Page:The Hessians and the other German auxiliaries of Great Britain in the revolutionary war.djvu/68

 56 of Germany where the authorities had not some claim on some of the soldiers.

Seume, the captive poet, has left a graphic description of his experiences on shipboard. The men were packed like herring, A tall man could not stand upright between decks, nor sit up straight in his berth. To every such berth six men were allotted, but as there was room for only four, the last two had to squeeze in as best they might. “This was not cool in warm weather,” says Seume. Thus the men lay in what boys call “spoon fashion,” and when they were tired on one side, the man on the right would call “about face,” and the whole file would turn over at once; then, when they were tired again, the man on the left would give the same order, and they would turn back on to the first side. The food was on a par with the lodging. Pork and pease were the chief of their diet. The pork seemed to be four or five years old. It was streaked with black towards the outside, and was yellow farther in, with a little white in the middle. The salt beef was in much the same condition. The ship biscuit was often full of maggots. “We had to eat them for a relish,” says Seume, “not to reduce our slender rations too much.” This biscuit was so hard that they sometimes broke it up with a cannon-ball, and the story ran that it had been taken from the French in the Seven Years' War, and lain in Portsmouth ever since. The English had kept it twenty years or so, and “were now feeding the Germans with it, that these might, if it were God's will, destroy Rochambeau and Lafayette. It does not seem to have been God's will, exactly.” Sometimes