The Americans, whether ashore or afloat, were the hardest prisoners to guard of any. They seem never to have relaxed in their plans and attempts to escape, and as they were invariably better supplied with money than Frenchmen and Spaniards, they could add the power of the bribe to the power which knowledge of their captors’ language gave them. Hence no estimate can be formed of the real number of Americans who got away from the hulks, for, although a very exact system of roll call was in use, the ingenuity of the Americans, immensely backed by their purses, contrived matters so that not merely were the numbers on board always complete at each roll call, but upon more than one occasion, by some over-exercise of ingenuity, the captain of a hulk actually found himself commanding more prisoners than there were! By way of relief to the monotony of this _guerre à outrance_ between captors and captives we may quote instances when the better humanity of the hapless ones came to the fore. In 1812 a prisoner made an attempt to set the hulk _Ganges_ on fire at Plymouth, and a large hole was burned in her side. The other prisoners helped to extinguish the flames, and were so angry with the incendiary that they were with difficulty prevented from tearing him to pieces. Three officers of the Inverness Militia were sailing in the harbour at Portsmouth in the same year, when a squall upset their boat, and they were thrown into the water. One of the officers could not swim, and seeing him struggling for life, a French prisoner on the _Crown_ hulk at once sprang overboard and brought him safely to the ship. He was at once liberated and returned to France. But even heroism became a cloak for trickery among these weary, hopeless, desperate exiles ever on the watch for a chance of escaping. In 1810 a French prisoner at Plymouth obtained his freedom by saving a British sentry from drowning, but the number of British sentries who, after this, met with accidents which tumbled them overboard, and the unfailing regularity with which heroic prisoner-rescuers appeared on the scene, awakened the suspicions of the authorities, who found out that these occurrences were purely commercial transactions. So they stopped automatically. It is equally pleasing to come across, in this continually dreary record of crime and misery, a foreign testimony to English kindness. The following letter was kindly lent to me by Mr. J. E. Mace, of Tenterden, Kent, to whose grandfather it was addressed: ‘Chatham. Le 10 janvier, 1798. ‘_A Monsieur Mace, Tenterden._ ‘CHER MONSIEUR: