A Journal, of a Young Man of Massachusetts, Late a Surgeon on Board an American Privateer, Who Was Captured at Sea by the British in May, Eighteen Hundred and Thirteen and Was Confined First, at Melville Island, Halifax, Then at Chatham, in England, and Last at Dartmoor Prison

In January 1813 a young man from Massachusetts sailed out of Salem as assistant surgeon on a privateer schooner with four carriage guns and ninety men aboard. The cruise ran south to the coast of Brazil and back, and in May the British frigate Tenedos ran the little vessel down off Martha’s Vineyard. What follows is two years of captivity set down close to the event: Melville Island at Halifax, where the barracks reminded him of a horse stable; the transport Regulus, whose bread came full of worms; the prison ships moored in the Medway at Chatham; and finally Dartmoor, where on 6 April 1815 the guards fired on American prisoners two months after the war had formally ended. Benjamin Waterhouse, the physician who introduced smallpox vaccination in America, prepared the manuscript and published it in Boston in 1816.