In 1779 Howard reported that there were 392 French and 298 American prisoners in Millbay. He noted that neither the wards nor the court-yards apportioned to the Frenchmen were so spacious and convenient as were those in the American part of the prison, nor were the provisions so good. In the hospital there were fifty patients; it was dirty and offensive, and Howard found only three pairs of sheets in use. (Herbert, above quoted, said that the hospital was not worthy of the name, that when it rained the wet beat upon the patients as they lay in their beds.) A new hospital was building, Howard continues, but he considered the wards were being made too low and too close, being seventeen feet ten inches wide, and ten feet high. In the American blocks the regulations were hung up according to rule, and he notes Article 5 of these to the effect that: ‘As water and tubs for washing their linen and clothes will be allowed, the prisoners are advised to keep their persons as clean as possible, it being conducive to health.’ I now make an extract from _The Memoirs of Commodore Barney_, published in Boston, 1832, chiefly on account of his stirring escape from Millbay, therein described. Barney was captured in December 1780 by H.M.S. _Intrepid_, Captain Malloy, whom he stigmatizes as the embodiment of all that is brutal in man. He was carried to England on the _Yarmouth, 74_, with seventy other American officers. They were confined, he says, in the hold, under three decks, twelve feet by twenty feet, and three feet high, without light and almost without air. The result was that during the fifty-three days’ passage in the depths of winter, from New York to Plymouth, eleven of them died, and that when they arrived at Plymouth, few of them were able to stand, and all were temporarily blinded by the daylight. It sounds incredible, but Mrs. Barney, the editress of the volume, says: ‘What is here detailed is given without adornment or exaggeration, almost in the very words of one who saw and suffered just as he has described.’ Barney was sent first to a hulk, which he describes as a Paradise when compared with the _Yarmouth_, and as soon as they could walk, he and his companions went to Mill Prison, ‘as rebels.’ He lost no time in conspiring to escape. With infinite pains he and others forced their way through the stone walls and iron gratings of the common sewer, only to find, after wading through several hundred feet of filth, their exit blocked by a double iron grating. He then resolved to act independently, and was suddenly afflicted by a sprain which put him on crutches. He found a sympathetic friend in a sentry who, for some reason or other, had often manifested friendship for the American prisoners. This man contrived to obtain for him a British officer’s undress uniform. One day Barney said to him, ‘To-day?’ to which the laconic reply was ‘Dinner’, by which Barney understood that his hours on duty would be from twelve till two.