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

“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.

Dartmoor was originally the brainchild of Thomas Tyrwhitt, a man who might have cut a more modest figure in English society had it not been for a chance meeting at Oxford that placed him in the orbit of George Augustus Frederick, the Prince of Wales and eventual King George IV. Gifted over 2,000 Cornish acres by his royal friend, Tyrwhitt advocated for the construction of a large prison at Dartmoor, near the Royal Navy’s Plymouth hub. For several years, captured French military personnel had been piling up inside the rotten holds of overcrowded prison hulks. A new facility was needed to address that growing problem. Dartmoor’s inhospitable climate and relative lack of infrastructure, of course, should have squashed Tyrwhitt’s schemes before they reached even the drawing board. But neither the Admiralty nor the Transport Board, responsible for Great Britain’s population of military prisoners, dared cross a favorite of the future king. Construction therefore soon began, influenced by the era’s more self-consciously “enlightened” approach to incarceration. Parcere Subjectis, an inscription atop Dartmoor’s main gate, was meant to capture the humanitarian spirit of the enterprise. A reference to the Aeneid meaning “spare the vanquished,” the bitter and bloody irony of those words quickly made itself apparent to thousands of unlucky inmates.

Who were those men and what was life like at Dartmoor? In answering those important questions, Guyatt’s impressive skills as a historian truly begin to reveal themselves. With the war against France winding down by 1814 (and hostilities with the United States heating up), the prison soon became a home exclusively for thousands of U.S. prisoners. And on their identities, Guyatt has the receipts. Or, better put, the receipt—a massive ledger (about a meter tall and quite thick) that recorded the names, identifying features, possessions, and circumstances of over 6,000 POWs from the United States. When combined with a handful of diaries and memoirs penned by Dartmoor detainees, these records provide a remarkably detailed picture of prison life. The Hated Cage vividly dramatizes the complex society that grew among the prisoners. There was political intrigue within various self-governing inmate factions. There were accusations of treason hurled at prisoners thought to be spies in the employ of Dartmoor’s overseers. There were tunneling operations and escape attempts. There was a surprisingly sophisticated economy, complete with marketplaces, money, and smuggling. And there were diversions galore, as sailors founded schools, casinos, athletic leagues, and theatre companies to stave off the debilitating effects of boredom. Everyone’s favorite pastime seemed to be the denunciation of Reuben Gaunt Beasely, a Virginia gentleman and merchant appointed as the official advocate for the interests of U.S. POWs in Great Britain. The prisoners nicknamed him “Beastly” and hanged him in effigy for his lack of efficacy. Anglophilia and an almost comic credulity certainly made him ill-suited to the position. But the U.S. government did the prisoners no favors either by refusing to pay Beasely a salary. This meant he had to spend valuable time making his own living when he might otherwise have been lobbying London officials on behalf of his languishing countrymen.

As Guyatt makes clear, however, the story of Dartmoor’s U.S. inmates is hardly a simple clash of high versus low. The prisoners were also at war with one another. Tensions bubbled up from a few different sources, but the most significant of those wellsprings was race. By mid-1813, several self-styled leaders among the incarcerated sailors were demanding a policy of segregation meant to confine Black inmates within a separate wing of the facility. Ward Four was soon designated the exclusive province of African Americans. It was there that Richard Crafus, dubbed “King Dick” by his supporters and detractors, emerged as Dartmoor’s best known figure. Guyatt does some remarkable detective work piecing together the life of a highly elusive historical actor. Likely an escaped slave from Maryland’s eastern shore, Crafus, as was true of many non-white people in the United States, turned to the sea when seeking a reprieve from American racism. There were economic opportunities afloat that Black men had a harder time finding ashore.

And so the man who would become King Dick at Dartmoor hopped aboard an ill-fated privateer during the War of 1812. The vessel’s eventual capture landed him in prison, where by most accounts, he became the de facto leader of the facility’s Black sector. The life of Richard Crafus becomes one of the book’s organizational conceits. As a result, Guyatt has much of interest to say about the dynamic interaction between racism, nationalism, and the sea. But just as if not more intriguing is the author’s investigation into the myths and misrepresentations that grew around Crafus. White observers—some of whom had never set foot inside Dartmoor—were quick to seize upon King Dick’s allegedly despotic control over Ward Four (as opposed to the miniature republics founded by white seamen) as evidence of the African American’s unsuitability for anything other than abject servitude. Here we learn that the stories Americans told about their time at Dartmoor became important artifacts in the construction of an increasingly segregated and dis-United States. Crucially, as Guyatt points out, only white narratives of prison life emerged after the Treaty of Ghent began to send the mariners home.

The insidious role of racism in structuring both life at Dartmoor and popular culture’s depiction of the prison was only one of several tragedies chronicled here. The climax, so to speak, of the American saga at Dartmoor occurred on April 6, 1815. By then, the War of 1812 had ended and the men were anxious to return home. But the U.S. government was slow to organize transportation for its citizens, meaning that sailors remained in the custody of prison officials facing postwar pressures to cut costs by shrinking rations. The breaking point finally arrived one fateful spring day. Prisoners playing a game began to taunt the guards, the crowds surrounding a hole in the wall started to look like a mass escape, and suddenly shots were fired. By the time the smoke cleared, nine U.S. sailors had been killed and many more suffered injury. The official report produced by the British government expressed regret but held no one to account. The U.S. government, meanwhile, did not press terribly hard for either the punishment of guilty parties or compensation for the victims. Sailors who witnessed the events swore that the hated British had perpetrated a “Dartmoor Massacre” worse than the slaughter in the streets of Boston that had triggered a revolution.

Few people outside those most directly concerned, however, seemed to care. Guyatt asks us to wonder why that was. The Hated Cage is therefore, among many other things, a brilliant meditation on historical memory. The lives of seafarers did not matter much, it turned out, once a war nominally fought for “free trade and sailors’ rights” had wound down. These were poor and itinerant individuals who did not have the time, education, or wealth required to press their case for justice. In fact, the men who died and suffered at Dartmoor had been privateers—a kind of irregular maritime militia—rather than naval personnel. It was tough to deify martyrs who, it seemed, had fought for a share of some prize money rather than patriotic principle. The people who mattered wished to get on with the business of transatlantic trade. For those in power, working-class blood seemed a small price to pay for the potential profitability of rapprochement. The Dartmoor prisoners mostly sank into obscurity as a result.

Nicholas Guyatt has therefore done an important service here. His painstaking archival work recovered an instructive episode from the War of 1812 that many others had tried to forget. But more importantly, the author reminds us of the important people who often live between the lines of our manuscript material. Richard Crafus, the Black man who ran what was, in effect, an entire U.S. city on British soil, left not one word of his own in the documentary record. How many more individuals like him await discovery? The Hated Cage has me excited to find out.

Author Biography

Brian Rouleau is an associate professor of history at Texas A&M University in College Station, TX, United States. He is the author of With Sails Whitening Every Sea: Mariners and the Making of an American Maritime Empire (Ithaca, NY, 2014).