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

145 страница из 159

A very bold attempt at escape in broad daylight was made by some desperate prisoners of the Canada hulk at Chatham in 1812. Beef was being hoisted on board the prison ship from a lighter alongside, on board of which were half a dozen American prisoners who were assisting in the operation. Suddenly, they cut the painter, and, helped by a stiff breeze, actually sailed off, and, although the guards on all the prison ships fired at them, would have escaped if they had not run aground off Commodore’s Hard, Gillingham. They sprang ashore here, and ran, but the mud was too much for them and they were captured.

The Americans, whether ashore or afloat, were the hardest prisoners to guard of any. They seem never to have relaxed in their plans and attempts to escape, and as they were invariably better supplied with money than Frenchmen and Spaniards, they could add the power of the bribe to the power which knowledge of their captors’ language gave them. Hence no estimate can be formed of the real number of Americans who got away from the hulks, for, although a very exact system of roll call was in use, the ingenuity of the Americans, immensely backed by their purses, contrived matters so that not merely were the numbers on board always complete at each roll call, but upon more than one occasion, by some over-exercise of ingenuity, the captain of a hulk actually found himself commanding more prisoners than there were!