A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed.. Benjamin Waterhouse
shall be.
After the ship had been cleansed, fumigated and partially white-washed, so as to be fit for the eye and nose of the health officer, she was examined by him, and reported free from contagion! Now I conceive this line of conduct not very reputable to the parties concerned. When we arrived off Portsmouth, our ship was filthy, and I believe contagious; we miserable prisoners, were encrusted with the nastiness common to such a place, as that into which we had been inhumanly crowded. It was the duty of the health officers and the surgeon of the Regulus, to have reported her condition when she first anchored; and not to have cleaned her up, and altered her condition for inspection. In the American service the captain, surgeon and health officer would have all been cashiered for such a dereliction of honour and duty. This is the way that the British board of admiralty, the transport board, the parliament, and the people are deceived, and their nation disgraced; and this corruption, which more or less pervades the whole transport service, will enervate and debase their boasted navy. We cannot suppose that the British board of admiralty, or the transport board would justify the cruel system of starvation practised on the brave Americans who were taken in Canada, and conveyed in their floating dungeons down the river St. Lawrence to Halifax. Some of these captains of transports deserve to be hanged for their barbarity to our men; and for the eternal hatred they have occasioned towards their own government in the hearts of the surviving Americans. We hope, for the honor of that country whence we derived our laws and sacred institutions, that this Journal will be read in England.
The Regulus was then removed to the anchoring place destined for men of war; and the same night, we were taken out, and put on board the Malabar store ship, where we found one hundred and fifty of our countrymen in her hold, with no other bed to sleep on but the stone ballast. Here were two hundred and fifty men, emaciated by a system of starvation cooped up in a small space, with only an aperture of about two feet square to admit the air, and with ballast stones for our beds! Although in harbor, we were not supplied with sufficient water to quench our thirst, nor with sufficient light to see our food, or each other, nor of sufficient air to breathe; and what aggravated the whole, was the stench of the place, owing to a diarrhœa with which several were affected. Our situation was indeed deplorable. Imagine yourself, Christian reader! two hundred and fifty men crammed into a place too small to contain one hundred with comfort, stifling for want of air, pushing and crowding each other, and exerting all their little remaining strength to push forward to the grated hatch-way to respire a little fresh air. The strongest obtained their wish, while the weakest were pushed back, and sometimes trampled under foot.
Out stretch'd he lies, and as he pants for breath,
Receives at every gasp new draughts of death.
God of mercy, cried I, in my agony of distress, is this a sample of the English humanity we have heard and read so much of from our school boy years to manhood? If they be a merciful nation, they belong to that class of nations "whose tender mercies are cruelty."
Representations were repeatedly made to the captain of the Malabar, of our distressed situation, as suffering extremely by heat and stagnant air; for only two of us were allowed to come upon deck at a time; but he answered that he had given orders for our safe treatment, and safe keeping; and he was determined not to lose his ship by too much lenity. In a word, we found the fellow's heart to be as hard as the bed we slept on. Soon after, however, our situation became so dangerous and alarming, that one of the marine corps informed the captain that if he wished to preserve us alive, he must speedily give us more air. If this did not move his compassion, it alarmed his fears; and he then gave orders to remove the after hatch, and iron bars fixed in its place, in order to prevent us from forcing our way up, and throwing him into the sea, a punishment he richly deserved. This alteration rendered the condition of our "black hole," more tolerable; it was nevertheless a very loathsome dungeon;—for our poor fellows were not allowed to go upon deck to relieve the calls of nature, but were compelled to appropriate one part of our residence to this dirty purpose. This, as may be supposed, rendered our confinement doubly disgusting, as well as unwholesome.
I do not recollect the name of the captain of the Malabar, and it may be as well that I do not; I only know that he was a Scotchman. It may be considered by some as illiberal to deal in national reflections, I nevertheless cannot help remarking that I have received more ill-treatment from men of that nation than from individuals of any other; and this is the general impression of my countrymen. The poet tell us, that
"Cowards are cruel, but the brave
Love mercy, and delight to save."3
The Scotch are brave soldiers, but we, Americans, have found them to be the most hard hearted and cruel people we have ever yet met with. Our soldiers as well as sailors make the same complaint, insomuch, that, "cruel as a Scotchman," has become a proverb in the United States.—The Scotch officers have been remarked for treating our officers, when in their power, with insolence, and expressions of contempt; more so than the English. It is said that a Scotch officer, who superintends the horrid whippings so common in British camps, is commonly observed to be more hard hearted than an English one. It is certain that they are generally preferred as negro-drivers in the West-India islands. It has been uniformly remarked that those Scotchmen who are settled on the Canada frontiers are remarkable for their bitterness towards our men in captivity.
We speak here of the vagrant Scotch, the fortune-hunters of the Caledonian tribe; at the same time we respect her philosophers and literary men, who appear to us to compose the first rank of writers. Without mentioning their Ossian, Thompson and Burns, we may enumerate their prose writers, such as Hume, and the present association of truly learned and acute men, who write the Edinburgh Review. A Scotchman may be allowed to show pride at the mention of this celebrated work. As it regards America, this northern constellation of talent, shines brightly in our eyes. The ancient Greeks, who once straggled about Rome and the Roman empire, were not fair specimens of the refined Athenians.
Our peasantry, settled around our own frontier, and around the shores of our lakes, have a notion that the Scotch Highlanders were, not long since, the same kind of wild, half-naked people compared with the true English, that the Choctaws, Cherokees, Pottowatomies and Kickapoo Indians are to the common inhabitants of these United States; and that less than an hundred years ago, these Scotchmen were in the habit of making the like scalping and tomahawking excursions upon the English farmer, that the North American savage makes upon the white people here. This is the general idea which our common people have of what Walter Scott calls "the border wars." Some of them will tell you that the Scotch go half naked in their own country—wear a blanket, and kill their enemies, with a knife, just like Indians. They say their features differ from the English as much as theirs do from the Indian. In a word, they suppose the Scotch Highlanders to be a race who have been conquered by the English, who have taught them the use of fire arms, and civilized them, in a degree, so as to form them into regiments of soldiers, and this imperfect idea of the half savage Sawney will not soon be corrected; and we must say that the general conduct of this harsh and self-interested race towards our prisoners, will not expedite the period of correct ideas relative to the comparative condition of the Scotch and English. The Americans have imbibed no prejudice against the Irish, having found them a brave, generous, jovial set of fellows, full of fun, and full of good, kind feelings; the antipodes of Scotchmen, who, as it regards these qualities, are cold, rough and barren; like the land that gave them birth.
We moved from Portsmouth to the Nore or Noah, for I know not the meaning of the word, or how to spell it. The place so called is the mouth of the river Thames, which runs through the capital of the British nation. We were three days on our passage. Here we were transferred to several tenders in order to be transported to Chatham. We soon entered the river Medway, which rises in Sussex, and passes by Tunbridge, Maidstone and Rochester, in Kent; and is then divided into two branches, called the east and west passage. The chief entrance is the west; and is defended by a considerable fort, called Sheerness. In this river lay a number of Russian men of war, detained here probably by way of pledge for the fidelity of the Emperor. What gives most celebrity to this river is Chatham, a naval station, where the English build and lay up their
The Emperor