they refused to serve against their country in British ships. Others
were prisoners of war. No exact statistics as to the number of
Americans thus imprisoned have ever been made public; but the records
of one great prison--that at Dartmoor--show, that, when the war
closed, six thousand American seamen were imprisoned there,
twenty-five hundred of whom had been detained from long before the
opening of the war, on account of their refusal to join the ranks of
the enemy. As I write, there lies before me a quaint little book, put
out anonymously in 1815, and purporting to be the "Journal of a Young
Man captured by the British." Its author, a young surgeon of Salem,
named Waterhouse, shipped on a Salem privateer, and was captured early
in the war. His experience with British prisons and transport-ships
was long; and against his jailors he brings shocking charges of
brutality, cruelty, and negligence.

The Yankee seamen who were captured during the war were first
consigned to receiving-prisons at the British naval stations in
America. Sometimes these places of temporary detention were mouldering
hulks, moored in bays or rivers; sometimes huge sheds hastily put
together, and in which the prisoners were kept only by the unceasing
vigilance of armed guards. "The prison at Halifax," writes Waterhouse,
"erected solely for the safe-keeping of prisoners of war, resembles an
horse-stable, with stalls, or stanchions, for keeping the cattle from
each other. It is to a contrivance of this sort that they attach the
cords that support those canvas bags or cradles, called hammocks. Four
tier of these hanging nests were made to hang, one above the other,
between these stalls, or stanchions.... The general hum and confused
noise from almost every hammock was at first very distressing. Some
would be lamenting their hard fate at being shut up like negro slaves
in a Guinea ship, or like fowls in a hen-coop, for no crime, but for
fighting the battles of their country; others, late at night, were
relating their adventures to a new prisoner; others, lamenting their
aberrations from rectitude, and disobedience to parents, and
headstrong wilfulness, that drove them to sea, contrary to their
parents' wish; while others, of the younger class, were sobbing out
their lamentations at the thoughts of what their mothers and sisters
suffered after knowing of their imprisonment. Not unfrequently the
whole night was spent in this way; and when, about daybrea