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Early next morning the two vessels were close off Dieppe Harbour; and there, when the tide suited, they were taken inside, and the prisoners put ashore at nightfall and lodged for three days in a filthy round tower, swarming with vermin. On April 1–Easter Sunday, I’ve heard it was–they were told to get ready for marching, and handed over, making twenty-five in all, with the crews of two other vessels, both brigs–the Lisbon Packet, bound from London to Falmouth with a general cargo, and the Margaret, letter of marque of London, bound from Zante, laden with currants–to a lieutenant and a guard of foot soldiers. Not a man of them knew where they were bound. They set out through a main pretty country, where the wheat stood nearabouts knee-high, but the roads were heavy after the spring rains. Each man had seven shillings in his pocket, given him at parting by the captain of his vessel–the three captains had been left behind at Dieppe–and on they trudged for just a fortnight on an allowance of 1 lb. of brown bread and twopence-halfpenny per man per day; the bread served out regular and the money, so to say, when they could get it. Mostly they came to a town for their night’s halt, and as often as not the townsfolk drummed them to jail with what we call the “Rogue’s March,” but in France I believe it’s “Honours of War,” or something that sounds politer than ’tis. But there were times when they had to put up at a farm house by the road, and then the poor chaps slept on straw for a treat.

Well, on the last day of the fortnight they reached their journey’s end–a great fortress on a rock standing right over the river, with a town lying around the foot of the rock, and a smaller town, reached by a bridge of boats, on the far side of the river. I can’t call to mind the name of the river, but the towns were called Jivvy–Great and Little Jivvy. [1] The prison stood at the very top of the rock, on the edge of a cliff that dropped a clean 300 feet to the river: not at all a pretty place to get clear of, and none so cheerful to live in on a day’s allowance of one pound of brown bread, half a pound of bullock’s offal, three-halfpence in money (paid weekly, and the most of it deducted for prison repairs, if you please!), and now and then a noggin of peas for a treat. They found half a dozen ships’ companies already there, and enjoying themselves on this diet; the crew of the Minerva frigate, run ashore off Cherbourg; the crew of the Hussar, wrecked outside Brest; and–so queerly things fall out in this world–among them a parcel of poor fellows from Ardevora, taken on board the privateer Recovery of this port.

To keep to my story, though–which is about Abe Cummins and Billy Bosistow. It was just in these unhappy conditions that the difference in the two men came out. Abe took his downfall very quiet from the first. He had managed to keep a book in his pocket–a book of voyages it was–and carry it with him all the way from Dieppe, and it really didn’t seem to matter to him that he was shut up, so long as he could sit in a corner and read about other folks travelling. In the second year of their captivity an English clergyman, a Mr. Wolfe, came to Jivvy, and got leave from the Commandant to fit up part of the prison granary for a place of worship and preach to the prisoners. It had a good effect on the men in general, and Abe in particular turned very religious. Mr. Wolfe took a fancy to him, and lent him an old book on “Navigation”–Hamilton Moore’s; and over that Abe would sit by the hour, with his room-mates drunk and fighting round him, and copy out tables and work out sums. All his money went in pen and ink instead of the liquor which the jailors smuggled in.