In Dartmoor Did the Prince Regent, a Wretched Prison Yard Decree

Abstract

“Dartmoor prison,” quips Nicholas Guyatt, “was a place where even the British thought the weather was bad” (1). Situated on southwest England’s desolate and forbidding moorlands, the penitentiary, originally built to house French detainees during the Napoleonic conflicts, was by 1814 transformed into a facility confining Americans captured at sea during the War of 1812. The scale of the operation was remarkable. When Dartmoor’s gates first opened in 1809, it quickly became the biggest internment center in the world. More than 6,500 Americans eventually languished behind its walls, the single largest contingent of U.S. prisoners of war (POWs) held overseas until World War II. At peak capacity in 1815, Dartmoor’s entirely American population of inmates would have been the twentieth largest city in the early republic. And on April 6 of that same year, the nine Yankee sailors killed (as well as the dozens more wounded) in a prison riot there would be the last official casualties of any declared hostilities between the United States and Great Britain. Despite its size and significance at the time, however, Dartmoor prison has failed to receive much attention from historians. The Hated Cage seeks to fill that historiographic void, even as it also attempts to explain the apparent lack of scholarly interest. The resulting narrative, written in an elegant but accessible style by Nicholas Guyatt, is both gripping and fascinating.