RELICS OF 1810

Greymouth Evening Star, 31 March 1930, Page 8

RELICS OF 1810

SECRETS IN WOODEN BOX. About the year 1876 a troopship landed from India the King’s Royal Rifles, formerly the 60th Foot, says the “Times Weekly.” The soldiers, after the habit of their kind, brotight with them many curious objects, token and souvenirs of their foreign service. And one of them named Swan carried in his baggage perhaps the most curious object of them all. It was a little box; the sides made of four pieces of different woods, hard and soft, with a slight overlapping lid of soft wood attached by two hinges of iron wire. The whole box measured 7in. long by Sin. high and deep. The sides and the lid were decorated with an applied ornament made of small strips of variously coloured straw arranged in a central panel representing houses and trees

within a border of the straws set slant. There is no record to tell in what Indian bazaar the soldier had picked up this peculiar treasure. For some 50 years it remained in his son’s family, preserved among the “army things,” as the memorials of his father were called. Then one day the son of the house, looking round for a box to use in the construction of a wireless set, found this Indian relic

and began to handle it, when the bottom fell out, and from the cavity thus revealed came IS letters written on old ptiper and in a language unknown to the family. His father, Mr J. W. Swan, brought the box and its contents to British Museum, and there the strange history of the casket was revealed. For the straw work was of a familiar type, a manufacture which occupied the long, weary leisure of French prisoners in English camps and hulks in the days of the Napoleonic wars. The letters are dated in November and December of the year* 1810, from two of the Chatham hulks, the Canada and the Irresistible, members of that grim fleet of ten dismantled ships which has an evil pre-eminence even in the annals of war prisoners. Antoine Da mare, of the commune of

Staples, had been carried off while pursuing his lawful avocation of fishing, and in this winter of 1810 he was to be sent home. Here was a chance of smuggling letters. Amid much excitement in the hulks, a box with a false bottom was made, ,and the prisoners fell to writing their hopes and their despairs and their appeals to their distant friends. Antoine no doubt took away the precious contraband, but we do not kilbw what happened to him. The box was never opened, the letters failed of their destination, and wandered over many seas and lands until the wireless enthusiast gave them back to the light of day.

The men write in agony at the failure of their hopes of exchange. “If we lived in the day Of tile fairies,” says one, “I would implore their favour to take me from this place.” They promise that they will spare their friends the description of the accursed den in which they rot. But we can represent their circumstances to ourselves by studying the accounts of life in the hulks given by Colonel Lebertre in his letter to Croker from the Canada, and by Louis Garneray ih his fascinating book, “Mes Polltons.” Lebertre’s letter is illustrated by a horrible engraving of the orlop deck of the Brunswick, Where 460 prisoners are shown lying packed like herrings in hammocks swung in a space some 130 feet long by 40 feet

broad and six feet high. There was space for only 431 hammocks, so that 29 men had to find a place underneath this mass of human beings. The official regulations were not inhumane, but carelessness of those in command and the villainy of contractors frequently make a mock of the intentions of the Government. The food was vile, and the prisoners themselves often gambled awajj theit clothes. Garneray describes them emerging oil deck from their prison. “Imagine.” he says, “a generation of the dead rising for a moment from their tombs with hollow eyes and wan, earth-col-oured complexions, their backs fallen in, their beards untrimmed, their dreadfully emaciated bodies scarcely covered with tattered rags, and you will have but a faint conception of the appearance f my comrades in

misfortune.” Garneray was an artist, and perhaps intensifies his picture, but there- is sufficient independent evidence that it is not wholly overdrawn. TALES OF WOE. The letters the poor fellows wrote amid these horrors are for the most part on the one monotonous note. Their messages home have' received no answer, and they complain bitterly that they are forgotten in their desolate captivity. It is an afflicting thought that these letters too were destined to receive no answer. Some are the work of illiterates hardly to be deciphered except by an expert ill. French phonetics, save when they give an unconsciously ironic turn to the universal sentiment of the rustic letter writer and “hope that this letter finds you as it leaves me at pre-

sent.” These men had been gathered by the hazards of war from all France. This last was a Breton, but another. Van Haverbeke, came from Dunkirk. He had commanded a privateer with the extraordinary name Le singe en batiste, and one of his crew, Louis Benoit, of Antwerp, was in the same prison. Van Haverbeke had asked to be put on his parole and to be released from the hulks, but 'that grace was refused him because his ship mounted only 12 guns. Two more guns, it appears, would have set him

free. He writes two letters to his father and to his love, Mademoiselle Kerkhove, in the same tone of resigned despair. So all, writing to father, mother, wife, mistress, afid friend, strike the same plaintive note of sick hearts and hope deferred. Their purgatory was to endure, for release came only with the fall of Napoleon in 1814. Among the papers is a certificate of the death of one of the prisoners on board the Brunswick. The dead from the hulks lie now in the grounds of the naval barracks at Chatham, where a memorial has been erected over their bones.