At Hakodate they were received by a great crowd, among which were several persons with silk dresses mounted on horses with rich caparisons. “Both sides of the road,” says Golownin, “were crowded with spectators, yet every one behaved with the utmost decorum. I particularly marked their countenances, and never once observed a malicious look, or any sign of hatred towards us, and none showed the least disposition to insult us by mockery or derision.” He had observed the same thing in the villages through which they had passed, where the prisoners had received, as they did afterwards, from numerous individuals, many touching instances of commiseration and sympathy. At Hakodate they were confined in a prison, a high wooden enclosure, or fence, surrounded by an earthen wall somewhat lower (and on their first approach to it hung with striped cloth),[93] inside of which was a long, barn-like building. Within this building were a number of small apartments, scarcely six feet square, formed of thick spars, and exactly like cages, in which the prisoners were shut up, the passages and other spaces being occupied by the guards.[94] Their food was much worse than on the journey (probably Japanese prison fare), boiled rice, soup of warm water and grated radish, a handful of finely chopped young onions with boiled beans, and one or two pickled cucumbers or radishes. Instead of the radish-soup, puddings of bean-meal and rancid fish-oil were sometimes served. Very rarely they had half a fish, with soy. Their drink was warm water, and occasionally bad tea. Their only means of communicating with the Japanese had been, at first, a Kurile, one of the prisoners, who knew a little Russian, and probably about as much Japanese. At Hakodate another interpreter presented himself; but he, a man of fifty, naturally stupid, and knowing nothing of any European language, except a little Russian, did not prove much better.