Hell Upon Water: Prisoners of War in Britain 1793-1815

CHAPTER 1

Marching Into Captivity

The eighteenth century was period of frequent conflict as the European powers jostled for continental supremacy, at the same time expanding their overseas empires, while attempting to limit the imperial ambitions of their rivals. The century saw France, Spain and Holland arrayed as frequent enemies of Great Britain. The War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748), the Seven Years War (1756–1763) and the American Revolutionary War on the side of the American colonists were all clashes in which these nations fought against Britain. Each war was characterized by conflict on land and sea across the globe, and resulted in many prisoners of war arriving in Britain. As the century progressed, armies and navies became larger, and consequently the numbers of prisoners taken became greater.

The extent of the conflict during the American Revolution prompted an attempt at regulating the business of repatriating prisoners of war. Exchange of prisoners had always been erratic, but in 1780 a treaty was agreed between Britain and France stating that vigorous attempts would be made to exchange all prisoners of war as speedily as possible after capture, man for man, rank for rank. If there were no prisoners of equal rank to exchange, then the numbers would be made up of a proportion of lesser ranks, or a cash equivalent could be substituted.1

This treaty was regarded as the gentlemanly way to conduct prisoner of war affairs, but it only worked when there were gentlemen on both sides who could reach an agreement. However, 1789 saw events in France that changed the situation. The French Revolution removed French gentlemen from the scene, either by guillotining them or forcing them to flee for their lives. While these momentous events were changing the social and political climate in that country, they were also to change the conduct of war.

Prior to 1789, European conflict was conducted in a ‘civilized’ manner between monarchs who, while pitting their relatively small but professional armies against each other, respected their mutual positions as heads of state. The French Revolution, under the banner liberté, égalité, fraternité, overturned the idea of royal and aristocratic privilege. This had two immediate effects. First, the French were infused with a national fervour to export their revolutionary principles to the rest of Europe. Second, this forced the nations of Europe to co-operate against a common foe. War was about to be waged on a scale never seen before.2

The Revolutionary War began in 1792 with the French demonstrating the effectiveness of a levée en masse by fighting off an Austro-Prussian alliance, at the same time as the abolition of the monarchy by the National Convention in Paris. 1793 began dramatically with the execution of Louis XVI in January; the following month resulting in France declaring war upon Britain, Spain and the United Provinces (Holland). While countries such as Spain and Holland later found themselves allied to France, Great Britain remained an implacable foe until the short-lived peace resulting from the Treaty of Amiens in 1801.

War between Britain and a France now under the First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte (he became Emperor in 1804) erupted in 1803. Again Britain found herself at war, actively or otherwise, against most European nations as alliances were made and broken. This war lasted until the defeat of the Emperor in 1814. After a short-lived exile to Elba he returned to claim the French throne, only to be finally defeated in the Waterloo campaign of 1815.

To understand how the war prison system developed in Britain, it is important to look at the events and activities that generated the reason for its existence: prisoners of war. During the period 1792–1815, over 200,000 prisoners of war arrived in Britain. Of this total, 122,440 were taken during the Napoleonic Wars 1803–15. The highest prisoner population in any one year was 72,000 in 1814.3

During the Revolutionary War the British Army fought an abortive campaign in the Low Countries during 1793–94. This generated prisoners, some of whom were sent to Britain while others remained in Holland (on board some prison hulks in the Scheldt) and in Germany awaiting exchange. Aside from this conflict and an Anglo-Russian invasion of Holland in 1799, the British Army was not to campaign again on the continent of Europe until the Peninsula War in 1808.

Nineteenth century historians viewed the British Army as a projectile fired by the Royal Navy, and in the 1790s many such firings took place as colonies belonging to France and her allies were attacked. Islands in the West Indies, Malta, French settlements in India and the Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope all fell to combined operations mounted by the British.4 While the politicians gained valuable bargaining counters at future peace negotiations and British merchants gained new markets to be exploited, the Admiralty acquired thousands of prisoners of war, men, women and children, soldiers, sailors and civilians. Although many of these were held locally until exchanged, the majority were transported to Britain to fill the land prisons and hulks.

