MEET THE AUTHOR

NICHOLAS GUYATT’s new book The Hated Cage is about an uprising by US prisoners of war in Dartmoor Prison in 1815

How did you research the book?

Dartmoor Prison has got a register of these 6,500 US sailors who were imprisoned there. Different columns list how old they were, where they came from in the USA, and tell you a bit about their race. The register also says what they looked like. The main thing I did that made the book possible is that I transcribed the register, so I basically had a massive spreadsheet where

I put all 6,500 names.

What were the problems with researching the stories of the black prisoners?

Approximately 1,000 of those 6,500 Americans were black. There are maybe three- or fourdozen accounts of the prison that are written by white people, but not a single one by a black person. There are diaries written by the prisoners that survive, and there were lots of memoirs and retrospectives that got written up by prisoners for a public audience, and a lot of them didn’t come out until the 1830s or the 1840s. In the 1830s and the 1840s the USA was definitely an even more challenging place for African-Americans than it had been in the 1810s.

So for me one of the revelations when I was trying to think about writing the book was to compare those journals and diaries – which were kind of unmediated, real-time impressions – with these memoirs that were written afterwards. And they tell strikingly different stories. I think that there was a kind of lived experience of racial solidarity, a kind of coming together, which all the memoirs tried to forget.

Did you learn anything from writing the book?

If you talk to people now in Britain or the USA and ask them about the Dartmoor Massacre, this event at the end of the War of 1812 when nine Americans were shot dead, nobody knows anything about it at all.

The reason for this is that the prisoners were the last Americans to die in a war between Britain and the USA. The two countries subsequently became much more friendly, developing the quote-unquote ‘special relationship’, and the consequence of that was that the story of these men at Dartmoor and what they suffered was never useful. Because it was never really something that there was any kind of political gain in remembering, these people were completely forgotten.

I thought about that quite a lot. It made me reflect upon what we remember in the past and what we forget – and I realised that those of us in the present have no control over the way that we’ll be remembered. We have no control over whether the future decides to forget us.