In the year 1857 an unsigned article on the subject of the Virginia
Navy was published in the _Southern Literary Messenger_, which
goes on to say: "But of all the sufferings in these troublous times
none endured such horrors as did those Americans who were so
unfortunate as to become prisoners of war to the British. They were
treated more as felons than as honorable enemies. It can scarcely be
credited that an enlightened people would thus have been so lost to
the common instincts of humanity, as were they in their conduct
towards men of the same blood, and speaking the same language with
themselves. True it is they sometimes excused the cruelty of their
procedures by avowing in many instances their prisoners were deserters
from the English flag, and were to be dealt with accordingly. Be this
as it may, no instance is on record where a Tory whom the Americans
had good cause to regard as a traitor, was visited with the severities
which characterized the treatment of the ordinary military captives,
on the part of the English authorities. * * * The patriotic seamen of
the Virginia navy were no exceptions to the rule when they fell into
the hands of the more powerful lords of the ocean. They were carried
in numbers to Bermuda, and to the West Indies, and cast into loathsome
and pestilential prisons, from which a few sometimes managed to
escape, at the peril of their lives.
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