I must here fairly account for the bad usage that I received: the regiment of horse that was cut to pieces in August 1776, at Long Island, was composed very largely of young men from the Western confines of Maryland. This was a source of general inveteracy to all British prisoners, it being represented that the regiment was refused quarter and massacred; how true this may have been, I cannot say. I had also become an object of particular severity because it was believed that I still meditated my escape—as was indeed the case.
In this jail I remained for twelve days, until past the New Year of 1782, suffering the bitings of hunger by day, and shivering all night with the cold. The only remission from our fetters was when once a day we were fetched down to the necessary-house under guard of two men with muskets. Though it can hardly be imagined that aught was wanting to our sufferings, yet the case was indeed worse. We were continually annoyed with the yellings of an emancipated black woman, confined at the bottom of the jail for the murder of her child. She used to yell the whole night long, weeping and wailing for her ‘poor honey lamb’, her ‘lill’ peach blossom’, who had ‘done gone to be an Angel’, as she hoped, ‘in Hebben’.
I cudgelled my brains to devise some means of escape and in the end bargained with the negro who brought the victuals and water-jug that I would give him one of my three shirts (which I still had on) if he provided me with pen, ink and a sheet of paper and conveyed a letter for me to an officer whom I knew to be in the town. This was Major Gordon of The Eighth, for whom I had undertaken the service of cleansing a small offensive wound that he suffered at York Town and of attending to the eleven wounded men his regiment left behind at Gloucester Point. He was a most generous gentleman: indeed he had voluntarily offered to take the place of Lieutenant-Colonel Lake, the field-officer appointed by Lord Cornwallis to command the captive army—and this only because he was a bachelor, whereas Colonel Lake had a wife and children at home.
The negro brought me the instruments I required and I wrote to the Major, acquainting him with my distressed condition and begging him to intercede with the American commander on my behalf. All I asked was to be liberated from jail and placed with other British soldiers.
The negro soon came back to tell me that he had delivered the letter, and therefore claimed the shirt. I did not know whether or no to believe him, but fulfilled my part of the bargain and waited anxiously for the event. On the morrow a soldier arrived at the foot of the board and bawled out: ‘Is there a prisoner here named Robert Land?’
No one replying, the soldier was going away, when I had the inspiration to call out: ‘Ay, pardon, here I am!’ for I guessed that my name had been miswritten on a warrant of release, and I would in any case rather be enlarged for awhile as Robert Land than remain fast in my fetters as Roger Lamb.
He said to me, ‘Come now, Land, look sharp and put your best foot forward. Do you love jail so much that you are thus slow to quit it?’
‘You must first unfetter me,’ said I.
‘Now, isn’t that a plaguey thing!’ he cried. ‘Heigh, turnkey, where are your cursed keys, you wretch? Now, quick, nip up that board and unfetter Mr. Land, the British soldier, or I’ll blow you through with my blazing iron. I’m in a pretty considerable tearing hurry this forenoon.’
In a twinkling I was unconfined and, trembling for weakness, descended the awkward board. The soldier took compassion on me when he saw my pale and hollow cheeks, and permitted me, despite his haste, to recover my money from the prison officer; though this greedy personage would not return me my spare shoes, which I saw that he was wearing himself. I then entrusted five shillings to the negro, with an extra shilling for himself, to lay out on victuals for my companions in misery. I believe him to have been a humane and honest fellow and hope that he discharged this duty.
The soldier now told me: ‘I have orders to take you to Captain Coote.’ I feared that after all I might have been mistaken in answering to the appellation ‘Land’, but was comforted when, on being conducted through the town to the quarters of Captain Eyre Coote of the Thirty-Third Regiment, that gentleman greeted me in my right name. ‘Why, Sergeant Lamb,’ he cried, when we were alone, ‘what have these rascals done to you? You look like a spectre!’
I related him my experiences in a few simple words and confessed my determination and hope still to effect my escape into New York.
The tears of sympathy filled his eyes. Said he: ‘Ay, Sergeant, we are all unfortunate, but must keep up our courage still. Major Gordon wishes to convey his regards to you: he has laboured under a complication of disorders since he first came here. He is not unmindful of your case but has referred it to me. You will be glad when I tell you, I have obtained from the American commander an order for your release. You are now to come under my command.’
