‘We cannot impress such a duty on our agents, as they consider it an impossibility to prevent the prisoners from selling them, as all the Vigilance exercised by the officers of the Department is insufficient to prevent the prisoners from making away with the most necessary articles of clothing and bedding.’ That the Transport Office were justified in their refusal is confirmed by an incident at the final embarkation of the French prisoners from the Perth dépôt in July of the same year, 1814. A considerable number of French Testaments were sent from Edinburgh to be distributed among the prisoners leaving for France. The distribution was duly made, but by the time the prisoners had reached the waterside, almost every man had sold his Testament for a trifling sum. It cannot be doubted, I think, that the hardships endured by the prisoners in the war prisons were very much exaggerated, and also that to a very large extent the prisoners brought them upon themselves. Especially was this the case in the matter of insufficient food and clothing. Gambling was the besetting sin of the prisons, and to get the wherewithal to gamble the prisoners sold clothing, bedding, and not only their rations for the day, but for days to come. At Dartmoor the evil occasioned by the existence of the sale of rations by prisoners to ‘brokers’, who resold them at a profit, was so great that Captain Cotgrave, the Governor, in February 1813, sent a number of the ‘brokers’ to the _cachot_. To their remonstrance he replied, in writing, much as a sailor man he would have spoken: ‘To the Prisoners in the Cachot for purchasing Provisions. The Orders to put you on short allowance (2/3rds) from the Commissioners of His Majesty’s Transport Board is for purchasing the provisions of your fellow prisoners, by which means numbers have died from want of food, and the hospital is filled with sick not likely to recover. The number of deaths occasioned by this inhuman practise occasions considerable expense to the Government, not only in coffins, but the hospital is filled with these poor, unhappy wretches so far reduced from want of food that they linger a considerable time in the hospital at the Government’s expense, and then fall a victim to the cruelty of those who have purchased their provisions, to the disgrace of Christians and whatever nation they belong to. ‘The testimony of the surgeons and your countrymen prove the fact.’