Deeds of violence did occur at times, as was only natural in a community circumstanced and constituted as was this crowd of prisoners of war; such deeds were, however, apparently rare. Some instances with a fatal termination are culled from entries in the register of deaths. “A seaman, aged twenty-three, killed from a blow in Prison by the following Black Man”—the next entry being one of a prisoner born in Dominique—“who hung himself in the Black Hole”; this man, “born in Dominique,” being undoubtedly the Black Man of the previous entry. “A soldier, a French prisoner, killed by one Jean François Pors in self-defence as the verdict at Coroner’s inquest.” A sailor, captured at Trafalgar, “shot by a sergeant of the West Essex Militia, verdict by Coroner’s Inquest, Chance Medley.” As to this entry, is it not probable that this sergeant of the West Essex Militia was the victim of the outrage reported in _The Stamford Mercury_, 12th February 1812, and that the chance medley may have been a struggle over a bundle of straw plait. In another entry death is occasioned by a stab from one of the prisoners accidentally; this might well have been a death in a duel, the witnesses of the duel, to exculpate the man who gave the fatal wound, giving evidence which satisfied the authorities that the stab was accidental. Duels were not infrequent, the weapons usually extemporised from knives which were fastened to sticks, or swords made out of sharpened hoop-iron or other similar material; and although there is no definite entry of a death as occurring in a duel, it is more than probable that the above entry as to the soldier killed by one Jean François Pors in self-defence is a euphemistic way of expressing that he was killed in a duel, and that this was the usual form of verdict on the victim of a fatal duel. The entries in the registers and in the certificates cannot be accepted as evidence disproving the statements of those who say that such deaths occurred, as there is good reason to believe that neither the registers nor the certificates were at certain periods of the war kept with sufficient accuracy to render them as valuable sources of information as they should have been. And in the event of a violent death, necessitating an inquest, at which the jury pronounces and the coroner records the cause of death, it was not improbable that the prison surgeon’s certificate, confirmed by the signature of the agent, would be missing from the records. Mention has already been made of the imperfection and hopeless incompleteness of the registers in the Record Office.