The better portion strove manfully to arrest the tendency around them to degradation, and constituted themselves a court to try offenders. When theft was proved on one, a punishment of twenty-seven lashes was inflicted. They also used every inducement to prevent the sailors from enlisting in the British service, to which last resort many were driven, to escape the horrors of that gloomy prison. When the 4th of July arrived, they determined to celebrate the national anniversary in their own prison, and so having by some means obtained two American standards, they placed them at the two ends of the building, outside the walls, and forming into two columns marched up and down the yard, singing patriotic songs, whistling patriotic tunes, and cheering the flag of their country. The keeper, hearing of it, ordered the turnkeys to take away the flags; but the prisoners sent to him, requesting as a particular favor that they might be allowed to celebrate the anniversary of their country's independence, adding if he insisted on attacking their colors he must take the consequences. The guards were then ordered in, when a scuffle ensued, in which one flag was taken, but the prisoners bore the other off in triumph to their room. At evening, when the guards came as usual to shut them up, a great deal of severe language and opprobrious epithets were used, stigmatizing the pitiful revenge in taking away their flags as mean and contemptible. Retorts followed, blows succeeded, and finally the guard fired on the crowd, wounding two men. Thus ended the 4th of July, 1813, in Dartmoor. In the apartments above the Americans, were crowded nearly a thousand French prisoners, miserable outcasts, with scarcely any thing left of our common humanity but the form. Many of them were entirely naked, and slept on the stone floor, stretched out like so many swine. The moment clothing was given them they would gamble it away. These wretches formed a conspiracy to murder all the Americans. Arming themselves with whatever weapon they could lay hands on, they contrived one morning to get into the yard before the latter, and as the first group of Americans, a hundred and fifty in number, emerged into the open air, fell upon them with the ferocity of fiends. Passing between them and the prison, they blocked the entrance to prevent the others from coming to the rescue. A wild scene of confusion and tumult followed. The French succeeded in stabbing and knocking down and mangling nearly every American, and would doubtless have beaten the whole to death had not the guard, attracted by the cries for help and shrieks of murder, rushed in, and by a bayonet charge ended the fray. A great number of the Americans were more or less injured and twenty shockingly mangled.