Benjamin Waterhouse
A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed.
It may be for good and wise purposes, in the order of Providence, that there should be a partition wall between us and Britain. We have had to deplore that three thousand miles of ocean is not half enough; for avarice, fashion and folly, are continually drawing us together; and these often drown the still small voice of patriotism, whose language is, "Come out of her, O my people!" There is nothing that tends so strongly to keep us asunder, as the different dispositions of the two people. The Americans are a kind, humane, tender-hearted people, as free from cruelty as any nation upon earth; and possessing as much generosity towards an enemy they have vanquished, and who is at their mercy, as any people to be found on the records of the human kind. Their laws express it; the records of their courts prove it; the history of the war illustrates it; and I hope that all our actions declare it. We may change, and become as hard hearted and cruel as the English. It may be that we are now in the chivalrous age, or that period of our political existence, which is the generous, youthful stage of a nation's life; this may pass away, and we may sink into the cold, phlegmatic, calculating cruelty of the present Britons; and become, like them, objects of hatred to our own descendants. Whatever we may, in the course of degeneration, become, we assert it, as an incontrovertible fact, that the Britons are now, and have been for many generations past, vastly our inferiors on the score of polished humanity. On this subject, we would refer the reader to the History of England, written by eminent Englishmen and Scotchmen, and to Shakespeare's historical plays; and to the records of their courts, the annals of Newgate, and of the Tower; and to their penal code, generally; but above all, to their horrid military punishments, in their army, and in their navy; and then contrast the whole with the history of America; of her courts, and of her army, and navy punishments.
We would not indulge invective, nor lightly give vent to the language of resentment; but truth and utility compels us to speak of the English as they really are. Their whole history marks them a hard hearted, cruel race, and such we prisoners have found them. We will not have recourse to so early a period as the reign of Richard the 3d, or Harry the 8th, or his cruel daughter Mary, but we refer to the latter part of Charles 2d, a reign of mirth, frolic and unusual gaiety of heart, and not a period of austerity and gloom. The instance we here adduce, was not the furious cruelty of a mob, or of exasperated soldiery storming a town; but of courtiers, privy counsellors, and advisers of the good humored Charles the 2d.
William Carstares, confidential Secretary to King William, during the whole of his reign; afterwards Principal of the University of Edinburgh, was a sincere and zealous friend both to religious and civil liberty, and he lived in reputation and honor till Dec. 28th, 1715. This worthy man was put to the torture before the privy council, in the latter end of the reign of Charles the Second. The Rev. Joseph M'Cormick, D.D. who has written his life, and detailed an account of his fortitude and sufferings in the cause of liberty, says, "that all his objections and remonstrances being over-ruled by the majority of the privy counsel, the public executioner was called upon to perform his inhuman office. A thumb-screw had been prepared on purpose, of a peculiar construction. Upon its being applied, Mr. Carstares maintained such a command of himself, that, whilst the sweat streaming over his brow, and down his cheeks, with the agony he endured, he never betrayed the smallest inclination to depart from his first resolution. The Earl of Queensberry was so affected, that, after telling the chancellor, that he saw that the poor man would rather die than confess, he stepped out of the council, along with the duke of Hamilton, into another room, both of them being unable longer to witness the scene; whilst the inhuman Perth sat to the very last, without discovering the least symptom of compassion for the sufferer. On the contrary, when the executioner, by his express order, was turning the screw with such violence, that Mr. Carstares, in the extremity of his pain, cried out, that now he had squeezed the bones in pieces, the chancellor, in great indignation, told him, that, if he continued longer obstinate, he hoped to see every bone of his body squeezed to pieces. At last, finding all their efforts by means of this machinery fruitless, after he had continued no less than an hour and an half under this painful operation, they found it necessary to have recourse to a still more intimidating species of torture. The executioner was ordered to produce the iron boots, and apply them to his legs; but happily for Mr. Carstares, whose strength was now almost exhausted, the fellow, who was only admitted of late to this office, and a novice in his trade, after having attempted in vain to fasten them properly, was obliged to give it over; and the counsel adjourned for some weeks."