The West Indies was a rich source of captives. One prison ship was stationed at Martinique but found to be insufficient for the numbers being taken, but as the authorities there regarded their prisoners as being ‘troublesome brigands and Negros taken in arms’, they were only too glad to transfer responsibility to the naval authorities in Britain. Sir Ralph Abercrombie sent 4,000 such prisoners to Britain from this theatre in 1796.5

When the Dutch enclave at the Cape fell in 1796 many soldiers and civilians were taken prisoner. The Governor, Abraham Sluysken, was sent to England to reside on parole at Hambledon, Hampshire, together with his staff and servants.6 Occasionally a campaign produced captives who did not spend time in Britain, such as when a British army ended Napoleon’s dreams of oriental conquest in Egypt in 1801. The French troops involved were fortunate in that they were allowed to return to France and no doubt the Admiralty shared their relief, as by this time the war prison establishment had expanded dramatically.

While the army captured enemy nationals in large batches as French, Dutch and Spanish territory fell, the Royal Navy was generating a constant flow of inmates for the prison depots as soon as hostilities began. Upon war being declared between Holland and Britain in 1796, the Admiralty immediately detained enemy ships sitting in British ports. This resulted in a large haul, for there were seven Dutch warships berthed in these ports at the time, one in Ireland, one at Leith, and five at Plymouth. This was a typical occurrence. Throughout the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars many merchant vessels and some warships were ‘detained by the Admiralty’ when they were in Britain’s harbours on the assumption of hostilities.7

The Royal Navy attacked enemy warships and merchant vessels whenever and wherever they could be found. During the blockade of the French and Dutch coastline many small vessels were captured such as whalers and local civilian craft. There was a restriction on attacking coastal fishing vessels as these were part of the local community. War was waged against nations, not local inhabitants who often supplied the Royal Navy with intelligence and fresh produce, although this limitation was ignored if the fishing vessel was found to have an armed soldier on board. This prohibition did not apply to the fishing and whaling fleets that operated in the North Sea and around Greenland; these were national fleets supplying the nation at war and so were legitimate targets. Coastal vessels supporting the commerce of France were often escorted into Portsmouth and Plymouth with the naval officers concerned receiving prize money and the captured French men and boys a berth in the hulks (many youths were taken to sea to learn the profession).8

The Admiralty had an ambivalent attitude towards individuals of neutral countries onboard enemy ships, and enemy nationals’ onboard neutral vessels. In May 1796 their Lordships were inundated with requests from the Danish, Prussian and Swedish Consuls to release their nationals who were taken prisoner on board Dutch vessels. Earlier that year Mr Dobree, the Agent for prisoners of war on Guernsey, informed the authorities in London that he had detained some American vessels that had arrived partly navigated by Frenchmen. He wished to know if they should be regarded as captives or set free. The reply was:

Orders have been given for detaining as prisoners of war all Frenchmen who may be found onboard neutral vessels arriving in the Ports within His Majesty’s dominions.9

Taking captives from neutral vessels was hardly an approach that would win friends abroad.

There was a further reason for closely examining the crews of all vessels, both enemy and neutral. Nobody loves a traitor to their country, least of all the British during the war with Revolutionary France. Revenue cutters often captured French privateers in the Channel such as the Rose Revenue Cutter that boarded one such vessel and found that the Master and most of the crew were actually British. The ship was taken to Plymouth where it was ordered that a strict examination be made of the crew, and any found to ‘be subjects of His Majesty’ should be properly secured and not regarded as simple prisoners of war. The French Corvette La Revanche was captured while under the command of a sailor named Cooper, and a detailed investigation performed to ascertain whether he was American or British.10 This sort of legal quibble was to have serious consequences during the latter part of the Napoleonic War.

