This decree was not a dead letter. Many persons were seized, imprisoned, and executed, without trial, or knowing their accusers. But the deepest stain upon the Spanish character, at this period, was the treatment experienced by prisoners of war. Thousands, and amongst them part of Dupont’s troops, who were only prisoners by a breach of faith, were sent to the Balearic Isles, but no order was taken for their subsistence. When remonstrated with, the junta cast seven thousand ashore on the little desert rock of Cabrera. At Majorca, numbers had been massacred by the inhabitants, in the most cowardly and brutal manner, but those left on Cabrera suffered miseries that can scarcely be described. The supply of food, always scanty, was often neglected altogether: there was but one spring on the rock, which dried up in summer; clothes were never given to them except by the English seamen, who, compassionating their sufferings, often assisted them, in passing the island. Thus, afflicted with hunger, thirst, and nakedness, they lived like wild beasts while they could live, but perished in such numbers, that less than two thousand remained to tell the tale of this inhumanity; and surely, it was no slight disgrace that the English government failed to interfere on such an occasion. [Sidenote: Appendix, No. 9.] [Sidenote: Lord Collingwood’s Correspondence.] [Sidenote: General Miller’s Memoirs.] But what were the efforts made for the defence of the country by this inhuman junta, which, having been originally assembled to discuss the form of establishing a central government, had, unlawfully, retained their delegated power, and used it so shamefully? There was a Spanish fleet, and a sufficient number of sailors to man it, in Carthagena. There was another fleet, and abundance of seamen, in Cadiz. Lord Collingwood, and others, pressed the junta, constantly and earnestly, to fit these vessels out, and to make use of them, or at least to place them beyond the reach of the enemy. His remonstrances were unheeded; the sailors were rendered mutinous for want of pay, and even of subsistence, and the government would neither fit out ships themselves, nor suffer the English seamen to do it for them; and at the very period when the marquis of Romana and the insurgents in Gallicia were praying for a few stands of arms and five thousand pounds, from sir John Cradock, the junta possessed many millions of money, and their magazines, in Cadiz, were unable to contain the continually increasing quantity of stores and arms arriving from England, which were left to rot as they arrived, while, from every quarter of the country not yet subdued, the demand for these things was incessant.