Abundant testimony can be adduced to the truth of what Vattel asserts from contemporary records as to both nations. {4} But between 1758 and 1773, the dates of the first and second editions of the French work just quoted, there was born, in Ajaccio in Corsica, a man who was to change all this—Napoleon Buonaparte, who, contemporaneously with the building of Norman Cross Prison, was erecting the pedestal on which he afterwards stood as Emperor, who for twenty years hung over Europe as a great shadow, keeping our ancestors in this country in very pressing terror of invasion, whom the British feared and hated, and whose dominant passion, as time went on, was hatred of England as the insuperable obstacle in his path of conquest. This little history will reveal to some extent the results of his methods as they affected the unfortunate soldiers and sailors who became prisoners of war. This is no place for discussing the right and wrong of the devastating Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars; the treatment of the prisoners of war, as shown in their prison life, alone finds its place in a History of the Depot at Norman Cross. At the commencement of the war the prisoners on either side were comparatively few, but early in its progress embarrassment arose on the British side from the large numbers of French and Dutch taken in the great naval victories of Howe, Jervis, Collingwood, and Nelson. To maintain these prisoners on a foreign shore or in the face of the enemy was impossible, and as their number increased it became evident that the existing prisons, and the few fortresses remaining in Britain, such as Porchester Castle near Portsmouth, Plymouth, Falmouth, and Fort George in Scotland, which had been hurriedly fitted up and converted into war prisons, were insufficient for the ever-increasing number of captives. To supplement these it became necessary to fit up special ships and maintain them as hulks, in the harbours of Portsmouth, Plymouth, and the Medway. These hulks were later used as places of confinement for malefactors among the prisoners, and also to relieve the prisons from overcrowding whenever an extraordinary accumulation took place in the country. In an article published in _Chambers’ Journal_ in 1854, the writer points out “the ships were large battleships, they were cleared of all obstructions in each deck, and would hold 900 men prisoners and the guard, without much overcrowding; the mortality was very low.” {5}