If to this shameful account we add their cruelty to the vanquished Scotch, in 1745, and of late years towards the brave Irish, together with what we have known of them in the revolutionary war, and in the present one, we can feel no pride in claiming kindred with them. They are a sluggish, cold, hard-fibred race of men, on whom soft and delicate airs of music make no agreeable impression. Loud and thundering sounds, such as the ringing of heavy bells, beating of drums, and firing of cannon, and the gothic hourra are requisite to move the phlegm that surrounds the tough heart of old John Bull.
When the Algerines captured some of our vessels, and made slaves of the crew, a very high degree of sensibility was excited. It was the theme of every newspaper and oration, and the subject of almost every conversation. The horror of Algerine slavery was considered as the ne plus ultra of human misery; but it has so happened, that we have many sailors returned again to their country, who have been enslaved at Algiers; and have been impressed and detained on board British men of war, and afterwards thrown into their prison-ships. The united opinion of these people is, the Algerine slavery is much more tolerable than the British slavery. The Algerines make the common sailors work from six to eight hours in the day; but they give them very good vegetable food, and enough of it; and lodge them in airy places; and always dispose the officers according to their rank; whereas the British seem to take a delight in confounding and mixing together, the officers with their men. As to their punishments among themselves, they will cut off a man's head; and strangle him with a bowstring, in a summary manner; but a Turk, or Algerine, would sicken at the sight of a whipping in the navy; and in the army of the Christian king of England. There is no nation upon this globe of earth that treats its soldiers and sailors with that degree of barbarity common to their camps, garrisons and men of war; for what they lack in the number of lashes on board a ship, they make up in the severity of infliction, so as to render the punishment nearly equal to the Russian knout.
If any one is curious to see British military flogging treated scientifically, I would refer him to chapter xii, vol. 2d, of Dr. R. Hamilton's Duties of a Regimental Surgeon, from page 22 to 82. The reading of it is enough to spoil an hungry man's dinner. We there read of the suppuration, and stench that follow after seven or eight hundred lashes; and that some men have complained that its offensiveness was almost equal to the whipping. We there read of the surgeon discharging a pound and a half of matter from an abscess, formed in consequence of a merciless punishment.—The reader may also be entertained with the discussion, whether it is best to wash the cats clear from the blood, (for the executioners lay on twenty-five strokes, and then another twenty-five, and so on, till the nine hundred or a thousand, ordered, are finished) or whether it is best to let the blood dry on the knots of the whip, in order to make it cut the sharper. There, too, you may learn the advantage of having the naked wretch tied fast and firm, so that he may not wring and twist about to avoid the torture, which, he says, if not attended to, may destroy the sight, by the whip cutting his eyes; or his cheeks and breasts may be cut for want of this precaution. He says, however, that in those regiments, who punish by running the gauntlet, it is almost impossible to prevent the man from being cut from the nape of the neck to his hams. You will there find a description of a neat contrivance, used at Gibraltar, which was compounded of the stocks and the pillory. The soldier's legs were held firm in two apertures of a thick plank, while his body and head were bent down to a plank placed in a perpendicular direction, to receive the man's head, and two more apertures to confine his arms. In this immoveable posture, human beings, Englishmen, Irishmen and Scotchmen, have had their flesh lacerated for more than half an hour! But the Doctor informs us, that the men did not like this new contrivance, as it checked their vociferation and injured their lungs; so it was discontinued; and they returned again to the halberts, where their hands were tied up over their heads. Some of these poor wretches have been known to gnaw the flesh of their own arms, in the agonies of torture; and many of them have died with internal impostumes.