The war with Revolutionary France came to an end with the signing of the Treaty of Amiens in 1801. The Admiralty lost no time in returning to the continent the many thousands of prisoners of war in England and instigating the dismantling of the prison establishment. However, it was fortunate that only a few of the older hulks had been broken up by 1803, as by then relations between Britain and France had deteriorated, resulting in the resumption of hostilities. Immediately the Royal Navy began snapping up prizes upon the oceans, with large numbers of prisoners coming from enemy vessels in the Channel, as the Navy enforced a blockade of French ports.

Napoleon’s proposed invasion of England generated an increase in sea traffic as vessels for this enterprise were constructed and moved along the coast. French efforts involved the construction of invasion craft not only in and around the Channel ports such as Boulogne, Ambleteuse and Calais, but as far east as the Rhine, in Dutch ports and Toulouse. These vessels were assembled on the Channel coastline, and the Royal Navy attempted to disrupt this shipping whenever it could, bringing some of the erstwhile invaders to England, but not in the victorious manner they had envisaged. The Emperor’s invasion hopes were postponed indefinitely by the campaign of Trafalgar in which 7,500 prisoners of war, both French and Spanish, were taken.11 The year 1805 also saw the Admiralty planning a new prison in the windswept Dartmoor countryside, to accommodate the increasing naval harvest of prisoners. The structure was intended to be more economical to run compared to the equivalent number of hulks.

The principal nationalities taken at this time were French, Spanish and Dutch. While the majority was taken at sea, occasional large hauls resulted from the capture of enemy colonies throughout the world, especially in the West Indies which was a major theatre of the war. However, the year 1808 saw the Spanish rise up against their erstwhile allies the French, giving Britain an opportunity to attack the French on the continent. Thus began the campaign in the Iberian Peninsula, which was to generate on occasion an overwhelming number of captives. The conflict involved successful sieges such as Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz, generating 1,100 and 3,700 prisoners respectively. Many enemy soldiers were taken during or immediately after the battles in Spain and Portugal, one example being the Battle of Salamanca at which over 7,000 prisoners were captured.12 The constant maneuvering of the British, Portuguese and Spanish forces resulted in a continuous flow of prisoners to Lisbon and from there to England. The battles and sieges may have generated large numbers of prisoners, but the constant patrols and skirmishes produced a steady trickle of captives.

It was not only British operations that generated captives. The Spanish Juntas did not have the facilities (both practical and administrative) to confine large numbers of prisoners of war, and so Spanish forces handed the majority of enemy soldiers taken by them over to Britain. Although the Spanish held many French prisoners on hulks in Cadiz and on the island of Cabrera, the treatment afforded them was so minimal that from 1810 many of them were sent to England. Spanish guerrilla activity produced captives, both from the military and from the large civilian population following the French armies such as Bernard Tolede, a French hotel manager ‘taken by the inhabitants in Spain, 11th November 1812’.13

The numbers of prisoners being shipped from Lisbon to English ports necessitated an increase in the prison ship establishment. Dartmoor Prison, planned to house the many prisoners arriving during the invasion scare, was finally ready for receiving prisoners in early 1809. This and the re-opening of Portchester Castle in 1810 were fortuitous, as by this time it was obvious that the Iberian Peninsula was to be a major theatre of war. Even this did not immediately alleviate the over-crowding problem in the prisons. That year Wellington was requested not to send any more prisoners from the Peninsula to England for the time being, as there was no room for them. He replied by sending 20,000 French captives to England in 1810–11, as he simply did not have the resources to house, feed and guard them in Spain or Portugal. His problem was compounded by the large numbers of soldiers deserting from French service. Wellington wrote:

Two battalions of the Regiment of Nassau, and one of Frankfurt having quitted the enemy’s army and passed over to that under my command … I now send these troops to England.14

Many of the soldiers in the French Armies were drawn from throughout the French Empire and satellite nations, and included Germans, Italians, Poles and Swiss troops. As the war dragged on, many thousands of such men were captured in battle or as a result of desertion from French service.

While the war at sea included naval engagements both large and small that generated inmates for the war prisons of Britain, there was a continuous sea-going conflict fought by both sides against enemy trade. Naval vessels did capture enemy merchantmen, but the latter were also at considerable risk from privateers.

