y
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;