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 next relation is that of Louis Garneray, a marine painter of some note, specimens of whose work during his nine years’ captivity in England may still be found in Portsmouth and its neighbourhood, and one at least of whose later pictures is in the Marine Gallery of the Paris Louvre.

What follows is an analysis in brief of his book Mes Pontons (which is, so far as I am aware, the most complete picture of life on a prison ship yet published), and, being but a brief analysis, is incomplete as to numberless most interesting details, so that I would recommend any reader who wishes to be minutely informed upon the subject to read the original volume of 320 pages. It is caustically, even savagely written, but nine years cut out of a young man’s life cannot serve to sweeten his disposition.

In May 1806 Garneray, who had been captured in the West Indies, was taken on board the hulk Prothée at Portsmouth, stripped, plunged into a cold bath, and clothed in an ill-fitting orange-yellow suit, on the back of which the large letters T. O. proclaimed him as under the care of the Transport Office. He describes the Prothée,—as he is hustled into the mob of ‘dead people come out for a moment from their graves, hollow-eyed, earthy complexioned, round backed, unshaven, their frames barely covered with yellow rags, their bodies frightfully thin,’—as a black, shapeless sarcophagus, of which the only parts open to air was the space between the fo’c’sle and the poop and the fo’c’sle itself, which was unbearable from the smoke of the many chimneys on it. Each end of the ship was occupied by the garrison, the officers aft and the soldiers forward. A stout barrier divided the guard from the prisoners, which was so garnished with heavy-headed nails as to seem like iron, and was fitted with loop-holes for inspection, and, if needs be, for firing through. On the lower deck and in the lower battery were packed seven hundred human beings.