Privateers were privately owned and armed vessels issued with a licence, or letter of marque, to attack enemy merchant shipping. Such vessels operated from both British and French ports, and were provided with large crews to man the prizes they took. As soon as war was declared in 1793 both sides fitted out privateers to raid the enemy shipping lanes to destroy their commercial capacity and capture seamen, thus weakening the enemy’s naval power.

As French and Dutch colonies fell into British hands, the market for goods manufactured in France and Holland diminished so merchants in these countries turned to financing privateers to maintain their trading interests. As Britain acquired new colonies, so British commerce benefited from these markets. More merchant vessels plying the seas meant more French privateers were fitted out to attack them, and this in turn resulted in increased activity by the Royal Navy to combat the menace. With the decline in overseas trade for France, more goods were sold in Europe, which meant an increase in French coastal shipping. This produced more prizes for the Royal Navy and for the many privateers operating from the ports in southern England and the Channel Islands.

From 1793 to 1797 an increased naval blockade of France further reduced the markets available to French merchants, many of whom invested in privateering. This threat to British trade did not reach serious proportions until 1797, thereafter gradually declining until 1802. French privateer activity never reached the same level during the period 1803 to 1815 as it did the previous decade, the peak being in 1807–08.15

The year 1797 caused many problems for the Admiralty in relation to prisoners of war. This year saw the mutinies at Spithead and the Nore, and news of these events encouraged French merchants to invest in privateering ventures, their reasoning being that these mutinies would seriously affect Britain’s capacity to enforce the naval blockade and to wage war at sea. 1797 saw a peak in the number of French privateers fitted out and launched into the Channel. 1797 also saw a peak in the number of French privateers captured by the British. The previous year had generated 2,448 privateer crewmen for the war prisons; in 1797 a total of 7,094 were taken, while the following year the number had dropped to 5,894, declining still further until 1801.16

What the French failed to understand was that while the main British fleets were temporarily incapacitated, those ships maintaining the blockade of the French coast – the frigates, cutters and sloops – were largely unaffected by the mutinies and continued their patrol of the Channel. The fact that more privateers were venturing forth from French ports only served to hand prizes to the Royal Navy on a plate. Revenue Cutters in the Channel also captured such enemy vessels.

Ships of the Royal Navy employed a number of ruses to ensnare enemy privateers, as generally the latter were faster and more maneuverable. Cinema-goers will be familiar with one method used by the Royal Navy to capture privateers, which was to pretend to be a merchant ship by displaying a total lack of discipline and a casual attitude in handling the ship. The guns were hidden and most of the crew below deck. When the unsuspecting privateer was within range, the covers were thrown off and the crew rushed on deck to open fire. By this time it would be too late for escape and the privateer would become a prize to line the pockets of the jubilant British seamen. The film Master and Commander (based upon the books by Patrick O’Brian) sees Captain Jack Aubrey employing this technique to lure the French privateer Acheron within range of his hidden guns. This was an effective and common technique utilized in the English Channel and the West Indies. Another ruse was to fly the flag of a friendly or neutral state until the privateer came within range. This flag was then run down and the naval ensign hoisted.17

When a privateer was taken the first act was to put a prize crew on board and secure the enemy crew in the hold. The vessel was sailed to the captor’s home port, and this included not only mainland Britain and the Channel Islands, but bases in the West Indies and Canada. Many French privateer crewmen were disembarked at British ports in the West Indies prior to being transferred to England.18

On arrival in Britain the seamen were sent to the nearest land prison or prison ship with space for them, while the officers were conveyed to London under guard to be examined by the Admiralty. They were asked questions to elicit who they were, the origin of their ship plus details of their voyage and cargo, which were confirmed by the ships papers if they had not been thrown overboard. It was important to establish the nationality of the crew, who could be from throughout the French coastal ports, northern Europe, the Mediterranean and North America. Most, however, were usually categorized as ‘French’ or ‘Dutch’ in the General Entry Books for Prisoners of War depending on the nationality of their ship. Occasionally British sailors joined the crew of French privateers and capture by the Royal Navy could find them on trial for treason.19 Soldiers taken on land or at sea were categorized according to the army in which they were serving, so German soldiers captured in Spain were categorised as ‘French’.

