According to Capt. Shortland’s advice, and our own necessities, we again made application to Mr. Beasley. In this letter we informed him that we were fully of opinion that the United States would sanction any reasonable overtures he should make to prevent her citizens from starving or perishing for want in a foreign prison; that his being agent for the United States was sufficient power, and he had a right to pledge the credit of the United States, which was amply sufficient to procure any sum requisite for our relief. We farther stated, in the most unequivocal terms, that unless some relief was given us soon, that the prisoners had come to a unanimous and final determination to offer our services _en masse_ to the British government, and at the same time transmit to the United States a copy of all letters from us to him, and set forth to Congress all our reasons for so doing, which would most undoubtedly cast all the blame on him. This month ended with increased cold, and snow falling daily. The prisoners did not go out of their hammocks, only at dinner, which was the only meal they had. _January, 1814._--The year commences with as cold weather as we ever experienced in the city of New York; the buckets in the prison, in the short space of four hours, froze ten or twelve quarts to a solid, and the prisoners must inevitably have frozen, were not the hammocks placed so near together as to communicate the animal heat from one man to another. The running stream that supplied the prison froze solid, and the weather was allowed to be colder than it had been for fifty years before. On the 1st the snow was two feet on the level, and began to snow again; the cold somewhat abated, and it continued snowing the greater part of the time till the nineteenth; it had now got to be four feet on the level, and the drifts in the yards as high as the prison walls (fifteen feet), the water all frozen, and the prisoners obliged to eat snow for drink. The guards were all obliged to leave the walls and retire to the guard-house; no sentry on duty except in the barracks.