Benjamin Waterhouse - A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed.

While the agent was making his declarations of friendship, and protesting upon his honour, that we should be sent home, he knew full well that the greatest part of the prisoners were to be sent across the Atlantic, to suffer the punishment of a British prison. The policy of the English government was, it seems, to discourage the enlistment of soldiers into our service by sending the prisoners, taken on the frontiers, to England. They meant also to distress us by accumulating our seamen in their prisons; and this they imagined would disenable us from manning our men of war, or sending out privateers. They preferred every mode of distressing us to that of fair fighting; for, in fair fight and equal numbers, we have always beat them by sea, and by land.

We were in good humor and high spirits, at the prospect of leaving our loathsome den, and once more returning home to see our mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, and school-fellows, and the old jolly companions of our happy days. We smiled upon Mr. Agent Miller, and he upon us. We greeted our turnkey, the now and then smooth tongued Mr. Grant, with a good morrow, and all feelings of hostility were fast subsiding; and one told him that he should be very glad to see him in Boston; another said he should be very glad to see him in Marblehead, and another at New-York, and Baltimore, and so on.

Towards the close of the month of August, and after Mr. Agent Miller and the military had taken the most effectual method to provide against the possibility of resistance from the prisoners, reports now and then reached us, that the expected exchange was unhappily broken off, and that it was the fault of the American government. These things were hinted with great caution, as not entitled to entire credit; the next day it was said, that the business of exchange was in a prosperous train. All this was done by way of feeling the pulse of the most respectable of the prisoners; those most likely to take the lead in an insurrection. We could easily trace all these different stories to the cunning Mr. Miller, through his subordinate agents.

On the first day of September, 1813, an hundred of us prisoners were selected from different crews, and ordered to get our baggage ready and be at the gate at a certain hour. On enquiring of our keeper, Mr. Grant, what was the design of this order, he replied with his habitual duplicity, that we were " to be sent home ." When Mr. Miller was asked the same question, he replied, that he had a particular reason for not answering the question; but none of us doubted, from the selection from different crews, but that we were about to be sent to our beloved country and natal homes. We left the prison with light hearts, not without pitying our companions, who were doomed to wait a while longer before they could be made so happy as we then felt. We stepped on board the boats with smiling countenances. The barge men told us that the ships we were going to were cartels.

Having arrived among the shipping, the officer of the boat was asked which of these several ships was the cartel—" There ," said he, pointing to an old 44, " is the ship which is to take you to old England ." Heavens above! What a stroke of thunder was this! We looked at each other with horror, with dismay, and stupefaction, before our depressed souls recoiled with indignation! such a change of countenance I never beheld! Had we been on the deck of a ship, and been informed that a match was just about being touched to her magazine of powder, we should not have exhibited such a picture of paleness and dismay. The deception was cruel; the duplicity was infamous. The whole trick from beginning to end, was an instance of cowardice, meanness and villany. It proves that cowards are cruel; that barbarity and sincerity never meet in the same bosom.

We now saw that the rumor of our rising upon our keepers, and marching to Halifax was a miserable falsehood, spread abroad for no other purpose than to double our guards, and prevent the imagined consequences of desperation, should it be discovered that we were to be sent across the Atlantic. It is possible we might have succeeded in disarming the soldiers on the island, and taken their cannon; but for want of more arms we could have done but little. Had we all been armed, we could have entered Halifax, and put to the test the bravery of these loyalists: but an unarmed multitude are nothing before an eighth part of their number of regular soldiers. Military men in Halifax could never have had a moment's serious apprehension from the prisoners on Melville Island. It is my firm opinion, however, that had we been apprized of our cruel destination, we should have risen upon the boats, and attempted an escape, or sold our lives dearly. Revenge and desperation have done wonders; and both would have steeled the heart and nerved the arm of our little band of sufferers. Had we not been beguiled with the lies of the agent and his turnkey, we should have given our enemies a fresh proof of American bravery, if not imprudence. Had Miller been on board the boat with us, we should most certainly have thrown him overboard. His base and dishonourable artifice, first to raise our hopes and expectations to the height of joy, and then to sink us in despair, was an infamous deed, worthy such a reward. Speaking for myself, I declare, that my heart sunk within me, and I came near fainting, and it was some time before tears came to my relief; then in a burst of indignation, I cursed the perfidious enemy, and felt my soul wound up to deeds of desperation.

