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

154 страница из 159

‘Staff:2 surgeons, 1 assistant surgeon, 1 matron, 1 interpreter, 1 cook, 1 barber, 1 mattress maker, 1 tailor, 1 washerwoman, and 10 nurses.Received 141. Discharged 69. Died 19. Remaining 53.

‘Fever and dysentery have been the prevalent complaints among the prisoners from Pampelune, whose deplorable state the Board of Inspection are in full possession of. (Among these were some forty women “in so wretched a state that they were wholly destitute of the appropriate dress of their sex”. Two of the British officers’ wives collected money for the poor creatures and clothed them.) Pneumonia has recently attacked many of these ill-conditioned men termed Romans, many of whom were sent here literally in a state of nudity, an old hammock in the boat to cover them being excepted.’

(The Romans above mentioned were the most degraded and reckless of the Dartmoor prisoners, who had been sent to the hulks partly because there was no power in the prison that could keep them in order, and partly because their filthy and vicious habits were revolting to the other and more decent prisoners.)