I hastily thanked Captain Coote (later to become Lieutenant-General Sir Eyre Coote) for his kindness, and took the liberty of congratulating him upon the news, that had but lately arrived in the country, of the victory of his uncle and namesake over an enormous horde of Indians under Hyder Ali at the battle of Porto Novo. ‘Ay, Sergeant,’ he said, heaving a sigh, ‘but my poor uncle has yet a long course to run. The sick old man, with his handful of half-starved men, and the dice loaded against him by the treachery of the Madras Government, marching and countermarching in that pestilential climate—it grieves me to turn my thoughts thither, and towards those other brave commanders of ours distressed with terrible odds in distant parts of our Empire. In India, Goddard, Popham and Camac; and my friend Flint at Wandewash reduced, I hear, to constructing wooden mortars and grenades of fuller’s earth! General Elliott besieged and bombarded these long months at Gibraltar, and poor Murray whose flag still flies—as I hope—at Port Mahon. Our comrades pent up in Charleston, and several other garrisons languishing in Pensacola and the West India Islands under constant threat of destruction by fever or the French and Spanish fleets. The Americans have but one war to fight, and a host of allies; we are fighting now alone and for our lives, like a bull set upon by three mastiff’s in front, while a couple more sneak round to lay hold on his vitals. Would to Heaven I were free of my parole: I would attempt to escape in your company.’
While the faculties of my nature remain entire I shall never forget the affecting manner in which Captain Coote addressed me. Said I, ‘Your Honour, my reasons for deserting were love of liberty and loyalty to my Sovereign. You have confirmed me in them and I will never rest until I find a chink in my prison door and break out again.’
Captain Coote then said: ‘Hark ’ee now, Sergeant Lamb: I have already directed my sergeants to build you a hut in the pen and to take you into their mess. This they are glad to do, for they all esteem you. Here, will you accept this guinea from me as a tribute to your steadfastness? And when you have rested yourself somewhat and resumed your purpose, my hope and prayer is that you come safe through.’
I went off in triumph to join The Thirty-Third in their pen, and there found my hut nearly constructed; but hardly was I settled in some degree of ease and comfort with these excellent people, when an order came that, for regularity, all men who were quartered with regiments not their own should be returned where they belonged. I was to be sent under guard to the Royal Welch Fusiliers who were confined at Winchester, about eighty miles away to the westward.
This journey of five days, by way of the South Mountains and Harper’s Ferry, was unremarkable. My two guards were silent and surly both with each other and with me. They guarded me very close by day and secured me by night with heavy fetters, which I must carry during the march. All the way along the Potomack River, the soil was rich and chiefly, it seemed, given up to wheat-growing. Beyond the gorge through the South Mountains lay a broad limestone valley, the water of which at first caused me severe gripings. In the middle of this valley, with the snow-covered Devil’s Backbone behind it, lay Winchester, which I found to be an irregularly built town of about two hundred houses. The Royal Welch Fusiliers occupied a pen in a fort near b
y, which had been constructed during the previous war by General (then Colonel) Washington as a protection against the Red Indians.
Here I was welcomed by Captain de Saumarez, who commanded the Regiment in captivity and had heard of my hardships. He said: ‘Sergeant Lamb, will you take a hint from me? I understand from the guards who brought you here that you are a marked man. The sergeant says that his comrades have been constantly employed in apprehending you and escorting you from one place to another. It is my notion that when in three days’ time we march up to Little York in Pennsylvania, they will arrest you, as soon as you fall into the ranks, and confine you here in Winchester Jail; from whence you will not obtain release, except by death, until the war ends.’
I thanked the Captain for his warning; and on the morning of January 16th, when the Regiment, with all the others, marched up to Little York, I reported sick and remained behind at the hospital. The Surgeon, to whom I was known, very obligingly sent me to lie on a pallet in the death-hut, appropriated to the men whose lives were despaired of.
