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