Their constitutions are broken; the stamina of nature worn out;
they cannot recover--they die. Even the few that might have survived
are dying of the smallpox. For it seems that our enemies determining
that even these, whom a good constitution and a kind Providence had
carried through unexampled sufferings, should not at last escape
death, just before their release from imprisonment infected them with
that fatal distemper.
"To these circumstances we subjoin the manner in which they buried
those of our people who died. They dragged them out of the prison by
one leg or one arm, piled them up without doors, there let them lie
until a sufficient number were dead to make a cart load, then loaded
them up in a cart, drove the cart thus loaded out to the ditches made
by our people when fortifying New York; there they would tip the cart,
tumble the corpses together into the ditch, and afterwards slightly
cover them with earth. * * * While our poor prisoners have been thus
treated by our foes, the prisoners we have taken have enjoyed the
liberty of walking and riding about within large limits at their
pleasure; have been freely supplied with every necessary, and have
even lived on the fat of the land. None have been so well fed, so
plump, and so merry as they; and this generous treatment, it is said,
they could not but remember. For when they were returned in the
exchange of prisoners, and saw the miserable, famished, dying state of
our prisoners, conscious of the treatment they had received, they
could not refrain from tears.
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