Читать книгу Prisoners of War in Britain 1756 to 1815. A record of their lives, their romance and their sufferings онлайн

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The following experiences of an American prisoner of war are from The Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, (1816), who was a surgeon, by name Benjamin Waterhouse, captured at sea in May 1813, and confined on Melville Island, Halifax, whence he was transported to Chatham, and then to Dartmoor. The account is interesting as showing the very marked difference between the American and the French prisoners of war, and is otherwise remarkable for the hatred and contempt of the writer for Britons in general and for Scotsmen in particular, entire pages being devoted to their vilification. Waterhouse, with a hundred of his countrymen, was shipped to England on the Regulus, and his complaints are bitter about the shameful treatment on board—the filth, the semi-starvation, the vermin, the sleeping on stone ballast, the lack of air owing to the only opening to the lower deck being a hatchway two feet square, the brutal rule of allowing only two prisoners to go on deck at a time, and the presence in their midst of the only latrine. The captain, a Scotsman, would only yield to constant petitions and remonstrances so far as to sanction the substitution of iron bars for the hatchway.