Had the agent informed us of the orders of his government, and made us acquainted with our destination, we should have braced our minds up to the occasion, and submitted to our hard fate like men. We should have said to each other in the language of Shakespeare—" if these things be necessities, let's meet them like necessities ;" but to be deceived and duped, and cajoled into a state of great joy and exultation, and then, in an instant, precipitated into the dark and cold regions of despair, was barbarous beyond expression. As much resentment as I feel towards Miller and his subalterns, I cannot wish either of them to suffer the pangs I felt at the idea of this floating dungeon.

The late Governor Gerry, in one of his communications to the legislature of Massachusetts, when speaking of the impressment and ill usage of our seamen by the English, calls a British man-of-war " a floating Pandemonium ." I never felt the force of that expression until I entered on board this floating hell.

After some difficulty and delay we got ourselves and bedding up the side of the ship; and as our names were called over, our bedding was served out to us. We informed the officer that there were but seventy blankets for an hundred men; to which he replied, that he had orders to serve out blankets in the same proportion as they served out our provisions. To understand this, the reader must know that the British have been in the habit, all the war, of giving to their prisoners a less quantity of food than to their own men. They uniformly gave to six of us the same quantity which they gave to four of their own sailors. If what they allowed to their own men was barely sufficient, what they gave to us could not be enough to satisfy the cravings of hunger; and this we all found to be the case.

The crew of the man of war sleep on the deck which is next under the gun deck, while our destination was on the deck under that. It was to the ship what the cellar is to a house. It was under water, and of course, without windows, or air holes. All the air and light came through the hatch way, a sort of trap door or cellar way. In this floating dungeon, we miserable young men spent our first night, in sleepless anguish, embittered with the apprehension of our suffering cruel death by suffocation. Here the black hole of Calcutta rose to my view in all its horrors; and the very thought stopped my respiration, and set my brain on fire. In my distress, I stamped with my feet, and beat my head against the side of the ship in the madness of despair. I measured the misery of those around me by what I myself suffered. Shut up in the dark with ninety-nine distressed young men, like so many galley slaves, or Guinea negroes, excluded from the benefit of the common air, without one ray of light or comfort, and without a single word expressive of compassion from any officer of the ship. I never was so near sinking into despair. We naturally cling to life, but now I should have welcomed death. To be confined, and even chained any where in the light of the sun, is a distressing thing, especially to very young men, but to be crowded into a dirty hole in the dark, where there was no circulation of air is beyond expression horrible. Perhaps my study of the human frame, and my knowledge of the vital property of the air, and of the philosophy of the vital functions, may have added to my distress. I remembered what I had read and learnt in the course of my education, viz: that every full grown person requires forty-eight thousand cubic inches of air in an hour, or one million, one hundred and fifty-two thousand cubic inches in the course of a day; and that if this is once received into the lungs and breathed out again, it cannot be breathed a second time, till it is mixed with the common atmospheric air. When I considered that our number amounted to an hundred, I could not drive from my mind this calculation, and the result of it nearly deprived me of my reason. The horrors of the Black Hole of Calcutta have been long celebrated, because Englishmen suffered and perished in it. Now the English have more than a thousand black holes into which they unfeelingly thrust their impressed men, and their prisoners of war. Their tenders that lay in the Thames, off Tower-wharf, are so many black holes into which they thrust their own people, whom their press gangs seize in the streets of London, and crowd into them like so many live rabbits or chickens carrying in a cart to market. My reflections on these things have greatly changed my opinion of the English character in point of humanity.