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

73 страница из 159

Dupin wrote:

‘By a restriction which well describes the mercantile jealousy of a manufacturing people, the prisoners were prohibited from making for sale woollen gloves and straw hats. It would have injured in these petty branches the commerce of His Britannic Majesty’s subjects!’

to which the reply was:

‘It was so. These “petty branches” of manufactures were the employment of the wives and children of the neighbouring cottagers, and enabled them to pay their rent and taxes: and, on a representation by the magistrates that the vast quantities sent into the market by the French prisoners who had neither rent, nor taxes, nor lodging, firing, food or clothes to find, had thrown the industrious cottagers out of work, an order was sent to stop this manufacture by the prisoners.’

As to the sickness on board the hulks, in reply to Dupin’s assertions the Government had the following table drawn up relative to the hulks at Portsmouth in a month of 1813:

Ship’s Name. Prisoners in Health. Sick. Prothée 583 10 } = 1½% Crown 608 3 } San Damaso 726 32 } Vigilant 590 8 } Guildford 693 8 } San Antonio 820 9 } Vengeance 692 7 } Veteran 592 7 } Suffolk 683 6 } Assistance 727 35 } Ave Princessa 769 9 } Kron Princessa 760 4 } Waldemar 809 1 } Negro 175 0 } 9,227 139

Dupin also published tables of prison mortality in England in confirmation of the belief among his countrymen that it was part of England’s diabolic policy to make prisoners of war or to kill or incapacitate them by neglect or ill-treatment. Between 1803 and 1814, the total number of prisoners brought to England was 122,440. Of these, says M. Dupin,