day brought the same distressed sensations, and every night the
same doleful feelings, arising from darkness, stench, increased
debility and disease. The general and most distressing in the
catalogue of our miseries was the almost unceasing torment of hunger.
Many of us would have gladly partaken with our father's hogs, in their
hog-troughs. This barbarous system of starvation reduced several of
our hale and hearty young men to mere skeletons. What with the
allowance of the enemy, and the allowance from our own government, in
which was good hot coffee for breakfast, we were generally robust and
hearty at Melville Island. Some of our companions might well be called
fine looking fellows, when we came first on board the Regulus; but
before we arrived on the coast of England, they were so reduced and
weakened, that they tottered as they walked. It was the opinion of us
all, that one young man absolutely died for want of sufficient food!
Yes! Christian Reader, a young American, who was carried on board the
Regulus man of war transport, perished for want of sufficient to eat.
In this insufficiency of food, complaint was made to the captain of
the Regulus, but it produced no increase of the scanty allowance; and
had the common sailors possessed no more humanity than their officers,
we might all have perished with hunger. You who never felt the
agonizing torture of hunger can have no idea of our misery. The study
of my profession had acquainted me, that when the stomach is empty and
contracted to a certain degree, that it, in a measure, acts upon
itself, and draws all the neighbouring organs into sympathy with its
distress: this increases to an agony that ends in distraction; for it
is well known that those who are starved to death, die raving
distracted! Some of us in the course of this horrid voyage could have
eaten a puppy or kitten, could we have laid hands upon either.

The manner in which the English generally treat their _poor_ in their
work-houses, in England, is infinitely worse than the treatment of our
convicts in our state prisons. There are no very heavy chains, huge
blocks, or iron stanchions in our prisons, as there are in the
receptacles of the poor in England. We treat them with tenderness, as
unfortunate fellow creatures, and not with harshness, as criminals.

Our constitutions, mind and body united, were so constantly impressed
and worried with the desire of eating, that the torment followed us
in our sleep