imprisonment, the Admiralty was faced with a novel problem when those implicated were prisoners of war: they were  Chamberlain, Hell Upon Water, 152, 155. Lloyd, Arts and Crafts, 303–10.  Abell, 244–45; TNA ADM 98/225, TBLADP, 1808–1810: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Feb. 24, March 6, 1810. Seven forged bank notes were successfully intercepted by the market clerk John Mitchell in July 1810 (Stanbrook, 40). It is not known how long these inspections continued and with what results. 90  Andrews, 53–54. 91  Lardier claimed (vol. 1, 259) that “in no war depot was the trade in forged banknotes as active as at Dartmoor”. 92  McLynn, 134. 93  Chamberlain, Hell Upon Water, 152. 88 89

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already in prison.94 There was in any case some doubt as to whether enemy prisoners of war could be tried and sentenced like domestic criminals when it came to forgery cases, “owing”, as Transport Board solicitor Charles Bicknell put it in a letter of 1810, “to […] a doubt entertained by the Judges whether Prisoners of War are amenable to our municipal tribunals, for offences of this description; which are not crimes against the Law of Nations”. When the difficulty of acquiring actionable evidence against individuals suspected of involvement was factored in, plus the fact that the frauds at Dartmoor had targeted principally private banks rather than the Bank of England, Bicknell arrived at the conclusion that the Board should probably avoid pursuing costly prosecutions in its own name, which had in any case little chance of success.95 There was evidently frustration at the Transport Board that what it described as the “leniency” of the courts in this area seemed “calculated to operate rather as an encouragement to such illegal and injurious Practice by holding out Impunity to the mass of the Prisoners of War”, leaving the Board with “no means whatever of preventing the Delinquents further than putting them in close confinement” in the prison’s cachot or in the various black holes of the Plymouth hulks.96 In a later letter, the Board warned darkly that “the Forgeries of Prisoners will become a very serious Evil unless strong Measures be taken to stop it”.97 A number of additional “measures” were indeed tried out at Dartmoor in the following period. With Board approval, Agent Cotgrave attempted to use the closure of the market as leverage to undermine the work of the forgers, suspending trade for nearly a month in January and February 1812. In exchange for re-opening the market, he demanded that those  Ibid., 156.  TNA ADM 98/153: TBLPW, 1810–1811: TO to Charles Bicknell, Dec. 22, 1810; TNA ADM 98/226, TBLADP, 1808–1810, fol. 37r: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Dec. 22, 1810; ADM 97/108, TO, Correspondence from Legal Officers, 1808–1810: Charles Bicknell to TO, Dec. 29, 1810, fols. 1–2. 96  TNA ADM 98/131: TBLPW, public offices, 1809–1810. TO to Mr Beckett, Dec. 13, 1810, fol. 2 (my emphasis). On the use of the cachot and the Plymouth hulks for Dartmoor prisoners implicated in counterfeiting in this period, see TNA ADM 98/150, TBLPW, 1809: TO to Robert Best, Sept. 22, 1809; TNA ADM 98/225, TBLADP, 1808–1810: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Oct. 23, Nov. 20, Dec. 7, 1809; ADM 98/245: TBLAPL, 1810: TO to Capt. Rogers & Capt. Hawkins, Sept. 27, 1810; PAB, Ms. 413, Edward Hawkins Coll., Letters and journals, 1808–1813: 413/353: TO to Capt. Hawkins, Apr. 27, 1810. 97  TNA ADM 98/131, TBLPW, public offices, 1809–1810: TO to Mr Beckett, Feb. 15, 1811. 94 95

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with notes or coin in their possession give them up, and that they reveal how they had obtained the raw materials used in their production.98 Neither this tactic, however, nor a printed “Caution” placed in the local press in 1811, alerting the public to the scale of the counterfeiting activities of French prisoners,99 nor again the posting in the prison in May 1812 of details of the executions of a number of convicted forgers,100 succeeded in stamping out the practice, any more than did the guards’ regular searches of the prisons, or the “trifling” intelligence obtained by the prison authorities from informants.101 By the end of 1812, the Transport Board evidently felt the need to defend its record on the subject. In a letter addressed in December to the Secretary of State for War, Lord Palmerston, the Board declared that “Forgeries are not more frequent at Dartmoor than at other Depots”, and insisted that everything that could be done was being done.102 The following May, Captain Cotgrave sought to defend his own record on forgery at Dartmoor, attaching a testimonial from the London law firm of Kaye, Freshfield and Kaye, solicitors to the Bank of England, which praised the agent’s “active endeavours to check the fabrication and calculation of forged Bank Notes by the Prisoners of War”.103 Frustration lingered, however. When, in January 1814, Agent Shortland asked whether the French naval surgeon and forger Auguste D’Orange might be released from the prison’s cachot after two months’ confinement there, the testy reply from his superiors was that “the board do not consider that 2 months’ confinement is sufficient punishment for a crime which, in a British subject, would have been punished by death”. D’Orange was finally returned to the general prison population at the beginning of March.104 Counterfeiting 98  TNA ADM 98/227, TBLADP, 1812–1813, fols. 12–14, 15, 19, 20, 22, 25–26: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Jan. 22, 28; Feb. 3, 6, 11, 18, 1812; James, 63. 99  TNA ADM 98/155, TBLPW, 1811: TO to J. White, Printer’s Agent, July 26, 1811. See also ADM 99/208: TBMPW, July 1811, TO to Capt. Cotgrave, July 26, 1811. 100  TNA ADM 98/227, TBLADP, 1812–1813, fol. 65: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, May 28, 1812. Between 1804 and 1815, twenty-eight prisoners of war were hanged for forgery, including seven in 1812 alone (Chamberlain, Hell Upon Water, 156). 101  TNA ADM 99/207: TBMPW, May–June 1811, June 16, 1811. 102  TNA ADM 98/133: TBLPW, 1811–1812, To public offices, fol. 14: TO to Lord Palmerston, Dec. 14, 1812. 103  Cotgrave, “Answers and Remarks”, fols. 469–70. 104  TNA ADM 98/228, TBLADP, 1813–1815, fols. 34, 53: TO to Capt. Shortland, Jan. 7, March 2, 1814; ADM 103/96: GEBDPFR, 1811, prisoner n° 8498; Stanbrook, 55–56.

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activity persisted during the final two years of the prison’s existence, as several American captivity narratives attest, but seemingly on a smaller scale than previously.105

V Counterfeit banknotes and coin were used on occasion by prisoners to bribe sentries or turnkeys as part of an escape plan. Such was the case in November 1810, for example, when four privates from the Nottingham Militia, on sentry duty at the prison, were bribed to the tune of £8 each in gold coins and counterfeit notes to assist in the escape of six French prisoners. The prisoners were quickly recaptured, and the four soldiers arrested and court-marshalled the following month in Plymouth. A guilty verdict was returned on three of the four soldiers, and two of their number subsequently faced the firing squad.106 The case was widely reported in the national and regional press.107 In a similar case from March 1812, a private of the Roscommon Militia was bribed with forged banknotes to facilitate the escape of three French prisoners. His identity was revealed when, unaware that he had been paid in counterfeit notes, he attempted to use one of them.108 Another Roscommon soldier stationed at Dartmoor was arrested later the same year after trying to pay for food and drink in a local tavern with two forged £1 notes acquired from some French prisoners.109 In many respects, however, what mattered most to the authorities was not whether the bribe was paid in counterfeit currency or not, but whether the escaping prisoner succeeded in “running” or not. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, escapes from Dartmoor were relatively rare: perhaps an average of one and two per month. Escape attempts would have been much more common than this of course—like the case reported in November 1809 of two French prisoners attempting to conceal themselves in a departing refuse cart, spotted when they came up for air from their noisome hiding place110—but claims in captivity narratives,  J. Jones, 107.  TNA ADM 98/226, TBLADP, 1810–1811, fol. 31v: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Nov. 29, 1810; Chamberlain, Hell Upon Water, 155–56; James, 49. 107  “Dartmoor”, Morning Chronicle, Dec. 6, 1810; “Plot at Dartmoor”, Royal Cornwall Gazette, Nov. 24, 1810; [Untitled], Public Ledger and Daily Advertiser, Dec. 6, 1810. 108  [Untitled], Exeter Flying Post, March 26, 1812; [Untitled], The Sun, March 28, 1812. 109  Chamberlain, Hell Upon Water, 156. 110  [Untitled], Cheltenham Chronicle, Nov. 2, 1809. 105 106

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suggesting that, as French prisoner Louis Catel put it, “escape was the constant focus of our thoughts” and that “nearly all of us spent our time racking our brains to find a stratagem we had not used yet to trick our barbaric captors”,111 need to be approached with some caution. French historian David Rouanet has argued that simply “accepting one’s dire fate was the most common reaction” to captivity among prisoners of war in this period.112 It should be recalled in this context that elsewhere in his memoir, Catel himself had referred to a group of his countrymen “who did nothing, resigning themselves philosophically to the rations and supplies provided by the British government”.113 Presumably, this philosophical “indifference” extended to refraining from taking active steps to break out of the prison. It is probably fruitless to look for any difference in the behaviour of French and American prisoners in this respect. We quoted in Chap. 5 the official view (supported by US captivity narratives) that the Americans were “much more refractory than the French prisoners” and of a particularly “truculent and unruly disposition”. Part of that reputation for obstreperousness acquired on the prison ships consisted of a deeply rooted and indefatigable determination to escape, and fears that those qualities would be replicated at Dartmoor help account, no doubt, for the decision made soon after their arrival to sequester the first American prisoners in Prison N° 4, with no access to the prison market and no contact with their French counterparts. Whether that reputation for truculence and unruliness was deserved or not, there is no evidence that it manifested itself in a spike in the number of break-outs following the arrival of the first US prisoners in April 1813.114 Whatever proportion of Catel’s countrymen and their American counterparts in fact spent their waking hours focussed constantly on escape, for many, no doubt, breaking out remained no more than a pipe dream; a welcome remedy perhaps for tedium and a way of keeping hope alive.115 Taking concrete steps to break out of Dartmoor Prison was something else entirely and undoubtedly concerned a  Catel, vol. 2, 155–56 (my emphasis).  Rouanet, “Les Grognards face à la captivité”, 257. 113  Catel, vol. 2, 123. 114  An examination of Ira Dye’s prisoner database reveals that fifty-three US inmates escaped during the period 1813–1815, 0.8 per cent of the total. The proportion for our sample of 5760 French prisoners is broadly similar: 0.6 per cent (Dye database; TNA ADM 103/92–94: GEBDPFR, May–Sept. 1809). 115  Chamberlain, Hell Upon Water, 166–67. 111 112

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considerably smaller number of individuals. One of the reasons was an eminently practical one. A French contemporary noted that prisoners of war wishing to escape from a British prison had two barriers to negotiate: the prison walls and the sea.116 In the present case, a third might be added, what a newspaper article of December 1812 termed “the terrible inclemency of Dartmoor”.117 As far as the first and most immediate of those three barriers was concerned, the prison’s architecture and regulations were designed, respectively, to make escape as difficult as possible, and the consequences of capture for the prisoners, and of collusion for the guards, turnkeys and any facilitators in the local community, as punitive as possible. Unauthorised contact between prisoners and the duty guards was strictly forbidden, and there were severe penalties for both parties, particularly for members of the garrison.118 The prison’s architecture was designed to come to the aid of the rule-book in this respect. We cited earlier in the book the Transport Board reasoning on the subject. The wrought-iron palisade fence which marked the curved perimeter of the prisoners’ compound was intended both “to prevent the Prisoners breaking loosely out, and injuring the Masonry Work” and also, critically, to stop them as “from communicating with the Sentinels”. From their position on the inner boundary wall and on the platforms and bastions set into it, the latter were able “to command the Area of all the Prison Building within, which was thought sufficient to […] prevent any irregularities among the Prisoners in the Day and to prevent escapes by sudden Surprise in the Night”. In this way, the spatial economy of the prison rendered “communicating with the Sentinels” on the boundary wall difficult, effectively isolating the prisoners in the semi-­ circular enclave of the Prison-Yard. A brief, barked order in one direction and an acknowledgment—or insult—in the other was probably all the communication that could be achieved in this context. Despite such constraints, there would have been no shortage of opportunities for a snatched conversation between captives and captors or for passing a scribbled note: in the marketplace for example, or when the inmates were being turned out of their prisons for the daily muster. The employment of working parties of prisoners around the prison offered further opportunities for unsupervised interaction with the guards and  Pariset, 18.  [Untitled], Kentish Gazette, Dec. 4, 1812. 118  Instructions for Agents, art. XXXIII; Chamberlain, Hell Upon Water, 168–69; Lloyd, Prisoners of War, 281. 116 117

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turnkeys. Masons, carpenters and labourers were hired for the construction or modification of prison buildings, including, in the former case, the two new prisoner accommodation blocks, the raised wall and the enlarged cachot. There were also running repairs to be made, a recurrent problem given the effects of Dartmoor’s unforgiving climate. Other prisoners worked as blacksmiths, interpreters, tailors or shoemakers, dug the prison gardens, picked horse hair for bedding, made swabs for the prison hospital or dug graves in the Burying Ground, all paid at the standard rate of 6d a day.119 Initially, the Transport Board had forbidden the employment of Dartmoor prisoners outside the prison walls, but in 1811 the Board reversed its policy, following a request from Agent Cotgrave in February to be permitted to dispatch working parties of prisoners to cut turf for fuel.120 The employment of Dartmoor inmates outside the prison gates would subsequently be extended, with both French and later American prisoners hired to work on various Admiralty-funded schemes— including the long-delayed project to construct a parish church in Princetown, work on which began in March 1812121—and on farming, quarrying and road construction projects in the neighbouring towns and villages for private employers, among them the ubiquitous Thomas Tyrwhitt.122 The Transport Board was aware of the risks involved in permitting work outside the prison gates—this explains no doubt their initial reluctance, a position in line with practice at other war depots.123 However, when in late 1812 a government minister questioned the wisdom of such a policy, the Transport Board countered that if the practice were to be discontinued, it “would be attended with very considerable Expense, on account of the Number of Workmen it would become necessary to hire

119  TNA ADM 98/225, TBLADP, 1808–1810, TO to Capt. Cotgrave, June 30, Sept. 12, 1809; March 1, May 10, 1810; ADM 98/226, TBLADP, 1810–1811, fol. 1r-v, 70r, 104v: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, June 2, 5, 1810; May 20, Oct. 10, 1811. 120  Stanbrook, 39. 121  Ibid., 77–84. 122  TNA ADM 98/225, TBLADP, 1808–1810, TO to Capt. Cotgrave, May 31, 1809; ADM 98/226, TBLADP, 1810–1811, fol. 78v, fol. 112r: July 5, Nov. 14, 1811; ADM 98/227, TBLADP, 1812–1813, fol. 116: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, May 13, 1813; TNA ADM 98/228, TBLADP, 1813–1815, fol. 34: TO to Capt. Shortland, March 11, 28, May 25, 1813. 123  Chamberlain, Norman Cross, 103; MacDougall, 328–29.

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instead of the Prisoners so employed”.124 As elsewhere, we can observe here the effects of pressures pulling official policy at Dartmoor in two very different directions: one which gave priority to security and containment and the other intent on keeping the administrative (and financial) footprint of the prison small. There were also, evidently, powerful local interests keen to tap this plentiful supply of cheap manual labour, Tyrwhitt chief among them. So, work outside Dartmoor Prison continued; its inmates, according to one glowing press report, “allowed to work in the country surrounding the prison, and return at night in the most cheerful manner”. Some did not return in fact, but escapes were considered “very rare”.125 Only in September 1814 did the Transport Board re-rethink its policy on the subject, following a spate of successful escapes from the working parties by American prisoners.126 If allowing working parties outside the prison represented a calculated security risk, the same was true of Dartmoor’s Market Square. For not only could prohibited articles be smuggled in and out of the prison, but human contraband could potentially be moved in the same way, although in the latter case, as might be expected, demand was above all in the outward direction. There are several recorded cases of disguises being smuggled into the prison by local farmers and market traders intended to allow prisoners to slip out of the main gates unnoticed.127 The best documented example concerns Louis-François Vanhille, a French naval commissaire, who was sent to Dartmoor in December 1811, after having broken the terms of his parole at the Cornish market town of Launceston.128 According to an account of the Frenchman’s “adventures” by Georges Pariset, published in 1905, Vanhille was placed on arrival at Dartmoor in the petty officers’ prison or Petit Cautionnement, and shortly afterwards was elected by his fellow officers to the prison’s conseil.129 It may have been his status 124  TNA ADM 98/133: TBLPW, 1811–1812, to public offices, fol. 14: TO to Lord Palmerston, Dec. 14, 1812. 125  [Untitled], National Register, Dec. 15, 1811. For examples of such escapes in September–October 1812, see Stanbrook, 47. 126  TNA ADM 98/228, TBLADP 1813–1815, fol. 135: TO to Capt. Shortland, Sept. 22, 1814. Following the departure of the Americans and the return of French prisoners to Dartmoor in July 1815, working parties outside the prison were once again permitted (ADM 99/261: TBMPW, June–Sept. 1815, July 4, 1815). 127  James, 75; Lloyd, Arts and Crafts, 26. 128  Pariset, 7–17; TNA ADM 103/96: GEBDPFR, 1811 prisoner n° 8497. Both Thomson (35–44) and Abell (278–83) discuss the case at length, drawing heavily on Pariset’s account. 129  Pariset, 18.

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as a member of this prisoner committee which explains why he was apparently given permission to take walks outside the main prison gates, as indicated on a contemporary map of the prison by John Wethams, dated July 1812. The map features a dotted line, indicating where, as the key explains, “Mr V. had liberty to go”.130 It was probably on these daily walks, or at the prison market, that the Frenchman was able to find local people willing to take messages to his contacts in Launceston, with a view to planning his escape. A disguise was smuggled into the prison by a Tavistock market trader, Mary Ellis, and on August 21, dressed as a waggoner, Vanhille walked unchallenged out of the prison gates. He headed first for Launceston, and subsequently travelled widely in Britain, a fact which, together with the long list of British co-conspirators involved in his escape, caused considerable alarm at the Admiralty. He was recaptured in Jamaica in January 1813, having crossed the Atlantic disguised as a British traveller, “Mr Williams”.131 The Frenchman was returned to captivity in Britain, this time to Forton Prison, followed by the hulks at Chatham. In May, he was taken to London to be “interrogated respecting the persons suspected to have favored his escape, and also respecting certain papers found upon him”, apparently with little result.132 Eleven months later, in April 1814, Louis-François Vanhille was released from Chatham and he returned to France.133

VI In addition to the need to guard against collusion on the part of prison guards, turnkeys and market traders, there was also the permanent concern that Dartmoor’s inmates would succeed in breaking out through or under the prison walls. In line with the point made earlier that prisons were constant works-in-progress, Dartmoor war depot underwent regular structural modifications designed to prevent it becoming Lardier’s hole-­ riddled escaper’s paradise. These changes included the decision, taken in 130  TNA MFQ 1/147: Pictorial map, Dartmoor Prison, 1812. On this map, see Stanbrook, 48–51; Mitchell & Janes, 96–97. 131  TNA ADM 1/4359: Admiralty, Secret letters, including draft orders and instructions to overseas flag officers, 1813; ADM 103/489: TO, Register of French and American Escaped prisoners of war, 1812–1813; Pariset, 21; Abell, 280–82. 132  TNA ADM 97/111: TO, Correspondence from legal officers, 1813, C.  Bicknell to TO, May 22, 1813; C. Jones to A. McLeay, June 14, 1813. 133  Abell, 282–83.

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1808, before even the first prisoners had arrived, to raise the height of the sentry boxes, fix lamps to the palisade fence and install a system of alarm wires and bells to the boundary walls.134 In 1810, the idea was first mooted of adding partition walls in the Prison-Yard, and the following year the transverse wall separating the Prison-Yard from the rest of the site was reinforced with thick wood and nails. Extra sentry boxes were also added at this time.135 In 1812, three gates leading into the Military Way were strengthened in the same manner as the transverse wall, “for the purpose of preventing them easily being cut through by the Prisoners”, and the outer perimeter wall raised from ten to twelve feet.136 The same logic lay behind the decisions in 1810–1811 to fit the new, larger prison cachot with a floor of granite blocks to prevent tunnelling, and to strengthen the floors of the privies with elm planks and iron gratings.137 As noted earlier, in May 1813 Agent Cotgrave stated that the various structural alterations made to the prison meant that “the chance of escapes [was now] impracticable unless by treachery”. As a result, he predicted confidently, no “weak part is left to them to escape”.138 In reality, throughout Dartmoor’s history—both before and after Cotgrave’s boast—prisoners found ways of getting around, through, over and under the material obstacles representing the first of those three barriers which needed to be negotiated by any escapee. Sometimes, that involved help from a “treacherous” guard, turnkey or market trader, sometimes not. In the latter case, a major concern, as reflected in several of the structural alterations listed above, was the possibility that prisoners would break through and particularly under the walls of the prison. This was brought home to the prison authorities just a few months after the arrival of the first prisoners. In the space of a few weeks, at the end of July and the beginning of August 1809, two escape plans were foiled, both of which involved breaking through the floor of one of the prison’s accommodation buildings and then tunnelling towards the boundary walls.

134  TNA ADM 98/225, TBLADP, 1808–1810, TO to Capt. Cotgrave: Oct. 17, 1808; Apr. 25, 1809; Dec. 7, 1809. 135  Loc. cit., Apr. 14, 1810; ADM 98/226, TBLADP, 1810–1811, fol. 101v: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Sept. 14, 1811. 136  TNA ADM 98/227, TBLADP, 1812–1813, fol. 12: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Feb. 21, 1812; above, Chap. 3. 137  See Chap. 3. TNA ADM 99/209: TBMPW, Aug. 29, 1811. 138  See above, 89.

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In July, it was discovered that wooden planks had been removed by inmates from the Petty Officers’ Prison with this object in mind, and Daniel Alexander was promptly instructed to reinforce the floor in question.139 Within a fortnight, a larger-scale plan had been uncovered, involving (as a later report put it) “an attempt made by the prisoners at Dartmoor in cutting the prison buildings and undermining the prison walls”. Two hundred prisoners were reportedly planning to escape. If successful, this would have been one of the largest prisoner break-outs of the period, and a major blow to both the Transport Office and Dartmoor’s agent, just two months after the war prison had received its first prisoners. One report suggests that Cotgrave was made aware of the prisoners’ intentions in June by a French informer, Pierre Ménat, but it would appear that it was not until early August that the plan was thwarted.140 Five men did manage to escape. Four were recaptured quickly and returned to Dartmoor; the fifth appears to have got clean away.141 Several other prisoners, including Breton privateer seaman Yves Perrins, described as “the ringleader in all the escape attempts at Dartmoor” in this period, were sent to Plymouth later that month, where it was ordered that they “be confined on board the most secure prison ship”.142 The motives of informer Pierre Ménat are not recorded, but it is likely that improving his chances of being released or exchanged entered into the equation. The promise of more or better food might also have been a factor.143 As noted in Chap. 2, the system of prisoner exchanges between Britain and France largely collapsed after 1803. For naval and army officers, there continued to be the possibility of release to one of Britain’s fifty parole towns, but the overwhelming majority of French combatants after 1803 were destined to remain confined in one of the war depots for the duration of hostilities. It is noteworthy in this respect that of the 5760 139  TNA ADM 98/225, TBLADP, 1808–1810, TO to Capt. Cotgrave, July 22, 1809; ADM 98/150, TBLPW, 1809, TO to D. Alexander, July 28, 1809. 140  PAB, Edward Hawkins Collection, 413/545: Capt. Rogers to Capt. Hawkins, Nov. 5, 1810; 413/16, Capt. E. Hawkins, Letter Book, 1810–1812, fol. 80: Capt. Hawkins to TO, Nov. 1, 1810. 141  TNA ADM 103/92–93: GEBDPFR, 1809. 142  TNA ADM 98/225, TBLADP, 1808–1810, TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Aug. 9–10, 1809; ADM 98/244: TBLAPL, 1809: TO to Capt. Rogers, Aug. 9, 1809; PAB, Edward Hawkins Coll., 413/16, Capt. E. Hawkins, Letter Book, 1810–1812, fol. 84: Capt. Hawkins to TO, Nov. 7, 1810. 143  Lardier, vol. 1, 238.

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French prisoners at Dartmoor who arrived at the prison between May and September 1809, and who make up the sample studied for this book, only 186 (3.2 per cent) are known to have been exchanged or released in advance of the general peace of 1814.144 A further thirty-one were released on parole.145 This meant that turning informant represented one of the few means to obtain an early release; the other being enrolling for military service with the British Army or Royal Navy, a step taken by 125 men in our sample, and nearly double that number (about 220) among the US prisoners.146 Both choices were encouraged by the Transport Office, but both, equally, came with considerable risks for the prisoners concerned.147 In November 1810, Captain Edward Hawkins, the superintendent of the Plymouth prisons and prison ships, recommended that Ménat be exchanged with some urgency. It was partly, he argued, a matter of encouraging other prisoners to follow the man’s example. There was also a second, more pressing, reason in this particular case. After spending two months in Dartmoor’s hospital on Cotgrave’s orders for his own protection, in November 1809 Ménat had been transferred to Plymouth’s Mill Prison. The following October, Ménat had been recognised by another prisoner, who, it turned out, was none other than Yves Perrins, the “ringleader” sent from Dartmoor to the Plymouth hulks the previous year. Fearing that the French informer’s life was now “greatly endangered”, Mill Prison’s agent, Captain Rogers, had transferred him to a prison ship, but Hawkins told the Transport Board in November 1810 that “this story is now so gone abroad that he [Ménat] is obliged to be kept in a sick berth on board the ship, it not being safe to put him among the Prisoners”.148 Ménat left for Morlaix five days later.149 144  This total may be an underestimate as it includes only those noted in the Entry Books as being sent to Plymouth “for France”. A further 314 prisoners were noted as “sent to Plymouth”, with no further information given. It is reasonable to assume that some, at least, of that latter group were also destined to be released. Even when these two groups are combined, however, the proportion released or exchanged amounts to no more than 8.7 per cent of the cohort. 145  Calculated from TNA ADM 103/92–94: GEBDPFR, May–Sept. 1809. 146  Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront, 182. 147  MacDougall, 367–69; Taylor, 368–69. 148  PAB, Edward Hawkins Coll., 413/545: Capt. J. Rogers to Capt. E. Hawkins, Nov. 5, 1810; 413/16, Capt. E. Hawkins, Letter Book, 1810–1812, fols. 80, 84: Capt. Hawkins to TO, Nov. 1 & 7, 1810. 149  TNA ADM 103/293: GEBPLFR, 1809–1810, prisoner n° 26064.

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All would-be escapees at Dartmoor risked disclosure at the hands of informers among their fellow prisoners; the latter ready, as one historian puts it, to “weigh immediate benefits against long-term ramifications, and individual action against collective resistance”.150 Those escape plans which involved a substantial number of individuals and preparation stretching to weeks or even months were particularly vulnerable. It is precisely escape attempts of this kind that receive the most attention in the captivity narratives relating to the prison. This derives in part no doubt from the fact that such break-outs, even if ultimately foiled by the authorities, offer an effective illustration of prisoner defiance as distinct from passivity, highlighting the qualities of ingenuity, perseverance and pluck which, as noted earlier, many such accounts choose to emphasise. In addition, it could be argued that carefully planned and executed escapes of this kind are well-suited to a particular kind of prisoner memoir, one which, self-consciously or not, seeks to present the prisoner of war experience as a series of self-contained episodes or tableaux, each with its own narrative structure and literary effects. Louis Catel’s two-volume work, sub-titled “A historical narrative of the misfortunes and escapes of French prisoners in England during the Empire, between 1809 and 1814”, published in 1847, offers a good example of this genre, devoting over a hundred pages in its second volume to one such escape attempt at Dartmoor; a plan, in his words, “as audacious as it was foolhardy”.151 Catel takes the reader through every step of the six-­ month preparation period, from the choice of the spot on the prison floor where the four-man team were to begin digging, through the obstacles and surprises encountered during the excavation of the tunnel, culminating in the escape itself, when, according to his account, at 8.30am on a foggy morning in November 1810, out of sight beyond the prison walls, the four men, disguised as British naval officers, clambered out of the tunnel and headed for the Plymouth road and freedom.152 Clive Lloyd has described Catel’s account as “in places improbable”;153 a reference no doubt to the gothic turn taken by the narrative when the four tunnellers stumble first on a skeleton, and then on an underground crypt, complete with a well-preserved corpse, guarded by a helmeted and  Jones-Minsinger, 497.  Catel, vol. 2, 155–264 (quotation at 156). 152  Ibid., 157–98. 153  Lloyd, Prisoners of War, 281. 150 151

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heavily armed stone warrior.154 The fact that neither the names of the four escapees given by Catel nor the date (November 27, 1810) correspond to any escape listed in the Dartmoor Entry Books would tend to bear out Lloyd’s scepticism. That being said, two multiple escapes from the prison are recorded for the end of 1810: one of eight prisoners on November 15 and a second, of five men, on December 4.155 The November break-out in particular is a good candidate for having furnished material for Catel’s account, involving as it did a group of fellow naval officers, probably living in the same quarters as the author. Whatever its inspiration, some of Catel’s telling details rings true, including the problems faced by the escapees in breaking through the “extraordinarily hard” prison floor, the need to deviate the tunnel to avoid a boulder blocking their path, and the problem of disposing of the “very stony” soil excavated each day.156 According to Catel’s compatriot, Alexandre Lardier, a number of escape tunnels were dug at Dartmoor by the French prisoners during this period. Lardier himself was involved in one abortive attempt in Prison N° 4, along with thirty other prisoners— again, nearly all officers. The tunnel was abandoned when a fellow prisoner informed the authorities of the plan. Lardier observed bitterly that such men “neither deserved forgiveness, nor would they obtain any”.157 A series of American escape tunnels, dug in the summer of 1814, also feature in several captivity narratives relating to Dartmoor.158 Seaman George Little offers a valuable first-hand account of one of the tunnels, dug under Prison N° 5.159 Although his account is spread over four pages rather than Catel’s hundred, it shares many of the structural and stylistic features of the Frenchman’s account, emphasising the material difficulties involved (which, unsurprisingly, were similar in the two cases) and the constant danger of detection. Little’s is one of several memoirs to state that the escape plan in Prison N° 5 was agreed on “unanimously” by the American prisoners, resigned by this stage of their captivity to the fact that “all hopes of exchange had long since been given up”.160 The tunnelling  Catel, vol. 2, 167–74.  TNA ADM 103/92–95: GEBDPFR, 1809–1811. From December 1810–January 1811, nine of the thirteen escapees were subsequently recaptured and returned to Dartmoor. 156  Catel, vol. 2, 157–59. 157  Lardier, vol. 1, 237–38. 158  Hicks, 236–37; J. Jones, 114–20. 159  Little, 236–39. 160  Ibid., 236. See also Andrews, 110; Palmer, 121. 154 155

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work was to be done at night to avoid detection, and it was decided that what Little described as “the vast amount of rubbish which must necessarily be dug from this cavern” should be washed down the drains, hidden under the stairs, or fashioned into a kind of mortar and plastered over the walls before being covered in whitewash.161 Little describes a particularly tense moment as the tunnel was being excavated under the Prison-Yard. Faced with a lack of air in the confined space of their “subterranean vault”, which limited the amount of time any one prisoner could spend underground to thirty minutes, the prisoners decided to pierce a series of air holes, linking the underground passage to the surface: This was a work of extreme hazard, because sentinels were posted, about thirty feet from each other, all around the prison yard. Detection, therefore, would seem to be inevitable; the risk, however, must be attempted or the project abandoned. The first air hole was commenced about twelve feet from the commencement of the passage, and extended to the surface without discovery.162

Over a period of forty days, the New England seaman worked for two hours each night: I […] exerted all my physical powers at this work, elated almost beyond measure with the prospect of success (for, as yet, all had been kept a profound secret from the enemy) and as we had penetrated in our passage as far as the inner wall, and reasonably calculated that, unless we were detected, or that some of our own men should prove faithless, we should effect our object.163

As Little’s parenthesis hints, the “profound secret” would not remain one for much longer. On the morning of September 2, 1814, Captain Shortland entered the Prison-Yard with a large detachment of soldiers, and the tunnel was uncovered, its whereabouts apparently indicated by an informer. The prisoners were moved to the blocks on the other side of the yard, and the tunnel filled in by soldiers the same day.164 And so, notes  Little, 237–38; Andrews, 111–12; Bates, 74.  Little, 237. 163  Ibid. 164  Ibid., 238–39; Andrews, 114–15; Bates, 75–76. See also Thomson, 158–59. 161 162

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Little, “our long cherished hopes of escape were entirely frustrated”.165 According to Charles Andrews, several other back-up tunnels begun at the same time as Little’s were discovered by the authorities in the following weeks, again following tip-offs from informants, and again the prisoners were moved.166 The American prisoner committees heard evidence against men suspected of informing the British, but either those concerned had already been spirited away by Shortland or the evidence was deemed insufficiently conclusive to justify reprisals.167 The agent, for his part, suspended the prison market and put the “riotous and improper” occupants of the prisons concerned on reduced rations. One prisoner, deemed to have played the role of “ringleader” in the break-outs, was sent to the cachot.168 Andrews noted sourly at the close of these events: “we [were] left to despair; we had no prospect by which we could hope to be relieved, but every thing seemed to threaten us with imprisonment for life”.169

