When Bonnefoux was at Chatham, there were five prison ships moored under the lee of Sheppey between Chatham and Sheerness. He describes the interior arrangements of a hulk, but it resembles exactly that of the painter Garneray whose fuller account I give next. Writing in 1835, the Baron says: ‘It is difficult to imagine a more severe punishment; it is cruel to maintain it for an indefinite period, and to submit to it prisoners of war who deserve much consideration, and who incontestably are the innocent victims of the fortune of war. The British prison ships have left profound impressions on the minds of the Frenchmen who have experienced them; an ardent longing for revenge has for long moved their hearts, and even to-day when a long duration of peace has created so much sympathy between the two nations, erstwhile enemies, I fear that, should this harmony between them be disturbed, the remembrance of these horrible places would be reawakened.’ Very bitterly does the Baron complain of the bad and insufficient food, and of the ill-fitting, coarse, and rarely renewed clothing, and he is one of those who branded the commanders of the prison ships as the ‘rebuts’—the ‘cast-offs’ of the British navy. The prisoners on the _Bahama_ consisted largely of privateer captains, the most restless and desperate of all the prisoners of war, men who were socially above the common herd, yet who had not the _cachet_ of the regular officers of the navy, who regarded themselves as independent of such laws and regulations as bound the latter, and who were also independent in the sense of being sometimes well-to-do and even rich men. At first there was an inclination among some of these to take Bonnefoux down as an ‘aristo’; they ‘tutoyer’d’ him, and tried to make him do the fagging and coolie work which, on prison ships as in schools, fell to the lot of the new-comer. But the Baron from the first took up firmly the position of an officer and a gentleman, and showed the rough sea-dogs of the Channel ports that he meant it, with the result that they let him alone.