‘S’il est cruel d’être livré aux dégoûts et aux peines que cause la captivité la plus dure, il est bien doux de trouver des êtres sensibles qui, comme vous, cher Monsieur, savent plaindre le sort rigoureux des victimes de la guerre. Ce que vous avez eu la bonté de m’envoyer, plus encore, l’expression des beaux sentiments me touche, me pénètre de la plus vive reconnaissance, et me fait sentir avec une nouvelle force cette vérité constante:—L’Humanité rapproche et unit tous les cœurs faits pour elle. Comme vous, cher Monsieur, et avec vous, je désire avec ferveur que les principes de notre Divin Législateur reprennent leur Empire sur la terre, la conséquence en est si belle! ‘Dieu vous garde beaucoup d’années. ‘FARBOURIET, Colonel 12^{me} Hussards.’ In 1807, as a consequence of the bombardment of Copenhagen and the subsequent surrender to England of the Danish fleet, there were 1,840 Danish prisoners in England, who received double the allowance of French prisoners, inasmuch as they were rather hostages than prisoners—hostages for the good behaviour of Denmark as regards Napoleon;—the captain of a man-of-war got four shillings per diem, a commanding officer two shillings, the captain of an Indiaman three shillings, and so on. In other respects they were treated as prisoners of war. These Danes were largely taken from the hulks to man our merchant navy, and one Wipperman, a Danish clerk on H.M.S. _Utile_, seems to have made this transfer business a very profitable one, until the accusation brought against him by a Danish prisoner of war of having obtained a watch and some money under false pretences, brought to light the fact that his men rarely if ever joined the British merchant service except to desert at the first opportunity, and generally went at large as free men. He was severely punished, and his exposure brought to an end an extensive crimping system by which hundreds of dangerous foreigners had been let loose from the prison ships, many of them spies and escape-aiders. Foreign writers have included among their various complaints against the British Government its reluctance to allow religious ministration among the prisoners of war. But the Transport Office, as we shall see later, had learned by experience that the garb of sanctity was by no means always the guarantee of sanctity, and so when in 1808 a Danish parson applied to be allowed on the prison ships at Chatham, he got his permission only on the condition that ‘he does not repeat, the old offence of talking upon matters unconnected with his mission and so cause much incorrect inferences’—a vague expression which probably meant talking about outside affairs to prisoners, who had no other source of information.