VII One final break-out from Dartmoor is worth considering here. Like the French escape of November 1810 described above, it features in the 1847 memoirs of former prisoner, Louis Catel. The details of the escape itself may well be apocryphal, or possibly loosely based on events which the author had heard about in conversations with inmates in another war prison—as noted above, both plagiarism and invention have been found to be a common feature of nineteenth-century captivity narratives.170 That being said, the interest of Catel’s narrative in the present context lies elsewhere, for whether true, partly true or apocryphal, the sequence of events he describes throws valuable light on the final aspect of the porous prison to be discussed in this chapter: its cultural life. The main outlines of the  Ibid., 238.  Andrews claimed that three tunnels were dug simultaneously in prisons 4, 5 and 6, and that an attempt was also made to re-open the N° 5 passage after its initial discovery. De Witt’s map also depicts the route of the tunnels from prisons 5 and 6 (see Fig. 7.3). Traces of two tunnels dug under Prison N° 5 were uncovered during building work at Dartmoor in 1881 and 1911 (Thomson, 161–62, 255–56; Abell, 253). 167  Andrews, 115–19. 168  Little, 238–39; Andrews, 119; ADM 98/228, TBLADP, 1813–1815, fol. 3: TO to Capt. Shortland, Sept. 12, 1814. 169  Ibid. 170  Catel gives no date for this escape, and the names of the two escapees he provides, “Sanbot” and “Routier”, proved untraceable in the Entry Books. 165 166

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escape, as recounted by Catel, can be briefly described. A three-act play was put on in the prison, specially written for a Francophile British army officer named Calonne, called “Captain Calonne and his Good Lady”. The permission of the eponymous captain for the play to be performed was sought and obtained, and he graciously offered to lend the production one of his uniforms and a dress of his wife’s for the actors performing their roles on stage. On the play’s opening night, two members of the cast, dressed in the borrowed costumes, walked out of the prison, successfully hoodwinking the guards. When Captain Calonne found out what had happened (following an announcement on stage bringing the play to a premature end), he attempted to raise the alarm, but was himself detained as an imposter, along with his wife, and only released the following morning. In one final twist recounted by Catel, a parcel was delivered to the hapless captain a few days later, returning his uniform and his wife’s dress. It was accompanied by a formal letter, asking the addressee to forgive its authors for the “amusing stratagem” of which he had been the victim, and inviting the Calonnes to a production of the play in France once the war was over.171 With its costume changes and case of mistaken identity, plus the presence of the stock characters of the credulous army officer, the coquettish wife and the gormless sentry, all of whom are outwitted by the esprit of the French prisoners, Catel’s tale is itself highly theatrical. But behind these improbable events, the Frenchman’s account throws valuable light on an important aspect of the prison’s social and cultural life. Catel had noted earlier in his book that “the dismal situation” in which the prisoners at Dartmoor found themselves “required distractions capable of easing their captivity”. Thus, “entertainments of all kinds were organised as everyone tried to invent some new form of recreation”.172 Significantly, it was to the theatre that Catel turned to illustrate this statement, lending weight to the contention that “theatre (as well as music) served as a vital link to home [for prisoners of war], and to the safety and security of a pre-captive past”; thus helping them to navigate the emotional and psychological trauma of captivity.173 Catel observes that the large, high-ceilinged rooms of the prisons at Dartmoor were particularly well-suited to putting on plays and concerts. Drawing on an “elite group of prisoners” with experience as actors,  Catel, vol. 1, 266–77.  Ibid., 261–62. 173  Cox, 70, 9–10; Rouanet, “Grognards face à la captivité”, 261. 171 172

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musicians, artists, set decorators and technicians, a dramatic society was set up, run by a committee of “distinguished” men—presumably from the French officer class. The necessary permissions from the authorities were obtained and the “indispensable materials” for the sets ordered. According to Catel’s account, the agent agreed with alacrity to the prisoners’ request to set up the dramatic society, keen to see their energy diverted from organising escapes. A case of treading the boards rather than undermining them, as it were.174 Earlier in his book, the Frenchman had stated that three hours every morning and every afternoon were taken up with the study of literature, foreign languages, mathematics, drawing, music, fencing and dance; in short, with “everything necessary for the education of men destined to occupy an important place in society, whether in government, the Navy or the Army”.175 Here were the accomplishments—scientific, linguistic, sporting and aesthetic—expected of a member of the French officer corps, and by implication they were not to be extended to ordinary seamen and soldiers. Fellow officer Alexandre Lardier hints at a similar fault line among the French prisoners at Dartmoor when describing evenings spent at the prison in the company of “captivating” conteurs (storytellers), capable of “distracting us […] for several hours […] after a long day of sadness and boredom”, with their tales of bold escapes and feats of arms.176 It was better than reading, Lardier observed, “for only one’s ears and a small degree of attention were necessary to enjoy it, combining as it did the pleasures of idleness with the stimulation of the intelligence”.177 He went on: Those lodged on our floor were comprised to a large extent of men who had received a more or less advanced education, and they would hardly have tolerated the kind of exaggerated and fantastical tales heard in the guardroom and on the gun-deck. What we needed was something more rational, something truer to life, and our conteurs were equal to the occasion.178

It is reasonable to assume that the “distinguished” members of Catel’s dramatic society would have adopted the same stance with regard to their  Catel, vol. 1, 262–64.  Ibid., 160–61. 176  For the same point, see Cobb, vol. 2, 83–84. For the context, see Gilje, To Swear Like a Sailor, 117. 177  Lardier, 241–42. 178  Ibid., 242. 174 175

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own productions. That those productions would have been considered suitable for the senior officers of Dartmoor’s garrison179—men who could be expected to share that aristocratic culture which still (though this was changing) bound together Europe’s military elite, even in wartime—but not perhaps for those hailing from the “guardroom” or “gun-deck”. At the departure of the French prisoners in May 1814 (Catel left on the 23),180 the “very good” scenery, decorations and costumes of the Société dramatique were bought up by the Americans, and according to one prisoner account, the new proprietors were the members of the African American theatre company based in the cockloft of Prison N° 4. A second theatre company (with reputedly inferior, home-made scenery and decorations) put on plays in the cockloft of Prison N° 5. According to Benjamin Browne, to whom we owe these details, the actors in the former case were “mostly blacks” and in the latter “all whites”—and in both cases, he notes wryly, “all males”.181 Both companies put on plays once a week, and charged 6d admittance.182 The Transport Board had previously objected to the principle of “prisoners performing plays for money”, and in 1806 had told the agent at Norman Cross Prison to put a stop to this “very irregular practice”. The order had followed an anonymous complaint made to the Board that money was being paid by “strangers” to attend performances at the Cambridgeshire prison.183 The theatre company set up by the French prisoners at Portchester Castle depot in 1810, which put on elaborate productions for audiences of between 250 and 300, and was fitted out with boxes and an orchestra pit, ran into trouble with the authorities for similar reasons. It was allowed to continue only on condition that in future no British civilians were admitted.184 In the case of Dartmoor, in contrast, with theatre attendance apparently confined to prisoners and officers from the prison garrison, the issue does not seem to have raised any official hackles. Evidence regarding the plays performed on the various Dartmoor stages is fragmentary.185 Torry recalled that the prison’s gateways and 179  Catel noted that “the English officers […] attended nearly all our performances” (vol. 1, 265–66). 180  TNA ADM 103/93: GEBDPFR, 1809, prisoner n° 2310. 181  Browne, 238–40. 182  Pierce, 34; Cobb, vol. 2, 40. 183  Chamberlain, Norman Cross, 105–6. 184  Lloyd, Arts and Crafts, 284. On the Portchester Castle theatre, see Cox, ch. 7. 185  Fabel, 181–82.

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sentry boxes were “plaistered over with play-bills”, announcing forthcoming productions.186 Benjamin Browne copied down two examples of such bills, and reproduced them in his memoir. The first announces the performance of the popular late eighteenth-century comedy, Heir at Law by “The Dartmoor Thespian Company” at Prison N° 5 on December 29, 1814. At the foot of the bill, it was announced: “On account of the reception of the happy news of the TREATY OF PEACE, the theatre will be Splendidly Illuminated”.187 Frank Palmer attended a crowded performance of Heir at Law in November 1814, noting in his diary: “a ticket was of very little service as mob laws prevailed among the Prisoners. They made a rush in & there being no seats, some stood up & some sit on the deck & such. Another crowding you never saw”. Although Palmer’s view was obscured by a tall African American prisoner sitting in front of him, he wrote that “the scenery was very good and so was the performance”.188 Browne’s second play-bill was for a production of the “celebrated” mid-­ eighteenth-­century tragedy, Douglass, to be performed by Prison N° 4’s “Amateur Dramatic Company”, and was scheduled for February 3, 1815. It was noted that the doors opened at 5pm and that the performance commenced at 6pm. Admission, as usual, was 6d, though it was noted that cheaper seats at 4d would be available at the rear.189 Other plays put on in Prison N° 4 included Othello and Desdemona.190 Henry Torry wrote, evidently with a moue of disapprobation, that “these blacks have been desirous of having their prison the centre of amusement”. Although Torry considered that Prison N° 4’s actors were “half the time, ignorant of the meaning of the words they utter”, this had clearly not prevented him from attending, for he added that he “seldom failed to attend these exhibitions”.191 Torry was not alone in this respect. Indeed, it has been suggested that Prison N° 4 “became the centre of entertainment and entrepreneurial activity” at Dartmoor in these years.192 It was, wrote Salem seaman Joseph Valpey in his diary, a place to go “to see the fashions and pass the time”, and “hear the News of the day”.193 His  Waterhouse & Torry, 170.  Browne, 240. 188  Palmer, 108–9. 189  Browne, 241. 190  Waterhouse & Torry, 170. 191  Ibid. 192  Gilje, Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights, 265. 193  Valpey, 16–17. 186 187

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countryman Nathaniel Pierce noted that “there is more amusement in this Prisson than all the rest of them”, and listed the activities on offer in N° 4’s cockloft “schools” as reading, writing, fencing, boxing (taught by Richard Crafus himself) and dancing.194 Torry offers a similar list of schools in Prison N° 4 (noting in passing the “extraordinary” fact that both black and white prisoners featured among their pupils), and describes how the visitor to the cockloft “may be regaled with the sound of clarionets, flutes, violins, flagelets, fifes, tambarines” along with the singing of the prison’s occupants. Small wonder then that for twenty-year-old Nathaniel Pierce, all of this “was very divirting to a young Person”.195 What N° 4 prison was to “amusement”, Prison N° 1 was to “education”, according to Benjamin Browne, though he added that each of the prisons at Dartmoor had its share of schools. Classes cost 6d a week (or less if paid for by the month), and the subjects on offer ranged from the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic, to foreign languages, elocution, shipbuilding, naval tactics and political economy.196 US diarist Frank Palmer was one of those teaching navigation. His entry for December 13, 1814, recorded that he was “now employd in Teaching Navigation, Lunars, Writeing, &c &c &c, but my schollars bring cheifly Writeing, [which] brings in only 6d pr Month”.197 Perhaps Virginia privateer prizemaster Edward Armistead was among Palmer’s pupils, for the former noted in a letter of February 1815 that “my time here has been spent to as much advantage as possible, at school, [in] the study of navigation by lunars”.198 Palmer noted with regret that his income from teaching prisoners like Armistead was “rather to[o] small”, lending weight to Josiah Cobb’s remark that the schools “were much more numerous than profitable”. At least, added Palmer, his teaching kept him supplied in chewing tobacco.199

 Pierce, 33–34.  Pierce, 34. 196  Browne, 197; Bunnell, 137; Cobb, vol. 2, 164. 197  Palmer, 118. 198  Swem Library, James Barron Papers 1776–1899, Box Folder 2.40: E.  Armistead to J. Barron, Feb. 18, 1815, fol. 1; TNA ADM 103/88: GEBDPUS, 1814, prisoner n° 1104. 199  Palmer, 118; Cobb, vol. 2, 164. 194 195

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VIII Returning to Prison N° 4, there is a case for considering the building as the centre of the American prisoners’ spiritual life also, since, it has been noted, “Dartmoor’s faithful found their only satisfying spiritual community and charismatic preacher in [… its] cockloft”.200 On Sundays, the sound of violins, flageolets and tambourines gave way to that of the “wild, but not unpleasant” music emanating from the prison’s black choir which punctuated the meetings led by evangelical Virginia preacher, Simon Harris, often referred to in the prisoner narratives simply as “Simon”.201 Browne devotes several highly critical pages to the preacher, describing him in highly racialised language as “ugly, thick-lipped [and] ignorant”. He was, moreover, in Browne’s view, “a consummate rascal” who defrauded his congregation, while spouting every Sunday “a torrent of broken gibberish”, delivered with “grimaces and contortions”. Browne does concede that the meetings attracted a “considerable number of whites”, but qualifies that statement with the barbed comment that they were drawn to N° 4’s cockloft by the music rather than the priest.202 Torry in contrast recognised that Harris’ “performances [had] an imposing cast”, were “often listened to with seriousness” and were “delivered, frequently, with great warmth”, though his comments also came with a caveat: he hinted darkly that the black preacher “had drawn several whites into his church” by “art and cunning”.203 Harris enjoyed a privileged status in Prison N° 4, in part perhaps because his ministry found favour with Richard Crafus, but his unmatched renown among the devout inmates of the other prisons speaks to his possessing undeniable qualities as a spiritual leader.204 Interestingly, Simon Harris was not the only preacher to minister to the faithful in N° 4. There was a second prisoner, called John, who often worked closely with him, though he seems to have held more orthodox religious views (favouring, for example, the use of the Anglican Prayer Book), perhaps influenced by his former employment as a servant to an English duke.205 In addition, there was the Reverend Jones, a Methodist minister from Plymouth, who  Bolster, 125.  TNA ADM 103/90: GEBDPUS, 1814, prisoner n° 4199. 202  Browne, 193–96. For a similarly racialised description of S. Harris, see Palmer, 140. 203  Waterhouse & Torry, 165. 204  Bolster, 126. 205  Fabel, 183–84. 200 201

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“would hold forth in a quiet and rational manner” in the N° 4 cockloft every Thursday.206 On March 3, 1815, Nathaniel Pierce noted in his diary that he was planning to “hear the word of God” from the Reverend Jones that afternoon, though only, he added, “if he preaches it without bringing in Prayers for his Majesty”.207 Pierce went on to state that several months previously, “a Preacher used to visit the other Prisons once in a week, but the Prisoners not liking his Prayers for some time at last led him in to the necessary to preach to the walls of the lothsome place, by himself. He went off and we have not seen him since.”208 Robin Fabel has described the quality of organised religion at the prison as “generally dismal”.209 This was as much a matter of design as accident in fact, for Admiralty policy was that no official provision should be made for the spiritual welfare of prisoners—nor, as seen earlier, was there any religious ceremony accompanying prison burials. In this respect, then, the prisoners were on their own, unless outside volunteers were ready to offer their services.210 In fact, the Transport Board was no keener to provide for the religious needs of its own personnel at Dartmoor, at least initially. In a letter to the Admiralty in June 1809, the Board wondered “how far it is an Object for Government to provide a Chapel at the Prison as there are only 20 persons employed there under this Department”.211 Not very far was evidently their view. Two years later, however, official policy on the subject changed, and construction of Princetown Church got underway (built, as noted earlier, by French and later American prisoners).212 It was not in fact until April 1813 that the church’s incumbent, the Reverend James Holman Mason was appointed, and not until the following January that he first performed divine service. Even then, building work at the church remained unfinished, with many of its fixtures and fittings yet to arrive.213 As the church’s historian, Elizabeth Stanbrook, observes laconically, “it would seem that the church, and indeed the Parsonage House, were finished

 Browne, 192; Valpey, 23.  Pierce, 34. 208  Ibid. 209  Fabel, 183. 210  Chamberlain, Hell Upon Water, 158. 211  TNA ADM 98/115, TBLPW, 1809. To the Admiralty: TO to Lord Mulgrave, June 16, 1809. 212  ADM 98/132: TBLPW, To the Admiralty, 1809: TO to G. Harrison, Oct. 25, 1811. 213  Stanbrook, 77–83. 206 207

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[just] in time for the closure of the War Prison and the departure of all troops and associated staff”.214 In any case, Princetown Church was intended to serve the prison personnel and, to a lesser extent, its military garrison—prisoners were expected to make their own arrangements.215 In fact, there was no shortage of volunteers wishing to bring the Scriptures to Dartmoor’s French and American prisoners. The “generally dismal” record of the authorities derives not, or not only, from negligence or indifference, but from concerns—once again—about the porosity of the prison. In July 1809, a French abbot residing in Plymouth applied for permission to perform the last rites on dying French prisoners. The Transport Board gave its assent, but Cotgrave was ordered “carefully to prevent any communication” between the abbot “and the prisoners in the hospital at large”. The letter finished by reminding the agent that no French priests were to be admitted to the prison in any other circumstances, nor for that matter any other unauthorised visitors.216 Transport Board concerns were not restricted to members of the French clergé. In 1810, Methodist missionaries had been granted permission to preach on board the Medway prison ships,217 but the Board was reluctant to extend the authorisation to the land depots, arguing, in a letter the following year to Sir Robert Peel, then Under-Secretary of State for War, that “as a general measure to be adopted to the larger Depots on Shore”, they “do not consider the Measure adviseable”, particularly given the (unspecified) “Disorder and Confusion” that had taken place at Norman Cross Prison when similar permission had been granted.218 The Board was still 214  Ibid., 83. In 1868, nearly all the internal fittings dating to this period were destroyed by fire. The church narrowly avoided demolition in the 1990s, and is now managed by the Churches Conservation Trust (ibid., 84; James, 204). 215  TNA ADM 98/228, TBLADP, 1813–1815, fols. 179–80: TO to Capt. Shortland, Jan. 12, 1815. 216  TNA ADM 98/225, TBLADP, 1808–1810: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, July 19, 1809. In line with this policy, a Monsieur Levillain was refused permission in May 1813 to erect a chapel in the prison hospital at Dartmoor “for the convenience of preaching to the prisoners” (ADM 98/309, fol. 108: TBLPW, 1812–1815, TO to M. Levillain, May 8, 1813). 217  Toase, Wesleyan Mission, 25–26. 218  TNA ADM 98/132: TBLPW, 1811, to public offices: TO to Robert Peel, Oct. 19, 1811.

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dragging its feet in August 1812, expressing doubt as to the “authority” of the Methodist annual conference which had nominated five “itinerant ministers or preachers” to administer to the French prisoners of war.219 By this point, Methodist missionaries had been given permission to visit the land prisons to distribute bibles and religious tracts, but for the moment preaching was confined to the prison ships.220 It is probably to these Methodist missionaries that Benjamin Browne refers when describing the distribution of bibles at Dartmoor in 1814–1815. He states that the “chimerical” experiment was quickly abandoned when it was discovered that the books were more often being traded by their owners for beer and rum than kept for spiritual succour.221 There are scattered references of this kind to visiting preachers at Dartmoor in this period, but with the exception of Prison N° 4’s Mr Jones and his “quiet and rational manner”, there seems to have been no permanent missionary presence in the prison until the very last months of the prison’s existence, in the summer of 1815. In August that year, a Reverend Durrell was given permission by the Board to “visit and instruct” the prisoners. A few months later, rooms in an unoccupied part of the prison were set aside for his use, “for divine service and also to commerce with the prisoners and superintend the schools”.222 By this point evidently, earlier concerns at the Admiralty about clerical go-­ betweens, secretly conveying correspondence to and from prisoners, and possibly fomenting disorder and/or organising escapes, had abated.223

219  TNA ADM 1/3763, Admiralty, Correspondence and Papers, 1660–1976, TBLPW, 1812: TO to J.W. Croker, Aug. 27, 1812, fols. 331–32, 333–36, 338. 220  Portsmouth-based Methodist missionary William Toase makes this distinction, referring to permission granted by the TO at the end of October 1811 (see Toase, Wesleyan Mission, 25–26, 33; Toase, Memorials, 36). On Toase’s work with French prisoners of war, see Morieux, Society of Prisoners, 123–24, 126; Chamberlain, Hell Upon Water, 159–61; Sibiril, Sibiril & James, 18–19. 221  Browne, 191–92. See also Valpey, 18. 222  TNA ADM 98/167: TBLPW, 1815–1816: TO to Messrs. J. Reyner & R. Stevens, Aug. 21, 1815; ADM 98/229, TBLADP, 1815–1817, fol. 3: TO to Capt. Shortland, Oct. 12, 1815. There is some suggestion in the TB correspondence that by autumn 1814, Princetown Church’s incumbent, Reverend Mason, was also administering to the prisoners of Dartmoor. If so, it is puzzling that not a single one of US captivity narratives mentions the fact (loc. cit., fol. 157: TO to Capt. Shortland, Nov. 10, 1814; ADM 98/166: TBLPW, 1814–1815, TO to J. Butterworth, Sept. 24, 1814). 223  Walker, 178.

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IX One final aspect of Dartmoor’s “porosity” remains to be considered: the circulation of letters, newspapers, books, pamphlets and other texts in the prison. It is an issue that touches on questions of security, but also throws light on both the prison’s cash economy and its cultural life. On the first point, the 1809 Instructions for Agents made it clear that all letters to and from prisoners were to transit uniquely via the agent, and that any “suspicious correspondence” was to be forwarded to London.224 Cotgrave put in place a system by which a few trusted prisoners were authorised “to bring all letters and representations to me from the body of the Prisoners”, prompting complaints from some of the French prisoners that those “Prisoners who have permission to pass the Gates [from the Prison-Yard] are no representatives of theirs”. Refusing to give ground on the prisoners’ demands on this as on other matters, Cotgrave maintained in his “Answers and Remarks” of May 1813 that the only alternative to the scheme he had put in place would be to allow the inmates “to pass and repass the Gates” at will, “bring[ing] up to the Agent, all Letters, etc. to be done by order of the Prisoners, and not the Agent”; a clear “subversion of all Government”.225 The clear implication in the prisoners’ complaint was that some of their “letters and representations” were not being transmitted in one direction or the other, a complaint later echoed, as noted earlier, by American agent, Reuben Beasley.226 There were, however, ways around Cotgrave’s gatekeepers, including trusting letters to fellow prisoners about to leave the prison or bribing a sentry or turnkey. In April 1810, French prisoner “P.G.” persuaded a man employed in the prison dispensary to smuggle in a letter from a distant cousin of the Frenchman residing in Britain, and to smuggle out his reply.227 A case was also reported in 1811 of a “market girl found with letters to and from prisoners” on her person. It was ordered that she be refused admission to the market in the future.228 US prisoner Perez Drinkwater noted in a letter to his wife Sally in October 1814 that  Instructions for Agents, art. XXXVII.  Cotgrave “Answers and Remarks”, fols. 466–69. 226  See above, 119. 227  Le Havre Municipal Archives, France, Ms. 53Z15: Diary of P.G. Dartmoor, 1809–1810, fol. 18: Apr. 1, 1810. 228  ADM 98/226, TBLADP, 1810–1811, fols. 116v–117r, 118r: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, Dec. 5, 13, 1810. 224 225

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he was “compeled to smugle this out of prison for they will not allow us to write to our friends if they can help it”.229 On an earlier occasion, Drinkwater had entrusted a letter addressed to his brother Elbridge to a departing French prisoner, apologising in advance that “it will be a long time before you receive it, as it has got to go by the way of France to get to you”.230 The erratic delivery of letters at Dartmoor, whether the result of interference by the prison authorities or due to some other cause, was a frequent source of anxiety and self-doubt, as seen earlier in the case of Frenchman Étienne Lochet. American prisoner Joseph Valpey wrote in his diary in similar fashion in April 1815: On the fourth this Morning there was twelve hundred Letters arived here from America, Chiefly from Marblehead and Salem, but none for Myself, but I hope that it May please the almighty God for to spare me that I may once more see My parents and know the reason for there Slighting me so much as they have done since I left Salem.231

Two months earlier, on February 8, a similar large shipment of over a thousand letters had arrived at Dartmoor. Frank Palmer was more fortunate than his countryman, for there were three letters for him. Having been forced hurriedly to sell some clothing to pay the 7s 6d owing in postage (several of his “supposed friends” having refused to lend him the money), he collected the precious cargo. He described the moment in his diary: How happy I felt at this moment. I must say the most so of any moment of my life and much more so as they conveyd the pleasing inteligence of the Health and comfort of all my near & Dear Friends, Excepting the Death of An Amiable little niece. The Health of my Honourd Parents particularly my Father who enjoys more than his usual health.232

 P. Drinkwater to S. Drinkwater, Oct. 12, 1814, qtd. James, 177.  P. Drinkwater to E. Drinkwater, May 21, 1814, repr. in “Life in Dartmoor: A Military Prison during the War of 1812. Perez Drinkwater’s Narrative of Experience as a Prisoner of War”, Boston Daily Globe, March 31, 1885. 231  Valpey, 26. 232  Palmer, 145–46. 229 230

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After detailing the contents of each letter, Palmer added: “Three times three ore and ore again have I perused those letters. It is pleasure Rapture, to read and read again and still find them pleasing.”233 The official policy restricting the circulation of newspapers and other printed material within the prison was also a frequent source of complaint—and circumvention. The newspapers provided eagerly awaited news of the outside world, and also, on occasion, information about what was happening within the prison itself. Several US prisoner accounts affirm that whereas Tory and federalist newspapers—including the “most detestable” Times of London and, even worse in the eyes of one memoirist, the Federal Republican and “the Boston federal papers”—were readily available inside Dartmoor, what another calls “the liberal journals” had to be “smuggled into the prisons”.234 French prisoners were also involved in this illicit trade in newspapers, employing one of their numbers to translate articles giving the latest news of the war into their mother tongue. Louis Catel recorded his “profound sadness” at the succession of French military setbacks he learnt about in this way.235 Prisoners employed to work outside the prison gates were able to smuggle in newspapers and other items, and “friendly” guards sometimes supplied papers too.236 On occasion, however, more elaborate schemes were apparently required. Benjamin Browne refers to William Cobbett’s Political Register—a popular choice with American prisoners237—being smuggled into the prison hidden in a loaf of bread, and notes that the papers were so expensive that the prisoners “had to club together to form companies for the purpose of taking them”. There is also a report of prisoners selling their weekly fish ration back to the victualling contractors to raise money to pay a British contact to smuggle in “one of the weekly journals from London”.238 American newspapers (other than the officially approved titles) were particularly difficult to get hold of, though occasionally the arrival in the prison of captives recently departed from the United States offered a precious supply.239  Ibid., 147–48.  Browne, 198–99; Waterhouse & Torry, 175. On this point, see Gilje, To Swear Like a Sailor, 211. 235  Catel, vol. 2, 318–19. 236  Andrews, 91, 71. 237  See Waterhouse & Torry, 175; Palmer, 134. 238  Browne, 199; Bates, 57. 239  Browne, 199. 233 234

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There were also official guidelines regarding the circulation of books in the prison. Theoretically, all titles sold to, or ordered by, the prisoners had to be approved by the Transport Board.240 In March 1813, Captain Cotgrave was told that books could be supplied for the prisoners “provided they are religious books”, but it is not clear if these books were in fact distributed, or indeed how far the Board or its agents at Dartmoor took an interest in the prisoners’ reading habits more generally. Though some prisoners seem to have held on to books in their possession when they were captured,241 it is likely that many volumes were destroyed, lost or stolen in the chaotic circumstances of captivity, creating a substantial demand for new titles to buy or borrow. There are scattered references in both the French and American captivity narratives to unofficial “libraries” existing in the prison, including, in the latter case, one established in one of the cocklofts with the proceeds of Royal Navy prize money. The library was said to have been “a pleasant source of amusement and instruction to some of the prisoners”. Books were lent out at ½d a week.242 It is significant in this context that many of the Dartmoor prisoner narratives list reading among the activities helping to keep at bay the daily tedium of confinement.243 There are also occasional comments indicating the importance of reading for some inmates. Nathaniel Pierce, for example, noted in his diary for February 5, 1815, that he had walked about for a “considerable” time that day, but had “seen no good book to read, as I ought, to devot myself to God”.244 Frank Palmer, in contrast, wrote in his diary the following month that he had “been up through the Night Reading the History of Bonaparte’s Travels & Invasion of Egept”. He admitted to feeling “quite Dull” with fatigue the following day.245 On an earlier occasion, Palmer had noted his intention to reflect on his predicament as a prisoner of war with a view to writing about the subject, before adding that “my mind at present is not prepared for such thoughts as I would wish to transmit to writing as I have been reading novels through the day & they have so engross’d my attention that I must defer giving loose to my reflections for the present”.246  Chamberlain, Norman Cross, 105.  Cobb, vol. 2, 167. 242  Catel, vol. 1, 161; Browne, 198; Cobb, vol. 2, 40. 243  See Palmer, 161; Cobb, vol. 2, 6; Clover, “Reminiscences”, vol. 23, n° 6, 519. 244  Pierce, 29. 245  Palmer, 174. 246  Ibid., 107. See also Valpey, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28. 240 241

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In addition to the newspapers and books, shorter, more ephemeral texts would have been in constant circulation within the prison, offering further evidence that Dartmoor functioned as a site of cultural exchange.247 These texts included official notices posted by the Transport Board and agent, and the play-bills referred to previously. One prisoner account also speaks of “bulletins” which were “occasionally posted on the walls, containing the leading incidents of news, prison memorabilia, &c”, supplementing the news transmitted orally by the prison criers.248 Other texts would have passed from hand to hand, such as those sold by an American prisoner who “used to hawk his own verses about”, and was known as the prison “poet laureat”.249 It is significant perhaps in this context that when in the summer of 1814 a method was sought for circulating information secretly about a new American escape attempt “that would obtain the opinion of all the prisoners without the suspicion of the guards or officers, it was thought best to have it done in poetry”; a choice which strongly suggests that the circulation of poems among the prisoners was common enough not to risk attracting unwelcome official attention.250 Some of the verses sold or passed around would have been set to familiar tunes of the period. It is likely in fact that many songs circulated inside the prison, both in written form, and orally, and there are several cases of poems and songs surviving in multiple versions.251 Josiah Cobb recalled that “music was a favourite amusement of many of the inmates. They met at one another’s mess tables with their instruments and note books, and could easily wear away a few hours of each day, which otherwise would have hung heavily upon them.”252 It has been shown that music, songs, and poetry—the latter two often in doggerel form—played an important role in the lives of Anglo-American seafarers, and the point may be extended to prisoners of war more generally.253 Paul Gilje notes that the songs sung by US sailors “ran the gamut from the sentimental to the sensational and from true love to the bawdy”. Songs and poems celebrating  The phrase is Catriona Kennedy’s (Kennedy, 134).  Browne, 198. For a similar point about British prisoners of war in France, see Kennedy, 126. 249  Cobb, vol. 2, 176. 250  Andrews, 108–9. 251  See Palmer, 227–74, Valpey, 32–49; New York State Archives, Ms. BD11128: Thomas B. Mott, War of 1812 Songs and Ballads. 252  Cobb, vol. 2, 165. 253  Hicks, 18. 247 248

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national identity were also popular, whether lauding the achievements of the young republic’s jack tars or vilifying its enemies.254 In one sense then, the songs and poems penned or circulated by prisoners of war were merely tapping into a broader popular maritime tradition.255 As might be expected, however, the works composed at Dartmoor also evoke themes specific to the experience of captivity, including one, possibly composed by seaman Joseph Valpey, which takes as its subject the prison itself: a “place picht on purpose for tormenting man/Where Frenchmen and yankey’s together must stay/Until the war’s o’er or else run away”.256 Important events were also commemorated in verse, like the failed attempt by six American prisoners to profit from a freak snow drift to clamber over the prison walls in January 1814.257 Particular, reviled individuals linked to the experience of captivity might equally be targeted, with agents Cotgrave, Shortland and Beasley all singled out for special mention. The treatment meted out to prisoners by their captors was, unsurprisingly, also a popular theme, as in a poem by a French prisoner, which condemns the inhumanity of the “vile” and “perfidious” Anglais. This was one of a series of poems written by Pierre Barbier, a thirty-six year-old sous-officier in the French merchant marine from the port of Paimboeuf on the Loire River, who was among the first prisoners to arrive at the prison in May 1809.258 His verse survives in a remarkable manuscript “Collection of Selected Songs […] written in England at Dartmoor Prison, August 1st, 1810”. Each page is bordered and decorated by hand in coloured inks, and there are a number of full-page illustrations of pastoral, architectural and topographical subjects.259 This “collection” must have been a precious one for its owner; its contents probably to be shown, at most, to a few of Barbier’s trusted 254  Gilje, To Swear Like a Sailor, 135, 168 (quotation at 135); Hicks, 176. For an example of such a ballad, see “The American Tar”, noted as “composed in Dartmoor, England”, repr. in Palmer, 269–70. For other versions, see Valpey, 43–44; US Library of Congress, Printed Ephemera Collection, Portfolio 228, Folder 25: “The Constitution & Guerriere, followed by A new song, written in Dartmoor prison [1813]”. 255  Gilje, To Swear Like a Sailor, 135ff. 256  “Of Dartmore Prison” (Valpey, 32). For a slightly different version, see New York State Archives, Ms. BD11128: Thomas B. Mott, War of 1812 Songs and Ballads, fol. 34. 257  Andrews (1852 edn.), 35. On this escape attempt, see Joy, 68–69. 258  TNA ADM 103/92, GEBDPFR, 1809, prisoner n° 905. Barbier would remain at Dartmoor until the peace of May 1814. 259   Nantes Municipal Archives, France, Ms. 719: “Recueil de chansons choisies … appartenant à Pierre Barbier. Fait en Angleterre, à la prison de Dartmoor, le 1er aoust 1810”, c. 1810–1814. On the title page of his collection, Barbier wrote that if anyone found his

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friends, rather than “hawked about” the prison like the verses of the American “poet laureat”. The poem cited above, entitled “Liberty regained, or far from you”, looked forward to the day when “Gentle and dear Liberty/You will come to break my chains” and “the torch of vengeance” would topple the “haughty” English.260 In another poem, entitled “Complaint of a Prisoner”, Barbier evoked “the boredom, the chains and the destitution”, as well as the “utter exhaustion” of his fate. “What have I done?”, the poem asks, “What crime have I committed to suffer so much?”261 * * * In March 1815, after nearly five months’ confinement in Dartmoor, Joseph Valpey wrote a series of poems, “expecting daly”, as he put it, “to get Released from his Imprisonment”, following the peace treaty signed at Ghent by the British and American delegations the previous December (the motive for that “splendidly illuminated” theatre stage in Prison N° 5, referred to earlier). Valpey’s poems are shot through with a mood of longing and impatient expectation, tinged with an intense sense of grievance against those whom he called, in a poem of that name, “The Sharks of Dartmoor”. Adopting a traditional ballad formula, the poem begins by calling on its author’s fellow prisoners “to Prison bid adieu/To Shortland and his Turnkey’s and all his cursed crew”. The work continues, settling scores with both the material symbols of the carceral regime and the individuals and groups whom Valpey held responsible for his hardships: We’ll bid adieu to dartmoor there Potatoes Coal and Turf, There barley Bread and Turnips and dam’n Doctors stuff, There codfish and herrin no more of that we’ll use, But leave it behind for Doctors clerks Turnkey’s & Jew. We have done with your Messing out’ or will have very soon, The prison then you may inspect three time’s in the forenoon, Your Marketing then you may stop your Porter and small Beer, And your Poison Rum and Viteral [victuals?] that has killed hundred’s here.262

Valpey’s poem bears a striking resemblance to the bitter comments written by Frank Palmer in his diary on March 17, 1815—two days after the notebook and was kind enough to return it, they would receive, as a reward, a kiss—“or two, if necessary”. 260  Ibid., 50–51. 261  Ibid., 140. 262  Valpey, 47.

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composition of “The Sharks of Dartmoor”—cited in part towards the beginning of this chapter, on the occasion of the “pleasing intelligence” confirming that the Treaty of Ghent had been ratified. Palmer’s entry veers between bitter condemnation, as seen earlier, of the “innumerable shoals of Farmers, market women and Jews” who had “subsisted during the War entirely on the outgoings of these Prisons”, and satisfaction that, soon, “British Soldiers, Sailors, Turnkeys, or Agents” [would no more] domineer over the unfortunate Captive”. Palmer added that he had celebrated the “most GLORIOUS NEWS” from Ghent over a glass of porter, and purchased two suits of clothes; one for himself, one for a friend, “Mr Fellows”.263 In fact, both Valpey and Palmer—along with “Mr Fellows”264—would have some months to wait yet before bidding adieu to Dartmoor, as indeed would most of their countrymen. Valpey’s and Palmer’s words reflect a widely shared combination of impatient expectancy and deep-­ seated and multi-faceted grievance among the American prisoners— against the prison’s agent, its turnkeys, soldiers, sailors and doctors, and against the farmers and market traders. This was not the Dartmoor of handsome profits made from intricate bone warships and large-scale straw plait manufacture, of elaborate theatrical productions and time spent in novel reading. That side of Dartmoor was real enough, as this book has shown, but it existed alongside scanty and unpalatable victuals and ragged clothing, over-taxed small beer, repeated early morning roll-calls, searches and market embargoes, enforced by “pricking” guards. It also existed alongside disease and death, as illustrated by another of Valpey’s poems, an epitaph to his friend and former shipmate, twenty-two-year-old Josiah Gwinn, who had been carried away as a result of unwanted “porosity” of a different kind—the epidemic of smallpox that had ravaged the prison that winter. In the ten-line poem, Valpey recorded the “spotless honour”, “winning wit” and “soft humanity” of his friend.265 This was the complex  Palmer, 168. On this period, Chap. 7.  Probably Nathaniel Fellows, a captain’s clerk on the privateer schooner, the Rolla, the same vessel on which Palmer had been serving when captured in December 1813 (TNA ADM 103/90: GEBDPUS, 1814, prisoner n° 3942). 265  “Sacred to the Memory of Josiah Gwinn” (Valpey, op. cit., 49); TNA ADM 103/640: Dartmoor death certificates, 1809–1816, week ending Feb. 24, 1815; TNA ADM 103/90: GEBDPUS, 1814, prisoner n° 4930. Valpey’s memoir reproduces several letters sent by him to Gwinn while the latter was in hospital, written from February 6–10, 1815. He eventually received a reply from fellow prisoner Edward Porter on the 11th, stating that Gwinn’s life was “despaired of”. Gwinn died on the 22nd (Valpey, 64–65). 263 264

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background against which the events of the spring of 1815 would play out in the prison, culminating in death and injury; not this time from epidemic disease, but from multiple rounds of musket ball and from bayonet wounds. It is to that background and to those events that we turn for the book’s final chapter.

CHAPTER 7

“Blood Shed & Cloudy Weather, Wind Easterly”: The Dartmoor Massacre (1815)

“A report has reached us”, wrote an unnamed journalist in the Plymouth and Dock Telegraph on Saturday, April 8, 1815, “that on Thursday night last, in consequence of a daring attempt by the American prisoners at Dartmoor, who have been in a state of great impatience, to effect their escape, the military there were under the necessity of firing on them, by which five are said to have been killed, and thirty wounded”.1 Five American prisoners were indeed killed at Dartmoor on April 6: John Haywood, Joseph Toker (or Took) Johnson, William Leverage, James Mann and John Washington. Two more, James Campbell and Thomas Jackson, died of their wounds on  the 7th, and were included by prison surgeon George Magrath in the official list of those killed, alongside the thirty-one prisoners seriously injured by musket shot or bayonet. A further two men, John Gray (or Grey) and John Roberts, succumbed in the coming weeks from infected wounds. This takes the likely death toll to nine.2  [Untitled], Plymouth and Dock Telegraph, April 8, 1815.  NA, RG 45–566: Rolls and Lists of prisoners of war, 1812–1815, Box 2/5: “A return of American Prisoners of War … killed and wounded at Dartmoor, April 1815”; Box 2/6: “Description of Death Wounds inflicted on the Evening of the 6 April 1815”; TNA ADM 103/640: Dartmoor Certificates, 1799–1814: returns for the weeks ending April 7, Apr. 28 and May 12, 1815. John Grey died on April 26 and John Roberts on May 12. 1 2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Davie, French and American Prisoners of War at Dartmoor Prison, 1805–1816, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83891-1_7

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The events of Thursday April 6, 1815, understandably—and rightly— overshadow all other aspects of the final months of the American presence at Dartmoor, and this is true both of the accounts of those who witnessed the events first-hand, and of the historians who have written about the prison on the moor during this period. The attempt to find meaning in the carnage was a priority (for different reasons) for all parties concerned in the aftermath of the events of that day. For most US observers, there was no question of acknowledging the “necessity” of gunfire to halt the “daring” escape attempt of the American prisoners. It was that early version of events, which referred to what had happened as “a most serious affray”, “a dreadful riot” or an “insurrection”, that dominated British press coverage in the days after the publication of that article in the Plymouth and Dock Telegraph, and indeed Transport Office correspondence on the subject.3 However, by the middle of June, with the first eyewitness accounts from American prisoners now having reached US newspaper desks (including, in one case, an early copy of Charles Andrews’ The Prisoners’ Memoirs),4 a powerful alternative narrative for the events of April 6 had begun to circulate on the other side of the Atlantic, with headlines like “Horrid Massacre!” and “Massacre at Dartmoor”.5 In this alternative narrative, common to both prisoner accounts and press reports, Captain Thomas Shortland was singled out for particular censure, blamed for having given the order to soldiers from the garrison to open fire on a tight mass of unarmed (and non-escaping) prisoners. As US prisoner Frank Palmer put it vividly in a diary entry written on the evening of April 6, the soldiers of the Dartmoor garrison had “chase[d] their Brothers about—like the hunting of foxes”, with predictable results. He added: “Brothers did I say? Let me [e]race out that name. They Brothers? No, Never, they are not worthy of such a Name”.6 Shortland’s 3  For British press coverage, see for example “Disturbances at Dartmoor Prison”, Morning Chronicle, Apr. 11, 1815; [Untitled], Leeds Intelligencer, April 24, 1815; [Untitled], Bristol Mirror, April 15, 1815; [Untitled], Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, Apr. 13, 1815; “Dreadful Riot at Dartmoor Prison”, Taunton Courier, Apr. 13, 1815. On the TO view in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, see A. McLeay to R.G. Beasley, Apr. 10, 1815 & J.W. Croker to J.P. Morier, Apr. 10, 1815, repr. in MPUS, 157–58, 159–60. McLeay refers to “a violent attack on the guard” and a “revolt”; Croker to an “alarming riot”. 4  Repr. in “Horrid Massacre”, National Intelligencer, June 15, 1815. 5  Dzurec, 175. See for example: “Massacre at Dartmoor”, National Intelligencer, June 13, 1815; “Horrid Massacre!” National Intelligencer, June 15, 1815; “Dartmoor Massacre”, Niles’ Weekly Register, June 17, 1815. 6  Palmer, 182.

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actions were portrayed repeatedly as the very epitome of British brutality and heartlessness, with some accounts going as far as to suggest that the bloodshed had been carefully planned by the ignominious naval captain with malice aforethought. Looking for meaning in the carnage might also lead in a second direction (not necessarily in contradiction with the first): to interpreting the events of the previous weeks and months at Dartmoor in the light of what was to follow, casting the massacre as the grimly logical culmination of a long series of decisions and actions, set against a backdrop of systematic mistreatment of the American prisoners by the British authorities. In this way, April 6 could be portrayed as a telling symbol of the (mis)use of power by British prison officials, and also of prisoner resistance to that power; thus summing up in three words the US prisoner of war experience as a whole. Much, in fact, as the word “ponton” or hulk came to be used as shorthand to describe the French experience of captivity in Britain in many subsequent accounts across the Channel. That the events of April 6 came at the end of a period of heightened tension at Dartmoor cannot be gainsaid. US naval historian Paul Gilje explains the context: In the months after the diplomats agreed to the Treaty of Ghent (December 14, 1814), ending the war, American prisoners at Dartmoor were caught in a world of limbo. Peace promised to bring their release. Neither the British nor the American government seemed eager or able to deal with six thousand unruly sailors. […] Left to languish through another austere winter, they grew ever more resentful of the walls and the guards that bound them to their desolate fate. With liberty on the horizon, but still out of reach, Jack Tar took rowdyism to a new level and pushed his keepers to the edge and then beyond.7

Gilje’s account throws up a number of intriguing questions concerning this period of “limbo” of nearly four months between the signing of the Treaty of Ghent and the Dartmoor Massacre. What precisely did American “rowdyism” consist of during this period, and how did it change in character during the winter of 1814–1815, if indeed it did so? What then was the “new level” of prisoner rowdyism to which Gilje refers, and what was the nature of the “edge” towards which the authorities at the prison were being “pushed” inexorably by Jack Tar? The impression given here is of 7

 Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront, 184. See also Gilje, Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights, 266.

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the prison authorities at Dartmoor reacting to events rather than mastering them; carried along, like a cork bobbing along in a stream, by what Gilje terms an “undercurrent of [American] rowdiness”.8 Seeking answers to these questions constitutes, arguably, a vital prerequisite to any attempt to understand the Dartmoor Massacre itself. Starting from this premise, this chapter adopts—unlike the preceding ones—a broadly chronological structure. In order to consider the extent to which the beginning of the period of “limbo” as defined by Gilje represents a veritable fault-line in relations between the prisoners at Dartmoor and their keepers, the period under consideration will be extended backwards beyond the signature of the Treaty of Ghent; back in fact to the summer of 1814, when, former governor Basil Thomson claimed, the first of an “extraordinary series of blunders” was made by the British and American authorities.9 Without necessarily accepting Thomson’s contention that had these “blunders” not been made, the life of the prison would have continued without incident until the end of the war, the events he describes offer a useful benchmark from which to compare the periods before and after the signature of the Treaty of Ghent; pre-limbo versus limbo, as it were. Once these two periods have been investigated, the latter part of this chapter will turn to exploring in detail the Dartmoor Massacre itself, along with the broader ramifications of that day’s events.

I Thomson argued that “the trouble really began in August, 1814, when there arrived at the depot four men under sentence of solitary confinement in the cachot for the whole period of their detention”.10 The Entry Books record that it was in fact at the beginning of July that the four men, Simeon (or Simon) Hayes, John Miller, James Rickor (or Ricker) and Elijah Whitten (or Witten) were sent from Plymouth to Dartmoor, where, according to an annotation added to the prison register in red ink, they were “ordered into confinement […] for attempting to Blow up the Vivid after being taken Possession of by the crew of the Ceres Frigate”.11 Bound  Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront, 183.  Thomson, 163. 10  Ibid. 11  TNA ADM 103/88: GEBDPUS, 1814 (my italics). Prisoner nos. 1671 (Hayes), 1672 (Rickor/Ricker), 1673 (Whitten/Witten), 1674 (Miller). 8 9

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for Belfast from Lisbon, the Vivid had been captured off the Scilly Isles by the Baltimore privateer Surprise at the end of May that year. A prize crew from the privateer—the four men named above—was landed on the Vivid, but the men and their prize became separated from the Surprise, and the Vivid subsequently changed hands again when it was boarded by sailors from the British frigate, HMS Ceres. The boarding party found a number of spent matches in the merchantman’s hold located ominously close to some barrels of powder, and it was concluded that the prize crew had intended to blow up the ship, and perhaps the British frigate with it. The captain of the Ceres ordered the four to be placed in chains for the voyage back to Britain, and then, as Josiah Cobb puts it, “without the slightest trial or hearing”, the men were sent to Dartmoor, with orders that they be kept in solitary confinement in the cachot for the duration of the war.12 The sentence on the four Americans would not be lifted until more than eight months later, on March 18, 1815—the longest sentence of solitary confinement meted out to any prisoners at Dartmoor.13 Whether or not the four men were culpable of the “evil intentions”14 attributed to them with regard to the Vivid (and, if they were, whether they merited the punishment handed down to them) is less important in the present context than the fact that—as the testimonies of both Cobb and Charles Andrews attest—there was a widely shared conviction among the American prisoners at Dartmoor that the four had been punished with unwarranted severity.15 Money was collected among the prisoners, allowing “relief” to be conveyed to the four in secret by a complicitous turnkey, who, Cobb records, “never let an opportunity slip without administering to their comfort, when it was possible to avoid the lynx eyes of his superior”.16 That “comfort” was of course relative. It will be recalled that prisoners placed in Dartmoor’s cachot were confined on two-thirds rations in an unheated, windowless cell devoid of furniture except for matting on the floor, with the only light and air which came through small ventilation holes under the eaves. Even with the addition of unauthorised succour, perhaps in the form of extra food, clothes or candles, conditions inside the cachot must have remained harsh indeed.  Cobb, vol. 2, 199–201 (quotation at 201); Lloyd’s List, June 3 & 21, 1814.  James, 111. 14  Cobb, vol. 2, 200. 15  Ibid., 199–201; Andrews, 107–8. 16  Cobb, vol. 2, 201. See also Andrews, 130. 12 13

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The members of the Vivid prize crew would play a significant role in the events of 1815, as shall be seen presently. For the moment, however, the illicit “relief” being provided to the prisoners in the cachot was probably low on the list of Agent Shortland’s priorities—if indeed he was aware of it. The second half of 1814 was marked by an inexorable rise in the number of American prisoners at Dartmoor, following the Admiralty decision, taken in June, to concentrate all US inmates in the Devon prison. By the end of the year, numbers had risen to approximately 5700, an increase of nearly six-fold since January. In the month of October 1814 alone, there were 1671 new arrivals.17 It was noted in Chap. 5 that between late August and October that year, Shortland’s official correspondence with the Transport Board was peppered with descriptions of the American prisoners as being “disorderly”, “turbulent” and “riotous”, and he asked for, but was refused, an extra turnkey to help maintain order.18 In addition, the prison market was suspended on several occasions and the prisoners were repeatedly shunted from prison to prison to allow the damage done by the escape tunnellers to be repaired. The repairs, as usual, were to be paid for by putting the prisons concerned on short rations, which meant that the prisoners were faced with the double blow of reduced official supplies and no access to the market to purchase their own food. A newspaper report of November 1814, probably quoting a Transport Office source, described the American prisoners at Dartmoor as being “far from orderly and quiet”, adding that they were “continually laying plans of escape, not occupying themselves as their predecessors, the French, did, in different works and amusements to while away their time”.19 With the exception of the two letters sent by the prisoners to their government in Washington in September 1814 (discussed in Chap. 4), non-­ official sources for the second half of that year are somewhat thin on the ground—at least until October, when a number of American diarists and

17  Calculated on the basis of official figures for October 10, 1814, to which were added the new arrivals in the prison between then and the end of the year (TNA ADM 1/3767, fol. 37: TBLPW, 1814, TO to J.W. Croker, Nov. 2, 1814, “A Report of the Number of American Prisoners of War confined at Dartmoor Prison on the 10th of October 1814”; ADM 103/90–91, GEBDPUS, 1814–1815). Figures for January 1814 are from James, 111. 18  TNA ADM 98/228, TBLADP, 1813–1815, fols. 122, 124, 125, 127, 130–31, 150–51: TO to Capt. Shortland, Aug. 25, 26, 27, 30, Sept. 12, Oct. 27, 1814. 19  [Untitled], Windsor and Eton Express, Nov. 6, 1814.

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memoirists arrived at the prison and began recording their experiences.20 A notable exception to this generalisation is the narrative of Charles Andrews, which covers the whole of the nearly two-year period of his incarceration at Dartmoor, beginning in July 1813. Basil Thomson had little time for Andrews’ “gloomy and unimaginative lines […], written to stir the indignation of Americans against England for her inhuman treatment of the guileless and meek American sailors”.21 However, as Ira Dye has cogently argued, while The Prisoners’ Memoirs: Or, Dartmoor Prison does indeed have “a stronger anti-British tone” than some comparable volumes (such as Cobb’s two-volume A Green Hand’s First Cruise, considered by Thomson as “more light-hearted and trustworthy”), Andrews’ narrative has the advantage of “more day-to-day detail” as well as “agree[ing] with the other journals and with the official records on most important details”.22 The Prisoners’ Memoirs is thus a particularly valuable source for the period under consideration, and along with the less complete contemporary journals of US seamen George Little (who arrived in June 1814), Joseph Bates and Benjamin Browne (both of whom arrived in September), it provides an important counterpoint to the official sources on the subject. The “day-to-day detail” that Dye admired in Andrews’ account (lacking for example in Browne’s more episodic, literary narrative, edited for publication in 1846 by Nathaniel Hawthorne)23 offers some vital clues to the background to Captain Shortland’s correspondence with the Transport Office and indeed to that scribbled note he penned in early October 1814, in which the American prisoners were described as “in general, much 20  Among those arriving at this period were D.A. Neal, B.F. Palmer (both Oct. 5), H. Torry (Oct. 11), J. Valpey (Oct. 28) and L. Clover (Oct. 31). D. Bunnell, N. Pierce and J. Cobb arrived even later: in December 1814 for the first two, and January 1815 in the case of Cobb. 21  Thomson, 127. 22  Ibid.; Dye, “American Maritime Prisoners”, Appendix 2, 315. Dye notes (ibid.) that Andrews is less reliable on dates for the early part of his journal, possibly because it was begun some time after his arrival in July 1813, forcing him to rely on his memory for earlier events. This might also explain why the journal erroneously places its author’s arrival at the prison three months too early (April 1813). 23  Browne. The extent of Hawthorne’s editing of Browne’s text is unclear, as are the precise circumstances in which the former prisoner’s papers came into the novelist’s possession. Hawthorne himself stated: “My only editorial care has consisted in here and there a verbal correction, and in marking out passages that it seemed advisable to omit” (N. Hawthorne to E.A.  Duyckinck, Jan. 4, 1846, repr. in Hawthorne, Selected Letters, 120–21, quotation at 120).

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more refractory than the French prisoners” and of “a truculent and unruly disposition”.24 Andrews claims that by this point, “the number [of prisoners at Dartmoor] being now very large, it was feared they would rise, and take possession of the guard house, and then make their escape”. Although he adds that there was no such intention among the prisoners, he goes on to state, as seen earlier, that “Capt. Shortland was in daily fear of such an attack, for there was scarce a day but some dispute or strife took place, between the turnkeys or guards and the prisoners, and [he] kept a continual alarm”.25 Echoing the words of the newspaper article from November cited previously, Andrews added, citing an unnamed British military source, that the members of the garrison “had more trouble with four thousand Americans, than they should have with twenty thousand Frenchmen”.26 Historian Dan Hicks makes a useful distinction between disorderly behaviour on the part of the American inmates which “consciously undermined the British rituals that codified their identity as prisoners”, and that which reflected other rituals, of the prisoners’ own making.27 “Making a keno” during roll-call, described in Chap. 5, offers a striking example of Hicks’ “undermining” rituals, and an entry in Francis Selman’s journal for October 24, 1814, provides a further illustration of prisoner resistance to the unpopular morning reveille. “The commander of this prison”, Selman wrote, “says that he shall report all prisoners in a state of mutiny for not turning out in the rain to be counted”.28 This was not the first time the prisoners had refused to obey the rules for the roll-call. Henry Torry recorded that on one such occasion shortly before his arrival on October 11, the prisoners had been assembled outside, but had grown tired of waiting for the agent to arrive and signal that they could return to their quarters (a delay they suspected of being deliberately engineered to “vex” them). At which point, Torry writes, “they made a simultaneous rush forward, and so forced their passage back into their prison-house”. As a punishment, the market was suspended for two days.29 A further suspension of the market followed the later incident reported by Selman, and may have  Above, 178.  Andrews, 122–23. 26  Ibid., 123. See Torry, 183, for a similar point, purportedly quoting “a gentleman, belonging to this depot”. 27  Hicks, 231–32. 28  Selman, 69. 29  Waterhouse & Torry, 151. 24 25

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been the source of the reference to “disorderly and riotous conduct” in the Transport Board correspondence of October 27.30 This was in fact part of a broader pattern of clashes between the prisoners and the authorities during this period. Selman also noted a suspension of the market on October 15, “in consequence of some American stealing boards from Prison N° 6”, while on the  16th and 19th, he stated that soldiers had fired through the windows of two of the American prisons “for not putting the lights out”.31 Andrews records the same incident.32 It is unclear whether the soldiers were acting on orders from Shortland, or on their own initiative, but significantly, the incident would be cited retrospectively by a committee of American prisoners after the events of April 1815 as proof of a pattern of “continued insult, injury and vexation to the prisoners generally” on the part of Dartmoor’s agent.33 All the evidence then points to a notable deterioration in the relations between the prisoners and the prison authorities in the autumn of 1814. Andrews states that by this point, the prisoners “would not hear any abusive language against the President of the United States”, and that “on the first disrespectful word from a sentery, stationed singly in the yard, they would knock him down, and he could get no relief, till they were willing to release him, for the prisoners immediately surrounded him by hundreds”.34 Although there are clear similarities here with “making a keno” during roll-call (and may have involved the same individuals), what Andrews describes here belongs rather to Hicks’ second category of disruption, involving rituals of the prisoners’ own invention. As in this case, there was often a clear political dimension to such rituals, what Elizabeth Jones-Minsinger terms “a boisterous form of nationalism”: “performative, pragmatic, situational, and conditional, used to champion their rights before combative British and American officials”.35 Raucous patriotic celebrations of American military victories, and of key dates in the calendar like George Washington’s birthday, the New Year and—especially—4th of July were a notable feature of such boisterousness, deliberately intended

30  TNA ADM 98/228, TBLADP, 1813–1815, fols. 150–51: TO to Capt. Shortland, Oct. 27, 1814. 31  Selman, 68. 32  Andrews, 126. 33  Prisoners’ report, Apr. 7, 1815, qtd. Waterhouse & Torry, 188. 34  Andrews, 123. 35  Jones-Minsinger, 473–74.

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to achieve the double purpose of celebrating national virtues and antagonising their British captors.36 Interestingly, on 4th of July 1814, the American prisoners at Dartmoor had been given unusual latitude by Captain Shortland to organise the day’s festivities as they saw fit. The agent may have been anxious to avoid a repetition of the events on the same day the previous year, when the hoisting of two home-made flags by the prisoners had resulted in intervention from a detachment of guards. In the ensuing mêlée, only one of the flags had been recovered—an embarrassment for the authorities. A further disturbance had occurred that evening at turning in, and the guards had fired on the prisoners, wounding two.37 The following year, things were to be done differently. There was to be a formal 4th of July oration in the Prison-Yard delivered by one of the prisoners, to which were invited the officers and soldiers of the prison’s garrison, as well as the clerks and the turnkeys. This was to be followed, at 2pm, by a dinner for the prisoners of soup and beef, washed down with two hogsheads of porter, the purchase of which had been specially authorised by Shortland for the occasion. (Further unauthorised washing-down would be afforded by some illicitly imported rum.)38 Although, according to Andrews (to whom we owe these details), the unscripted unfurling of a banner that morning, bearing the legend “All Canada or Dartmoor prison for life”, had reportedly “irritated” the officers present (and “pleased” the ordinary soldiers), all in all, he wrote, “the day was passed in the greatest harmony, no quarrel or strife occurred to mar its pleasure”. At 11am, a long speech was delivered by an unnamed sailor, standing on a beer cask placed in the Prison-Yard, vaunting “the great exploits” and “ardour” of the United States’ “infant navy”. At the end of the oration, some of the British officers, who had been listening from the prison walls, descended into the yard. Some good-natured verbal sparring had ensued, with the British reportedly expressing surprise that the Americans still held out any hope of victory, and observing that since many of the prisoners were “Englishmen born”, it was “a very great pity His Majesty should be deprived of so many valuable seamen”. The prisoners, for their part, gave their guests “a particular account of the  Hicks, 232–33.  Andrews, 33–35; Massachusetts HS, Jacob Reeves papers, 1809–1835, Ms. N-779: J. Allen, “Life at Dartmoor Prison”, 1813, 4–6. The TB subsequently wrote to Cotgrave, commending the military for having “acted very properly on the occasion” (TNA ADM 98/227, TBLADP, 1812–1813, fol. 241: TO to Capt. Cotgrave, July 7, 1813). 38  Lloyd, Prisoners of War, 292; Thomson, 24–25. 36 37

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situation of America, her means of defence, and the spirit and determination of the people; the great superiority of gunnery, which the American seamen possessed over those of Great Britain; the truth of which was shown in the actions of the Guerriere, Frolic, Java, etc.”39 Andrews concludes his account by noting that “the next day, every man resumed his occupation and seemed to enjoy a negative happiness, which arose from a freedom from absolute pain”.40 There would be little talk of “freedom” or “happiness” (negative or otherwise) that autumn. By then, the days of informal banter in the Prison-­ Yard between the prisoners and the officers of the garrison must have seemed like a distant memory. What had happened in the intervening period? A combination of factors was probably responsible for the deteriorating situation; chief among them, as Charles Andrews argued, the link between rising prisoner numbers (they increased nearly threefold in the three months after July 4) and the fears of a mass rising or break-out. Henry Torry too made the connection, recording that the rise in the prison population at this time “increased our obstinacy”.41 The events of August and early September that year, described in the last chapter, in which multiple escape tunnels had been discovered emanating from the American prisons—literally as well as figuratively undermining the security and discipline of the prison—would have done nothing to allay official fears. Shortland’s preferred method of collective punishment, the suspension of the market, coupled with cuts in rations to allay expenses linked to escapes or damage to prison property, was also, as has been seen, a festering source of resentment (and hardship) among the prisoners. At the same time, as those two collective letters dispatched to Washington in September vividly illustrate, there was a keen sense of frustration and anger at the seeming indifference or incompetence (or both) exhibited by the American agent, Reuben G. Beasley. It was during this period of heightened tension at Dartmoor that we can observe another feature of American defiance noted by Hicks, what he refers to as “juvenile pranks”.42 Such behaviour offered prisoners, no doubt, a welcome break from the daily routine, and a chance to turn the tables on their captors. During the evening of September 19, 1814, as  Andrews, 97–104.  Ibid., 104–5. 41  Waterhouse & Torry, 151. 42  Hicks, 234–35. 39 40

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Philadelphia seaman Thomas Mott recorded, a jacket was lowered on a rope “for amusement” from the top of one of the prisons. As was no doubt intended, the sentries mistook the jacket for an escaping prisoner. The alarm was raised, and the soldiers “fired several times in the Prison, but fortunately hurt no one”.43 It is likely that this night-time “amusement” was prolonged for some time afterwards by the singing or reciting of the two ballads known to have been composed to mark the occasion, “The Battle of the Jacket” and “The Battle at Dartmoor”—no doubt performed where possible within earshot of the trigger-happy sentries. The reaction of Dartmoor’s “bold and British Captain” (as one of the ballads dubbed him) to having “conquered a jacket” that evening is not recorded, but can be imagined.44 By late-November 1814, the Battle of the Jacket was probably also a distant memory. A surge in mortality in the prison, notably in the prevalence of pneumonia, had served to further sap American morale, as did the ubiquitously cold and wet weather. One prisoner recalled “a Cold and te[d]eous Winter” that year, with only three fleeting glimpses of the sun during the month following his arrival at Dartmoor in late October. Indeed, he added, there was “nothing but a continual rain from the first of November to the first of January”, and only on the occasional “very Clear day” was it possible to see from one prison to another.45 Another inmate recorded repeated falls of snow during December.46 The cold and wet, exacerbated by a leaking roof in one of the prisons,47 may help account for the increase in hospital cases at the prison. The death toll during the thirty days to November 20, 1814, was almost three times that of the previous thirty.48 The Transport Board was sufficiently concerned by the outbreak of pneumonia at Dartmoor to write to Shortland in early October for further 43  New York State Archives, Ms. BD11128: Thomas B.  Mott, “War of 1812 songs and ballads”, fol. 54. 44  “The Battle at Dartmoor”, Mott, “War of 1812 songs”, fol. 55 (“Bold and British captain”); Andrews, 125 (“conquered a jacket”). 45  Valpey, 13. 46  Andrews, 135. 47  Waterhouse & Torry, 152; P. Drinkwater to Sally Drinkwater, Oct. 12, 1814, cited in Felknor. 48  NA, RG 45–566: Rolls and Lists of prisoners of war, 1812–1815, Box 2/6: R. Beasley, “List of American Prisoners of War who have died at Dartmoor Prison during the months of September, October, November and December 1814”, Jan. 10, 1815).

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information on the subject, quoting a report they had received that “a great proportion” of the patients in the prison hospital were suffering from the disease, and that the latter was responsible for the entirety of the deaths in the prison during the previous month.49 Shortland’s reply— which has not survived—evidently did not allay the Board’s fears, for at the end of November, medical inspector Dr Andrew Baird was dispatched to the prison to investigate the matter.50 After spending nearly two weeks at the prison, Baird concluded, somewhat improbably, that the “great excesses” of alcohol consumption among the American prisoners were largely to blame for the bout of pneumonia, and, as noted in the previous chapter, he recommended the issuing of a ration of “strong beer” to prisoners to wean them off the harmful spirits.51 Whatever the causes of the surge in disease and mortality at the prison, there is no gainsaying its impact on the inmates, healthy and sick alike, as illustrated by a series of entries made by Francis Selman in his diary during this period. On Wednesday, October 26, he wrote: “Nothing new; only this is a miserable place for prisoners, being a leaky house. Not allowed to purchase anything. There are two hundred and fifty sick in the hospital, and ten have died during this week.” Later entries recorded that four men had died in the hospital (October 28) and then a further five (November 6). An entry on December 1 noted that a man had hung himself in Prison N° 5, and on the following day Selman recorded that forty-two of his countrymen had died in the hospital between 1st and 27th of the previous month.52 Other letters and memoirs covering this period also indicate a preoccupation with hardship and disease. Privateer captain Richard Hamilton told his mother in a letter of November 26 that “the daily accounts of mortality from the Hospital [were] from six to eight”, adding that this “might be prevented were we more comfortably situated and more

49  TNA ADM 98/228, TBLADP, 1813–1815, fol. 141: TO to Capt. Shortland, Oct. 5, 1814. 50  Ibid., fol. 164: TO to Capt. Shortland, Nov. 30, 1814; TNA ADM 98/123: TBLPW, 1814–1815, To the Admiralty, fol. 176: TO to J.W. Croker, Dec. 26, 1814; ADM 98/166, TBLPW, 1814–1815, fols. 157, 159, 169: TO to Dr Baird, Nov. 29, 30, Dec. 12, 1814. 51  TNA ADM 98/228, TBLADP, 1813–1815, fols. 169, 171: TO to Capt. Shortland, Dec. 14, 17, 1814; RCP, testimony of Dr A. Baird, Apr. 15, 1818, 177. 52  Selman, 67–68.