Americans! think of these barbarities, and bless the memories of those statesmen and warriors, who have separated you, as a nation, from a cruel people, who have neither bowels of compassion, nor any tenderness of feeling, for the soldier, or the sailor. They value them, and care for them on the same principle that we value a horse, and no more, merely as an animal that is useful to them. I have for some time believed that America would be the grave of the British character. Our free presses dare speak of their military whippings, without fearing the punishment inflicted on the Editor of their Political Register, as drawn by one of themselves.6
Those pressed men liberated from the British men of war, and sent on board this ship, the Crown Prince, that is, sent from one prison to another, are large, well made, fine looking fellows, for such they usually select as Englishmen.—Some of them were men of colour. The following anecdote does honor to the character of Sir Sidney Smith, as well as to that of our brave tars. Sir Sidney was then off Toulon. On the news reaching the crew that the United States had declared war against England, all the Americans on board had determined not to fight against their country, or aid in striking its flag; they therefore asked permission to speak with Sir Sidney, who permitted them to come altogether on the quarter deck; they told him they were all Americans by birth, and impressed against their will into the British service; and forcibly detained; that although they had consented to do the duty of Englishmen on board his ship, they could not fight against their own country.—"Nor do I wish you should," was the answer of this gallant knight. On being reminded by one of his officers, that they were nearly all petty officers—he observed to them, that they had been promoted in consequence of their good behaviour; and that if they could, as he hoped they would, reconcile themselves to the service, he should continue to promote them, and reward their good behaviour. They thanked him; but assured him that it was against their principles, as Americans, and against a sense of duty towards their beloved country, to fight against their brethren, or to aid in pulling down the emblem of their nation's sovereignty. He promised to report the business to his superiors; and turning to one of his officers, said, "I wish all Englishmen were as strongly attached to their country, as these Americans are to theirs."
Another instance of a British commander, the opposite of this, is worth relating. I give it as the sufferer related it to us all; and as confirmed by other testimony beside his own. The man declared himself to be an American, and as such, asked for his discharge. The captain said he lied; that he was no American, but an Englishman; and that he only made this declaration to get his liberty; and he ordered him to be severely whipped; and on every punishing day, he was asked if he still persisted in calling himself an American, and in refusing to do duty? The man obstinately persisted. At length the captain became enraged to a high degree; he ordered the man to be stripped, and tied up to the gratings, and after threatening him with the severest flogging that was in his power to inflict, he asked the man if he would avoid the punishment, and do his duty? "Yes," said the noble sailor, "I will do my duty, and that is to blow up your ship the very first opportunity in my power." This was said with a stern countenance, and a corresponding voice. The captain seemed astonished, and first looking over his larboard shoulder, and then over his starboard shoulder, said to his officers, "this is a damn'd queer fellow! I do not believe he is an Englishman. I suppose he is crazy; so you may unlash him, boatswain:" and he was soon after sent out of that ship into this prison-ship. This man will carry the marks of the accursed cat to his grave!
O, ye Tories! ye Federalists, ye every thing but what you should be, who have derided the sufferings of the sailor, and mocked at his misery—had you one half of the heroic virtue that filled and sustained the brave heart of this noble sailor, you would cease to eulogize these tyrants of the ocean, or to revile your own government for drawing the sword, and running all risks to redress the wrongs of the oppressed sailor. The cruel conduct of the British ought to be trumpeted through the terraqueous globe; but we would feign cover over, if possible, the depravity of some few of our merchants and politicians, who regard a sailor in the same light as a truckman does his horse.
Several of these impressed men have declared, that in looking back on their past sufferings, on board English men of war, and comparing it with their present confinement at Chatham, they feel themselves in a Paradise. The ocean, the mirror of heaven, is as much the element of an American as an Englishman. The great Creator has given it to us, as well as to them; and we will guard its honor accordingly, by chasing cruelty from its surface, whether it shall appear in the habit of a Briton or an Algerine.
CHAPTER V
It is now the last day of the year 1813; and we live pretty comfortably. Prisoners of war, confined in an old man-of-war hulk, must not expect to sleep on beds of down; or to fare sumptuously every day, as if we were at home with our indulgent mothers and sisters. All things taken into consideration, I believe we are nearly as well treated here, in the river Medway, as the British prisoners are in Salem or Boston; not quite so well fed with fresh meat, and a variety of vegetables, because this country does not admit of it. We nevertheless do suffer as we did at Halifax; and above all, we suffered on board the floating dungeons, the transports, and store-ship Malabar, beyond expression.
