Sep 30, 2010 - Sale 2223

Sale 2223 - Lot 207

Price Realized: $ 6,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 6,000 - $ 9,000
(WAR OF 1812.) Rice, Matthew. Journal by Matthew Rice, Prisoner of War, on Board H.M. Ship Gloucester 74 . . . from Barbados toward England with a Convoy of Merchants Ships. 36 manuscript pages. Folio, 13 x 8 inches, in early burlap wrappers; minor edge wear affecting a few words, but generally sound. Vp, 23 July to 12 October 1814
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The entries in this unusual prison journal appear at first to be a standard ship's log, with daily notes on the weather and bearings. Only the title page and headers on each page suggest that the author is being held prisoner. Apparently, the author was an officer or navigator who had been given liberty of the deck, and quite possibly assisted with the operation of the ship. During the voyage, he seemed to take his role seriously, reporting as if he were a full crew member. The first entry reads "At daylight, out boats & sent them for water & sand. Received on board 127 American prisoners of war from the prison ship for their passage to England." On 29 July he wrote "Discharged 64 of our prisoners of war into H.M.S. Bembow, rec'd from her 6 marines & 4 seamen." 31 July: "Discharged several American prisoners on board the merchant vessells to help them to work there ships at the same wages that thay give there own crews."
Not until his arrival in England did Rice seem to realize how grim the life of a prisoner would be. 1 October: "All hands like drounded ratts, that not the worst, but all our baggage and no way whatever to dry them. At 9 all hands was numbered down below in a most disagreable scituation among Negros and every other class of unpleasant company." He arrived at Dartmoor Prison on 10 October, "the most heanious place that I ever beheld, being very mutch farteagued . . . without a bed or eny thing else to lay on." In the prison yard the next day, he "fell in with two or three hundred of my old aquaintence, but no distinction between masters, mates or cooks at this place, all hands bundled togeather." His final entry was written on 12 October: "Looking around me to see the prison filled up, hammocks in every hole & corner, four or five, ten high, looking like so many crows nests stuck up in an old tree." The Dartmoor life seemed an affront to Rice's aristocratic sensibilities even more than a place of physical privation.
The first few days of this voyage were also described in "Papers of an Old Dartmoor Prisoner," edited by Nathaniel Hawthorne, in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, March 1846. Provenance: A genealogical note with the diary gives Captain Matthew Rice's dates as 1772-1836, and traces the descent to Rice's great-grandaughter Ida Lizzie (Davis) Prescott (1857-1942). The volume was found in a 1951 package addressed to Mrs. Elizabeth B. Prescott of Sun River, Montana. with--partly printed marriage certificate of Matthew Rees [Rice] and Ann Bryson, Savannah, GA, 4 January 1768.