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attention given to us”.53 Nine days earlier, as part of an unusually long diary entry, Frank Palmer had wondered how long the Almighty would “suffer these unprincipl’d race of Englishmen to keep us confined within this damp, dark & gloomy place?” He went on: “Are we eternally to remain within the unhealthy walls of a prison to suffer in body every pain & disease which nature is able to bear & in mind all the horrors of despair which a mind free from the common perplexities of this world can suggest or imagination describe?”54 The despair of these months was occasionally punctured by short-lived rumours of peace. The prison newspapers were constantly scoured for news from Ghent, and when none was to be found, disappointment, Lewis Clover wrote, “knew no bounds, and they sank to the lowest state of despondency”, neglecting both “employments and amusements” as “the one only theme took possession of their minds”.55 “We are wearied out”, agreed Henry Torry. “I speak for myself, and I hear the same expression from others”.56 Frank Palmer also felt worn down by those “alternate hopes and fears”. On Christmas Day, 1814, he wrote in his diary: “Hope deferd is like a lingering consumption; it wastes away our lives by degrees, and will end only in Death.”57 When, at last, at the end of December 1814, the multiple rumours of peace circulating at Dartmoor were succeeded by the definite news—communicated both by the press and via a letter from Agent Beasley—that a treaty between the British and American delegations at Ghent had been signed, there were scenes of jubilation. Clover remembered that the prison in which he was confined “exhibited within [that night] one blaze of light; for everyone who could procure a candle divided it with those who could not, and by this means every post throughout the establishment was decorated with six or eight pieces of burning candles”.58 Torry recorded that as news from Ghent “flew like wild fire through the prison”, some prisoners “screamed, hollowed, danced, sung, and capered, like so many Frenchmen. Others stood in amaze, with their hands in their pockets, as if doubtful of

53   Mariners’ Museum, Norfolk, Vancouver (Canada), Hamilton Letters, CK79(7): R. Hamilton to L. Hamilton, Nov. 26, 1814, fol. 1. 54  Palmer, 107. 55  Clover, “Reminiscences”, vol. 24, n° 5, 458. 56  Waterhouse & Torry, 156. 57  Palmer, 124. 58  Clover, “Reminiscences”, vol. 24, n° 5, 458.

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its truth.”59 As for Frank Palmer, he recorded on 29th that “this news has so agitated my mind I have not been able to compose myself to write or hardly set down”. “PEACE, PEACE”, he added, “I cannot write any more at present”.60 The festivities lasted several days, morphing into the celebrations for the New Year, with improvised firecrackers let off to represent an eighteen-­ gun salute. The band of Prison N° 4 struck up Yankee Doodle Dandy, and “saucy” white flags were raised over each of the prisons, bearing the legend “Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights”.61 On this occasion, wisely perhaps, the authorities made no effort to seize the flags, but Shortland succeeded in persuading the prisoners to lower them on condition that they could be hoisted again when the treaty was ratified.62 In his diary entry for the first day of 1815, Frank Palmer began by wishing his readers a Happy New Year, before adding: “I am certain t’is the happy’st that I ever experienced”. The “anticipation of futer enjoyments”, he went on, “makes us entirely forget the past in the more happy prospect of the futer”.63 The risk, of course, as Palmer had noted just a week earlier, was that the “anticipation of futer enjoyments” would curdle into the bitter disappointment of “hope deferd”. A bitterness intensified perhaps by the fact, as fellow prisoner George Little observed sourly, that “confinement [at Dartmoor] was as close, and the treatment equally as bad, as it had been before the news of peace arrived”.64

II In a sense, then, there was something Janus-faced about the mood among the American prisoners at Dartmoor at the beginning of 1815 as they entered Gilje’s state of “limbo”. On the one hand, many nursed old enmities from their past dealings with the British—and possibly were even quicker to take offence or more likely to ride roughshod over the prison rule-book now that the two countries were at peace, or at least close to it, with the formal ratification of the Treaty of Ghent by the two countries seemingly but a question of time. Henry Torry wrote around this time  Waterhouse & Torry, 158.  Palmer, 125. See also Andrews, 135–36; Valpey, 17; Pierce, 26; Little, 239. 61  Andrews, 136–38; Palmer, 126–28; Browne, 261–62. 62  Andrews, 137–38. 63  Palmer, 128. 64  Little, 239. 59 60

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that the news of peace had put all the prisoners “in an uneasy and unsettled state of mind”, and “encourage[d] riot” among the “most unruly” elements. More positively, the “despair” of the previous months had given way to hope, and thoughts had begun to turn to “preparing and planning our peaceable departure from this loathsome place”.65 Lewis Clover offered a similar analysis of the state of mind of the prisoners. “From this time forth”, he wrote, “all was hubbub and confusion, occasioned by the preparations for leaving”. Clover added that with some prisoners expecting to leave in a matter of days (forgetting that the treaty needed to be ratified in Washington), all “mechanical employments” had been suspended, and “the police which had been established [by the prisoners] at an early period by themselves, for mutual protection and good order, began now to lose its influence”. The result, according to Clover, was that “theft, gambling, and licentiousness soon got the ascendency”.66 It was not then that the cords of imprisonment were less tightly wound, but rather that there was a second, competing focus of attention at Dartmoor: Clover’s “preparations for leaving”. Here was the second face of the captive Janus in these months. And that new focus of attention meant that several thousand pairs of eyes swivelled as one man in the direction of the one individual seemingly capable of ensuring the Americans’ swift departure from Dartmoor and from England: US agent, Reuben G. Beasley. One face then was turned towards Beasley, the other towards the British. The actions of both would be judged in the weeks and months ahead by Dartmoor’s American prisoners and both would be found wanting. How did that shift from “pre-limbo” to “limbo” make itself felt? Torry’s and Clover’s are not the only captivity narratives to claim that a qualitative shift occurred after the beginning of 1815. Josiah Cobb for example describes how “every circumstance” during this period “seemed to widen the breach between the inmates of the prisons and the governor of the Depot, who at all times was too ready to make use of his authority to irritate, rather than to soothe the turbulent spirits of those placed within his control”.67 Similarly, Benjamin Browne recalled the “large number of petty causes of irritation on both sides”, leading to a “highly excited state

 Waterhouse & Torry, 161–62.  Clover, “Reminiscences”, vol. 24, n° 5, 459. For a similar account, see Little, 239. 67  Cobb, vol. 2, 186. 65 66

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of angry feelings which led to the catastrophe of the 6th of April”.68 Browne singled out Shortland’s use of the threat to withdraw access to the prison market as well as the repeated roll-calls as the most frequent causes of complaint among the prisoners.69 Interestingly, Shortland himself would later identify the beginning of 1815 as marking what he called “the commencement of the antipathy of the prisoners to him”, singling out for blame the fallout from the Transport Board prosecution of the four American prisoners implicated in the forcible tattooing of their fellow countrymen who had served on the Royal Navy ship, HMS Pelican, discussed in Chap. 5. Until then, the agent claimed, he had been “on good terms” with the American inmates, “going down at all times among them as he used among the French prisoners”.70 It should be noted, however, that each of the accounts cited above was written with the benefit of hindsight, and may reflect, in part at least, an understandable wish on all sides to slot this “pre-massacre” period into a narrative based on Cobb’s widening breach between the inmates and the prison authorities. In all likelihood, the experience of incarceration at Dartmoor during the first month and a half of 1815 was not very different from that of the previous autumn, with time continuing to “pass heavely” in anticipation of news of the ratification of the Ghent treaty,71 and with repeated clashes over roll-call, keno-style mobbing of the prison guards, suspensions of the prison market and collective punishments for damage to prison property.72 Moreover, the weather was still bitterly cold, prison numbers were still rising (albeit more slowly than before),73 and disease continued to stalk the prison. Pneumonia and tuberculosis continued to carry off several prisoners every week, but in December a deadly new disease made its appearance: smallpox. Dr George Magrath, the experienced Ulster naval surgeon transferred to Dartmoor from Mill Prison Hospital in September 1814 to replace William Dykar,74 had alerted Shortland to a possible case of the disease at  Browne, 262.  Ibid., 259–60. 70  MPUS, Larpent-King Report, 137, testimony of T. Shortland, Apr. 24, 1815. 71  Palmer, 140 (entry for Jan. 28, 1815). 72  Ibid., 138–39; Waterhouse & Torry, 162–63, 180–81; Valpey, 19; Pierce, 27–29. See also Stanbrook, 66–67. 73  The prison population rose by 269 between the beginning of January and mid-February 1815 (TNA ADM 103/91: GEBDPUS, 1814–1815), taking the total to about 6000. 74  Carson, 8. 68 69

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the prison on December 13. The first smallpox fatality was recorded ten days later, on the 23.75 There would be sixty-three further deaths from smallpox before the disease was brought under control at the end of March 1815 by Dr Magrath, assisted by Dr Baird, dispatched once again to the prison by the Transport Board.76 On 28th of that month, a letter was addressed to President Madison, signed by fifteen of Dartmoor’s prisoners. The letter paid tribute to Magrath’s “unparalleled exertions” in treating those afflicted with the “malignant small-pox”, and gave the physician credit for “rescuing many citizens of the United States from the fast approximating embraces of death”.77 Those embraces of death were evidently on the minds of many at Dartmoor during the early part of 1815. For Charles Andrews, writing at the beginning of February, this “most dreadful calamity now alarmed and endangered the life of every man […], and threatened destruction to every living soul”. He added that “the disorder was so violent that when it attacked a person, he had nothing to expect but immediate death; numbers died daily”.78 The mortality rates at Dartmoor also preoccupied Joseph Valpey, Frank Palmer and Nathaniel Pierce around this time. With his friend Josiah Gwinn just admitted into the prison hospital, Valpey wrote at the end of January that he was “fearful that he [Gwinn] will End his days in this place, as the Small pox Rages Very Rapid”. He noted that “Seven poor Souls Departed this Life Last Night”.79 Palmer recorded in 75  TNA ADM 103/635: Register of deaths of prisoners of war, 1793–1831: Dr G. Magrath to Capt. Shortland, Dec. 13, 1814; NA, RG 45–566: Rolls and Lists of prisoners of war, 1812–1815, Box 2/6: Reuben Beasley, “List of American Prisoners of War who have died at Dartmoor Prison during the months of September, October, November and December 1814”, Jan. 10, 1815, fol. 5. 76  TNA ADM 103/640: Dartmoor Certificates, 1799–1814; ADM 98/228: TBLADP, 1813–1815, fols. 192–93: TO to Capt. Shortland, Feb. 22, 1815; ADM 98/116: TBLPW, 1814–1815, fols. 235, 241–42: TO to Dr Baird, March 2, 11, 1815; USS Constitution Museum, Boston, NARA T168, Consular Letters from London (Beasley Letters), 1812–1816: Roll 10, Drawer 11: R. Beasley to Gen. J. Mason, Commissary of Prisoners, Feb. 14, 1814. 77  “To his Excellency James Madison”, March 28, 1815, cited in Andrews, 244–46 (quotations at 245). Andrews also reproduces Magrath’s reply to the letter, dated March 30, thanking its authors “for this unexpected proof of your regard” (ibid., 247–48, quotation at 247). A second letter praising Magrath’s “indefatigable exertions” on the behalf of the American prisoners would be addressed to J.Q. Adams on April 10, 1815, and again prompted a reply from the doctor (Andrews, 248–52). 78  Andrews, 144–45. For a similar point, see Bunnell, 137. 79  Valpey, 19–20 (entry for Jan. 30, 1815).

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his diary a week later that he had heard from a nurse that as many as “12 to 20 Died every Day—Small Pox chiefly”, and reported that a fellow prisoner had told him that he had seen twenty bodies in the prison mortuary or “Dead House” beyond the prison walls to the north, “where they remain untill next day where A Cart takes and caries them God only Knows where”—in fact, to the shallow pit on the open moor a few hundred yards to the east which constituted the prison’s burial ground.80 Nathaniel Pierce’s diary entry for February 8 captures the same preoccupation with disease and death (he estimated the daily death toll at about five), while also expressing the hope for better times ahead, when his countrymen would “be landed on that Blessed Eden the American shore where we can injoy our friends, health & Liberty, as we did once before”.81 The mortality figures for the prison were in fact lower than those cited by Valpey, Palmer and Pierce,82 but the fact that such estimates were in circulation (and given credence) speaks to the grip the disease acquired over the prisoners during the early part of 1815. Small wonder then that Joseph Valpey should have spent much of March 1 in “Meditating on the Deaths of so many of My Fellow Prisoners”. His friend Josiah Gwinn had died in the prison hospital the previous week.83 If the experience of incarceration at Dartmoor during January and early February 1815 could be said to have resembled in many respects that of the previous autumn, there is strong evidence that from the middle of February onwards, a notable further deterioration took place in relations between the inmates and the prison authorities at Dartmoor. One incident in particular seems to have played a key role in that shift, and, significantly, it would—like the incident the previous October in which soldiers from the garrison had fired through the prison windows—be cited retrospectively as palpable proof that Shortland’s “sole study” during this period “appeared to be devising means to render the situation of the prisoners as disagreeable as possible”.84 On February 13, 1815, Simeon Hayes, one of the four members of the Vivid prize crew held in the prison cachot since the previous July, profited from a moment of inattention from his guards and  Palmer, 143 (entry for Feb. 6, 1815).  Pierce, 29–30. 82  The death toll from smallpox was in fact close to one per day during February and March 1815, and perhaps double that when all causes of death are counted (TNA ADM 103/640: Dartmoor Certificates, 1799–1814). 83  Valpey, 22–23. 84  Prisoners’ report, Apr. 7, 1815, cited in Waterhouse & Torry, 187–88. 80 81

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clambered over the eight-foot iron palisade, losing himself in a crowd of several hundreds of his compatriots who had gathered in front of the iron railings in the yard behind Prison N° 1.85 Hayes was spirited away swiftly and successfully hidden for several days in different locations—including in a small space under the stone flags of Prison N° 5. The prisoners rejected entreaties on the part of Captain Shortland to give up Hayes, stating, as one account puts it, “that they did not presume that the British government would expect them to stand sentry over each other”.86 Neither checks by the turnkeys when the inmates were counted out nor searches of the different prisons by the sentries turned up the elusive escapee, and subsequent attempts to pressure the prisoners into giving him up by suspending the prison market and preventing their free movement between the different prisons did not prove any more successful.87 When word reached the authorities on February 14 that the fugitive was indeed being concealed in Prison N° 5, a detachment of sixty soldiers was sent in to clear the building of its occupants in order to conduct a thorough search. When the building was eventually cleared and the search completed, the prisoners refused to obey an order from Captain Shortland instructing them to return inside.88 The result, as described by Josiah Cobb, was a tense stand-off, with just ten paces separating “a solid body of from one to two thousand” prisoners and the raised muskets of the soldiers, several hundred in number. Cobb himself had decided to stay “out of the fray” at the top of some stone steps; one of many, according to his account, convinced that there would be bloodshed before the day was out.89 There is some confusion as to what happened next. Cobb claimed that a stone was thrown, narrowly missing Shortland’s cheek, upon which the “extreme[ly] agitated” agent ordered the troops to open fire on the assembled prisoners. The order—given twice—was countermanded by the senior military officer and the soldiers stayed their fire. At which point Shortland left the yard, followed shortly afterwards by the guards.90 Although one other prisoner source91 backs up this account, the vast  Cobb, vol. 2, 201–8.  Prisoners’ report, Apr. 7, 1815, cited in Waterhouse & Torry, 188. 87  Cobb, vol. 2, 201–6; Thomson, 165–67; Pierce, 30–31; Andrews, 147–48; Palmer, 149–52; Valpey, 20–21. 88  Cobb, vol. 2, 204. 89  Ibid., 206. 90  Ibid., 206–7. 91  Prisoners’ report, Apr. 7, 1815, cited in Waterhouse & Torry, 188. 85 86

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majority of US diaries and memoirs makes no mention whatsoever of such an order. They do report the stand-off between agent and prisoners in front of Prison N° 5, with some versions mentioning the prisoners issuing a warning that the guards would be “surround[ed] and disarm[ed]” if “they attempted to use any violence”; or that Shortland threatened to give the order to fire (one account mentions muskets being cocked in readiness). All agree, however, that the soldiers simply withdrew when it became clear that they were not going to be able to force the men inside, perhaps following some kind of negotiation between the two parties.92 The weight of the evidence would seem then to argue against Shortland having ordered the guards to fire that day, but at the same time it is likely that Cobb was correct to consider that the risk of violence was a very real one.93 The battle of wills continued for a number of days, with the prison market remaining resolutely closed, and the prisoners in their turn refusing to be employed for any paid work around the prison. There were also cases of prisoners refusing to be turned out of their prison blocks when ordered, and of more damage to prison property.94 Shortland attempted to negotiate an end to the crisis with the prison committees, but was told defiantly that “he might keep the Market shut as long as he thought proper—as it did not effect the Prisoners as they had no money to spend”. Behind the bravado, however, there were strains, with several prisoner shopkeepers accused of profiteering, and subject to reprisals from the Rough Allies.95 One prisoner confided to his diary on February 16: “for my part I wish Hostilities might Cease—as we are out of Potatoes and Coals”.96 Four days later, an agreement was reached, and the market re-­ opened, on condition that Dartmoor’s personnel were not “disturb[ed] or molest[ed]”.97 Whatever Shortland’s view of the agreement, the prisoners evidently considered the outcome a resounding victory, and catalogued the result as further proof of the efficacy of “saucy” Yankee rumbustiousness. There was even some sympathy for Shortland; it was after all “no  Andrews, 148; Valpey, 21; Pierce, 31; Neal, 115; Browne, 263–64; Palmer, 150.  Cobb, vol. 2, 208. 94  Pierce, 31–32; Palmer, 151; Andrews, 148; Browne, 262–63; TNA ADM 98/228, TBLADP, 1813–1815, fol. 188: TO to Capt. Shortland, Feb. 16, 1815. 95  Palmer, 152. Cobb states (vol. 2, 203) that food and fuel prices in the prison rose by up to 400 per cent following the suspension of the market. 96  Palmer, 152. 97  Ibid., 155. 92 93

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disgrace to him […] to be beat by Americans”. Frank Palmer closed his diary entry of February 20 on a high note: “Come off Victorious—Success my Boys!”98 The men of the Vivid prize crew99 were released from the cachot on March 18, 1815, after more than eight months of solitary confinement. They had just missed—though would no doubt have heard about—the return of the truce ship Favourite on 13th, announcing the ratification of the Treaty of Ghent by President Madison. The news brought to a close a period of restless anxiety for the prisoners, with incessant speculation concerning the likely date of the ship’s arrival.100 Like the previous December, news of the ratification, when it finally did come, was greeted with scenes of jubilation in the prison. “All was now joy, congratulation, good humour, life and jollity”, recalled one prisoner, adding: “None supposed we should be in prison a week longer”.101 As before, the prison was lit up and flags hoisted.102 With release now seemingly imminent, attention for the moment turned away from the prison’s “surly keeper” and towards the American agent.103 By late March, Beasley had procured four ships, and was looking for more,104 but the task was proving difficult. Suitable vessels were in short supply, with shipowners preferring to enter into more lucrative contracts than those offered by a government charter to carry prisoners—and a foreign government with a poor credit rating at that. In addition, communication between Beasley and the Admiralty was repeatedly hampered by mutual suspicion resulting from the long-standing disagreement between the two nations, referred to in Chap. 2, over who should pay for the repatriation of prisoners of war.105 The American prisoners at Dartmoor were unaware of these pressures and constraints on Beasley’s actions, and true to his modus operandi described earlier in this book, the US agent  Pierce, 32; Palmer, 155.  There is some doubt as to whether Hayes was among them. Andrews states (153) that Hayes was still at liberty at that point, while Cobb indicates (vol. 2, 209) that he had been recaptured and returned to the cachot. The Entry Book records simply that the four men were released from the cachot on March 18 (TNA ADM 103/88: GEBDPUS, 1814). 100  Waterhouse & Torry, 174–75; Palmer, 169; Andrews, 153. 101  Cobb, vol. 2, 187. See also Bates, 73. 102  Waterhouse & Torry, 185; Valpey, 24; Andrews, 152. 103  Waterhouse & Torry, 185. 104  TNA ADM 98/123: TBLPW, 1814–1815, To the Admiralty, fol. 193: TO to J.W. Croker, March 31, 1815. 105  Based on Dye, “American Maritime Prisoners”, 306–8. 98 99

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evidently saw no need to enlighten them. Instead, he showered the prisoners with terse notes, indicating that their debts had to be paid before release, that they needed to be vaccinated against smallpox, and—most seriously—that there was some doubt as to whether their monthly allowance from the American government (established in February 1814) could still be paid, now that the war was officially over.106 Even that last slight would have been forgotten had there been news of the cartel ships. But there was not. The result was growing frustration and ultimately anger on the part of the prisoners at the agent’s “dilatory” behaviour.107 On March 21, one of the prisoner committees penned a sarcastic letter to Beasley, wondering whether, in “out the way” London, the American agent had in fact heard that the Treaty of Ghent had been ratified by the American president.108 Henry Torry observed bitterly around this time that “if Shortland and Beasley were both drowning, and one only could be taken out by the prisoners of Dartmoor, I believe in my soul, that that one would be Shortland”. The latter, at least, had “the excuse of an enemy” for his conduct.109 Even the arrival of a letter from Beasley on March 24 that three vessels were being prepared to convey prisoners to the United States was not enough to douse the smouldering resentment. Frank Palmer noted in his diary that the agent’s letter was “couch’d in such terms as strongly indicated that his Interest in our favor was entirely Obliterated”, and he expressed his doubts that the three ships in question really were “fiting to convey 6000 Prisoners home to America”. He concluded that “this conduct in our Agent Certainly is not Explicable—and deserves Reproof”.110 That reproof was not long coming. On the following day, March 25, unable to take out their frustration on Beasley in person, the prisoners fashioned an effigy of the “genteel, haughty looking gentleman agent”, and he was tried in absentia by a jury of prisoners; accused of “depriving many hundreds of your countrymen of their lives, by the most wanton and most cruel deaths, by nakedness, starvation, and exposure to pestilence”. He was found guilty on every count. His behaviour throughout, it was claimed, had been marked by persistent neglect, leaving the prisoners to 106  Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront, 185–86; Dye, “American Maritime Prisoners”, 308; J. Jones, 83–84. 107  Palmer, 171. 108  Pierce, 36. 109  Waterhouse & Torry, 182. 110  Palmer, 171.

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suffer and  die in Dartmoor while he skimmed off government funds intended for their succour.111 On sentence being pronounced by the judges, the figure, dressed in borrowed coat, pantaloons and cravat, was hung from the roof of Prison N° 7, where it was left for several hours, before being cut down and paraded around the prisons, accompanied by musicians playing the death march. Then,—accounts vary on this point— the effigy was either burnt by a group of Rough Allies or left in the gutter in the Prison-Yard to be carried away with the day’s refuse.112 Although both Andrews’ account and that of Henry Torry emphasise the due process—albeit a mock due process—accompanying the trial, sentencing and execution of the effigy, and that those responsible for the day’s events were no “infuriate mob”, but “some of the steadiest men within the walls of Dartmoor prison”,113 several Dartmoor memoirists were evidently ill at ease with certain features of this ritualised protest, a form of traditional collective action with roots in the anti-British resistance of the 1760s and 1770s.114 Josiah Cobb, for example, referred with unconcealed distaste to the “horrific” scene he had witnessed; complete with “unlicenced rage”, “the howlings of the mob”, “reckless tempers”, “yelling shrieks”, and “heavy groans kept all in a tumult”.115 Frank Palmer too considered that the conduct of the crowd “deserve[d] censure equaly as much as Mr Beaslys”.116 The whole scene was witnessed by Shortland, the turnkeys and guards, and significantly there is no indication that they attempted to intervene in the proceedings at any point. The agent’s reactions to the day’s events have not left any record. He may have welcomed the novelty of seeing someone other than himself the object of the prisoners’ wrath.117 That being said, with still no arrival date set for the cartel ships, it is reasonable to assume that any sense of relief he may have felt about the recent shift in focus of prisoner discontent was offset by the realisation, as he watched Reuben Beasley swinging in effigy by his neck from the roof of Prison N° 7, that the behaviour of the prisoners was becoming both more  Andrews, 158–60.  Waterhouse & Torry, 182–83; Andrews, 157. Cobb, vol. 2, 191; Bunnell, 138; Clover, “Reminiscences”, vol. 24, n° 5, 459. 113  Andrews, 156–61; Waterhouse & Torry, 183. 114  Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront, 186. 115  Cobb, vol. 2, 192. 116  Palmer, 173. 117  Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront, 186. 111 112

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self-confident and more volatile.118 The historical record does not allow us to deduce if Shortland contemplated that prospect with foreboding or with the equanimity of a man confident in his own abilities and in those of the men under his command. Either way, ten days later, those abilities would be sorely tested.

III In some respects, it could be argued that the Dartmoor Massacre began on Tuesday April 4, 1815, or, rather, that the events of April 4 ran almost seamlessly into those of the  6th. Several of the prisoner accounts from Dartmoor covering this period implicitly structure their narratives around this premise, considering, as Benjamin Browne put it, that “the occurrences of the 4th of April […] have an intimate and important connection with the massacre of the 6th”.119 Charles Andrews makes the same point, if more cryptically: “On the fourth [of April], a circumstance occurred, which may lead to the recital of other circumstances, which many to whose hand this work may come, may be inclined to doubt the veracity of”.120 The “circumstance” occurring on April 4, as Andrews goes on to explain, was that “during the whole of this day the prisoners remained without bread”, and were “obliged to subsist on the four and a half ounces of beef, and the soup made of it”. By the evening, at which point thirty-six hours had passed since the issue of the last bread ration, “hunger became so pressing, that it drove us to a state of desperation, and we could no longer endure it”.121 In fact, the prisoners had been told that morning, or possibly on the previous day, that on 4th they were going be issued with a pound (454 g) of ship’s biscuit instead of 1½ pounds (680 g) of the usual “soft bread”. The prisoners suspected, as Josiah Cobb noted, that the reason for the substitution was to allow the contractor to offload his supplies of biscuit, stored on site (as per Transport Office instructions) in case the waggons bringing fresh food supplies were not able to reach the prison during the winter due to adverse weather conditions.122 With the prisoners seemingly  Ibid.  Browne, 265–66. 120  Andrews, 166–67. 121  Ibid., 167. 122  Cobb, vol. 2, 210–11. 118 119

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set to leave the prison in a matter of days, the victuallers were keen to issue the soon-to-be-redundant stocks of biscuits; a practice resorted to in other war depots.123 In the face of complaints from the prisoners, the contractor’s clerk made it clear that it was a case of biscuit or nothing; a decision evidently made with Transport Board approval, and, presumably, with Shortland’s knowledge.124 The agent himself was absent in Plymouth all day, so took no part in the day’s proceedings. Late in the morning of the 4th, Cobb observed (as on previous occasions, from a safe distance) a larger than usual number of prisoners congregated in the Prison-Yard, “eager”, as he put it, “to bring on a conflict, if for nothing else than to exhibit their bravery under such a fire, ever displaying a contrariness, by doing aught to vex the soldiery”. Insults were exchanged with the sentries, a prisoner was prevented by the butt of a musket from climbing the railings separating the Prison-Yard from the Market Square and stones were thrown.125 As with the events surrounding the trial and execution of the effigy of Reuben Beasley the previous month, Cobb’s censorious account—stressing the role of the Rough Allies in picking a fight with the guards—offers a striking contrast with that of Andrews, who states that a “riposte” was agreed only after “mature deliberation” on the part of the prisoners, collected together in “companies”.126 Whatever the degree of “mature deliberation” involved, all accounts agree that at about six o’clock, a large crowd of prisoners congregated in the Prison-Yard, pressing against the gates leading to the Market Square. The gates were forced, or gave way under the pressure of numbers, and the prisoners surged into the square and headed for the railings at the far—upper—end of the rectangular market space, next to which was situated the entrance to the large, polygonal storehouse where the bread was kept prior to issue. Meanwhile, the alarm bell had been rung, and several hundred members of the prison garrison had been hurriedly assembled to bar the prisoners’ route, bayonets fixed. Accounts vary on the details, but there seems to have followed a tense stand-off between sentries and prisoners, the two groups separated by only a few feet, and the prisoners were  Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront, 186.  Shortland was reminded by the TB on April 7 that if prisoners refused to accept a ration of ship’s biscuit instead of soft bread, “agreeably to the Board’s instructions”, they were to be issued with nothing else (TNA ADM 99/260: TBMPW, March–June 1815, TO to Capt. Shortland, Apr. 7, 1815). 125  Cobb, vol. 2, 212. 126  Andrews, 166–67. 123 124

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told that they would be fired upon if they did not return to their prisons. To which they retorted that they would not withdraw until they had been issued with the bread known to have been delivered to the prison storehouse (intended presumably for the following day’s ration). In some versions, they added that if the bread was refused them, they would seize it for themselves. A parley followed, and it was agreed that the prisoners would be issued with their normal bread ration once they had vacated the Market Square and returned to their prisons. It was not until late in the evening—around 11pm or midnight—that, the soft bread ration having been issued in the normal fashion to each mess, the prisoners retired to their beds.127 Charles Andrews’ memoir states that during the latter part of the evening of the  4th, “the guards, soldiers, keepers, and every person connected with the prison, remained in the greatest apprehension”, fearing that the “troubles would end in a more serious way, and the prisoners all make their escape”.128 Andrews adds that “many” prisoners took the opportunity to scale the prison walls while the attention of the guards was focussed on the Market Square, but that most of the escapees returned to the prison of their own accord the following morning, though not before their night-time errancy had caused some consternation among the residents of the surrounding villages and farmsteads.129 The situation was clearly viewed by Dartmoor’s prison personnel and garrison as one of the utmost gravity, and urgent messages were dispatched during the evening both to Captain Shortland and to the commander of the Plymouth garrison, apprising them of the situation. Significantly, in the latter case, the military commander at Dartmoor, Major Joliffe, requested from his superiors “instructions as to ordering the troops to fire in case of necessity”.130 Even more telling perhaps were Shortland’s actions on receiving the news. He returned to the prison the following morning accompanied by two 127  Cobb, vol. 2, 212–13; Bates, 78–79; Waterhouse & Torry, 186; Andrews, 168–70; Pierce, 39; Palmer, 176–77; Clover, “Reminiscences”, vol. 24, n° 5, 459–60; Browne, 265–68. 128  Andrews, 170. 129  Ibid. One prisoner, Thomas Johnston (or Johnson), did escape definitively that night (TNA ADM 103/90: GEBDPUS, prisoner n° 5142; ADM 103/640: Dartmoor Certificates, 1799–1814: “Report of One American Prisoner of War who have [sic] escaped from Dartmoor, the h Day of April 1815”). 130  Andrews, 171; TNA FO5/111: Foreign Correspondence before 1906. United States of America, Series II. Letters and reports on the Dartmoor Massacre, April–May 1815, fol. 81: C. Larpent to Lord Castlereagh, Apr. 29, 1815.

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hundred extra troops hastily mustered from the Citadel garrison in Plymouth. On arrival, Shortland found to his surprise that all was quiet, but he was reportedly “indignant at the conduct of the prisoners, and at the compliance of his officers with their demands”.131 It has been argued that “the bread incident on April 4 produced a heightened feeling of anxiety and tension between the British soldiers and American prisoners at Dartmoor”; and, furthermore, that the events of that day both “install[ed] fear into the minds of the British militia” and aggravated hostility towards Captain Shortland.132 Andrews affirms that the authorities continued—wrongly—to fear a mass break-out. Those official fears were probably stoked by the kind of rumblings in the prison picked up by Frank Palmer, who noted in his diary on the morning of April 6 that the prisoners were “growing daily more and more discontented”, and “seem[ed] determined to make some bold attempt to escape from this dam Prison”. He added: “I believe should we remain here much longer they would attempt it”.133 The prisoners, for their part, assumed (probably rightly) that Shortland had been aware of the attempt made in his absence to “palm upon them the damaged remnant of ship’s bread which they had on hand, in lieu of the usual kind”, as Lewis Clover put it, who also claimed that, had the Dartmoor agent been present on the 4th, “blood would have been shed”. As it was, according to Clover, Shortland had to make do with “threats which were then uttered [that] were terribly fulfilled” a few days later.134 The latter comment was made with the benefit of post-massacre hindsight, of course. That being said, it is reasonable to suppose that the events of April 4 did nothing to improve Shortland’s standing among the American prisoners—an element of crucial significance for what was to follow. Indeed, the fact, as many saw it, that the contractor (and by implication Shortland) had flouted the unwritten rules governing the substitution of ship’s biscuit for bread meant that their reaction could be couched in terms of a protest aimed at upholding a body of customary rights with regard to the provision of food to prisoners of war; that the actions of the authorities on April 4 had violated the “moral economy” governing these questions.135 This argument cloaked the  Browne, 268. See also Waterhouse & Torry, 186, for the same point.  Leonowicz, 20. 133  Andrews, 170; Palmer, 179. See also Pierce, 39–40. 134  Clover, “Reminiscences”, vol. 24, n° 5, 460. 135  An approach suggested by Peter Jones’ insightful article on the Captain Swing riots of 1830–1831 (P. Jones). He cites (274) E.P. Thompson’s comment which is highly relevant in 131 132

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day’s actions in a mantle of legitimate protest, and re-wrote the outcome as a case of a wrong righted. Which in turn, perhaps, increased the prisoners’ self-confidence and/or assertiveness in the face of attempts by the prison authorities to impose their will. At the same time, there is evidence in the US captivity narratives that some of the prisoners felt, if not Shortland’s indignation, at least some puzzlement at the behaviour of Dartmoor’s military garrison that evening—and possibly even some sympathy for the predicament of the British. Josiah Cobb, highly ambivalent, as has been seen, about any collective action undertaken by his fellow prisoners, expressed regret that the officer in command of the militia guards had not ordered his men to prevent the prisoners from entering the Market Square. Once what Cobb called the “half-famished, angry, overwhelming crowd” had gained the square, the guards were outnumbered, and from that moment on, it was too “dangerous” to attempt to drive the prisoners back. But what if decisive action had been taken at an earlier stage? Would that not have been “amply sufficient to hold [the prisoners] in check”?136 Benjamin Browne reasoned in similar terms (despite his initial concerns, noted above, about the legitimacy of the contractor’s decision to issue hard tack rather than bread). Indeed, Browne claimed (in sharp contrast to the view expressed by Lewis Clover  cited above) that had Captain Shortland been at Dartmoor that evening to take control, “in all probability the tragedy of the 6th would have been anticipated”.137 Cobb and  Browne were  reasoning with the benefit of hindsight, of course, but Shortland may well have been thinking along the same lines on his return to Dartmoor on the 5th, once he had heard the full story of what had happened the previous day. He may well also have been “determined”, as Justin Jones argues, “not to allow an event such as the riot [of April 4th] to occur again”—again a fact of crucial significance for what was to follow.138 It is probable, moreover, that certain (many?) of the ordinary soldiers of the garrison shared Shortland’s “indignant” reaction in the face of their officers’ “compliance” to the demands of the prisoners, when the two camps had confronted each other at the upper end of Market Square. the present case: “being hungry, what do people do? How is their behaviour modified by custom, culture and reason?”. 136  Cobb, vol. 2, 213. 137  Browne, 267–68 (qtd. 268). 138  J. Jones, 127.

