“The name of Isaac Cotgrave, agent at Dartmoor, of cruel memory, will ever be engraven in odious characters on the minds of every American who witnessed his unparalleled cruelty.”
Presently the iron sceptre was wrested from his hand and placed beyond his reach. The new agent, Captain Thomas G. Shortland, at this time, December, 1812, superseded Cotgrave. Shortland was a man whose feelings had not yet grown callous, and at his first arrival he was shocked at the scenes of misery which presented themselves in every shape. Touched with compassion he could not continue the cruel practice of counting over the prisoners every morning in the yard. He countermanded the order which his predecessor pretended he was obliged to enforce, and he declared to the prisoners that he would do all in his power to procure them better treatment from his government.
The year 1814 began with as cold weather as was ever experienced in the city of New York. The buckets in the prison containing ten or twelve quarts froze in the short space of four hours to a solid mass, and the prisoners must have inevitably 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 was set hard and the weather was said to be colder than it had been for fifty years before. The water was all frozen and the prisoners obliged to eat snow for drink. The guards were driven to abandon their posts on the walls and retire to the guard house; not one sentry was on duty except inside the barracks. At midnight eight prisoners, thinking to take advantage of the night to make their escape as no sentries were in sight, formed a ladder and with it ascended and descended the first wall directly against the guard house; in ascending the second the soldiers in the guard house discovered them and prevented seven; the eighth got over the wall and got away. Those recaptured were at once carried to the black-hole, the first destination of all who tried and failed to escape. The weather was bitterly cold; still despite their sufferings they were passed on to the inner dungeon and lay there for ten days and nights on the straw; worse threatened, and for the whole of the inhabitants of Dartmoor communication with Plymouth was interrupted and supplies promised to run short. Everyone was put on half or two-thirds allowance. Salt rations, a reserve of which was always kept in stock, were issued to garrison and prisoners alike and the total, it was estimated, would not last for more than ten days for the large population shut in, amounting to nine thousand French and American prison troops, and numbering fifteen hundred with officers, doctors and turnkeys besides.