All the Frenchmen are sent out of the ship, excepting about forty officers; and these are all gamblers, ready and willing, and able to fleece us all, had we ever so much money. I wonder that the prison-ship-police has not put down this infamous practice. It is a fomenter of almost all the evil passions; of those particularly which do the least honor to the human heart. Our domestic faction have uttered a deal of nonsense about a French influence in America.—By what I have observed here, I never can believe that the French will ever have any influence to speak of, in the United States. We never agreed with them but in one point, and that was in our hatred to the English. There we united cordially; there we could fight at the same gun; and there we could mingle our blood together. The English may thank themselves for this. They, with their friends and allies, the Algerines and the Savages of our own wilderness, have made a breach in that great Christian family, whose native language was the English; which is every year growing wider and wider.
January, 1814.—We take two or three London newspapers, and through them know a little what is going forward in the world. We find by them that Joanna Southcote, and Molenaux, the black bruiser, engross the attention of the most respectable portion of John Bull's family. Not only the British officers, but the ladies wear the orange colored cockade, in honor of the Prince of Orange, because the Dutch have taken Holland. The yellow, or orange color, is all the rage; it has been even extended to the clothing of the prisoners. Our sailors say that it is because we are under the command of a yellow Admiral, or at least a yellow Commodore, which is about the same thing.
About this time there came on board of us a recruiting sergeant, to try to enlist some of our men in the service of the Prince Regent. He offered us sixteen guineas; but he met with no success. Some of them "bored" him pretty well. We had a very good will to throw the slave overboard; but as we dare not, we contented ourselves with telling him what a flogging the Yankees would give him and his platoon, when they got over to America.
About five hundred prisoners have recently arrived in this "reach," from Halifax. There are between one hundred and fifty and two hundred of Colonel Boestler's men, who were deceived, decoyed, and captured near Beaver Dams, on the twenty-third of June, 1813. These men were principally from Pennsylvania and Maryland. It is difficult to describe their wretched appearance; and as difficult to narrate their suffering on the passage, without getting into a rage, inconsistent with the character of an impartial journalist.
To the everlasting disgrace of the British government, and of a British man of war, be it known, that these miserable victims to hardheartedness, were crowded together in the black hole of a ship, as we were, just like sheep in a sheep-fold. They allowed but two to come upon deck at a time. They were covered with nastiness, and overrun with vermin; for these poor creatures were not allowed to wash their clothes, or themselves. O, how my soul did abhor the English, when I saw these poor soldiers! It is no wonder that people who only see and judge of the Americans by the prisoners, that they conceive us to be a horde of savages. They see us while prisoners, in the most degraded and odious light that we ever before saw or felt ourselves in. I can easily conceive how bad and scanty food, dirt, vermin, and a slow chronical disease, or low spirits, may change the temper and character of large bodies of men. I would advise all my countrymen, should it ever be their hard lot to be again in British bondage, to exert themselves to appear as clean and smart in their persons, as their situation will possibly admit. That I may not be accused of pronouncing the English a cruel people, without proving my assertions, I will here ask my reader to have recourse to the speech of Sir Robert Heron, made in Parliament, in April, 1816, where he recites the treatment of the poor in the alms-houses at Lincoln. After a painful recital of the miserable state of the work-house in that city, he mentioned "that there were five cells strongly guarded with iron bolts, not for the reception, of lunatics, but for the punishment of such poor persons as might fall into any transgression. In each of these were strong iron staples in the wall and floor, to which the poor delinquent was chained. Among several instances of cruelty, the worthy Baronet mentioned that a Chelsea pensioner, seventy years of age, and totally blind, had been for a whole fortnight chained to the floor, because he had been drunk! That a very young girl, having contracted a certain disease, had been chained in a similar manner to the floor, lest she should contaminate others. Would it be believed, said Sir Robert to the House, that one chain fixed round her body, had been weighed, and was found no less than twenty-eight pounds weight!"—From what I have heard of the generous turn of the Prince Regent, his sympathetic heart would be moved to compassion for these two frail mortals, the one very old, the other very young. But what are we to think of his master, the magnanimous John Bull? I believe a soldier feels more of the martial spirit when in uniform, than in a loose drab coat. The same feeling may extend to a judge in his robes, and to a parson in his gown. They all may feel braver, more consciencious, and pious, for this "outward and visible sign," of what the inward ought to be.