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No doubt the resulting situation provoked anxiety in some members of Dartmoor’s garrison, as Christopher Leonowicz has suggested.139 Other militia soldiers, probably, were itching to even the score after what they saw as the humiliating capitulation by their superiors on the  4th. Here then was a volatile compound of carefully nurtured resentment, half-truth and rumour circulating on both sides; all powerfully shaped and agitated by the recent history of the prison. That background would play a crucial role both in the unfolding of the events of April 6, and in their subsequent (re)interpretation.

IV The events of April 6, 1815, would be the object of three different official inquiries in the following days and weeks, and a fourth conducted by a committee of ten Dartmoor prisoners. The testimony of almost a hundred witnesses,140 involved to a greater or lesser extent in those events, drawn from Dartmoor’s prison personnel and garrison and as well as its inmates, would be taken down (in some cases on multiple occasions), sifted and interpreted. Conclusions would be reached, and reports issued, generating in turn comment on both sides of the Atlantic. The eyewitness testimony collected by these various official and unofficial inquiries, running to several hundred pages, represents a key resource for anyone wishing to understand the Dartmoor Massacre. A study of this arguably under-­ utilised resource will form the centrepiece of the following discussion, alongside the more familiar words of diarists, memoirists and correspondents present on April 6. Trevor James has argued with regard to the events of that day that “accounts of what exactly happened in the market square and the vicinity […] are shrouded in confusion, inaccuracy, and the contradictory evidence of those who were present, depending which side they were on”.141 To a certain degree, it could be argued that the confusion and the  Leonowicz, 20.  Ninety-eight witnesses in all were heard by the Admiralty inquiry, the prisoner committee, the Coroner’s inquiry and the Larpent-King investigation (calculated from: NA, RG 45–566: Rolls and Lists of prisoners of war, 1812–1815, Box 2/6: “List of Witnesses” [n.d.]; Waterhouse & Torry, 190–95). 141  James, 131. 139 140

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contradiction are more apparent than real, and derive above all from the fact that the events of April 6 were interpreted by the different parties involved in the light of those of the previous six months described earlier in this chapter, and perhaps above all through the lens of April 4. This led those involved to reach very different conclusions concerning the motivations and objectives of the principal protagonists—and how blame was to be apportioned. Those differences in interpretation shall be examined presently, but for all the controversy surrounding the question of responsibility for the Dartmoor Massacre, the main sequence of events can (with some exceptions) be constructed with relative confidence, as indeed James’ own judicious account testifies.142 Thursday, April 6 had started “unusually pleasant”, and indeed several memoirists evoke an almost Arcadian atmosphere in the prison that day. Josiah Cobb, for example, recalled that some of the inmates “were amusing themselves one way, some another, for they had every variety of game that each could remember from his school-boy frolickings”; while Nathaniel Pierce described how “the prisoners [were] diverting themselves, gambling, playing ball, &c”. Among the diversions Pierce notes was a good-natured “sham fight” between two groups of prisoners, armed with turfs of grass, until the guards, “envying our happyness, order’d them out of the grass plot”. Lewis Clover went as far as to state that “the day was spent as in a happy dream”, with “some amusing themselves at various games: some wrestling, some walking, and meditating upon their homes, wives, children, and friends, whom they hoped soon to see, after a separation of many years”.143 These narratives segue effortlessly into an account of how, during the afternoon, what Pierce called “a number of mischievious men” had “been making a Breach through the wall into the Barracks yard which they completed about the time their sport was ended in the Grass Plot”. He goes on to recount that “after pestering the soldiers for some time at the hole in the wall they removed to the uper gate [separating the Prison-Yard from the Market Square] and as usual began to cheer, being playfull & passing the word keeno”.144 Many of the memoirists would subsequently emphasise that the “trifling” breach, “pecked through the wall”, was the result “of mere play”; the consequence of the “sulky”,  Ibid., 131–36.  Cobb, vol. 2, 213; Pierce, 40; Clover, “Reminiscences”, vol. 24, n° 5, 460. 144  Pierce, 40. 142 143

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“churlish” and “surly” guards on duty in the Barracks yard having grown tired of throwing the prisoners’ ball back over the wall.145 All the first-hand accounts of the Dartmoor Massacre concur that it was this breach in the wall separating n° 7 yard from that of the soldiers’ barracks (formerly the petty officers’ prison), or rather the moment when news of its existence reached the ears of Captain Shortland at about 6 o’clock, that set in train the events that would lead to bloodshed, injury and death that evening. The implications of the prisoner accounts cited above are clear: that the situation had begun to escalate because the prison guards had literally refused to play ball, or for that matter to turn a blind eye to the harmless “school-boy frolickings” of the turf war earlier in the day. Few of the accounts join the dots with quite the same blunt economy as that of New York seaman David Bunnell—“Capt. Shortland, on receiving this intelligence [of the breach in the wall], ordered his troops to fire at us”146—but many of the Dartmoor captivity narratives reach, ultimately, the same conclusion: either that Shortland reacted with inexplicably callous brutality to the innocent, if rambunctious, horseplay of the American prisoners, first in n° 7 yard and then in the Market Square; or, as the unofficial inquiry conducted by the prisoners’ committee would affirm on the 7th, that learning of the events of the last few days on his return from Plymouth, Dartmoor’s agent had “determined on the diabolical plan of seizing the first slight pretext to turn in the military, to butcher the prisoners for the gratification of his malice and revenge”.147 Whether Shortland “naturally concluded [that the sounding of the alarm bell] would draw the attention of a great number of prisoners towards the gates, to learn the cause”, as the same prisoners’ committee would claim,148 or, alternatively, that the surge of a large body of prisoners towards the railings separating the Prison-Yard from the Market Square was simply the unintended, if “most unfortunate”, consequence of the captain’s decision to sound the alarm (as the later Anglo-American inquiry would argue),149 the result was the same. Several hundred prisoners made 145  Cobb, vol. 2, 213–14; Clover, “Reminiscences”, vol. 24, n° 5, 460–61; Bates, 79; Bunnell, 139; Yale University Library, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Ms. 32 D25 1815A: A Doolittle, “Plan and description of Dartmoor Prison England: with a representation of the unfortunate transactions of the 6th of April 1815”, key; Waddell, 69. 146  Bunnell, 139; TNA ADM 103/90: GEBDPUS, 1814, prisoner n° 5809. 147  Prisoners’ report, Apr. 7, 1815, qtd. Waterhouse & Torry, 197. 148  Ibid. 149  MPUS, Larpent-King Report, “Report”, 17.

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a beeline for the railings, “to see what was the matter”, as witness after witness put it.150 Among their number were probably some of the “mischievous men” referred to above by Pierce—possibly men known for their association with the Rough Allies.151 Charles Andrews was at pains to point out that only the prisoners directly in front of the railings would have been able to see what was going on, and that neither they nor those behind them had any intention of entering the Market Square. At the same time, Andrews refers—using the same adjective as Pierce—to the presence of “mischievous persons” among those present at the railings; a description that rather undermines his reluctance to be drawn on whether the gates were forced open “by accident or design”.152 In fact, there is plentiful evidence from eyewitnesses—both American and British—attesting to gate n° 1 (near the hospital) being deliberately forced.153 It is reasonable to assume that those responsible had every intention of entering the Market Square, probably in the same spirit of “mere wantonness” (as prisoner Niel McKinnon would subsequently describe it)154 that had characterised the series of confrontations with the guards and sentries earlier in the day, during the turf fight (which, significantly, had taken place in an area strictly off limits to prisoners beyond the iron palisade fence) and at the barrack wall breach. There is no evidence, however, that either the wall breach or the decision to force open the gates into the Market Square sprang from anything other than a desire to goad and perhaps to jostle the prison guards— “making keno” writ large, as it were. (Significantly perhaps, the word “keno” was reported by several eyewitnesses, both at the gates, and in the square.)155 Here perhaps was a welcome opportunity to revisit the events 150  See example, Prisoners’ report, Apr. 7, 1815, depositions II, V, qtd. Waterhouse & Torry, 191–92; MPUS,  Larpent-King Report, testimonies: W.  Hobart, prisoner (89); J.G.  Gatchell, prisoner (94); W.  Clements, prisoner (101); W.  Mitchell, prisoner (105); J. Rodd, turnkey (111); W. Dewetter, prisoner (131). 151  Leonowicz, 21. 152  Andrews, 174–75. 153  MPUS, Coroner’s inquiry, testimony of H.  Hull, prisoner (68–69); Larpent-King Report, testimonies: J. Reeves, prisoner (103); Private A. Wheeler, north guard (75); Private H.  Burgoyne, west guard (84); J.  Carley, turnkey (103); Sergeant J.  Collard, Somerset Militia (120). 154  Ibid., testimony of N. McKinnon, prisoner, 91, 93. See also ibid., “Report”, 16. 155  Ibid., testimonies: W.  Clements, prisoner (101); William Mitchell, prisoner (105); J. Carley, turnkey (113); S. Morgan, turnkey (114); W. Wakelin, turnkey (114); H. Rowe, plumber & glazier (116).

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of April 4 and what is more, on the very same spot. Gilje’s “rowdyism” had brought success on that earlier occasion, in the form of a square meal of “soft bread” and a satisfying points victory over the prison authorities. Some may well have reasoned that the same tactics could bear fruit again. Others, no doubt, had no such thoughts, and had simply come up out of their yards and to the gates “without design”, as Joseph Bates put it, other than to satisfy their curiosity.156 And once the gates were open, it would have been difficult to turn back for any who wished to, such was the forward pressure from other prisoners around and behind them. It was probably then by accident and by design that several hundred prisoners poured into the lower end of Dartmoor’s Market Square at about 7pm, just as Captain Shortland, and behind him the garrison’s northern guard of about fifty soldiers, were entering the same rectangular space some 200 feet away through the gates at the upper end. The soldiers formed into a line across the middle of the square and waited. Shortland meanwhile advanced towards the prisoners, now occupying the bottom part of the marketplace, and according to the testimony he gave to the internal Admiralty inquiry into the massacre the following day, the agent had attempted—along with prison surgeon, Dr Magrath— “to persuade the Prisoners to go quietly to their Prisons”, warning them that “the Military [would] be compelled to Fire if they persevered in attempting to force their way up”.157 Shortland was by his own admission acting on the assumption that when put together, the evidence of the forced gates and the barracks wall breach (plus a second reported breach near the barracks cookhouse), combined with pre-existing intelligence that a mass break-out was to be expected before April 10, bore all the signs of a concerted plan to gain control of the prison, perhaps by encircling and disarming the guards.158 It could be considered a plausible chain of reasoning, and indeed it evidently convinced the two Admiralty commissioners dispatched from Plymouth on the 7th, after Shortland had alerted the port’s naval commander, Admiral Sir John Duckworth, by letter the previous night that “the American prisoners [had] behaved in a most riotous and disorderly  Bates, 79.   TNA ADM 1/836, Letters from Commanders-in-Chief, Plymouth, 1815: Rear Admiral Sir J. Rowley & Capt. A.W. Schomberg, “Report into the causes and circumstances attending the riots at Dartmoor Prison”, Apr. 7, testimonies: T. Shortland & Dr G. Magrath. 158   Ibid., testimony of T.  Shortland; MPUS,  Larpent-King Report, testimony of T. Shortland, 133. 156 157

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manner”, and that “the Military [had been] called in to prevent them from carrying their plan into execution, which was understood to be, to take possession of […] the Military Barracks and Arms”.159 That explanation would be dismissed out of hand by the subsequent Anglo-American inquiry, conducted by US commissioner Charles King and his British colleague Seymour Larpent between April 21 and 26, though they acknowledged that there were solid grounds for having read the events of the day in that way, and thus that Dartmoor’s agent had been entirely justified in his decision to sound the alarm as a precautionary measure.160 Former prisoner Benjamin Browne would come to much the same conclusion, conceding that Shortland had drawn the logical conclusion from the events at the barracks wall and the market gates, namely that “the time for prompt action had come, and admitted of no delay”.161 The “prompt action” decided upon by Shortland, as noted above, was to establish a military cordon across the market square, and then to advance to engage with the prisoners in an effort to persuade them to leave the Market Square and return to their prisons. It is not clear whether Shortland expected these pourparlers to succeed. It is likely in any case that he had already decided on a course of action were they to fail—which turned out to be the case, with only a minority of prisoners opting to leave the square. In his evidence to the Larpent-King inquiry, Shortland stated that while he was talking to the prisoners, the latter continued to press forward, and seemed to be trying to outflank the soldiers on the left (hospital) side of the square. The agent had turned to the soldiers behind him urging them to hold their ground, conscious, as he explained, that “there was not a single soldier above these to prevent escape through the outer gates”. It was at this juncture, Shortland, stated, that between twelve and fifteen soldiers had “charged down towards [gate] No. 1”.162 There is a considerable body of eyewitness testimony, both from the soldiers and from the American prisoners present in the square at the time,

159  TNA ADM 1/836, Letters from Commanders-in-Chief, Plymouth, 1815: Capt. Shortland to Admiral Sir J. Duckworth, Apr. 6, 1815, fol. 1; Rear Admiral Josias Rowley & Capt. A.W.  Schomberg, “Report into the causes and circumstances attending the riots at Dartmoor Prison”, Apr. 7, fol. 3. 160  MPUS, Larpent-King Report, “Report”, 17–18. 161  Browne, 271–72 (quotation at 272). 162  MPUS, Larpent-King Report, testimony of T. Shortland, Apr. 23, 1815, 133.

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attesting that it was the agent himself who gave the order to charge.163 One of those eyewitnesses was Somerset Militia sergeant, John Collard. He had himself, he stated, been “in the rear of the charging party”, and claimed that Shortland’s order had had to be repeated “two or three times” before it was obeyed. He added that the soldiers had “endeavoured to drive them [the prisoners] back, but did not charge the same as they would an enemy; if they had they must have killed scores of them, as every bayonet would have told”.164 James Reeves, a twenty-seven-year-old merchant seaman from Salem, was one of the prisoners in the Market Square at the time of the bayonet charge in which Sergeant Collard took part, and his unusually detailed testimony offers some valuable clues about what occurred.165 Admitting that he was “tipsey” when entering the square (adding “or I suppose I should not have done it”), Reeves stated he had been one of the prisoners whom Dr Magrath had urged to return to their prisons. Some had evidently heeded the surgeon’s advice, the American noted, but he was not one of them. Observing once again that had he been sober, he would probably have behaved differently, he went on: I saw the soldiers coming down; they charged upon us immediately, and I then went back directly. I was pricked. I lost my hat, and went to pick it up, when I was pricked again. I went back with my face to them; some turned their backs; but I stood a little more [closely] upon going back than I should have done had I been sober. I received two pricks in the breast, and two in the arm.166

The testimony of Dr George Magrath before the coroner’s inquiry gives a striking indication of how fluid the situation was on the ground at that point: “On hearing the word charge given”, Magrath stated, “he 163  Ibid., testimonies: Sergeant A. Wheeler, north guard (75); Private J. Saunders, Somerset Militia (76); Private W.  Rowles, north guard (79); Private J.  Hamlet, north guard (80); J. Reeves, prisoner (104); John Bennett, store clerk (118); Sergeant John Collard, Somerset Militia (121); C. Rowe, prisoner (130); Prisoners’ report, Apr. 7, 1815, deposition numbers I (Addison Holmes), VI (J. Reeves, J. Greenlaw, I.L. Burr, T. Tindal), XIII (J. Taylor), qtd. Waterhouse & Torry, 190–94; Coroner’s inquiry, witness statements, Apr. 8, 1815, in MPUS: testimony of J. Odiorne, prisoner (52); Private W. Gifford, Somerset Militia (59); H. Hull, prisoner (69). 164  See previous note for reference. 165  TNA ADM 103/87: GEBDPUS, 1813–1814, prisoner n° 682. 166  MPUS, Larpent-King Report, testimony of J. Reeves, prisoner, 104.

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looked around (for his back was then to the soldiers and his face towards the prison) and found himself on the point of the soldiers’ bayonets who were close to him”. After having been driven a considerable way with the prisoners “at the point of the bayonet”, the doctor had managed to extricate himself, and pass behind the advancing soldiers on their left. It was at this moment, he stated, that “firing commenced”.167 Shortland’s own testimony, it will be recalled, was curiously vague on the subject of the bayonet charge, making no mention of who had issued the order. He may have considered that assuming responsibility for the charge would have undermined his statement, given to the Anglo-­ American inquiry, that he did not “think [him]self authorized to command the military to fire because it was their duty when they thought it necessary”,168 and that elusion was the safer course. Lieutenant Aveline, the highest-ranking military officer on the spot at the moment when the order to charge was given, evidently reached (or was directed to reach) the same conclusion, for between the internal Admiralty inquiry on April 7 and the Larpent-King interviews on the 24th, he changed his testimony from the crisp affirmation that “Captain Shortland ordered 15 men to file off to the left and charge”, to the rather convoluted statement that the soldiers “did not charge by my order, nor did I hear captain Shortland order it; I considered myself under captain Shortland’s orders; had I been alone, I certainly would have charged the prisoners long before.”169 It was shortly after the charge that the order to open fire was given. The prisoners had by this juncture been pushed back at bayonet point to the vicinity of the gates, and many were attempting to pass through the small passage separating the Market Square from the Prison-Yard, in order to attain (as they thought) the relative safety of the three prison yards and beyond them their prison blocks. The situation on the ground was chaotic. Josiah Cobb later recalled that “those in front found it impossible to retreat sufficiently rapid, to keep clear of the bayonets, by the others in the rear standing their ground, not seeing the manoeuvre of the soldiers”.170  Ibid., Coroner’s inquiry, testimony of Dr G. Magrath, 49.  Ibid., 135: Larpent-King report, testimony of Thomas G. Shortland. 169   TNA ADM 1/836, Letters from Commanders-in-Chief, Plymouth, 1815: Rear Admiral Josias Rowley & Capt. A.W. Schomberg, “Report into the causes and circumstances attending the riots at Dartmoor Prison”, Apr. 7, testimony of Lieut. Aveline; Larpent-King Report, testimony of Lieut. Aveline, 127. 170  Cobb, vol. 2, 215. On this point, see also Larpent-King Report, testimony of Lieut. Aveline, 128. 167 168

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While it is likely, as Charles Andrews affirmed, that many of the prisoners still in the square and at the gates were, at this point, “retiring as fast as so great a crowd would permit and hurrying and flying […] in every direction”,171 some credence should be given (despite its clearly self-­ serving character) to the large body of testimony from British soldiers and prison officials attesting to the fact that some at least of the prisoners around the gates remained defiant, trading insults with the soldiers, and daring the latter to fire.172 A key question is who—if anyone—gave the order to open fire. The central contention of the unofficial report produced by the committee of prisoners on April 7 was that Dartmoor’s “sanguinary” governor had effectively transformed the prison into a death trap before sounding the alarm bell; planting snipers on the boundary wall platforms, and ordering that most of the prison doors be locked.173 It followed from this premise that all of the important decisions taken that evening—including the order to fire—were necessarily his. Witness after witness among the American prisoners lent their support to this narrative. New York seaman Thomas Tindale, for example, testified that he had been standing near gate n° 4, “not ten steps” from the agent, and had seen him give the order to fire— twice. Tindale added that the captain’s sword had been drawn at the time, and he had been dressed in a blue coat without epaulettes.174 The Anglo-­ American commissioners were not convinced by such vivid details, for they found that different witnesses recalled different details, making it, they stated, “very difficult to reconcile their testimony”.175 Contradictory detail was not an issue in the British testimony, for detail of any kind was in noticeably short supply. The soldiers and officials present in the square at that point claimed either not to have heard any command to fire, or, more frequently, that they had heard it, but could not identify its origin.176 Shortland was similarly vague, at least by the time of the Larpent-King inquiry. In his letter written during the evening of April 6, he had stated that the garrison commander Major John Joliffe had had been “under the

 Andrews, 175.  Hicks, 247; James, 133–34; J. Jones, 134; Leonowicz, 25. 173  Prisoners’ report, Apr. 7, 1815, qtd. Waterhouse & Torry, 197; Hicks, 248–49. 174  MPUS, Larpent-King Report, testimony of T.  Tindale, prisoner, 131; TNA ADM 103/88: GEBDPUS, 1814, prisoner n° 1682. 175  Ibid., “Report”, 20. 176  Ibid., 20–21. 171 172

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necessity of ordering the Military to fire”,177 but when it transpired that the major had in fact been having dinner in the officers’ mess in Princetown when the alarm bell at the prison sounded, and had only arrived in the Market Square once the firing had started,178 Shortland changed his testimony, affirming that he “did not hear any order to fire”. At the same time, he was in no doubt that had someone issued such an order, it would have been the right decision, given his conviction that had the order not been given, the prisoners “might have forced the guard, which they were in the attempt to do”. He added that “if that guard had been forced, the depot would have been lost”.179 Larpent and King chose to take Shortland at his word, effectively (as a counter-report signed by seventeen prisoners would point out in July 1815) sweeping aside much of the American testimony.180 Questions could have been raised about the probative value of the clearly evasive British testimony, but the Anglo-American inquiry contented itself with concluding that given the “very contradictory” evidence, it “may remain a matter of doubt whether the firing first began in the square by order, or was a spontaneous act of the soldiers themselves”.181 At the end of the day, whether the firing in the Market Square began at the behest of Captain Shortland (later revealed to be Charles King’s own personal opinion),182 was ordered by an unknown officer of the garrison, was simply the result of a “spontaneous act” of the soldiery or even a misheard taunt from an American prisoner (a possibility suggested privately by Seymour Larpent)183 made little difference to the result. Witnesses on both sides remembered, for the most part, first one or two single musket shots, then more generalised firing, aimed at the prisoners around the gates. Some mentioned “volleys” of musket shot, others “straggling”

177  TNA ADM 1/836, Letters from Commanders-in-Chief, Plymouth, 1815: Capt. Shortland to Admiral Sir John Duckworth, Apr. 6, 1815, fol. 1. 178  Joliffe had supplied the inquiry with a written statement to that effect two days earlier (Larpent-King Report, 82–83: written statement, Major J.T. Joliffe, Apr. 26, 1815). 179  MPUS, Larpent-King Report, testimony of T. Shortland, 135–36. 180  “Reply to King and Larpent’s Report” [n.d., c. July 1815], cited in Waterhouse & Torry, 213. 181  MPUS, Larpent-King Report, “Report”, 20–21. 182  Ibid., 11–14: C. King to J.Q. Adams, Apr. 26, 1815. 183  TNA FO 5/111, Foreign Correspondence before 1906. United States of America, Series II.  Letters and reports on the Dartmoor Massacre, April-May 1815, fols. 80–81: S. Larpent to Lord Castlereagh, Apr. 29, 1815.

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fire.184 The first shots were fired by the soldiers of the north guard who had accompanied Shortland into the Market Square, and were lined up some fifteen to twenty feet from the railings. As reinforcements from the south guard entered the square from the upper end and formed up, they also started firing, apparently without waiting to receive any orders.185 The first shots may have been aimed over the prisoners’ heads (one report mentions that their fire “rattled the slate from the roofs of the buildings at every discharge”),186 leading some prisoners to assume that the soldiers were firing blank cartridges. Niel McKinnon recalled: “The prisoners retreated [into the yards] after the first fire, but I heard them shouting and rallying, cheering each other, and I think I heard them again dare the soldiers to fire. I heard several say they thought they were blank cartridges.” McKinnon added: “I gave it as my opinion”. Soon afterwards, however, he had had cause to revise that opinion. On his way down to the prisons, he heard that Maryland seaman John Haywood had been shot, and he returned up the slope towards the railings. He found Haywood, one of two men of colour to die from wounds inflicted that day,187 lying dead inside the gate to yard N° 4. A musket round had entered his shoulder and lodged in his neck.188 Another prisoner was at that point inside Prison N° 7, near the entrance, and hearing shouts that the cartridges were blank, had found himself propelled into the yard “much against my will”. Like McKinnon, he soon realised that the soldiers were in fact firing live ammunition: I had got but a little way out of the door [of Prison n° 7] when the firing commenced from the wall, and the balls were flying in every direction, but mostly over our heads. The glass lamp over the door was smashed to atoms,

184  See for example, MPUS, Larpent-King Report, testimonies: J. Rust, prisoner (73); John T. Trowbridge, prisoner (74). E. Jackson, private Derby Militia (85); D.S. Warren, prisoner (108); W. Norris, turnkey (110); Sergeant J.  Collard, Somerset Militia (122); Private W.  Gifford, Somerset Militia (124–25). 185  Ibid., testimonies: Lieut. Fortye, Somerset Militia (128–29); Sergeant J.  Williams, south guard (82). 186  Cobb, vol. 2, 216. 187  The other was Thomas Jackson. See below, 279 & note. 188  MPUS, Larpent-King Report, testimony of N. McKinnon, prisoner (92).

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and the pieces fell among us. The current immediately set in towards the door, and I was carried into the prison again.189

The firing went on for more than ten minutes. During that time, noted another witness from the same prison, “the pattering of the balls against the buildings seemed like a hail-storm”.190 For some prisoners, the realisation that they were being fired on came as a complete surprise. One prisoner later told Josiah Cobb that he had been […] carelessly looking through the gratings, a little apart from the main body, nor dreamed his person was in jeopardy, till the squad of soldiers approached, one pointed his musket downwards, within a foot of his knee, and blew all below to a jelly, splintering and mangling the thigh above in a horrible manner.191

As indicated by the testimony from Prison N° 7 cited above, gunfire was now being aimed at the prisoners not only by the soldiers lined up in front of the gates, but also from the platforms built into the semi-circular inner boundary wall which ran behind the backs of the prisons. As elsewhere, it is unclear if a specific order to fire was given on the platforms, and if so by whom.192 Whatever the precise circumstances, it is clear that both the prisoners still at the upper end of the yards near the gates and those now running down the slope towards the various prisons were being targeted by the guards on the walls.193 Among those making for the prisons was committee member Thomas Mott—though he was probably walking rather than running, since he was assisting a badly wounded prisoner. As he attempted to reach one of the prison buildings, Mott later testified, he “found [him]self unexpectedly open to the fire of soldiers on the ramparts of the south wall; their fire was kept up in so brisk a manner that it appeared almost impossible to enter [the prison] without being shot”. The two men, along with several others 189  Browne cites at length the “recollections” of this unnamed prisoner, described as one of his “neighbours” in Prison N° 7 (Browne, 275–79, quotation at 278–79). 190  Ibid., 279. 191  Cobb, vol. 2, 215. 192  MPUS, Larpent-King Report, testimonies: Private E.  Jackson, Derby Militia (85); Ensign S. White, Somerset Militia (128). 193  Ibid., “Report”, 22–23.

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who had taken cover behind the cookhouse, eventually “sallied out for the purpose of gaining our prison door, when a volley of musket balls showered in amongst us”. Two were killed and two others wounded.194 Some prisoners were more successful in finding shelter. When the soldiers charged in the Market Square, US prisoner Addison Holmes “stepped aside, and got between two sentry boxes and the troops passed him”. Privateer captain John Odiorne was at that moment at the other end of the square from Holmes, helping unload that day’s bread delivery. He was advised by a nearby official to hide in the prison storehouse. He remained there until the following morning.195 Others fled to the nearest prisons, or took refuge amongst the wounded in the prison hospital.196 Massachusetts seaman Lott Davis opted for Prison N° 6’s cookhouse, having decided that it was “the only safe place from the firing”.197 Most of the deaths and injuries on the evening of April 6 seem to have occurred in the space of no more than ten or fifteen minutes. Some were the result of the virtually simultaneous gunfire directed at the gates and yards from the Market Square and the wall-top bastions. Philadelphia seaman William Dewetter was one of those pushed back by the soldiers’ charge. He described what happened next: I turned round and just as I got inside the inner gate shots were fired; one grazed the side of my head which made me giddy, and turned me round two or three times; I saw a prisoner named [James] Mann198 fall; went to him and took him up; the balls flew about so thick that if there was one I suppose there was one thousand.199 194  Prisoners’ report, Apr. 7, 1815, qtd. Waterhouse & Torry, 193–94: testimony of T.B. Mott. 195  MPUS, Coroner’s inquiry, witness statements: A. Holmes, prisoner (55); J. Odiorne, prisoner (51–53); J. Arnold, steward (56–58); TNA ADM 103/89: GEBDPUS, 1814, prisoner n° 3592. 196  Bates, 82. 197  MPUS, Larpent-King Report, 106: testimony of Lot Davis, prisoner; TNA ADM 103/90: GEBDPUS, 1814, prisoner n° 5341. 198  One of the five prisoners killed outright that evening, the musket ball entering through his shoulder and lodging in his chest (NA, RG 45–566: Rolls and Lists of prisoners of war, 1812–1815, Box 2/5: “A return of American Prisoners of War … killed and wounded at Dartmoor, April 1815”; Box 2/6: “Description of Death Wounds inflicted on the Evening of the 6 April 1815”; TNA ADM 103/640: Dartmoor Certificates, 1799–1814: returns for the weeks ending April 7, 1815; ADM 103/87: GEBDPUS, 1813–1814, prisoner n° 970). 199  MPUS, Larpent-King Report, 131: testimony of William Dewetter, prisoner; TNA ADM 103/88: GEBDPUS, 1814, prisoner n° 1950.

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Some minutes later, Shortland and some of the militia officers in the Market Square appear to have endeavoured to bring the firing there to a halt.200 There is strong evidence, however, that their orders were not heeded immediately.201 Shortland’s own statement that “whenever I could, I had requested them to desist [firing]” gives the same impression.202 Once firing had finally stopped in the square, a party of soldiers was ordered through the gates into the Prison-Yard; the aim being, according to Sergeant Collard, to “turn the prisoners into their different prisons”. Somerset Militia private John Saunders remembered his orders a bit differently: “to charge the men to their prisons”—at bayonet point.203 Another militia private described how, once the prisoners had returned into their yards, “we went into them to see if there were any stragglers about”.204 Collard testified that he had no knowledge of what happened next in the yards, though admitted to having heard gunfire coming from that direction.205 In fact, what the sergeant heard confirmed that, for some soldiers at least, “charging” the prisoners to their prisons involved both bayonet and musket. Further fatalities and serious injuries would follow as the militia soldiers pursued the “stragglers” down the yards. Philadelphia ship’s boatswain John Slater saw one such group of soldiers at the far end of one of the prisons as he was near gate n° 7, passing between prisons 6 and 7 with two other prisoners. Slater testified that he was knocked to the ground when one of his party, John Washington, a privateer seaman from Georgia, was shot and fell towards him. Slater got to his feet and, without waiting, ran towards his own prison, N° 5.206 According to several prisoner accounts, Washington was not killed by this initial shot, and was able to take shelter 200  MPUS, Larpent-King Report, testimonies: Major Joliffe (83); Sergeant George Pitt (84); Private R. Watt, Derby Militia (109); Private W. Ward, Derby Militia (109); Sergeant J.  Collard, Somerset Militia (122); Private W.  Gifford, Somerset Militia (125); Private J.  Soathern, Derby Militia (126); Lieut. Aveline, Somerset Militia (127); Lieut. Fortye, Somerset Militia (129). 201  See testimonies of Lieut. Aveline and Private Soathern above, and that of Private S. Lapthorn, Somerset Militia (ibid., 124). 202  MPUS, Larpent-King Report, testimony of T. Shortland, 134 (my emphasis). 203  Ibid., testimonies: Sergeant J.  Collard, Somerset Militia (122); Private J.  Saunders, Somerset Militia (77). 204  Ibid., 78: testimony of Private W. Smith, Somerset Militia. 205  See note 200 for reference. 206  MPUS, Larpent-King Report, testimony of J.  Slater, prisoner (130); TNA ADM 103/90: GEBDPUS, 1814, prisoner nos. 3936 (Washington), 4316 (Slater).

