Devonshire August and September 2017

THOUSANDS OF CAPTURED
FRENCHMEN were
imprisoned in Devon during
the Napoleonic wars which,
off-and-on, ran between 1803
and 1815. Eleven thousand of
them died here during their
incarceration and are buried in
mass graves at Dartmoor prison.
The French prisoners on Dartmoor
by John Fisher
So too are 271 American sailors captured
during the 1812 American war.
Initially they were put into military prisons
and prison ‘hulks’, derelict ships anchored
in estuaries. Conditions on these hulks
were appalling with overcrowding, poor
diet, crude sanitation and little in the way
of exercise or fresh air.
Prison ship 'The Devonshire'
Many of these hulks were in Plymouth and
too close for comfort to Plymouth Docks
and the temptation for hundreds of highlyqualified
young marins to break out and
‘liberate’ one or two of His Majesty’s menof-war
in a getaway.
Death rates rose to an unacceptable level
and it was decided to build an escape-proof
prison on land. The Plymouth hulks were
emptied one at a time and the local militia
escorted the prisoners and their possessions
as they were marched out of the city and
up onto the moor.
It's not what you'd consider the most cheerful looking place, Dartmoor Prison was
originally built to accommodate Napoleonic prisoners of war, but it must have been
very welcome to prisoners after a prolonged stay on one of the prison ships
The prison that awaited them, then as now,
was a forbidding looking place: grey and
cheerless it had been built from Dartmoor
granite by local labour in the middle of
nowhere and as far as could be judged
on that late, May afternoon in 1809 as
the first contingent arrived, it also looked
escape-proof.
ocean waves changed into granite during a
tempestuous storm, and you will then form
an idea of what Dartmoor is like.”
But to those ragged, pale-faced men escaping
those sodden, cheerless, wooden hell-holes
that had contained some of them for years,
it must have looked like a paradise.
The entrance to Dartmoor Prison
In describing Dartmoor’s rolling hills
and valleys at that time, a Monsieur Jules
Poulain, a Frenchman who is said to have
lived at Princetown to be near a friend who
was confined there, wrote, ”Think of the
Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt
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