Chapter XXXVI: A.d. 1746 (4)

[1238] A letter from Fort Augustus, dated June 27, 1746, which made the round of the public journals at the time, thus describes these pastimes:--“Last Wednesday the duke gave two prizes to the soldiers to run heats for on bare-backed Galloways taken from the rebels, when eight started for the first, and ten for the second prize. These Galloways are little larger than a good tup, and there was excellent sport. Yesterday his royal highness gave a fine Holland smock to the soldiers’ wives, to be run for on these Galloways, also bare-backed, and riding with their limbs on each side of the horse like men. Eight started, and there were three of the finest heats ever seen. The prize was won, with great difficulty, by one of the Old Buff’s ladies. In the evening, General Hawley and Colonel Howard run a match for twenty guineas on two of the above shelties: which General Hawley won by about four inches.”

[1239] _Jacobite Memoirs_, p. 300. William Jack, one of the prisoners, in a letter to his friends in Elgin (_Memoirs_, p. 299), says that the sailors used to amuse themselves by hoisting the prisoners up to the yard-arm and dropping them into the sea, and that they would tie them to the mast and flog them; that for several months they had no bed-clothes, and that they used to dig holes among the ship’s ballast, consisting of black earth and small stones, to keep themselves warm. John Farquharson of Aldlerg, himself a prisoner, in a letter to the Rev. Mr. Forbes, published among the Forbes papers, gives an appalling description of the miseries of his fellow prisoners on their voyage from Inverness to London. He says that from hunger, bad usage, and exposure “to all weathers, they were seized with a kind of plague which carried them off by dozens;” and that “a good many of those who would have outlived their sickness, were wantonly murdered by the sailors, by dipping them in the sea in the crisis of their fevers.” After arriving in the Thames, the common prisoners were put into Tilbury Fort, and would have perished for want had not some humane people supported them. The officers were marched rank and file to Southwark jail, amid the hootings of a tumultuous mob, who loaded them with scornful epithets, and assailed them with brickbats, stones, and other missiles.