Napoleon’s Berlin Decree of November 1806 inaugurated the Continental System, ordering that Britain was to be blockaded; all trade with her should cease; British nationals and goods were to be seized; and no ship was to be allowed to enter a French port after leaving a British one. This was the French response to the failure of peace negotiations and the British order of the previous May that declared that the European coast from Brest to the River Elbe was formally blockaded. The Royal Navy virtually closed all ports (i.e. those from which British commerce was excluded) to neutral shipping which had failed to first call at a British port and pay duty on their cargoes. A British Order in Council of 7 January 1807 was an effort to prevent neutrals from carrying goods between French ports. This activity against each nation’s trade encouraged French merchants to fit out privateers, many of which then fell victim to the blockade by the Royal Navy.

Napoleon’s Milan Decree of 1807 outlawed all neutral shipping that submitted to British rules. The principle neutral nations at that time were Denmark and the United States of America, both countries that prospered through their neutrality. The Danes had suffered many of their merchant vessels being detained by the Royal Navy during 1805 and 1806 when they were suspected of carrying enemy property or contraband. If these vessels were proved to have been engaged in trade that could benefit the enemy, the cargo, and in some cases the ship itself, were condemned as a lawful prize and the captors being awarded prize money. This was an arrangement that suited the Royal Navy to the detriment of the Danish merchant community and Anglo-Danish relations.20 In the summer of 1807 the British Government took the decision to strike against the Danes, launching an attack on Copenhagen. This was to prevent the Danish fleet from falling into the hands of Napoleon and swelling his naval forces. While this aim was dramatically achieved after a bombardment of the city and dockyard, it led to seven years of war with what remained of the Danish Navy in the Baltic region. Many thousands of Danes, both soldiers and seamen, became captives of the British, although these two countries had better diplomatic relations when it came to the exchange of prisoners compared with the situation between Britain and France.

American maritime trade also suffered considerably from the French Decrees and British Orders in Council, as American vessels were barred from any direct traffic between the West Indies; any colony of a belligerent; and any but its own or a British port. There were many in the USA who were prepared to go to war to maintain the right to free trade.21 To enforce the regulation of trade, the Royal Navy was empowered to stop and search any ship on the high seas. If that was not bad enough in American eyes, there was also the serious quarrel over impressment.

Britain experienced a continual shortage of seamen to man her ships. Vessels of the Royal Navy had a reputation for harsh conditions and indefinite service on board, and whenever possible many British seamen deserted to the American merchant service where the conditions and treatment were better. Indeed, many American ship owners positively welcomed deserting British seamen, finding such experienced sailors an asset to their vessels. The British response was the search of neutral ships and the seizure of any crewmen considered Britons. It was often difficult to identify British nationals and many American seamen were impressed in ‘error’. Frequent complaints were lodged by the United States over the impressment of its nationals.

Public opinion in the USA finally forced President James Madison to sign a declaration of war against Great Britain on 18 June 1812. The Americans had as their war aims the restoration of maritime rights; an end to impressment; the final destruction of the Indian threat to the frontier lands (this threat often being materially supported by Britain) and the annexation of Canada.

This act had three effects that influenced the prisoner of war population held by Britain. First, the resulting land campaign in Canada generated many prisoners. Second, American privateers attacked British merchant vessels in the West Indies, the Atlantic and even around the coast of Britain. Third, those American seamen who had been pressed into service on board His Majesty’s ships immediately gave themselves up as prisoners of war. The records contain many entries regarding such seamen. Charles Parditt ‘gave himself up on board HMS Ocean, being an American subject’ in November 1812. HMS Aboukir lost four of her crew in this way in the same month, and the situation was the same on board many other ships of the Royal Navy.22