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by a wall, where he was later discovered by a party of soldiers, and shot multiple times in the head at point blank range.207 Washington’s death quickly acquired symbolic status among the American prisoners. In the words of one, its “savage harshness excited more horror in the minds of the prisoners, and hatred towards its […] authors, than any other which took place during the massacre”.208 Whatever their private reservations,209 Larpent and King’s report would find no fault with the prison authorities at Dartmoor concerning either the initial decision to sound the alarm, or the subsequent orders to charge and then open fire on the prisoners in the marketplace.210 However, when it came to the conduct of the soldiers ordered into the yards, and of those on the wall-top platforms, who had deliberately targeted prisoners making for the prison doors or otherwise trying to take shelter in the yards, the report roundly condemned their behaviour as “wholly without object or excuse” and “a wanton attack upon the lives of defenceless and, at that time, unoffending individuals”.211 The directing of musket fire at three of the prison doorways, as crowds of “helpless and unarmed prisoners” attempted to enter them, came in for particularly forthright criticism from the inquiry’s authors.212 Niel McKinnon witnessed one such incident, as a group of prisoners were “charged” by the soldiers towards the doors of Prison N° 4:

207  Valpey, 60; Cobb, vol. 2, 217; Palmer, 180, 82; NA, RG 45–566: Rolls and Lists of prisoners of war, 1812–1815, Box 2/5: “A return of American Prisoners of War … killed and wounded at Dartmoor, April 1815”; Box 2/6: “Description of Death Wounds inflicted on the Evening of the 6 April 1815”; TNA ADM 103/640: Dartmoor Certificates, 1799–1814: returns for the weeks ending Apr. 7, 1815. 208  Cobb, vol. 2, 217. See also P. Drinkwater to his parents, Apr. 8, 1815, cited in Felknor; Prisoners’ report, Apr. 7, 1815, deposition numbers II, V, qtd. Waterhouse & Torry, 196. 209  King told J.Q. Adams on April 26 that “by a conduct a little more temporizing, this dreadful alternative of firing upon the unarmed prisoners might have been avoided”. Three days later, Larpent wrote in similar terms to Castlereagh that “probably the tumult might have been subdued by milder means” (MPUS,  Larpent-King Report, 12: C.  King to J.Q. Adams, Apr. 26, 1815; TNA FO 5/111: Foreign Correspondence before 1906. United States of America, Series II. Letters and reports on the Dartmoor Massacre, April–May 1815, fol. 81r: S. Larpent to Lord Castlereagh, Apr. 29, 1815). 210  MPUS, Larpent-King Report, “Report”, 18, 21. 211  Ibid., 23. In this respect, Donald Hickey’s description of the Larpent-King inquiry as an “attempt to whitewash the affair” fails to capture the ambivalence of the report’s conclusions (Hickey, 313). 212  MPUS, Larpent-King Report, “Report”, 24.

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I was then driven with the rest into No. 4, and the sergeant having his halbert close to one of the prisoners, and the soldiers their bayonets charged. I entered the prison with my face to the soldiers, until I was so far that I thought I was safe, when I turned my back, and at that moment a musket was fired close to me, which wounded a little boy,213 who screamed and dropped down; he died the next day. […] the prisoners were crowding round the door, not being able to get in fast enough […].214

James Reeves was already inside Prison N° 1 when the soldiers fired through the doorway. He told the Larpent-King inquiry how, “mad at being pricked” by a bayonet earlier that evening, he had “flung a stone out at the soldiers”.215 Garrison commander Major Joliffe claimed in a written statement that it was as a result of such provocation that “the military [had] fired a few shots at the prisoners in the yard”, adding that “the firing was without my orders, and I conceive took place owing to the military being so exasperated”.216 Numerous American witnesses contested the British evidence of widespread stone-throwing in the yards (and Reeves emphasised that he had acted after the soldiers fired through the doors), but there seems little doubt that, whatever its origin, there was indeed what Lieutenant Aveline called considerable “irritation” among the militia soldiers.217 The fact that the guards in the Market Square had been reluctant to obey the order to stop firing is no doubt significant in this context. It is likely in fact, as suggested earlier, that “irritation” had been festering among the soldiery for some time before April 6. In Dartmoor prison that evening, free reign was given to what the Larpent-King report described as “the state of individual irritation and exasperation on the part of the

213  Fourteen year-old black New Yorker, Thomas Jackson. He was shot in the abdomen and died of his wounds the following day. When he was killed, Jackson had only been at Dartmoor for a little over a month (TNA ADM 103/640: Dartmoor Certificates, 1799–1814: return for the week ending April 7, 1815; NA, RG 45–566: Rolls and Lists of prisoners of war, 1812–1815, Box 2/5: “A return of American Prisoners of War … killed and wounded at Dartmoor, April 1815”; Box 2/6: “Description of Death Wounds inflicted on the Evening of the 6 April 1815”; ADM 103/91: GEBDPUS, 1814–1815, prisoner n° 6520). 214  MPUS, Larpent-King Report, testimony of N. McKinnon, prisoner, 93. 215  Ibid., testimony of J. Reeves, prisoner, 104. 216  Ibid., written statement of Maj. J. Joliffe, 83. 217  Ibid., testimony of Lieut. Aveline, 127.

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soldiers who followed the prisoners into their yards”, with bloody consequences.218 On the evening of April 6, Frank Palmer was clearly still trying to process what had occurred over the previous few hours, as his disjointed diary entry vividly illustrates. What was clear in his mind was where to place responsibility for that day’s events: Too Inhuman to mention—(In fact I feel myself quite inadequate to the Task of describeing such Savage Barbarity in its proper Collours—Even Shortland (who was drunk) if that is any palliation?) stamp’t upon those whom were allready Dead—or nearly—and who he was the Sole cause of haveing Murderd—Cowerd. Villian. Blood Thursty Rascal, what epithet can be applied to thee sufficiently Indicative of such Brutal & Savage Barbarity, none, Say none—words can’t describe—nor pen depict, your Inhuman conduct—in collours—so black as the Crime.219

Nathaniel Pierce’s diary entry for the 6th conveys the same mixture of incredulity and bitter anger directed against the British in general, and Shortland in particular: It is an imposibility for me to describe the Barbarity of this Capt. Shortland, but is worse than the massacree at Boston in the year [17]70; in this fray there is about 50 kill’d and wounded & in a Cowardly manner. […] This is real British bravery, yard arm & yard arm in the real old english style. This day ends with Blood shed & Cloudy weather, wind Easterly.220

Ship’s clerk David A. Neal would later write of that evening’s events that “there was no doubt blame on both sides”, adding that “the affair […] was commonly called the Dartmoor massacre, but I doubt the justice of the term”.221 Benjamin Browne would also, as noted earlier, have “after-­ thoughts” about Shortland’s culpability.222 If such opinions were being voiced in the various prisons at Dartmoor that night, they have not left any record. The “general” view among the prisoners at that point, Browne recalled (including his own), was that “without a shadow of a doubt, […  Ibid., “Report”, 22.  Palmer, 180. 220  Pierce, 41. 221  Neal, 119. 222  Browne, 272. 218 219

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Shortland] was a cold-blooded murderer”.223 Josiah Cobb recalled that the night was one of “anxiety and disquietude”; and Browne that “scarcely an inmate of Dartmoor turned into his hammock”, but passed “from mess to mess, talking about the occurrences of the day”, and “all vowing vengeance in the mostly deadly terms on the author of the catastrophe”.224 Others “brooded over their wrongs in silence”.225 The following morning, the prison doors were unlocked later than usual, at between 8 and 9 o’clock. The prisoners filed out into the yards, to discover that the breach in the barrack yard wall had been filled in, but that there was still evidence of the previous day’s events.226 The mood was sombre. “Dismal it was”, Pierce wrote in his diary, “to see the blood and brains about the yard”. Joseph Valpey, for his part, noted a “consider[able]” amount of blood in his own yard, N° 7, and in N° 4, but “not so much” in N° 1.227 With no clear information yet available on the numbers or identities of those killed and injured the previous evening, and with rumours circulating about “mangled” bodies being buried “privately” on Shortland’s orders outside the prison walls,228 there was relief for some to discover that “lost friends”, who had taken refuge the previous evening in a prison other than their own or in the prison hospital, had turned up alive and well.229 Charles Andrews was one of those to visit the hospital that morning, and he recorded the “painful” sights and sounds that greeted him: tables “covered with the amputated legs and arms of our fellow prisoners” and “the groans of forty-two wounded in a most shocking manner”. Seven corpses were laid out, “solemn witnesses of the horrid act”.230 Frank Palmer would draw up a list of the dead and wounded the following day and post up copies in the various prisons under the title, “British Massacre”.231 During the morning and early afternoon of the 7th, there was a near constant coming and going of officialdom at the prison, starting with a  Ibid.   Cobb, vol. 2, 216; Browne, 283. See also Waterhouse & Torry, 222; Clover, “Reminiscences”, vol. 24, n° 5, 492. 225  Clover, “Reminiscences”, vol. 24, n° 5, 462. 226  Cobb, vol. 2, 216; Browne, 279, 283–84; Pierce, 41. 227  Pierce, 41; Valpey, 27. 228  Andrews, 189. 229  Bates, 82. 230  Andrews, 182. 231  Palmer, 185–86. See also Pierce, 42. 223 224

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colonel dispatched from Plymouth with troop reinforcements to take control of the garrison. He came to the gates to address the prisoners, accompanied by Captain Shortland. The arrival of the agent was greeted with jeers and insults.232 Shortland’s position was certainly an uncomfortable one. His reputation and future were now in the hands of others, with his management of the prison the subject of intense scrutiny from high-­ ranking army and navy officers. The prisoners remained hostile, despite (as Nathaniel Pierce reported) the agent expressing regret at what had happened the previous evening, while declaring that it “was not his fault for he did not order them [the soldiers] to fire”—a statement described by Pierce as “a positive lie”.233 Shortland tried to regain some semblance of control of the situation that morning by sending a note to the prisoners’ committee, requesting that they come to his office to give him their account of events. The curt reply came that there was no question of “hold[ing] any communication with the murderer of our fellow citizens”. Any discussion of the events of the 6th would, they stated, be uniquely with the military authorities, at the gates.234 Dartmoor’s agent had become an irrelevance. Those discussions began later that morning, first with Plymouth’s senior army commander, Major-General Brown, and they continued in the afternoon with the two Admiralty envoys, Admiral Rowley and Captain Schomberg. The ten members to conduct the prisoners’ own inquiry were also appointed that morning and depositions taken down later the same day.235 The following day it was the turn of the district coroner, Joseph Whiteford, and his jury. Inquests were held on the seven men who had died on the  6th and 7th, and the testimony of twenty-one witnesses taken, including some of the prisoners already deposed by the prisoners’ committee. The dead prisoners were interred in the prison burial ground, without ceremony, the following evening.236 Both the Admiralty and coroners’ inquiries validated the thesis of an American riot-cum-mass-escape-attempt; a stance reflected in the coroner’s verdict of “justifiable homicide”.237 The  Andrews, 181; Waterhouse & Torry, 188.  Pierce, 41. 234  Andrews, 181. 235  Browne, 284–85; Andrews, 182, 192–94; Pierce, 42; Waterhouse & Torry, 188, 220–21; Palmer, 181. 236  Andrews, 195–96. 237  TNA ADM 99/260: TBMPW, March–June 1815, Capt. Cotgrave to TO, Apr. 11, 1815. 232 233

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contrast with the findings of the prisoners’ committee inquiry, completed on the 7th, that the events of the previous day represented “a premeditated scheme in the mind of Capt. Shortland”, the fruit of one man’s “bitter enmity against the prisoners”, could not have been starker.238 When the coroner’s verdict was announced on April 10, Pierce noted sourly in his diary: “this afternoon Capt. Shortland was tried & honourably acquitted & justify’d in all his Murderous Deeds”.239 Andrews referred to “this most extraordinary and unjust verdict”, adding dismissively that the jury had been composed of twelve “peasants”, all of them “dependants of Capt. Shortland”.240 Small wonder then perhaps that Palmer should record on the 8th, when the coroner’s investigation was in progress, that “the affair which has been the subject of conversation for this day or two past, is still more so. It seems as tho the prisoners intends [sic] to remember it”. He added “—and well they ought too”.241

V Palmer’s sentiments would be a recurring feature of references to the Dartmoor Massacre during the coming months. Several prisoner narratives of the events of April 6 end with an injunction to keep the memory of that day alive. One anonymous account, appended to Joseph Valpey’s Dartmoor diary, finishes with the words: “Ye sons of Columbia, the Blood of your slaughtered countrymen Cries to you from the ground, avenge our Deaths, remember the 6th of April AD 1815”.242 Another, a set of “Remarks” reproduced in Benjamin Waterhouse’s edition of Henry Torry’s memoir, ends as follows: “Though our policy as an Independent Republic is pacific, yet should our rights again be assailed, and future wars ensue, WE WILL REMEMBER DARTMOOR!”243 In a letter written to his wife in Maine later that month, privateer captain James Fairfield referred to “that never to be forgotten day the 6th of April 1815”, adding that he hoped soon to be

 Prisoners’ report, Apr. 7, 1815, qtd. Waterhouse & Torry, 196, 198.  Pierce, 43. 240  Andrews, 192. 241  Palmer, 185. 242  Valpey, 62. 243  Waterhouse & Torry, 219. 238 239

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home to give her the “history” of that day in person.244 Such sentiments also featured on the flags made by the American prisoners to accompany their departure from the prison that spring. One bore the words “Remember the Sixth of April, 1815!”, another “Columbia weeps and we remember”.245 Cobb mentions also more elaborate commemorative flags fashioned by the prisoners, featuring a tomb and urn, flanked on either side by a seaman and a female mourner, both “bent in sadness”.246 Frank Palmer sketched a similar commemorative image in his diary.247 It is reasonable to assume that illustrations of this kind also featured on the “emblematical pictures and tablatures, commemorative of that unhappy event”, hawked by enterprising prisoners at the prison market in the days and weeks after the massacre.248 Cobb would claim that the local country folk “appeared as highly exasperated at the murderous conduct of Shortland, as were the prisoners themselves”, but it is probable that some purchasers, perhaps the majority, gave greater credence to the position defended by the loyalist press, that talk of a “massacre” was nothing but “a base attack” on British national character; a symptom of “the low and pitiful hostility of many Americans to this country”.249 Some of these commemorative images, like Frank Palmer’s, accompanied their owners back to the United States, and remained in private hands; a tangible, material link to the events of April 6.250 Other former prisoners chose to inscribe the events of that day on plans or sketches of Dartmoor, inextricably fixing the topography of the prison at that one moment in time. This was part of a larger body of visual material created by inmates at the prison, much of it probably lost.251 A number of printed images do survive though, like the 244   Brick Store Museum, Kennebunk, Maine, Captain James Fairfield Collection, 1784–1820, Folder 1: J. Fairfield to L. Fairfield, Apr. 25, 1815. 245  Palmer, 196; Andrews, 211. See also Clover, “Reminiscences”, vol. 24, n° 5, 520. 246  Cobb, vol. 2, 223. 247  The illustration represents a commemorative urn on a large plinth, framed by a seaman and a female mourner, with weeping (willow?) trees to each side (Palmer, 186–87). 248  Cobb, vol. 2, 221–22. 249  [Untitled], Norfolk Chronicle, Aug. 5, 1815; “America”, Windsor and Eton Express, Aug. 13, 1815. 250  One such image, similar in its treatment of the subject to F. Palmer’s sketch, was sold by Boston auctioneers, Skinner’s, in 2019 (https://www.skinnerinc.com/auctions/3222B/ lots/52 [consulted 5 May 2020]). 251  A rare exception is Perez Drinkwater’s “rough scetch of Dartmoore Prison” made in February 1815, preserved at the end of a notebook of his devoted to sailing problems (Maine HS, Me. Hist. Soc. Spec. Coll., Coll. 949, Ser. 6, v. 1: Notebook of P. Drinkwater, Jr., 1815).

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“Plan and Description of Dartmoor Prison England with a representation of the unfortunate transactions of the 6th of April”, published in New Haven in 1815, for which prisoner committee member Captain John T.  Trowbridge provided the “references”.252 Other plans of the prison, with additions depicting the massacre, drawn by fellow prisoners William Carnes and Glover Broughton, were published at about the same time.253 Broughton’s plan is reproduced here (Fig. 7.1). Waterhouse and Torry’s 1816 memoir Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts also features as a frontispiece an uncredited “Description of Dartmoor Prison, England”, complete with monochrome soldiers firing from the Market Square and the bastions on dark, compact wedges of prisoners, congregated at the gates and around the prison doors (Fig.  7.2). In the case of the 1815 engraving discussed in Chap. 3, based on Jacob Taylor’s drawing, reference to the massacre takes the more oblique form of a small circle placed on the barrack yard wall, indicating the “Hole in the Wall”—a case of “o” rather than “x” marking the spot. The same drawing (or a copy of it) was later re-published, with visual details from various moments during the day of the massacre added, including a small figure bending over a ball in the barrack yard. “Captain Shortland, commanding officer” is also present, standing in the Market Square, sword raised, next to a line of firing soldiers (Fig. 7.3). Various prisoners can be seen in prison yards 1 and 7, daubed, in the hand-coloured Library of Congress copy reproduced here, with little blobs of yellow wash, either fleeing or seemingly raising their arms in surrender. A number are lying on the ground, including one on an improvised stretcher, wielding, rather incongruously, an American flag. Soldiers can also be seen in groups in the three prison yards, and several are depicted firing towards the prisoners from the wall-top bastions. The US Republican press took up the theme of commemoration and memory that summer in its coverage of the massacre; its “inflamed rhetoric” marking, according to David Dzurec, “a return to a definition of nationalism that relied on American notions of the cruel and barbarous British ‘other’”.254 Thus, in one article, readers were called on to let their 252  Yale University Library, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Ms. 32 D25 1815A: A Doolittle, “Plan and description of Dartmoor Prison England: with a representation of the unfortunate transactions of the 6th of April 1815”, New Haven, 1815. 253  William Carnes (artist)/George Girder (engraver), “Massacre of the American Prisoners of War at Dartmoor Prison on the 6th of April 1815 by the Somerset Militia”, Salem, MA., c. 1815, engraving (private collection); Fig. 7.1. 254  Dzurec, 178.

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Fig. 7.1  “Dartmoor Prison drawn by Glover Broughton, 1815” (detail) (Wellcome Collection CCBY)

feelings of outrage and thirst for vengeance “descend to your children, and to your children’s children, until that nation shall be no more:— Instruct them to lisp the history of that horrible event, and as they gristle into manhood teach them to hate these English.” Another demanded that “the anniversary of the 6th of April be marked by humiliation and prayer for the souls of our fellow citizens thus hurried into eternity. Let us never forget it, and never forgive it.”255

 Qtd. ibid., 179.

255

Fig. 7.2  “Description of Dartmoor Prison, England” (detail), Benjamin Waterhouse [& Henry Torry], Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, Late a Surgeon on Board an American Privateer, Who was Captured at Sea by the British, in May, Eighteen Hundred and Thirteen, and was Confined First, at Melville Island, Halifax, then at Chatham, in England, and Last, at Dartmoor Prison (Boston: Rowe and Hooper, 1816), frontispiece (Internet Archive)

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Fig. 7.3  “A representation of the massacre of American prisoners in Dartmoor Prison, April 6, 1815” (detail), Hitchcock C.  De Witt, 1845 (US Library of Congress)

Never forget, never forgive. This had not been the outcome hoped for by the diplomats who had commissioned the joint Anglo-American investigation into the Dartmoor Massacre the previous April, with both sides eager to “seal off” an episode which risked threatening the fragile peace negotiated at Ghent.256 The idea for the inquiry had been first suggested to the American diplomatic delegation in London by Castlereagh on April 16, in an effort to resolve the glaring disparities between the conclusions of the military and prisoners’ inquiries and “secur[e] information as to the real

 Perkins, 165.

256

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state of the case”.257 Events moved swiftly thereafter. By the  18th, the basic outlines of the inquiry’s brief and the choice of the two commissioners had been agreed on, and both Shortland and the civil authorities in Plymouth informed.258 The first witness was heard in Plymouth Guild Hall on Friday April 21, and the last, at Dartmoor, the following Monday.259 When the contents of Seymour Larpent and Charles King’s report became public in mid-July, far from producing a consensus on a range of “impartial and satisfactory” conclusions, as had been hoped,260 some sections of US public opinion argued that the report was part of the problem, not the solution.261 King was subject to a stream of vitriolic criticism in the Republican press, with some commentators affirming that the twenty-six-­ year-old American was an inexperienced ingénue who had been “overreached” by the wily British. Less charitable voices claimed that King suffered “from a too common admiration of British principles and British characters”, and thus “was predetermined to fritter down the abuses which the British Government and its agents had lavished upon their American prisoners”.262

257  “Extract of a minute of a conversation … between [Lord Castlereagh …] and Messrs. Clay and Gallatin”, Apr. 16, 1815, repr. in MPUS, 7–9; H.  Clay and A.  Gallatin to R.G. Beasley, Apr. 18, 1815, in Clay, 20–21. 258  TNA FO 5/111: Foreign Correspondence before 1906. USA, Series II. Letters and reports on the Dartmoor Massacre, April–May 1815, Lord Castlereagh to S. Larpent (fols. 53–54), to J.W. Croker (fol. 67); to Major-General Torrens (fol. 69) and Viscount Sidmouth (fol. 73), all Apr. 18, 1815; H.  Clay to J.A.  Bayard, Apr. 28, 1815, in ibid., 21–23; The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA., Mss. HM 31201: Anna Margaretta Larpent diaries, 1773–1830 (17 vols.), vol. 9 (1814–1816), 121; ADM 98/228, TBLADP, 1813–1815, 109v: TO to Capt. Shortland, Apr. 18, 1815; PAB,  1/703/125: Plymouth Borough Records, Sessions business correspondence, J. Becket, Home Office to the Mayor, Plymouth, Apr. 18, 1815; 1/362/64: J. Becket, Home Office to the Mayor, Plymouth, Apr. 18, 1815. 259  Larpent-King Report, 73, 120. 260  H. Clay and A. Gallatin to R.G. Beasley, Apr. 18, 1815, in Clay, 21. 261  Adams, 26. 262  See Gilje, Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights, 271–73; Dzurec, 182–83. Quotations from Allen, 47; “Reply to King and Larpent’s Report” [n.d., c. July 1815], cited in Waterhouse & Torry, 218–19. Charles King’s brother, John Alsop King, would write to House speaker Henry Clay, a former member of the diplomatic mission to Britain the following April, requesting his intervention to salvage Charles’ reputation in the face of what he called continuing “venomous” attacks and “unworthy insinuations” in the “public prints” (J.A. King to H. Clay, April 3, 1816, in Clay, 189–90, quotations at 189).

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By the autumn of 1815, the controversy had receded as a political issue, a process helped by the British agreement to pay for a part of the repatriation costs for US prisoners and an offer made on behalf of the Prince Regent to compensate the victims of the massacre.263 That being said, the US government never formally validated the key finding of the Larpent-­ King report that both prisoners and guards were to blame for the “unfortunate occurrence” at Dartmoor.264 It was a point to which the British—understandably—would return time and again, as in a letter of August 1815, addressed to US Secretary of State James Monroe, formally offering compensation to the families of men killed or wounded on April 6. The letter conceded that “the extent of the calamity was to be ascribed to the want of steadiness in the troops, and of exertion in the officers”, but nevertheless maintained that “the firing appeared to have been justified at its commencement by the turbulent conduct of the prisoners”.265 The letter went on to affirm that the conduct of the Somerset Militia at Dartmoor on April 6 merited (and had indeed received) “the most severe animadversion”.266 The impact of that admission was though weakened considerably by bolting on to it the caveat that the soldiers’ behaviour at the prison that evening was the result of “the inexperience of a militia force” rather than “any spirit of animosity towards the prisoners”.267 In a terse reply at the end of 1815, Monroe referred to the “deep distress” caused to the whole American people by this “unfortunate event”. He added that “this repugnance is increased by the consideration that our governments, though penetrated with regret, do not agree in sentiment, respecting the conduct of the parties engaged in it”—probably a reference to the US conviction that Shortland deserved to be put on trial for his “unnecessary” order to fire on the prisoners.268 Only after this blunt assertion was diplomatic decorum restored by Monroe, thanking the Prince  Gilje, Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights, 274; Leonowicz, 28.  Gilje, Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights, 269; Larpent-King Report, “Report”, 14. 265  A. St. John Baker to J. Monroe, Aug. 3, 1815, repr. in MPUS, 28–29. The offer of compensation had first been made by Castlereagh in a similarly worded letter sent to US envoys H. Clay and A. Gallatin in May (Lord Castlereagh to H. Clay and A. Gallatin, May 22, 1815 (repr. in ibid., 24–26). 266  TNA FO 5/111: Foreign Correspondence before 1906. United States of America, Series II. Letters and reports on the Dartmoor Massacre, April-May 1815, fols. 146–48: Lt. Gen. Sir H. Calvert to Maj. Gen. Brown, May 13, 1815. 267  A. St. John Baker to Secretary of State Monroe, Aug. 3, 1815, repr. in MPUS, 28. 268  On this point, see J.Q.  Adams to J.  Monroe, June 23, 1815 (extract), repr. in ibid., 27–28. 263 264

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Regent for his offer of compensation, and for the motives which had led him to make it. The offer, however, was firmly declined.269 The two governments thus agreed to disagree, and left it at that.270 With Beasley’s long-awaited cartel ships now ready (the massacre having, in Alan Taylor’s words, “lit a fire under the American consul”),271 the evacuation of nearly 6000 American prisoners was able to begin, starting with the departure of 249 men on April 20.272 By previous standards, the operation was “quickly done”, but it was still not until late July that the last party of prisoners left the depot—more than three months after the massacre.273 By that point, the prison had begun to fill up again with a new influx of French prisoners. More than 6500 would arrive between the end of June and the end of November 1815.274 One American prisoner who witnessed the arrival of the first of the new French intake was struck by the sight of their “uniforms rent and torn to tatters”, with “many having the clotted blood scarcely dried upon their clothes and persons”.275 Dr George Magrath’s medical report for August 1815 gives a similarly grim picture. “With few exceptions”, he wrote, the 247 Waterloo prisoners who arrived at Dartmoor on August 22 and 23 “laboured under Gun Shot wounds, which were for the most part in an inflamed, foul and spreading state”. A considerable number, Magrath added, were “debilitated by fatigue” and “febrile complaints”.276 For the remaining American prisoners too, it was a period of hardship, though of a different nature. The payments to prisoners from the US government had now dried up, and much of the informal economy of the prison ground to a halt. Josiah Cobb, who was one of the last prisoners to leave Dartmoor, recalled this period as one of “a heart-sickening sameness, bringing no change of feelings, no relief to the aching mind, and no prospect of getting out”. There was, he added, “little to do, except to wait

 J. Monroe to A. St. John Baker, Dec. 11, 1815, repr. in ibid., 30.  Gilje, Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights, 270. 271  Taylor, 424. 272  Dye, “American Maritime Prisoners”, 308; Lloyd, Prisoners of War, 299. 273  Stanbrook, 70; Dye, “Dartmoor”, 4. Quotation from Dye, “American Maritime Prisoners”, 308. 274  TNA ADM 103/102: GEBDPFR, 1815. 275  Cobb, vol. 2, 260. 276  TNA ADM 103/635: Register of deaths of prisoners of war, 1793–1831, fols. 629–31: “Surgeon’s Medical report for the Month of August 1815”. 269 270

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for one’s turn”.277 Captain James Fairfield calculated glumly on April 25 that about 5000 of his countrymen would have to leave before his turn came.278 When news of release finally did come, the relief was palpable. Marblehead clerk Joseph Green wrote in his diary on May 4: “This day I am to leave dartmoor bastille. It will be the happiest day to me that I ever experienced. My heart is alive when I think I am to leave the place that so many of my unfortunate countryman has breathed their last in.” He added, “I am thankful that I have been spared and that I have a prospect”.279 Lewis Clover left at the beginning of July. When the men had formed into lines for the march to Plymouth, and the baggage loaded onto waggons, he turned back for one last look at the prison. “An undefinable feeling of superstitious awe thrilled through my system”, he later wrote. “I gazed as it were in a trance, upon the gloomy object, as it stood before me like some huge monster.”280 As for Nathaniel Pierce, he broke off his journal the day before his departure. After describing the arrival through the prison gates of 2000 more French prisoners that afternoon, he added: “end pleasant & ends this journal for want of paper. Tomorrow I leave this cursed Depot.” Pierce was released on July 3, two days after Clover.281 As for Cobb, he left on the 5th. At the head of his party was what he called “a raw-head-and-bloody-bone standard, emblematical of the massacre, with ‘Shortland the murderer’ in conspicuous capitals, flanked on each side by the stars and stripes”. After cheering, Cobb’s group “set out on our march”.282 Whether Thomas Shortland himself witnessed their departure—or saw the standard—is not recorded. In theory, the prisoners who had spent the longest in captivity were liberated first (a principle which led to Charles Andrews being among the first draft which left on April 20), but there is evidence that known troublemakers were kept back for the late drafts.283 It was possible, for those with the means, to leapfrog the queue and purchase the turn of a better-­placed prisoner, but  Cobb, vol. 2, 262; TNA ADM 103/91 GEBDPUS, 1814–1815, prisoner n° 6234.   Brick Store Museum, Kennebunk, Maine, Captain James Fairfield Collection, 1784–1820, Folder 1: J. Fairfield to L. Fairfield, Apr. 25, 1815. 279  Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, New York, Ms. GLC00498.01: Joseph W. Green, “Journal of a privateer and prisoner during the War of 1812”, 1812–1815, fol. 54. 280  Clover, “Reminiscences”, vol. 24, n° 5, 520; TNA ADM 103/90: GEBDPUS, 1814, prisoner n° 5392. 281  Pierce, 59; TNA ADM 103/91 GEBDPUS, 1814–1815, prisoner n° 5977. 282  Cobb, vol. 2, 269. 283  Lloyd, 300. 277 278

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there was always the risk, as James Fairfield discovered, that on the day the opportunity to leave would be just too strong to resist. He noted laconically in a letter to his wife Lois that “when they came to be called out”, the prisoner he had approached “took his own turn and left me for mine”.284 Dartmoor’s prisoners of colour from Prison N° 4 were also among the last to be liberated, though it is unclear whether this reflected official policy or a reluctance on their part to be shipped to destinations where “they might be taken up […] and sold into slavery”.285 For all of the American sailors who were held captive at Dartmoor on April 6, observes Paul Gilje, “the massacre remained deeply implanted in their consciousness. […] We will never know how many forecastle tales were repeated about the massacre, or how many sailors cursed Shortland while at sea or on liberty ashore.”286 Although some prisoners would later have second thoughts about Shortland’s culpability, many, no doubt, shared the view expressed trenchantly in the “Postscript” to Henry Torry’s prison memoir, that the behaviour of the American prisoners at Dartmoor had been “at times, provoking to the British officers set over them, but never malignant, much less, bloody”, tapping as it did into “a spirit of fun and frolic, which our people indulge in beyond all others in the world”.287 Torry’s assertion slots easily into one powerful narrative concerning the Dartmoor Massacre discussed in this chapter; a position reflected in a surviving letter of April 24, 1815, quoting US prisoner Captain Adams as saying that “it would require some ingenuity to produce any ground of justification [for the massacre], the fracas having actually originated in some Boys’ play”.288 In fact, the authors of several Dartmoor captivity accounts and prisoner testimonies sought to distance themselves from the behaviour of the prisoners directly involved in the “play” at the wall breach in yard N° 7 or at the gates near the Market Square, just as they had done on previous occasions. Several others described the conduct of those involved in pejorative terms, using words like “wantonness” or 284   Brick Store Museum, Kennebunk, Maine, Captain James Fairfield Collection, 1784–1820, Folder 1: J. Fairfield to L. Fairfield, Apr. 25, 1815. 285  Lloyd, History of Prisoners of War, 300; quotation from Cobb, vol. 2, 255. More research is needed on this important question. 286  Gilje, Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights, 274. 287  Waterhouse & Torry, 227–28. 288  BAOWMS, W1/2723, fol. 3: D. Lovell to S. Whitbread II, Apr. 24, 1815, citing US prisoner Capt. J.  Adams; W1/2722: Capt. J.  Adams to Daniel Lovell, March [April?] 19, 1815).

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“mischief”.289 Yet another claimed that many of those involved were inebriated.290 As seen earlier, former prisoner David A. Neal went as far as to deny the relevance of the term “massacre” to describe what had happened, though it should be added that he had already left the prison by that date.291 One final point on this subject is worth noting: several members of the prisoner committee testified that they had been called to the scene of the breach in yard N° 7 in order to prevent further damage being done to the wall, an indication perhaps that the conduct of those involved was considered by some of their fellow countrymen as sufficiently reprehensible to require intervention from the prisoners’ own regulatory authority.292 Whether, as Torry claimed, Americans of this period did indeed “indulge” in “fun and frolic” “beyond all others in the world” must remain a moot point, but it is clear from the foregoing discussion that there was no consensus among US sailors at Dartmoor on or after April 6, 1815, regarding where such harmless “fun” ended and something more injurious and destructive began. Those differences of opinion and interpretation would understandably be subsumed in the general post-April 6 outrage at the behaviour of the British during the massacre, but they should not be lost from view, and indeed they are a vital part of understanding the way events unfolded during the late afternoon and evening of April 6. This chapter has sought to demonstrate that the actions of all those involved were conditioned both by the recent and longer-term history of the prison, which had left each side firmly convinced that the other had imminent plans which were both unacceptable and probably violent. In this (limited) sense, Basil Thomson was right to affirm that “cross purposes” were at the heart of what happened at Dartmoor on April 6.293 It seems clear that some of the prisoners (albeit probably a small minority of those involved) were emboldened to action by the events of April 4, 289   Coroner’s inquiry, witness statements, Apr. 8, 1815, in MPUS, testimony of E.  Burnham, prisoner (65); Larpent-King Report, testimonies: T.B.  Mott, prisoner (87); N.  McKinnon, prisoner (90); G.  Smith, prisoner (97); J.N.  Bushfield, prisoner (99); W. Clements, prisoner (100); Pierce, 40. 290  Coroner’s inquiry, witness statements, Apr. 8, 1815, in MPUS, 68: testimony of H. Hull, prisoner. See also Palmer, 179. 291  Neal had left the prison four days earlier, on April 2 (TNA ADM 103/90: GEBDPUS, 1814, prisoner n° 3911). 292  Coroner’s inquiry, witness statements, Apr. 8, 1815, in MPUS: testimony of T.B. Mott (64); Larpent-King Report, testimony of J. Rust, prisoner (72). 293  Thomson, 182.