The two days that I spent here proved of some refreshment to me. When they had passed and the American guards had all moved away from the town in order to escort the army to Little York, it was not difficult to escape from the hut. It was left unguarded, because of the fatal purpose to which it was devoted. I must here say that I had confided to Smutchy Steel that I intended to follow behind the Regiment; and had asked him to do a service for me if he could. This was, to inform our old comrades of The Ninth, who were now quartered in the neighbourhood of Little York and there enjoyed a considerable degree of liberty, that I was on the way. I told him that I would represent myself as never having escaped from The Ninth at all, since their first surrender at Saratoga. My tale would be that I had stayed behind at Charlotteville working (like poor Terry Reeves) on Colonel Cole’s plantation, when The Ninth removed from thence in the previous April; but now was rejoining them.
The road, I found, ran very straight for about a hundred miles, with seven rivers or large creeks to pass, and a ridge of hills. I set off early on the morning of January 18th. The weather was extremely cold, but I had Captain Coote’s guinea, or rather its change in quarters, picayunes and coppers; as also my blanket and a few necessaries which I had obtained in the death-hut, from the effects of a Fusilier who died while I was there. In my knapsack were four pounds of flour, a gill bottle of rum and some dressed meat.
The severe treatment which I had received from the Americans seemed, in my mind, to excuse me from revealing the truth about myself. I was resolved only that I would not attempt to win the favour of any person whom I met by speaking with pretended disloyalty of my King and Country. This was one of my hardest marches, since it was made in the depth of winter and I was sick, alone and always in fear of being haled back to the jail. The wind was from the north-west and bitter beyond description. However, the very severity of the weather aided my purpose, since I met nobody upon the road who troubled to ask me questions, except one foolish old man who smelled like a pig-drover, though he had no hogs with him. He stopped me a few miles short of Spurgent, where I must recross the Potomack.
‘Stop, Mister!’ he cried. ‘Why, I guess now you be coming from Charlotteville by way of Wood Gap.’
‘Nein,’ said I, pretending to be German, for I could not abide the fellow. It was almost the one word in the German tongue which I knew at this time but ‘ja’, which is its opposite.
‘Why, then, I guess as how you be coming from Kentucke?’ he offered again.
‘Nein,’ said I again, dully.
‘O, why then, pray now where might you be coming from?’ he persisted.
To shake him off I reeled off some such unintelligible nonsense as: ‘Twankydillo, lilliput, finicky blitzen, niminy-piminy buzz-buzz potsdam finicky-fanicky, ulallo hot-pot Fredericksburg.’
He caught at the last word and said, as if he understood every word that I had spoken: ‘Why, then, you must have heard all the news. Pray now, Mister, what might the ruling price of bacon be in those parts?’
I pretended to grow angry: ‘Kenn kein Englisch,’ cried I, providentially recalling the words with which our German guards at Rutland pen had always put us off, did we ask them any slight favour.
This he understood. ‘Ay, ay, Mister, I see now you be’nt one of us. Well, I must be going on my way. I have a long tack before me.’
‘Ja, ja,’ said I, leaving him and continuing my march to the Potomack, which I crossed without question, proffering my fare to the ferryman without a word and pretending to suffer very violently from the toothache. During this time I lived on my rations, sleeping by night in sheds or fodder stacks. Often the snow was up to my knees, and the rivers that I had to ford were full of floating ice. I nearly lost two toes from frostbite, in my passage of the South Mountains, but rubbed them well with snow before it was too late. I made about fifteen miles a day. I passed on my way four freshly made graves of the army that had gone ahead of me.
I was now in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and from the language which I heard spoken knew that I was in a German part. These Germans were industrious, quiet, sober people and alone of all Americans abstained from asking impertinent questions of travellers. They always made for the richest lands, where they settled down in orderly communities and both built and farmed as for a lifetime—there was none of that hasty, restless pioneering manner with which English-speaking Americans staked out a plot in the wilderness, felled trees, ran up a slight hut, ploughed between the stumps, took their toll of the soil, and after a few years sold their plot cheap and passed on again to new ground. These Germans, and the Dutch intermixed with them, built fine solid houses and great red barns, tilled the land lovingly, keeping it always in good heart by a rotation of crops, and employed themselves and their households in all manner of artistic industries.
About January 25th, as I was stumbling along the road, very sick now, about five miles from Little York, a woman called out merrily from behind a stone wall:
‘How now, Spirit, whither wander you?’
