The Yanks locked up and shot in HMP Dartmoor
The shooting started soon after six on a chilly evening in April. It was 1815 and Dartmoor Prison, one of the most feared institutions in the world, was full of American sailors captured by British vessels during the Naval War of 1812.
This was a battle over who controlled the seas: the fledgling America couldn’t hope to match the British Royal Navy, but they could arm merchant vessels and encourage them to attack British shipping. This infuriated the British, who attacked American vessels in retaliation and, rather than press-ganging the crew into naval service, packed them off to Dartmoor.
The conflict was long over, but 6,500 American prisoners of war (PoWs) were still languishing inside those massive
granite walls, victims of both governments who were playing political games and delaying ratifying the treaty to end the war.
According to the diaries of American inmate Frank Palmer, some prisoners were ‘determined to make some bold attempt to escape from this damned prison’. On April 6, a large crowd of prisoners started an impromptu playful fight, hurling mud at each other and at the soldiers guarding them. In the confusion, it took the guards a while to spot a smaller crowd trying to punch a hole in the inner wall between the prison yard and the barracks. It was a prison break.
The situation rapidly deteriorated. The soldiers moved through the yard firing in all directions. Prisoners ran back to the cell blocks, trying to get through locked doors. The soldiers fired on them and also on men trying to carry their injured friends to safety. Then, wrote Frank, the guards fired through the doors and narrow windows, ‘without mercy’.
When the shooting stopped, men lay bleeding and groaning all around. Six were dead and three more soon died of their injuries. Frank wrote in his journal: ‘Is this not a sufficient proof of British barbarity? . . . Never will I make peace with
the english until I revenge the blood of my countrymen.’ As it happens, the men who lost their lives in Dartmoor were the last Americans to be killed in conflict between Britain and the U.S.
Grim, bleak and forbidding, Dartmoor prison in the wild Devonshire countryside was used as a jokey threat by beleaguered parents of a certain generation (mine, probably) to delinquent children: ‘If you carry on like this you’ll end up in Dartmoor.’
The prison was built in the Napoleonic Wars to hold French captives, soon followed by the 6,500 American sailors from the War of 1812 — the last time Britain and America were at war. Nicholas
Guyatt, the distinguished professor of American history at Cambridge University, decided to tell the story of those prisoners after a family holiday to Devon when he saw the graves of 271 American PoWs, just some of those who died during their incarceration.
Meticulously researched using contemporary prisoners’ journals, Guyatt brilliantly recreates the harsh, claustrophobic life inside the massive walls: wearing bright yellow uniforms covered with upward arrows like the best comic strip images, the men survived on a sparse diet of biscuits, bread and rice.
As inmate Benjamin Browne wrote, the cells were ‘very dark, very damp, very dirty and as uncomfortable places of abode as the malicious ingenuity of their contrivers could have hit upon.’ At the heart of the narrative is the massacre itself. But there is so much more to this: it is a prison drama about the extraordinary ingenuity men can display under the cruellest conditions. There was a rich cultural life, as the men tried to create an American ‘world in miniature’. Prisoners taught each other languages and science; they put on plays, learned dancing, staged boxing matches and played ball games. They collected books, loaned out for a modest fee, and the place was described as a ‘university with seven colleges’. Guyatt paints a vivid portrait of some of the extraordinary men who peopled the prison and he explores the racism intrinsic to Dartmoor: of the 6,500 men in the prison, at least 1,000 were men of colour, both Native
Americans and African Americans. The life of a sailor with its possibilities and level playing field was enormously attractive, especially to poorer Americans, and it was also a good escape from slavery for men such as the redoubtable Richard ‘King Dick’ Crafus, a giant of about 6 ft 7 in from Maryland who stalked the corridors of Prison Four with a couple of young acolytes, keeping order with a giant club.
Dartmoor has changed now — downgraded to a Category C prison for non-violent offenders and whitecollar criminals. There were plans to close it altogether by 2023.
A Plymouth newspaper offered four suggestions as to how it might survive without inmates: it could become a boutique hotel, a backpackers’ hostel, a paintballing experience or a venue for raves and parties. You wonder what the veterans of that chilly April evening in 1815 would have made of that . . .