In 1812, Hageman, the bread contractor, was brought up for fraudulent dealing, and was mulcted in £3,000, others concerned in the transactions being imprisoned for long terms. I am glad to be able to ring a change in the somewhat monotonous tone of the prisoners’ complaints, inasmuch as American prisoners have placed on record their experiences: one of them, Andrews, in a very comprehensive and detailed form. From the autumn of 1812 to April of 1813, there were 900 American prisoners at Chatham, 100 at Portsmouth, 700 at Plymouth, ‘most of them destitute of clothes and swarming with vermin.’ On April 2, 1813, the Transport Board ordered them all to Dartmoor, no doubt because of their ceaseless attempts to escape from the hulks. They were horrified, for they knew it to have the reputation of being the worst prison in England. From the Plymouth hulks _Hector_ and _Le Brave_, 250 were landed at New Passage, and marched the seventeen miles to Dartmoor, where were already 5,000 French prisoners. On May 1, 1813, Cotgrave, the Governor, ordered all the American prisoners to be transferred to No. 4 _caserne_, where were already 900 French ‘Romans’. [Illustration: DARTMOOR. THE ORIGINAL MAIN ENTRANCE. (_From a sketch by the Author._) ] The garrison at Dartmoor consisted of from 1,200 to 1,500 men, who, says Andrews, without the smallest foundation of fact, had been told off for this duty as punishment for offences. The truth is, that as our small regular army was on duty in many places elsewhere, the Militia had to be drawn upon for the garrisoning of war-prisons, and that on account of the many ‘pickings’ to be had, war-prison duty was rather sought than shunned. The garrison was frequently changed at all the war-prisons for no other reason than that between guards and guarded an undesirable intimacy usually developed. The American prisoners, who, throughout the war, were generally of a superior type to the Frenchmen, very much resented this association of them with the low-class ruffians in No. 4. I may here quote Mr. Eden Phillpotts’s remarks in his _Farm of the Dagger_.