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animated by Cobb’s spirit of “contrariness”. The US prisoners abroad that evening—whether “contrary”, curious or simply caught up in the compact crowd—found themselves surrounded on all sides by a forest of largely untested bayonets and muskets, and it seems equally clear that some of those muskets and bayonets were in the hands of inexperienced militia troops, whose “want of steadiness”, as their commanders would later delicately put it, translated into an eagerness to test those untried weapons in action—on American prisoners. The situation was thus a dangerously volatile one. Perhaps indeed, as a number of historians have argued, there was an inevitability about the violent dénouement that evening.294 Whether the trigger for the ensuing tragedy was a spoken order from Captain Thomas Shortland or from someone else, or from the spontaneous discharge of a musket, will probably never be known, but in any case it made little difference to the result: fifteen to twenty minutes during which, as Nathaniel Pierce wrote memorably in his diary that evening, Dartmoor’s militia guards, or some of them, had behaved as if “firing into an hencoop among a parcel of fouls”.295 After six years of existence as a war prison, Dartmoor had tragically become that “military fortress turned inside-out” referred to in Chap. 3, with the enemy judged to come not from outside, but from within, and treated accordingly.296

 See for example Budiansky, 354; Leonowicz, 27; Lloyd, Prisoners of War, 299.  Pierce, 41. 296  Morieux, Society of Prisoners, 225. See above, 81. 294 295

CHAPTER 8

Conclusion

On February 9, 1816, the last of the French inmates left Dartmoor. There was no long ribbon of tramping prisoners strung out along the road to Plymouth this time, as there had been in May 1809 when the first party of nearly 500 French prisoners had arrived at the prison on the moor.1 Six and half years after the arrival of that first contingent, just eight Frenchmen were still within its walls. The prison had been emptied of most of its 4000 or so remaining prisoners between early January and early February 1816, but the final eight, all undergoing treatment in the prison hospital, were kept behind until Captain Shortland could make the necessary arrangements for them to be transported by covered waggon to Plymouth.2 Dartmoor War Prison was officially “abolished” eleven days later on February 20; the staff paid off and the prison’s furniture, fittings and stores prepared for removal. Three days after that, Shortland, by this time in lodgings near Plymouth, was instructed to send any remaining public money in his possession, along with the Entry Books, to London by

 ADM 103/92: GEBDPFR, 1809.  TNA ADM 98/228, TBLADP, 1815–1817, fol. 38: TO to Capt. Shortland, Feb. 2, 1816; ADM 99/263: TBMPW, Jan.–March 1816, Capt. Shortland to TO, Jan. 9–Feb. 5, 1816; [Untitled], Taunton Courier and Western Advertiser, Feb. 15, 1816. 1 2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Davie, French and American Prisoners of War at Dartmoor Prison, 1805–1816, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83891-1_8

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waggon. The prison garrison was disbanded the following month, and the last stores removed.3 From conception to “abolition”, the strangest experiment on Dartmoor had lasted eleven years, and there had been prisoners of war on the moor for 2454 consecutive days. There were some good security and logistical reasons to build the country’s first permanent, national carceral establishment at one of Britain’s bleakest and least hospitable locations. The naval port of Plymouth was close, but not too close, and the construction of the new depot allowed pressure to be taken off the prison ships, judged insalubrious and (more importantly) expensive and easy to escape from. The permanence that came with the readily accessible Devon granite also had its advantages, particularly in the middle of a war that had lasted on and off for more than ten years, and could go on for many more yet. There were, of course, no shortage of less good reasons to build a prison on Dartmoor, and perhaps only Thomas Tyrwhitt would have been able to enumerate them all with any conviction. The construction of the prison was itself a major challenge, and nearly four years passed between that meeting of Alexander, Bouverie and Tyrwhitt on the moor at the beginning of July 1805 and the arrival of the prison’s first inmates—an extraordinarily long interval in a context of sharply rising prisoner numbers. Provisioning the war prison would also prove a major problem, particularly during the winter months when Nathaniel Pierce’s “Dartmoor weather” was at its most inclement. The cold, mist and rain also gnawed away at both the fabric of the prison and the watchfulness of its keepers, both of which offered opportunities for would-be escapers, even if that same unforgiving climate also posed its own dangers for those who did manage to break-out. In all, nearly 25,000 prisoners would be confined at Dartmoor War Prison between 1809 and 1816—a total population exceeding that of either of Devon’s two largest towns, Plymouth and Exeter.4 The numbers at the prison at any one time were considerably smaller than this of course, but with an official capacity of 8800 by June 1815,5 Dartmoor War Prison 3  TNA ADM 98/228, TBLADP, 1815–1817, fol. 45: TO to Capt. Shortland, Feb. 23, 1816; fols. 52–53: TO to Mr Bennett, March 18/25, 1816; ADM 99/263: TBMPW, Jan.– March 1816, Capt. Shortland to TO, Feb. 20–21, 1816; TO to Major-Gen. Torres, March 18, 1816. 4  Lysons & Lysons, xl–lix. The populations for Plymouth and Exeter in 1811 are given as 21,156 and 18,896 respectively. 5  TNA ADM 103/635: Register of deaths of prisoners of war, 1793–1831, fols. 552–55: Admiralty to TO, June 23, 1815.

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functioned as a carceral community equivalent in size to that of a thriving market town, with a major impact—economic, logistical and, less easy to pin down, cultural and psychological—on the surrounding region, albeit one that (despite Tyrwhitt’s hopes) would be of limited duration. It should be added that in terms of size, Dartmoor Prison dwarfed by a factor of more than ten the largest of the criminal prisons in early nineteenth-­century Britain. The comparison between the criminal and war prisons has been  a recurring theme of the book. Newly discovered evidence revealed that although subsequently modified, the initial design for Dartmoor submitted by architect Daniel Alexander at the end of July 1805 was inspired by the fashionable radial plan, complete with a Panopticon-style central inspection tower. The prison’s complex spatial economy would continue to reflect those origins during the ensuing period, but the emphasis placed on “inspection” or surveillance by criminal prison planners never became the driving force at Dartmoor it would be at radial prisons like Pentonville and Reading, or indeed at Maidstone, also designed by Alexander. Dartmoor shared with those establishments the need to ensure quiescence and containment, but, unlike them, it had no pretensions to effect the “reformation” of its inmates, and could thus eschew the new-fangled cellular structure seen as the latter’s necessary corollary. The Transport Board was at pains to point out the prisoners of war held on British soil during the French Wars and the War of 1812 were quite distinct from the population of the country’s criminal prisons, and, as that 1810 article from Ackerman’s Repository put it, that “every comfort [was] administered to alleviate the prisoners’ unhappy lot”. However sincere the intentions behind such remarks (echoed in the inscription Parcere subjectis etched into Dartmoor’s entrance arch), there is no denying that enemy combatants from those wars were held in Britain in conditions that frequently resembled those of the civil prisons, particularly the civil prisons of the unreformed variety, with their poorly supervised communal wards, and where goods and services could be purchased by inmates, if they had the wherewithal to pay. There is no denying either that the Transport Office-run war depots were managed according to a set of rules that resembled in certain respects those in place in convict prisons, houses of correction and county gaols. This book has argued that the carceral regime at Dartmoor Prison during these years featured in fact no less than three overlapping sets of rules: two emanating from the Transport Office, and one from the prisoners themselves. The official regime put in place at Dartmoor was a hybrid one, with

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one foot in conventional early nineteenth-century penal practice, and the other in a different, more “contractual” conception of incarceration, placing the treatment of prisoners of war within in a framework based—on paper at least—on a set of established rights and obligations, whereby complaints were attended to, grievances redressed, and justice seen to be done. In reality, that framework was a fluctuating one, its parameters regularly modified by the shifting international diplomatic situation and at the same time buffeted by a range of national political, financial and logistical pressures. Those parameters and pressures need in turn to be placed in the context of a conservative naval bureaucratic culture that tended to treat Britain as a fast anchor’d isle,6 and its prisoner of war depots as land-locked naval vessels. Little thought was given (unlike in the newer criminal prisons) to the implications of long-term incarceration. That bureaucratic context was given material form in the near constant flow of written orders dispatched to Dartmoor by the Transport Board, orders which were then interpreted (and occasionally ignored) on the ground by the Board’s agents—men also steeped in the traditions of naval command. As far as the American contingent at Dartmoor was concerned, the action (or inaction) of their own country’s agent, Reuben Beasley, was also a major factor. The space left for individual or collective agency on the part of the prisoners was in part a function of this fluctuating context. It was not a matter, as has sometimes been suggested, of Dartmoor’s inmates being “left almost completely to themselves to organize the prison, maintain discipline, and fill their time as they chose”,7 for the prisoners’ capacity to control their daily lives was strictly circumscribed. True, inmates could generally choose in which prison they lived, what they ate, how they dressed and how they spent a considerable portion of their time. Each of these generalisations comes though with significant caveats: the privilege of choosing in which prison building they lived was not extended to all prisoners at all times, while the possibility of supplementing Transport Office-issue rations and clothing with purchases from the prison’s internal or public market could be—and was—suspended on occasion (sometimes for prolonged periods), and in any case depended on having access to the funds necessary to benefit from what was on sale. One of the many paradoxes of daily life at Dartmoor in this period was that while the prison was 6  US prisoner Nathaniel Pierce used this well-known phrase from William Cowper’s 1785 poem, “The Task” in his entry for February 10, 1815 (Pierce, 29). 7  Fabel, 188.

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awash with cash—particularly in its later years—from private funds, from back pay and from prize money, there remained considerable inequality and material hardship. Only some inmates were able to enjoy the benefits brought by the influx of money; a state of affairs which, as noted above, recalls the carceral economy of the larger unreformed criminal prisons of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, where gaolers were effectively self-employed, and could provide for inmates—at a price—anything from visiting privileges to fuel and fresh laundry. Those without the money to line the gaolers’ pockets might be forced to beg, and some prisons were fitted with gratings or railings giving onto neighbouring streets for precisely this purpose.8 Thus, while there is evidence that some prisoners at Dartmoor were able to eat well and even employ servants, a wide range of the US and French captivity accounts, letters and petitions cited in this book convey in striking fashion the real hardships experienced by many inmates at the prison on the moor: of gnawing hunger, overcrowding, cold, disease and death. With no imposed regimen of penal labour, there was a considerable amount of time to be filled up for all prisoners, whatever their financial circumstances. This did allow a vibrant cultural and social life to flourish (though again, some activities, such as following classes at the various prison “schools” and attending theatrical productions, favoured those with funds), and for various forms of both licit and illicit craft and manufacturing work to be pursued, but the prisoners’ experience of time at Dartmoor was also punctuated—as in all carceral institutions—by a largely unchanging (and widely resented) rhythm of imposed turn-outs, turn-ins and lights-outs; of roll-calls, searches and all-too-brief meal-times. Carceral space was equally circumscribed and rule-bound. For most of the time and for most inmates, freedom of movement was restricted to their individual “prison” and Prison-Yard, and perhaps to a mess berth or two-foot hammock space within that prison, though it might extend (in this respect in sharp contrast to the situation in criminal prisons) to other accommodation blocks and yards within the palisaded semi-circular compound that constituted Dartmoor’s prison within a prison. Refusal to comply with these constraints of time and space, policed by turnkeys and armed sentries on the ground and on those wall-top bastions, led to a range of punitive sanctions, also familiar to inmates of other kinds of carceral institutions in this period, generally in the form of solitary confinement and/or dietary 8

 McGowen, 74.

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privation. Some of these offences, including damaging prison buildings or attempting to escape, might lead to a Transport Office speciality: collective punishment; again, by cuts in the food ration and/or suspension of access to the prison’s public market. When placed alongside the persistent problems of contractor fraud, corruption and theft, these collective punishments added significantly to the material hardships faced by Dartmoor’s prisoners. The third set of rules referred to above—those emanating from the prisoners themselves—were located at the interstices of official time and space at Dartmoor, and in some cases intersected with them. These rules represent no doubt the most striking departure from the regimes to be found in early nineteenth-century criminal prisons. This was the site of the prisoner committees or conseils, which functioned both alongside the official rule-book—such as by selecting the prisoners charged with the daily examination of the food rations supplied by victuallers—and also outside it, by enforcing their own unofficial code, complete with a scale of punishments, including the use of the lash, for those found guilty of infringing it. Theft from fellow prisoners was the most commonly punished offence, but sexual practices judged unacceptable, and uncleanliness were also targeted. Not only was the work of the committees at Dartmoor generally tolerated by the agent and Board (including, within certain limits, the punishments), but senior committee members were clearly recognised as valuable interlocutors in the day-to-day management of the prison—an unsurprising tactic on the part of the authorities when it is recalled that a few dozen prison officers and a few hundred guards were responsible for “the humane arrangement and controul” (to quote Ackermann’s again) of many thousands of prisoners, spread over a five-acre site. Indeed, there is some fragmentary evidence that confidence in committee personnel was such that some at least of their number, including Richard Crafus and Louis-François Vanhille, were permitted to venture beyond the prison walls; an indication perhaps of the continuing faith in those eighteenth-­ century conceptions of gentlemanly conduct among brothers in arms coming under pressure in this period. Certain aspects of the prisoner committees’ work, such as their role in the system of inspection of rations, depended, ultimately, on the goodwill of the prison authorities. That goodwill could be unilaterally withdrawn, though it was not a course of action without its risks, as Agent Cotgrave discovered to his cost in 1813. Cotgrave’s successor, Thomas Shortland, seems to have established more cordial relations with both French and

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American prisoners, at least initially, as Charles Andrews acknowledged,9 and even had some complimentary doggerel composed about him.10 However, whatever residual goodwill still existed between agent and prisoners in early 1815 was swept away by the events of April 6. Thus, when Dartmoor’s agent attempted to re-establish control over the situation on the  7th by summoning committee leaders, he was told in no uncertain terms that was no question of “hold[ing] any communication with the murderer of our fellow citizens”.11 In the new post-massacre circumstances, consent worked both ways. The work of the prisoner committees also shines a revealing light on social relationships between prisoners at Dartmoor, indicating not only, as noted above, those violations considered worthy of punishment by their peers, but also those actions by prisoners—such as the tattooing of “traitors” or the damage done to the barrack yard wall on April 6, 1815— where the committees proved powerless to intervene. The “Rough Allies” were probably involved in both the cases just cited, and the existence of this marginalised group of US inmates, like that of their French equivalent, the “Romans”, offers striking testimony of the deep fault lines running through the prisoner community at Dartmoor. These were partly divisions of social status and military rank—as indicated by Louis Catel’s six-fold division of the French prisoner community, from lords at the top to romains at the bottom—divisions which corresponded too, in some measure, to those economic inequalities between inmates referred to earlier. This book has shown that the issue of race was also a powerful vector of social (and spatial) organisation at the prison at least as far as the US inmates were concerned. Although the segregation of the prisoners of colour in Prison N° 4 in 1814 has often been linked by historians to the petition submitted to the authorities by the white prisoners (or certain of their number) in February of that year, new evidence has come to light which hints that the African American prisoners themselves may have been, in part at least, behind the move. Whatever the background to the sequestration of the prisoners of colour, it points to the reality of tensions

 Andrews, 61.  Dan Hicks quotes a ballad circulating at Dartmoor in this period, praising “Brave Shortland” for his decision not to punish several US prisoners caught trying to escape (Hicks, 249). 11  Above, 282. 9

10

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and—if Andrews’ account is to be believed12—of violence between the different American communities at Dartmoor. The extent of those tensions and that violence is difficult to establish with precision, as is their impact on the social and cultural life of the prison more generally. Chapter 6 presented strong evidence that black and white prisoners participated together in such activities as prison “schools”, theatrical productions and religious services. It is also clear from the accounts of several prison memoirists that such contacts were frowned upon by some. It remains uncertain which of these stances was the more common at Dartmoor, particularly when it is recalled that several of the key sources on this question were either published in the very different political and cultural ambience of the 1840s, or subject to significant (and unknowable) editorial revision. Henry Torry’s Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts (1816) is a good example of a source subject to revision of this kind (in this case “worked up” by Benjamin Waterhouse),13 while Benjamin Browne’s The Yarn of a Yankee Privateer (1846) combines both distorting factors, being published in the 1840s and revised for publication by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The “editorial care” of the latter, it will be recalled, consisted not only of making “here and there a verbal correction”, but also “marking out passages that it seemed advisable to omit”.14 Beyond the differences of socio-economic status, rank and race, it is also reasonable to assume that the contrasting personal histories of the French and American prisoners confined at Dartmoor in this period meant that they reacted to captivity in different ways, with some seeking opportunities for personal enrichment or escape, and others, as Catel put it, “resigning themselves philosophically to the rations and supplies provided by the British government”. Others again found refuge in gambling or alcohol, or took out their feelings of anger, frustration and humiliation at being held captive on their “tyrannical” British captors, on the traders of the prison market—or on each other. While, as this book has shown, the Romans and Rough Allies preoccupied memoirists and prison authorities alike, and contemporaries regularly highlighted the difference between the “truculent and unruly” Americans and the more placid French, “occupying themselves […] in different works and amusements to while away their time”, it is important to remember that such generalisations are likely  Above, 92.  Above, 118n. 14  See above, 241n. 12 13

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to conceal a more complex reality. With no systematic data for Dartmoor seemingly having survived on the nature and frequency of violations of any one of the three sets of rules operating in the prison, it must remain a moot point whether the Americans were collectively any more “truculent and unruly” than their French fellow captives, or, indeed, whether, as David Rouanet has argued more generally, simply “accepting one’s dire fate was the most common reaction” among the prisoners of war confined at Dartmoor. It is worth recalling in this regard that resigned acceptance generally leaves fewer traces in the historical record than “unruliness” or “truculence”, and this may well be true not only of the records of the prison administration, but also of the captivity narratives. The prison journal of Salem ship’s clerk, David A.  Neal, is one of the few surviving accounts from Dartmoor to state that “on the whole, neither the provisions nor the treatment of the prisoners could be complained of”. Neal added that: I was not […] uncomfortable except from the uncertainty as to the time of my deliverance. I was perfectly well and had means of procuring all the material comforts I required. Every morning I took a lesson in fencing for the sake of the exercise. I got my meals at coffee shops and eating rooms that were plenty in the prisons. Between them, I walked a good deal, wrote some, and read considerably having a tolerably good circulating library in our prison.15

Neal’s experience of confinement at Dartmoor may well have been untypical (he admitted, as noted above, that “many [prisoners] really suffered from hunger”), and may also be linked to the unusually short period of time he spent at the prison,16 but that experience nevertheless clearly forms a part—and quite possibly an under-acknowledged part—of the complex reality of captivity in this period. One final set of fault lines running through the experience of Dartmoor’s carceral population needs to be considered. The question of personal history was mentioned earlier. This revealed itself not only in the varied reactions to incarceration noted above, but also in the circumstances of capture; circumstances which, along with the fluctuating national and international situation mentioned earlier, might affect the  Neal, 115, 117.  He arrived at Dartmoor on October 5, 1814, and was released on April 2, 1815 (TNA ADM 103/90: GEBDPUS, 1814, prisoner n° 3911). 15 16

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conditions—and duration—of confinement. Many French and American prisoners, for better or worse, never tramped the seventeen wearying miles between Plymouth and Dartmoor Prison, and of those that did, some, like Neal, remained there for only a few months before being released, exchanged or (more rarely) placed on parole. A few managed to escape. Nearly 1500 died. The majority, however, remained where they were until a negotiated general peace treaty allowed their liberation. The French prisoners sent to Dartmoor in the late spring and summer of 1809, referred to above, were statistically most likely to spend a prolonged period confined at the prison, with nearly two-thirds (65.5 per cent) of the 5760 French captives  listed in the prison’s first three Entry Books for May– September 1809 detained until the peace of 1814, five years later. On the first page of the very first Entry Book for Dartmoor, dated May 22, 1809, eight prisoners are listed. While three of their number were released or exchanged between 1810 and 1813, the other five all remained at the prison until their release after almost exactly five years’ captivity, on May 21, 1814.17 Turning to the second page of the same register, eight of the nine prisoners listed were also released in May 1814; the ninth, François Rutie (or Ruty), died of tuberculosis in November 1809, after spending just six months at the prison.18 One in seven (14 per cent) of the more than 5000 men that make up the French sample studied for this book suffered the same fate, as did perhaps one in nine (11 per cent) of the prisoners as a whole during the period 1809–1814.19 The first to die, seaman Jean P.  Masse, was “brought dead to the prison” on May 22, 1809. The cause of death was not given. Masse’s personal details in the Entry Book were left blank—presumably because there had been no time to fill them in.20 His compatriot Jean-François De la Housse would be the last fatality at the prison, one of three Waterloo  infantrymen to die in Dartmoor’s hospital on January 31, 1816, just over a week before the release of the final eight prisoners mentioned earlier.21

 TNA ADM 103/92: GEBDPFR, 1809, prisoner nos. 1–8.  Ibid., prisoner nos. 9–16; ADM 103/640: Dartmoor death certificates, 1809–1816, week ending Nov. 10, 1809. 19  See above, 133–4.  20  TNA ADM 103/640: Dartmoor death certificates, 1809–1816, week ending May 26, 1809; TNA ADM 103/92: GEBDPFR, 1809, prisoner n° 106. 21  TNA ADM 103/640: Dartmoor death certificates, 1809–1816, week ending Feb. 2, 1816. 17 18

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Death and disease were then the constant accompaniment to incarceration at Dartmoor during the years 1809–1816. Generally, this involved the same fevers and illnesses that regularly decimated populations all over Europe and North America in this period, but occasionally, as this book has shown, death and injury also came from the deadly work of musket ball and bayonet point. A few prisoners took their own lives or died in duels or altercations. Both the mortality rate at the prison on the moor during the six and a half years of its existence and the bloodshed of April 6, 1815, reflect the conflicting, and arguably, contradictory, objectives set for this strangest of strange experiments. Dartmoor War Prison was intended to provide what Transport Board commissioner Ambrose Searle had proudly called “not only the most capacious, but the most desirable (if men […] can admit the Epithet) of all our Depôts”, but that desirability was severely undermined (perhaps an appropriate verb in the context of the prison’s history) by both accident and design. The “design” part of the equation was the decision to place far greater numbers of prisoners than in a conventional carceral institution for long periods in overcrowded, unheated prison buildings; to locate those buildings in one of the coldest and remotest corners of Britain; to rely on private contractors to supply meagre food rations and often inadequate clothing with limited official oversight (and to resort frequently to cuts in those already meagre rations as a means of disciplining the prison’s inmates); and lastly, to expect a small complement of prison staff and a few hundred heavily armed but poorly trained and poorly motivated militia soldiers to achieve not only the quiescence and containment of their captive charges, but also their “humane arrangement”. One of the themes running through my previous work on the penitentiary movement active in Britain during the same period was the persistence of a striking contrast, a gulf even, between the lofty aspirations of the prison reformers and the reality on the ground on the prison cell block or in the high-walled exercise yard.22 The reformers generally blamed the gap between theory and practice (when they recognised it at all) on inadequate personnel, ineffectual oversight and official parsimony, but they were also guilty, I argued, of a failure of imagination; or rather of possessing an imagination that ran in particular, narrow grooves; ones gouged deep by the forces of Enlightenment rationalism, associationist psychology and evangelical faith;  Davie, 541–42.

22

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[…] an imagination which considered that architecture and a well-conceived rule-book were capable, when working in harmonious tandem, of consistently bending the human spirit to their will. According to this conception, once prison design had been perfected to a T, the battle against crime was three-quarters won.23

It could be argued that, for all the undoubted differences between running a prisoner of war depot and a criminal prison, that same faith in the power of architecture and the rule-book dominated both the conception and management of the prison on the moor, resulting in a conviction that the “Dartmoor weather” and the considerable logistical and human challenges of building and operating a functioning prisoner of war prison for more than 8000 prisoners (and keeping it running for an indeterminate period) could be mastered by an act of will. The “design” choices mentioned earlier meant that the Transport Board, agent, staff and garrison were badly prepared to tackle the unexpected. This was the “accident” side of the accident and design equation. This left the prison ill-prepared to face the repeated bouts of epidemic disease that swept through its population; ill-prepared to cope with the regular influx of many hundreds of prisoners of war over a period of just a few days; ill-prepared to tackle the capricious and occasionally Siberian weather conditions that buffeted the region; and, finally, ill-prepared to handle the fallout from the persistent delays surrounding the ratification of the Treaty of Ghent in 1814–1815. The result, in the last case, was that the rule-book was torn up on April 6, 1815. Theory and practice parted company that evening, with fatal consequences. * * * In August 1816, six months after the departure of the last of Dartmoor’s inmates, an anonymous letter was sent to the editor of the Morning Post, claiming that the former war prison constituted “one of the most appropriate situations for a general prison for convicts”. With the existing gaols overcrowded, the hulks unsuitable, new penitentiary prisons on the Millbank model too expensive and transportation ineffective, what better solution than to convert this “unoccupied and neglected” ruin before it was too late? For here, explained the correspondent, was a site  Ibid., 542.

23

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conveniently distant from “the neighbourhood of a metropolis or any large town”, where such an establishment would be “liable to be attacked in any public commotion” and “easy of access to the friends or companions of the prisoners”. The situation of the former war prison was, moreover, a “fine” and “healthy” one, with “seven distinct ranges of building, adapted for prisons”. Also on-site were “a handsome chapel and parsonage house” (recently completed), “a neat range of houses, which might be advantageously occupied by the families of task masters and manufacturers, for employing the convicts, […] excellent reservoirs for water from the hills, and a vast extent of the former forest has been now brought into cultivation”. In addition, the letter went on, there was in the vicinity the “pretty little village called Prince Town, the inhabitants of which are daily forsaking it, for want of employment”. The author concluded by “point[ing] out the policy of preserving such a building, so obviously necessary in case we should be involved in another war, which would of itself supersede the necessity of a prison for convicts upon so large a scale, when it might revolve to its original purpose”.24 The Transport Board had in fact made the very same proposal as early as the beginning of February 1816, before the last of the war prison’s inmates had departed.25 The parliamentary committee of 1818 cited earlier in this book would come to many of the same conclusions as the Morning Post correspondent, citing the prison’s “healthy” location, “cheap” provisions, abundant building materials and fuel and water supplies. There were even, it was affirmed, copious quantities of “coarse wool” available locally for the future prisoners to make their own clothes! £5000 would be sufficient, the committee reckoned, to convert the buildings for the use of convicts, with a preference noted for juvenile offenders. As before, Dartmoor’s remoteness was seen as a positive advantage; the means by which, it was argued, young offenders might be “speedily removed from the contagious vices of the Metropolis” and “withdrawn from those habits of idleness which never fail to engender depravity, and to afford an opportunity for the imitation of bad example”.26 Many of those same arguments had been advanced in 1805, though “contagion” of a different sort had been feared on that occasion from the prison’s wartime inmates. It was, in fact, as if the controversies and  “On the Confinement of Convicts”, Morning Post, Aug. 31, 1816.  TNA ADM 1/3769, TBLPW, 1816, fols. 135–47: TO to J.W. Croker, Feb. 3, 1816. 26  RCP, “Dartmoor Prison”, 9–10. 24 25

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tragedies surrounding the war prison’s six-and-a half-year existence had been expunged; the historical record rebooted, as it were; ready for a new generation of planners to commend Dartmoor’s healthy climate, remoteness and abundant supplies of stone, land, fuel and water. For all the apparently self-evident advantages of the site, however, there would be no speedy “removal” of convicts to Dartmoor, juvenile or otherwise, in the wake of the 1818 committee. As noted in the introduction, prisoners would not return there until the end of 1850, when the new convict establishment would be superimposed on the old war prison. Shortly before that superimposition, in 1845, local author and poet, Rachel Evans, visited the site and recorded her impressions. She found the main elements of the former war prison still clearly recognisable, though the buildings’ floors had “in many cases […] entirely fallen in”, the courtyards become overgrown, while the houses had been “subject to the ravages of time in a moist climate, without being defended by wholesome heat”.27 As for Dartmoor’s former burial ground, she found that “horses and cattle [had] broken up the soil, and left the bones of the dead to whiten in the sun”.28 The prison itself was largely a decaying shell, but Evans was able to make out a number of messages in French scrawled on the wall of one of the clerk’s offices, and was also shown a door and stretch of wall near the former Market Square which still bore the pockmarks of musket fire from April 1815.29 It was noted earlier in this book that throughout its existence, Dartmoor War Prison, like all carceral ­institutions, was a work-in-progress. Here were two traces of that progress, still etched into the very fabric of the prison nearly thirty years after its last inmates had left; a fitting symbol perhaps, both of the agency of those detained at the prison on the moor, and of the deadly limits of that agency.