These poor soldiers were, of all men among us, the most miserable; they had suffered greatly for want of good and sufficient food; as six of them had to feed on that quantity which the British allowed to four of their own men. By what we could gather, the most barbarous, the most unfeeling neglect, and actual ill treatment, was experienced on board the Nemesis. This ship seems, like the Malabar, to be damned to everlasting reproach. I forgot to enquire whether her Captain and her Surgeon were Scotchmen.
We turn with disgust and resentment from such ships as the Regulus, the Malabar, and the Nemesis, and mention with pleasure the Poictiers, of 74 guns. The captain and officers of this ship behaved to the prisoners she brought, with the same kindness and humanity, as I presume the captain, officers and crew of an American man of war would towards British prisoners. They considered our men as living, sensitive beings, feeling the inconveniences of hunger and thirst, and the pleasure of the gratifications of these instinctive appetites; they seemed to consider, also, that we were rational beings; and it is possible they may have suspected that some of us might have had our rational and improvable faculty increased by education; they might, moreover, have thought we had, like them, the powers of reminescence, and the same dispositions to revenge; or they might not have thought much on the subject, but acted from their own generous and humane feelings. I wish it were in my power to record the names of the officers of the Poictiers. Of this ship we can remark, that she had long been on the American station; long enough to know the American character, and to respect it. Her officers had a noble specimen of American bravery and humanity, when the American sloop Wasp took the British sloop Frolic, and both were soon after taken by the Poictiers. The humane, and we dare say, brave Capt. Beresford, has the homage of respect for his proper line of conduct towards those Americans whom the fortune of war put under his command. We drank the healths, in the best beer we could get, of the captain, officers and crew, of his Britannic Majesty's line of battle ship, Poictiers.
That we may not be thought to accuse the British of barbarity without proof, we shall give an instance of their shocking inhumanity towards the inhabitants of Canada, in the year 1759, when their army was under the command of a Wolfe, extracted from Knox's historical journal of the British campaign in Canada, p. 322, vol. 1st, dedicated by permission to Gen. Anchers. "Yesterday Capt. Starks brought in two prisoners, one of them a lad of fifteen years of age, the other a man of forty, who was very sullen, and who would not answer any questions. This officer also took two male children, and, as he and his party were returning, they saw themselves closely pursued by a much superior body, some of whom were Indians, (probably the father and mother of the young children, and other relatives, and a few humane Indians)—he wished to be freed from the children, as, by their innocent cries and screeches, they directed the pursuers where to follow. Capt. Stark's lieutenant made many signs to them to go away and leave him, but they not understanding him, still redoubled their lamentations, and finding them hard pressed, he gave orders that the infants should be taken aside and killed, which was done"!!!—What is the reason this diabolical barbarity was never before condemned in print? The reason is plain—they were the children of Frenchmen. This shocking deed was perpetrated by the officers of General Wolfe's army, and published by one of his captains, under the sanction of Lord Amherst!
