and rodents. “Cold and famine were now our destiny,” a survivor wrote. “Old shoes were bought and eaten with as much relish as a pig or a turkey.” One sugar house prisoner reportedly gnawed the flesh from his arms to ward off starvation; another died while trying to eat a brick. The lucky ones could build a fire every three days. Many cell blocks lacked hearths or wood. Vermin infested the bedding straw. “It was bad in every sense of the word,” wrote a surgeon’s mate captured in August, “a dirty place, the prisoners wallowing in their own filth.” A British captain acknowledged, “If once they
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