 Rachel Evans, 143.  Ibid., 143. The former burial ground would remain in this sorry state until 1866, when two cemeteries, each with a stone cairn and a granite obelisk, were created on the initiative of the then governor of Dartmoor convict prison, Captain W. Stopford. The human remains recovered from the burial ground were divided in two, and attributed arbitrarily for re-burial to the “American” and “French” cemeteries. The American cemetery was renovated, and new memorial plaques added, for a dedication ceremony in 2003. Six years later, in 2009, the bicentennial of the prison’s opening was marked by a ceremony in the French cemetery (James, 39–42, 207–11; Stanbrook, 74; Thomson, 87–88; Sibiril, Sibiril & James). 29  Rachel Evans, 140. 27 28

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I. Archives A. Britain (i) The National Archives, Kew, London ADM 1 Admiralty, Correspondence and Papers, 1660–1976 4359: Secret Letters: includes draft orders and instructions to overseas flag officers, 1813 5122/16: Statements of the staff and work of Plymouth dockyard, hospital and breakwater, and of Dartmoor Prison, prepared for the Admiralty Board visitation, 1814 836: Letters from Commanders-in-Chief, Plymouth, 1815 3757–69, 74: Letters from the Transport Board, 1808–1816 ADM 97: Office of the Commissioners of Sick and Wounded Seamen (Sick and Hurt Board) and successors, in-letters, 1702–1862 108–13: Correspondence, legal officers, 1808–1817 128/3: Correspondence, pay and relief of prisoners of war, 1809–1821 129: Miscellaneous correspondence, prisoners of war and related matters, 1795–1815

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394: General Entry Books, St George prison ship, French prisoners of war, 1814 396: General Entry Books, St Isidoro prison ship, French prisoners of war, 1811–1812 409: General Entry Books, Stapleton prison, American prisoners of war, 1812–1813 489: Register of prisoners of war, French and American escaped prisoners, 1812–1813 491: Register of prisoners of war, French escaped prisoners, 1811–1814 512: Dartmoor, Alphabetical list of prisoners of war, 1809–1816 623: Register of French and American Deaths, Dartmoor prison, 1809–1816 635: Register of deaths of prisoners of war, 1793–1831 639: Chatham death certificates, 1799–1814 640: Dartmoor death certificates, 1809–1816 643: Norman Cross death certificates, 1797–1814 ADM 104: Admiralty, Office of the Director General of the Medical Department of the Navy, service registers and registers of deaths and injuries 44: Reports of Visitations by various members of the Transport Board, 1799–1808 ADM 105: Admiralty, Office of the Director General of the Medical Department of the Navy, reports of medical officers, inspectors of hospitals, etc., 1698–1988 21: Transport Board Medical Committee In-Letter Book: reports of Dr Andrew Baird as inspector of hospitals, 1807–1817 22–23: Dr Weir’s reports to the Transport Board, 1806–1817 44: Commissioners’ inspection reports to the Transport Board 46: Returns and statements of numbers of prisoners of war and exchanges, reports on claims of late Prisoners of war 59–66: Prisoners of War, Misc. papers, 1795–1820 FO 5: Foreign Office: Political and Other Departments: General Correspondence before 1906, United States of America, Series II 91: Foreign Office: General Correspondence before 1906. United States of America, Series II.  Domestic, Jonathan Russell, and R G Beasley, July– December 1812 107: General Correspondence before 1906. United States of America, Series II. Anthony St John Baker, 1.6.1815–31.12.1815 111: Foreign Correspondence before 1906. United States of America, Series II. Letters and reports on the Dartmoor Massacre, April–May 1815 FO 95: Foreign Office and predecessors: Political and Other Departments: Miscellanea, Series I 1/2: Plymouth. Report of F.S. Larpent and Charles King on occurrence of 6 April 1815 at Dartmoor Prison TS 21: Treasury Solicitor: Deeds, Evidences and Miscellaneous Papers 285: Lease of land parcel of the Duchy of Cornwall to be used as the site for a war prison, March 1806

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(ii) Other Archives Bedford Archives Office Whitbread Mss., W1/2708–2724, Dartmoor Prison, 1805–1815 Essex Archives Office Ms. D/DSe: James Brogden Correspondence, 1795–1842 Plymouth Archive, The Box (formerly Plymouth and West Devon Record Office) Ms. 413: Edward Hawkins Collection, Letters and journals, 1808–1813 Ms. 1148: Diary of Caroline Treby, 1808–1831 Ms. 1/674/1/42: Plymouth Borough Records, Aliens, 1809 Ms. 1/703, 716 Plymouth Borough Records, Sessions business and correspondence, 1815 Ms. 1/362/64–5: Plymouth Borough Records, correspondence, 1815 Ms. 1/646/2/8: Plymouth Borough Records, correspondence, 1815 Shropshire Archives Office Ms. X807: The Bright Collection, 1296–1892

B. France Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris Pièces relatives au Consulat et au Premier Empire, Généalogie, biographie et papiers de personnalités parisiennes ou d’historiens de Paris (series 30), ff. 112–17: Unknown to Mme Sebire, Granville (Normandy), Apr. 21st, 1810. Archives nationales, French National Archives, Pierrefitte-sur-Seine AF IV/1192–4: French Ministry of the Marine, general correspondence, 1806–1814 F/18/40/452–5 Censorship, 1813 MF/AF/IV/1674: State Archives, foreign relations, England, 1806–1812 Le Havre Municipal Archives Ms. 53Z15: Diary of P.G., Dartmoor, 1809–1810 Maine-et Loire departmental archives Letters from soldiers of the army of Napoleon I, 1795–22, Ms. 1 J 2891: Etienne Lochet to his parents, Dartmoor Prison, Apr. 27th, 1813 Nantes Municipal Archives

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Ms. 719: “Recueil de chansons choisies, contenant les sept merveilles du monde et plusieurs autres figures, dédié aux amateurs et curieux, appartenant à Pierre Barbier. Fait en Angleterre, à la prison de Dartmoor, le 1er aoust 1810”, c. 1810–1814 Service Historique de la Défense, French Ministry of Defence Archives, Vincennes Castle FF2. Central Archives of the French Ministry of the Marine, Correspondence, 1789–1838

C. USA Brick Store Museum, Kennebunk, Maine Captain James Fairfield Collection, 1784–1820 Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, New York Ms. GLC00498.01: Joseph W. Green, Journal of a privateer and prisoner during the War of 1812, 1812–1815 Huntington Library, San Marino, CA Mss. HM 31201: Anna Margaretta Larpent diaries, 1773–1830 (17 vols.). Maine Historical Society Me Hist Soc Spec Coll, Coll. 949, Series 6, v.1: Notebook of Perez Drinkwater, Jr., 1815 Massachusetts Historical Society Jacob Reeves papers, 1809–1835 National Archives, Washington, DC RG 45 – 502: Subject File, US Navy 1775–1910 RG 45 – 566: Rolls and Lists of Prisoners of War, 1812–1815 RG 45  – 616: Register of Expenses Incurred by American Prisoners of War in England, 1812–1814 RG 45 – 649: Miscellaneous Records of the Office of Naval Records and Library, 1803–1859 (microfilm) New York State Archives Ms. BD11128: Thomas B. Mott, War of 1812 Songs and Ballads Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio Special Collections, Orrin W. June War of 1812 Collection Swem Library, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA James Barron Papers 1776–1899 US Library of Congress, Washington, DC Printed Ephemera Collection, Portfolio 228, Folder 25: “The Constitution & Guerriere, followed by A New Song, written in Dartmoor prison, [1813]”. USS Constitution Museum, Boston, Ira Dye Collection Series V.  Microfilm: NARA T168, Consular Letters from London (Beasley Letters), 1812–1816 Series VIII. Research material: Boxes 1–6

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D. Canada Mariners’ Museum, Norfolk, Vancouver, BC Hamilton Letters, 1811–1819

II. Printed Primary Sources A. Parliamentary Reports and Official Papers (in Chronological Order) “Report from the Committee on the Health of the Prisoners confined at Winchester”, July 5, 1780, repr. in Reports from Committees of the House of Commons, Volume X.  Miscellaneous Subjects, 1780–1801 (London: House of Commons, 1803), 766–86. Rapport du comité de la chambre des communes en conséquence des différentes motions relatives au traitement des prisonniers de guerre (London, 1798). Report of the committee of the House of Commons, in consequence of the several motions relative to the treatment of prisoners of war: including the whole of the examinations taken before the committee: the correspondence relative to the exchange of prisoners: the instructions of Colonel Tate, &c. &c. &c (London: J. Wright, 1798). Papers Presented to the House of Commons, Relating to His Majesty’s Prison in Cold Bath Fields (London: House of Commons, 1800). Reports from Committees of the House of Commons, Volume X.  Miscellaneous Subjects, 1780–1801 (London: The House of Commons, 1803. Report from the Committee on the Laws Relating to Penitentiary Houses (London: House of Commons, May 1811). An Account of the Number of French Prisoners of War in England (London: House of Commons, June 1811). An Account of the Number of Prisoners of War in the Prison at Dartmoor […] shewing the number of deaths in each month (London: House of Commons, June 1811). Estimate of the Charge of the Establishment of the Three Departments of the Transport Office … for the Year 1815 (London: House of Commons, May 1815). Message from the President of the United States, transmitting a report of the secretary of state … in relation to the transactions at Dartmoor Prison, in the month of April last, so far as the American prisoners of war, there confined, were affected by such transaction (Washington: William Davis, Jan. 31, 1816).

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“Report from the Committee on the Prisons within the City of London and Borough of Southwark, 1. Newgate, etc.”, Parliamentary Papers, 1818, vol. 8, 297–544. Rules and Regulations of the General Penitentiary, Millbank (London: The Philosophical Society, 1825). Report on the discipline and management of the convict prisons, and disposal of convicts, 1851, with notes on the construction of prisons, treatment and disposal of juvenile offenders (London: House of Commons, 1852). Reports of the directors of convict prisons on the discipline and management of Pentonville, Parkhurst, and Millbank Prisons, and of Portland, Portsmouth, Dartmoor, and Brixton Prisons, and the hulks, for the year 1853 (London: House of Commons, 1854).

B. Maps and Plans American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts: “Description of Dartmoor Prison, England; Followed by a Report of a Committee of the Prisoners appointed to inquire into the Causes of the late Massacre at Dartmoor Prison”, broadside, published at the office of the National Advocate by Naphtalie Phillips (New York, 1815). The National Archives, London, MFQ 1/147: Pictorial map, Dartmoor Prison, 1812. US Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.: Prints and Photographs Division, Ref. 2003689336/LC-DIG-pga-08417: “View of Dartmoor Prison, from a drawing taken on the spot by J.J. Taylor, one of the prisoners, 1815”. US Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.: Prints and Photographs Division, Ref. 98503977/LC-DIG-pga-03832: “A representation of the massacre of American prisoners in Dartmoor Prison, April 6, 1815”, Hitchcock C.  De Witt, 1845. Wellcome Collection, London, “Dartmoor Prison drawn by Glover Broughton, 1815”, Boston, Tappan & Bradford, n.d. Yale University Library, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library: Ms. 32 D25 1815A: A Doolittle, “Plan and description of Dartmoor Prison England: with a representation of the unfortunate transactions of the 6th of April 1815”, 1815.

C. Newspapers and Periodicals Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette Boston Daily Globe Bristol Mirror Caledonian Mercury

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D. Books, Pamphlets, Articles and Edited Editions Adams, James, Dartmoor prison; or, A faithful narrative of the massacre of American seamen, to which is added, a sketch of the treatment of prisoners during the late war (Pittsburgh: S. Engels, 1816). Allen, Phineas, Dartmoor Massacre (Pittsfield, MA: Phineas Allen, 1815). Andrews, Charles, The Prisoners’ Memoirs: Or, Dartmoor Prison (New York: 1815). Andrews, Charles, The Prisoners’ Memoirs: Or, Dartmoor Prison, revised edn. (New York: 1852). Anon., Army List for September 1812 (London: The War Office, 1812). Anon., “Article V  – A Treatise on the Wealth, Power and Resources of the British Empire […] by P. Colquhoun”, The Quarterly Review (Jan. 1815): 398–433. Anon., “Description of the New Prison of War, Dartmoor”, The Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce, Manufactures, Fashions, and Politics, vol. 4, n° 21 (Sept. 1810): 161–63. Anon., “Massacre des prisonniers de guerre détenus à bord du ponton Le Samson, le 31 mai 1811”, Revue retrospective ou Bibliothèque historique, 2nd ser. Vol. 12 (1837): 143–58.

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Bates, Joseph, The Autobiography of Elder Joseph Bates: Embracing a Long Life on Shipboard (Battle Creek, MI: Seventh-Day Adventist Publishing Association, 1868). Beaudoin, Philippe, “Carnets d’étapes et souvenirs de guerre du Sergent-major Philippe Beaudoin”, ed. Albert Depréaux, Carnets de la Sabretache, N° 202 (1909): 657–72. Bentham, Jeremy, The Complete Works of Jeremy Bentham, Volume IV, ed. John Bowring (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1848). Bentham, Jeremy, The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, Volume 4: October 1788 to December 1793, ed. Alexander Taylor Milne (London: UCL Press, 2017 [1981]). Bentham, Jeremy, The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, Volume 5: January 1794 to December 1797, ed. Alexander Taylor Milne (London: UCL Press, 2017 [1981]). Bertillon, Alphonse, Signaletic Instructions, Including the Theory and Practice of Anthropometrical Identification (Chicago: Warner, 1896 [1893]). Brown, Arthur, “Plan Proposed for the new Gaol at Bury”, Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol. LXXI, Pt. 2 (1801): 696–98. Browne, Benjamin, The Yarn of a Yankee Privateer, ed. Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York & London: Funk & Wagnalls, 1926 [1846]). Bunnell, David C., Travels and Adventures of David C. Bunnell: During Twenty-­ Three Years of a Sea-Faring Life; Containing an Accurate Account of the Battle on Lake Erie (Palmyra, N.Y.: J.H. Bortles, 1831). Buxton, Thomas Fowell, An Inquiry Whether Crime and Misery Are Produced or Prevented by Our Present System of Prison Discipline, 2nd edn. (London: John & Arthur Arch, 1818). Carrington, N.  T., Dartmoor: A Descriptive Poem, with a Preface and Notes by W. Burt (London: Hatchard & Sons, 1826). Catel, Louis, La prison de Dartmoor, ou récit historique des infortunes et évasions de prisonniers français en Angleterre sous l’Empire de 1809 à 1814, 2 vols. (Paris: 1847). Clay, Henry, The Papers of Henry Clay, Volume 2: The Rising Statesman, 1815–1820, ed. James F. Hopkins & Mary W.M. Hargreaves (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1961). Cobb, Josiah, A Green Hand’s First Cruise …Together with a Residence of Five Months in Dartmoor, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Cushing & Brother, 1841). Clover, Lewis P., “Reminiscences of a Dartmoor Prisoner,” The Knickerbocker, Vol. 23 (1844): N° 2, 146–51, N° 4, 356–60, N° 6, 517–22; Vol 24 (1844): N° 5, 457–63, N° 6, 519–24. Duncan, Archibald, The British Trident or Register of Naval Actions, 4 vols. (London: James Cundee, 1805).

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Dupin, Charles, Voyages dans la Grande-Bretagne entrepris relativement aux services publics de la guerre, de la marine et des ponts et chaussées, en 1816, 1817, 1818, 1819, et 1820, 3 vols. (Paris: Bachelier, 1821). Evans, Rachel, Home Scenes: Or Tavistock and Its Vicinity (London & Tavistock: Simpkin & Marshall/J.L. Commins, 1846). Garneray, Louis, The Floating Prison. The Remarkable Account of Nine Years’ Captivity on the British Prison Hulks During the Napoleonic Wars, 1806 to 1814, trans. & ed. Richard Rose (London: Conway Maritime Press, 2003). Harris, Sir Nicholas (ed.), The Dispatches and Letters of Vice Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson, The Fourth Volume, September 1799 to December 1801 (London: Henry Colburn, 1840). Hawthorne, Nathaniel, Selected Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Joel Myerson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002). Howard, John, The State of the Prisons in England and Wales: with Preliminary Observations, and an Account of some Foreign Prisons (Warrington: William Eyres, 1777). Howard, John, An Account of the Principal Lazarettos of Europe; with Various Papers Relative to the Plague: Together with Further Observations on Some Foreign Prisons & Hospitals; and Additional Remarks on the Present State of Those in Great Britain and Ireland, 2nd ed. (London: J. Johnson, 1791). Jobbé-Duval, Émile (ed.), Mémoires du Baron de Bonnefoux, Capitaine de vaisseau, 1782–1855 (Paris: Plon, 1900). Kreider, Angela et al. (eds.), The Papers of James Madison, Presidential Series, vol. 6, 8 February–24 October 1813 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008). Lardier, Alexandre, Histoire des pontons et prisons d’Angleterre pendant la guerre du Consulat et de l’Empire, 2 vols. (Paris: Comptoir des Imprimeurs-Unis, 1845). Lebertre, Colonel [Hippolyte], Aperçu du traitement qu’éprouvent les prisonniers de guerre français en Angleterre (Paris: J.G. Dentu, 1813). Little, George, Life on the Ocean, or Twenty Years at Sea (Baltimore: Armstrong and Berry, 1843). Lysons, Daniel & Lysons, Samuel, Magna Britannica; Being a Concise Topographical Account of the Several Counties of Great Britain, Volume the Sixth […] Devonshire (London: Thomas Cadell, 1822). Magrath, Sir George, “On the Sanitary Condition of Dartmoor”, in Samuel Rowe, A Perambulation of the Antient and Royal Forest of Dartmoor (Plymouth: J.B. Rowe, 1848), Appendix 7, 251–53. Marshall, John, Royal Naval Biography, or Memoirs of the Services, 4 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green, 1824). Melish, John, A Description of Dartmoor Prison, with an Account of the Massacre of the Prisoners Designed as an Accompaniment to the View of Dartmoor Prison, Drawn by J.J. Taylor, One of the Prisoners (Philadelphia: John Melish, 1815).

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Mésonant, Lieutenant [Séverin], Coup d’oeil rapide sur les pontons de Chatam (1837), repr. in F. Teissèdre (ed.), Pontons et Prisons sous le premier empire (Paris: Librairie historique F. Teissèdre, 1998), 63–109. Mill, James, “Prisons and Prison Discipline”, Supplement to the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. VI, pp.  385–95, repr. (London: J. Innes, 1823). Miller, Hunter (ed.), Treaties and Other International Acts of the United States of America. Volume 2, Documents 1–40: 1776–1818 (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1931). The Naval Chronicle, Volume 7: January–July 1802, ed. James Stanier Clarke & John McArthur (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010 [1802]). Neal, David Augustus, East by Sea and West by Rail: The Journal of David Augustus Neal of Salem, Mass. 1798–1861, ed. Rantoul, Cynthia Neal (Bloomington: IUniverse, 1978). Neild, James, State of the Prisons in England, Scotland, and Wales (London: John Nichols & Son, 1812). Palmer, Benjamin F., The Diary of Benjamin F.  Palmer, Privateersman: while a Prisoner on Board English War Ships at Sea, in the Prison at Melville Island and at Dartmoor ([Connecticut]: The Acorn Club, 1914). Pariset, Georges, Les Aventures de François Vanhille, Prisonnier de guerre chez les Anglais de 1806 à 1814 (Nancy: Berger-Levrault, 1905). Pierce, Nathaniel, “Journal of Nathaniel Pierce, of Newburyport, Kept at Dartmoor Prison, 1814–1815”, The Essex Institute Historical Collections, Vol. LXIII (1937): 24–59. Pillet, René Martin, L’Angleterre vue à Londres et dans ses provinces, pendant un séjour de dix années, dont six comme prisonnier de guerre (Paris: Eymery, 1815). Pillet, René Martin, Views of England, During a Residence of Ten Years; Six of Them as a Prisoner of War (Boston: Parmenter & Norton, 1818). Selman, Francis G., “Extracts from the Journal of a Marblehead Privateersman Confined on Board British Prison Ships, 1813, 1814, 1815,” in The Marblehead Manual, ed. Samuel Roads, Jnr. (Marblehead, Mass.: Statesman Publishing Co., 1883), 29–74. Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline, [Second] Report of the Committee of the Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline, and for the Reformation of Juvenile Offenders, 1820 (London: SIPD, 1820). Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline, Remarks on the Form and Construction of Prisons (London: SIPD, 1826). Toase, William, The Wesleyan Mission in France: with an account of the Labours of Wesleyan Ministers among the French Prisoners during the Late War (London: John Mason, 1835).

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C. Theses and Dissertations Cox, Devon, Stages of Captivity: Napoleonic Prisoners of War & Their Theatricals, 1808–1814 (University of Warwick Ph.D., 2017). Dacam, John H., ‘Wanton and Torturing Punishments’: Patterns of Discipline and Punishment in the Royal Navy, 1783–1815 (University of Hull Ph.D., 2009). Duché, Elodie, A Passage to Imprisonment: British Prisoners of War in Verdun under the First French Empire (University of Warwick Ph.D., 2015). Hicks, Dan, True Born Columbians: The Promises and Perils of National Identity for American Seafarers of the Early Republican Period (Pennsylvania State University Ph.D., 2007). Jones, Justin, The Prison on the Moor: A Study of the Prisoner-of-War Experience Within Dartmoor Prison, 1813–1815 (University of Texas M.A. Dissertation, 2011). Lipke, Alan Thomas, The Strange Life And Stranger Afterlife Of King Dick, including His Adventures in Haiti and Hollywood With Observations On The Construction Of Race, Class, Nationality, Gender, Slang Etymology And Religion (University of South Florida M.A. Dissertation, 2013). Rouanet, David, Les prisonniers de guerre étrangers dans le nord-est de la France (1803–1814) (Université Paris 4-Paris-Sorbonne, 2008). Sinclair, David J., Daniel Alexander’s Place in Prison Design (Royal Institute of British Architects, London: Examination Dissertation, 1975). Springer, Paul Joseph, American Prisoner of War Policy and Practice from the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror (Texas A & M University Ph.D. 2006). Whitehead, Rachel Calvin, ‘It is a Merit to Escape’: Defending Desertion and Defining Borders on the U.S.-Canadian Frontier, 1884–1860 (John Hopkins University Ph.D. dissertation, 2016).

Index1

A Abell, Francis, 19, 133 Adams, Captain, 293 Admiralty, The, 8, 9, 26, 35, 53, 67, 87, 89, 98, 111, 113, 268 Alexander, Daniel Asher, 17, 18, 52, 54, 58, 60, 63, 64, 68, 80, 94, 95, 298, 299 Allen, John, 142, 190, 192, 200 Allen, William Henry, 164 Andrews, Charles, 91, 121, 124, 147, 164, 169, 173, 175, 176, 196, 201, 216, 236, 239, 241–245, 252, 258–262, 267, 272, 281, 283, 292, 303, 304 Australia, 2, 4, 5, 143, 201 Aveline, Lieutenant, 271, 279

B Baird, Dr Andrew, 54, 116, 127, 129, 134, 200, 247, 252 Barbier, Pierre, 231 Baring-Gould, Sabine, 54 Barton, Alana, 1, 10 Bates, Joseph, 241, 268 Beasley, Reuben G., 118, 120, 122, 124, 226, 231, 245, 248, 250, 256–258, 260, 291, 300 Beaudoin, Sergeant Philippe, 32–33 Bentham, Jeremy/Panopticon, 43, 60, 64, 105n36, 299 Bertillon, Alphonse, 144 Betton, Major Richard, 55 Bicknell, Charles, 202 Blackburn, William, 42, 59 Bodeau, Dr Emile-André, 56, 126, 152

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Davie, French and American Prisoners of War at Dartmoor Prison, 1805–1816, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83891-1

331

332 

INDEX

Bolster, Jeffrey, 177, 181 Bouverie, Edward, 298 Bowen, Captain James, 87 Brixton Convict Prison, London, 2 Broughton, Glover, 285 Brown, Alyson, 1, 10 Brown, Arthur, 60n39 Browne, Benjamin, 78, 143, 147, 148, 161, 168, 179, 181, 194, 220–222, 225, 241, 250, 259, 263, 269, 280, 304 Bunnell, David, 266 C Campbell, James, 235 Canada, 22, 119 Captivity narratives, 31, 33, 138, 155, 301, 304 Carnes, William, 285 Cartels & prisoner exchanges, 19, 21–24, 48 Catel, Louis, 56, 57, 152, 163, 168, 172n190, 198, 205, 213, 216, 228, 303, 304 Chamberlain, Paul, 155 Chatham Convict Prison, 2 Chatham (prisoners of war), 9, 25, 29, 31, 33, 35, 41, 51, 117, 120, 123, 144, 145, 152, 162, 209 Clover, Lewis, 78, 138, 140, 152, 153, 197, 248, 250, 262, 265, 292 Cobb, Josiah, 152, 162, 164, 168, 171, 180, 182, 186, 193, 197, 198, 221, 230, 239, 241, 250, 254, 258–260, 263, 265, 271, 275, 281, 284, 291, 292, 295 Cobbett, William, 228 Cochrane, Lord Thomas, 98, 126 Cold Bath Fields Prison, London, 6, 7 Collard, Sergeant John, 270, 277

Colley, Linda, 33, 34 Colton, Walter, 117 Cotgrave, Captain Isaac, 69, 72, 73, 79, 86, 88, 91, 93, 103, 111, 112, 115, 139, 145, 146, 149, 150, 157–159, 172, 185, 188–190, 196, 202, 203, 207, 210–212, 224, 226, 229, 231, 302 Crafus, Richard, 179–182, 222, 302 Criminal prisons, 2–4, 6, 9, 25, 27, 86, 95, 100, 107, 109, 148, 184, 299, 301, 308 Crimmin, Patricia, 155 Croker, John Wilson, 35, 37 D Daly, Gavin, 10 Dartmoor convict prison, 310 Dartmoor War Prison, 51 alcohol, 112, 115, 173, 199, 199n81, 244, 247, 304 art/craftwork, 198, 284, 301 barracks/military garrison/guards, 55, 57, 66, 67, 71, 81, 82, 87, 88, 112, 114, 115, 174, 197, 204, 206, 224, 243, 244, 246, 251, 260, 263, 266, 290, 301, 307 bastions/platforms, 80, 89, 95, 206, 275 books/reading, 229 cemetery/burial ground, 69, 92, 127, 253, 282, 310; French and American cemeteries, 310n28 climate, 54–57, 59, 65, 67, 79, 94, 96, 121, 126, 135, 150, 206, 207, 246, 298, 307, 308 “cocklofts,” 79, 83, 89, 96, 128, 178

 INDEX 

construction, 64, 66, 67, 95, 209 contractors, 156, 175, 189, 199, 262, 302 coroner, 127 cost, 49n154, 61, 65–67 Dartmoor Massacre, 84, 235, 251, 259, 303, 307, 308, 310; coroner’s inquiry, 282; Larpent-King report, 278, 289; prisoners’ committee inquiry, 282; sources, 264 design/plan, 58, 59, 61, 62, 64, 65, 70–73, 81, 83, 92, 94, 95, 141, 191, 206, 299 employment (prisoners), 85, 186, 206, 207 entrance arch, 73, 299 escapes, 47, 76, 81, 87, 88, 93, 134, 141, 147, 183, 197, 199, 204–206, 209, 210, 213, 214, 216, 216n166, 230, 240, 245, 306 flags/banners, 244, 249, 256, 284, 285, 292 forgery, 76, 169, 201–203 gambling, 88, 157, 170, 304 General Entry Books, 142, 144, 175, 297 hammocks, 78, 94 health/disease, 53, 56, 85, 89, 111, 114, 116, 125, 126, 129, 131, 134, 135, 246, 247, 252, 306–308 homosexuality, 161, 162 hospital, 68, 76, 93, 114, 116, 127, 247 Jewish traders, 190, 193 kitchens/cookhouses, 129 lease, 53, 58 letters, 226, 227 manufactured goods, 169, 196, 197, 199, 301

333

maps/plans, 284 market, 57, 76, 90, 112, 122, 147, 157, 173, 184, 185, 188, 190–192, 194, 202, 208, 240, 242, 245, 251, 255, 300, 302, 304 Market Square, 75, 76, 89, 191, 206, 260, 310 messes, 78 military way, 75, 80, 87 mortality, 126, 129, 133, 133n171, 134, 247, 252, 306 music, 174, 222, 230, 249 newspapers, 228 palisade fence, 66, 80, 87, 89, 206, 267 personnel, 138 petty officers’ prison, 67, 76, 86, 88, 211 poetry/ballads/songs, 150, 230–232, 246, 303 prisoner committees/conseils, 124, 160, 161, 163, 166, 179, 181, 182, 208, 216, 250, 302, 303 “prisons,” 59, 66, 67, 77, 85, 88, 94–96, 111, 118, 121, 135, 187, 300, 301, 307 prison uniform/clothing, 84, 88, 112, 118, 121, 122, 135, 148–150, 154, 170, 173, 300, 307 Prison-Yard, 77, 80 punishment, 134, 161, 171, 177, 301–303, 307; cachot/black hole, 90, 92, 93, 94n176, 95, 96, 166, 172, 203, 210, 238, 239; tattooing, 164, 166, 251, 303 race/prisoners of colour, 91, 92, 162, 175–181, 219, 220, 222, 274, 293, 303

334 

INDEX

Dartmoor War Prison (cont.) rations/food, 59, 88, 112, 121, 122, 134, 151–155, 159, 161, 173, 189, 195, 228, 259, 300, 302, 307 registration, 145 religion, 222, 223, 225, 304 roads, 54, 58, 66, 121, 213 roll-call, 146, 148, 168, 242, 243, 251, 301 “Romans,” 88–90, 114, 162, 168, 170, 172, 173, 176, 303, 304 “Rough Allies,” 167, 172, 173, 193, 255, 258, 260, 267, 303, 304 “schools,” 187, 218, 221, 301, 304 theatre, 217, 219, 301, 304 walls (boundary), 66, 75, 80, 82, 87, 88, 141, 210, 261 walls (internal), 85, 88, 89, 91, 95 women, 138, 140 Davis, Lott, 276 De Bonnefoux, Lieutenant Pierre-­ Marie-­Joseph, 33 Dewetter, William, 276 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 1 Drinkwater, Perez, 146, 226, 284n251 Duché, Elodie, 45, 198 Dupin, Charles, 31 Dye, Ira, 22, 133, 241 Dykar, Dr William, 73, 88, 111, 114, 129 E Evans, Rachel, 310 Evans, Robin, 28 Examiner, The, 125, 130 Exeter (Devon), 64, 156, 166, 298

F Fairfield, James, 186, 292 Forton Prison, Hampshire, 31 Foucault, Michel, 43n129 France, 7, 8, 18–21, 29, 30, 36, 48, 50, 56, 72, 103, 131, 148 G Garneray, Louis, 33, 33n83 George, Prince of Wales & Prince Regent, 18, 52, 290 George, Sir Rupert, 97, 101, 173 Gibbs, Sir Vicary, 130 Gilje, Paul, 230, 237 Gloucester County Gaol, 148 Gray, John, 235 Green, Joseph, 292 Guyatt, Nicholas, 181 H Hamilton, Richard, 150, 247 Harris, Simon, 222 Hawkins, Captain Edward, 212 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 241, 241n23, 304 Hayes, Simeon, 238, 253 Haywood, John, 235, 274 Hickey, Donald, 278n211 Hicks, Dan, 117, 141, 242 Holford, George P., 105 Holland, 40, 47 Holmes, Addison, 276 Howard, John, 4–6, 28, 29, 42 Hulks/prison ships, 9, 25–27, 29–33, 38, 41, 48, 49, 51, 89, 92, 93, 98, 117, 124, 205, 237, 308 I Impressment, 23, 121 Independent Whig, The, 124, 130, 132

 INDEX 

J Jackson, Thomas, 235 Jamaica, 104, 139, 209 James, Trevor, 11, 264 Johnson, Joseph Toker, 235 Joliffe, Major John, 261, 272, 279 Jones, Justin, 140 Jones, Peter, 262n135 Joy, Ron, 94 K Kennedy, Catriona, 20 Kent County Gaol, Maidstone, 53, 299 King, Charles, 269, 273, 278n209, 289, 289n262 “King Dick,” see Crafus, Richard L Lardier, Alexandre, 73, 127, 145, 161, 163, 165, 170, 172, 183, 197, 200, 214, 218 Larpent, Seymour, 269, 273, 278n209 Launceston (Cornwall), 208 Lebertre, Colonel Hippolyte, 34, 35, 37, 38 Lemon, Neil C., 123, 144 Leverage, William, 235 Little, George, 171, 214, 241, 249 Liverpool Borough Gaol, 59 Lloyd, Clive, 52, 57, 213 Lochet, Étienne, 186 Lovell, Daniel, 39, 132 M MacDougall, Ian, 154, 156 Magrath, Dr George, 56, 112, 113, 128, 166, 198, 251, 268, 270, 291 Mann, James, 235

335

Mason, General John, 123 Mason, Reverend James Holman, 223, 225n222 McKinnon, Niel, 144, 150, 267, 274, 278 Melish, John, 84, 91, 92 Ménat, Pierre, 211, 212 Mésonant, Lieutenant Séverin, 33, 37, 162 Methodism, 224 Millbank Penitentiary, London, 98, 107, 308 Miller, John, 238 Mill Prison, Plymouth, 25, 103, 139, 198, 212 Monroe, James, 116, 119, 290 Moreton Hampstead (Devon), 189 Morieux, Renaud, 11, 72, 82, 94, 183 Mott, Thomas, 246, 275 N Neal, David A., 152, 195, 200, 280, 294, 305 Newgate Gaol, London, 39, 44n132 Norman Cross prisoner of war depot, Cambridgeshire, 9, 32, 38, 40, 41, 43, 44, 46, 48, 50, 77, 94, 117, 219, 224 O Oakhampton (Devon), 189, 193 Odiorne, John, 276 P Palmer, Benjamin “Frank,” 137, 152, 153, 159, 160, 162, 166, 190, 195, 220, 221, 227, 229, 232, 236, 248, 249, 252, 256–258, 262, 280, 281, 283, 284

336 

INDEX

Palmerston, Lord (Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston), 203 Parole/parole towns, 20, 21, 77, 99, 102, 306 Peel, Sir Robert, 224 Penitentiary Act 1779, 5, 7, 28, 148 Pentonville Prison, London, 299 Perth prisoner of war depot, Scotland, 9 P.G. (French prisoner), 126, 154, 226 Pierce, Nathaniel, 55, 94, 221, 229, 253, 265, 280–283, 292, 295, 298 Pillet, General René Martin, 31–33, 37–39 Plymouth (Devon), 54, 57, 76, 97, 142, 189, 190, 193, 222, 289, 292, 297, 298, 306 Plymouth (prisoners of war), 9, 25, 29, 51, 53, 69, 84, 89, 90, 93, 117, 143, 186, 202, 212, 297 Plymouth garrison, 261, 282 Portchester Castle Prison, Hampshire, 50, 162, 219 Portland Convict Prison, 2 Portsmouth Convict Prison, 2 Portsmouth (prisoners of war), 9, 25, 29, 51, 117 Princetown (Devon), 52, 55, 189, 207, 309 church, 207, 224, 309 Prison design/architecture, 41, 42, 50, 60, 73, 77, 80, 82 Prout, Samuel, 68, 70 R Race, 37, 145, 181 Reading Gaol, Berkshire, 299 Reeves, James, 270, 279

Rickor, James, 238 Roberts, John, 235 Rouanet, David, 205, 305 Royal Navy, 22, 23, 26, 53, 98, 103, 104, 122, 124, 161, 166, 186, 195, 212, 229 S Searle, Ambrose, 48, 57, 66–68, 85, 97, 307 Selman, Francis, 242, 247 Shortland, Captain Thomas, 91, 92, 104, 122, 140, 146, 147, 166, 167, 178, 179, 181, 182, 200, 203, 215, 231, 232, 236, 240, 241, 243–246, 249, 251, 253–255, 257, 258, 260–263, 266, 268, 269, 271–273, 277, 280–285, 289, 290, 292, 293, 295, 297, 302 Sinclair, David, 61, 96 Slater, John, 277 Slavery, 145, 176, 177, 293 Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline, The, 42 Stanbrook, Elizabeth, 95 Stapleton prisoner of war depot, Bristol, 25, 116, 120 Statesman, The, 39, 132 Suffolk County Gaol, Bury St Edmunds, 60 T Tavistock (Devon), 76, 87, 97, 142, 189, 193, 209 Taylor, Alan, 177, 291 Taylor, J.J., 84 Thompson, E.P., 262n135

 INDEX 

Thomson, Basil, 9, 133, 238, 241, 294 Tindale, Thomas, 272 Torry, Henry, 118n93, 145, 162, 167, 180, 193, 220, 222, 242, 245, 248, 249, 257, 258, 283, 285, 293, 294, 304 Transportation, 7, 25, 28, 308 Transport Board/Office, 7, 8, 19, 20, 26, 30, 32, 33, 36, 37, 39, 40, 45–49, 52, 53, 64, 69, 72, 76, 85, 87, 96, 99–102, 104, 107, 109, 110, 116, 119, 129, 134, 135, 139, 151, 155, 158, 199, 202, 212, 224, 236, 246, 260, 299, 307–309 agents, 47, 102, 104, 109, 110, 300 contractors, 103, 135, 156 Instructions for Agents (1809), 105, 143, 146, 192, 226 prisoner of war depot regulations (1807), 106–108 prison markets, 108, 188 Treaty of Amiens, 1802, 18 Trowbridge, John T., 285 Tyrwhitt, Thomas, 17, 18, 52, 66, 99, 117, 125, 207, 298

337

U United States of America, 5, 8, 19, 22, 23, 116, 122, 175, 181, 244, 257, 290 V Valpey, Joseph, 142, 220, 227, 231–233, 283 Van Diemen’s Land, 4 Vanhille, Louis-François, 208, 209, 302 W Walker, Thomas James, 40 Washington, John, 235, 277 Waterhouse, Benjamin, 118n93, 304 Waterloo, Battle of, 291, 306 West Indies, 22 Whitbread, Samuel II, 110, 124, 126, 173 Whitten, Elijah, 238 Women, 27 Y Young, Arthur, 60