It may be tedious to our readers, especially if they be British, but we cannot yet leave the subject of the inhuman treatment of the American prisoners of war, while on their passage from Halifax to Chatham. The condition of the soldiers was the most deplorable. Some of these men were born in the interior, and had never seen the salt ocean; they enlisted in Boestler's regiment, and were taken by the British and Indians, somewhere between fort George and York, the capital of Upper Canada. They were pretty much stripped of their clothing, soon after they were taken, and their march to Montreal was conducted with very little regard to their feelings; but when sick, they were well attended to by the medical men of the enemy; their passage from Quebec to Halifax, down the river St. Lawrence, was barbarous. They suffered for victuals, clothes, and every other conveniency. The men say that they had more instances of real kindness from the Indians, than from the British. But on their passage across the Atlantic, their situation was horrible, as may be well supposed, when it is considered that these soldiers had never been at sea, and of course could not shift, and shirk about, as the sailors call it, as could the seamen; they were of course, sea sick; and were continually groping and tumbling about in the dark prison of a ship's hold. They suffered a double portion of misery compared with the sailors, to whom the rolling of the ship in a gale of wind, and the stench of bilge-water, were matters of no grievance; but were serious evils to these landsmen, who were constantly treading upon, or running against, and tumbling over each other. Many of them were weary of their lives; and some layed down dejected in despair, hoping never to rise again. Disheartened, and of course sick, these young men became negligent of their persons, not caring whether they ever added another day to their wretched existence; so that when they came on board the prison ship, they were loathsome objects of disgust. A mother could not have known her own son; nor a sister her brother, disguised and half consumed as they were, with a variety of wretchedness. They were half naked, and it was now the middle of winter, and within thirty miles of London, in the nineteenth century; an era famous for bible societies, for missionary and humane societies, and for all proud boastings of Christian and evangelical virtue; under the reign of a king and prince, renowned for their liberality and magnanimity towards French catholics; (but not Irish ones,) and towards Ferdinand the bigot, his holiness the Pope, and the venerable institution of the holy Inquisition. Alas! poor old John Bull! though art in thy dotage, with thy thousand ships in the great salt ocean; and thy half a dozen victorious ones in the Serpentine River, alias the splendid gutter, dug out in Hyde Park, for the amusement of British children six feet high! Can the world wonder that America, in her present age of chivalry, should knock over these doating old fellows, and make them the derision of the universe?
I can no otherwise account for this base treatment of the Americans, than by supposing that the British government had concluded in the summer and autumn of 1813, that America could not stand the tug of war with England; that Madison was unpopular; and that the federalists, or British faction in America, were prevailing, especially in New-England; and that, being sure of conquest, they should commence the subjugation of the United States by degrading its soldiery and seamen; as they have the brave Irish.—They may have been led into this error by our federal newspapers, which are generally vehicles of misinformation. The faction may impede, and embarrass for a time; but they never can long confine the nervous arm of the American Hercules.
Candor influences me to confess, that there were more attempts than one, to rise and take these men of war transports. I find that several experiments were made, but that they were always betrayed, by some Englishman, or Irishman, that had crept into American citizenship. I hope the time is not far off, when we shall reject from our service every man not known absolutely to have been born in the United States. Whenever these foreigners get drunk, they betray their partiality to their own country, and their dislike of ours. I hope our navy never will be disgraced or endangered by these renegadoes. Every man is more or less a villain, who fights against his own country. The Irish are so ill treated at home, that it is no wonder that they quit their native soil, for a land of more liberty and, plenty; and they are often faithful to the country that adopts them; but never trust an Englishman, and above all a Scotchman. It is a happy circumstance that America wants neither. She had rather have one English manufacturer than an hundred English sailors. We labor under the inconvenience of speaking the same language with the enemies of our rising greatness. I know by my own personal experience, that English books, published since our revolutionary war, have a pernicious tendency in anglifying the American character. I have been amused in listening to the wrangling conversation of an English, Irish and American sailor, when all three were half drunk; and this was very often the case during this month of January, as many of our men who had been in the British naval service, received payment from government; and this filled our abode with noise, riot, confusion, and sometimes fighting. The day was spent in gambling, and the night in drunkenness; for now all would attempt to forget their misery, and steep their senses in forgetfulness. The French officers among us, seldom indulged in drinking to excess. Our men said they kept sober in order to strip the boozy sailor of his money, by gambling.