My heart lifted with joy and I declaimed in reply:
‘Over hill, over dale,
Thorough bush, thorough brier,
Over park, over pale,
Thorough flood, thorough fire
I do wander everywhere——
Why, dear Mrs. Jane, do you recall at Rutland what trouble we took with the Fairy, the little drum-boy who would not learn those very lines?’
‘I have expected you to pass here these two days. Was the road so bad?’ asked Mrs. Jane Crumer. ‘You look very sick, Gerry Lamb. Come, my poor husband is down the road. He will give you a drink of peach-whiskey.’
Cramer’s wits were still turned, I found. He said to me: ‘Why, Sergeant Lamb, are you back so soon? Yesterday my Jane wept, when she told me that you had run away. See how she smiles now!’ He had lost all sense of the passage of time, and thought himself still in the year 1779, when I had escaped to New York from Hopewell. That Jane Crumer had wept then, touched my heart—and that she smiled now.
The peach-whiskey warmed me and I went along the road with them very cheerfully. But the happiest surprise was to come: Smutchy had contrived to convey my message to the sergeants of The Ninth and they had already obtained, from the unsuspecting American officer set over them, a pass in my own name in which I was described as belonging to their regiment. This precious piece of paper was handed to me as I entered the town, for several of my old comrades besides Jane Crumer and her husband had kindly and attentively watched for my arrival.
I thus avoided being put into the pen which had been constructed for the Royal Welch Fusiliers, and was adopted as an inhabitant of Convention Village, that had been built about two hundred yards away from the pen by the small remains of General Burgoyne’s army. The villagers were allowed very great liberties and regarded as almost citizens of America. I found that the pass gave me the privilege of ten miles of the neighbouring country, while I behaved well and ord
erly. I was conducted into the hut which my poor loving comrades had built for me here as soon as they heard of my approach. They had furnished it very comfortably with bed and blankets, chair and table, candles, liquor and even an iron stove.
CHAPTER XVIII
I remained for six weeks at Convention Village, visiting my former companions from hut to hut. I was astonished by the spirit of industry which prevailed among them. Men and women were employed in a variety of mechanical trades which they had either driven before they followed the drum or had learned during their captivity. Even the children were impressed into usefulness. One of my former comrades had married a ‘She-Kener’ or gipsy, a tribe that had been brought to the country from Germany by Dutch slave-traders as ‘redemptioners’, but had soon bought their freedom and were now settled down in this part. This gipsy taught the women lace-making and basket-weaving. Some soldiers whittled wooden spoons and likewise learned the trade of cutting bowls, plates, skimmers, cups and saucers from dish-timber: that is to say, from the large knots that occurred in old sugar-maples, soft-maples, beech and ash. From a single such lump of dish-timber a whole nest of bowls could be scooped. A man who had been a brass-worker sent his fellows around the countryside with money from the common stock to buy up old candlesticks, lamps, kettles and other brass and copper, paying by weight, then hammered the metal out and re-worked it into buttons, knee-buckles and shoe-buckles. Some of the soldiers he took on as apprentices; others became pedlars and sold the articles about the country, adding lace, brooms, wooden ware (inclusive of carved butter-stamps) and baskets to their stock.
I was called upon by my comrades, almost as soon as arrived in the village, to take the part of Richard Plantagenet in a public performance of the History of Henry the Sixth; Jane Crumer playing that of Queen Margaret. A chief reason for the esteem and even affection in which the Villagers were held by the people of Little York was these regular dramatic entertainments. The Americans had hitherto been almost unacquainted with stage plays and the impression made upon them by their first hearing poetry spoken with feeling and intelligence was very remarkable; I believe that they have never since lost their taste for the works of Shakespeare. When later I mentioned the matter to Major Mackenzie of my regiment, he remarked: ‘Why, now, what a lazy jade the Muse of History is—how she repeats herself! Two thousand years ago an expeditionary force sailed westward from the ancient maritime state of Athens against the vigorous Greek colonists of the New World of Sicily. The affair miscarried and a great number of Athenians were taken prisoners; but these mitigated the severity of their lot by performing the Comedies of the playwright Euripides, which greatly delighted their Syracusan captors.’
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