Yankee Ships and Yankee Sailors: Tales of 1812Barnes, James
History
Yankee Ships and Yankee Sailors: Tales of 1812
Barnes, James
United States -- History -- War of 1812 -- Naval operations -- Juvenile fiction
So much for the code duello, so much for false pride and extreme ideas
of what should touch one's honor. Can we think that such things really
happened, and so short a time ago! Have we not reason to rejoice that
it is all over? That people no longer start at the sound of shots in
shady lanes, run across tragedies on lawns or in tavern courtyards?
There is just another word or so to add that points a stronger moral
and rounds up the chapter: Joseph Bainbridge fell also in a duel. He,
alas, had many of them; but like all the rest, there was a last one.
The public mourned many times because good men were lost for causes in
which the nation had no interest and that could have been passed by
with a wave of the hand. A sad history that of "the field of honor."
DARTMOOR
The word "Dartmoor" means little to the ear of the American of this
generation, for it is the name of a town on the bleak open stretches
back from the sea in Devonshire. But during our war with England, and
for a long time afterward, the word "Dartmoor" brought up much the same
kind of recollections that "Andersonville" or "Libby" does to-day. It
was the prison where England kept in confinement those unfortunates
that the fate of war had thrown upon her hands. It was a safe
seclusion, indeed, and for the better explanation of the story that is
to be told here, it might be well worth the while to tell in a few
words what manner of place it was. Surrounding an enclosure, circular
in shape, and containing about eight acres, was a high stone wall,
where the sentries patrolled their beats, where they could look down
into the courtyards of the gloomy prison buildings some twenty feet
below them. The enclosure was divided into three partitions, by walls
that crossed the main space diagonally, and through which there were
grated gateways leading from one department to the other. The
buildings, seven in number, radiated from a common point like wheel
spokes. They were built of brick, with small iron-barred windows, and
in the entrance archway, leading from one yard to another (each
building had a separate yard), there were always stationed after sunset
two armed sentries with primed muskets. While the occupants of any one
building had access to all parts of it and to the others during the
daytime, it was difficult, indeed, to make a journey, or pay a visit,
after nightfall.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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