With about three dozen other prisoners he boarded the frigate Solebay and sailed to Cork in Ireland. Back in AmericaĪfter about two weeks, The British decided to send him back to America as a prisoner of war. Still, he anticipated a cruel death by hanging. He ate well and had a bottle of wine delivered to him every day. The British authorities confined him in close quarters in a castle, where he received much better treatment. They reasoned the Americans might retaliate against the many British prisoners they held. He didn’t know it at the time, but Parliament debated his fate, and decided against executing him for treason. The English had never seen anything quite like it and gawked at him. He wore a short fawn hunting jacket, twill breeches and a red cap. Crowds came to see them, and Ethan Allen was self-conscious about his outfit. They only survived, wrote Allen, because the British gave them rum.Īfter 40 days they arrived in Falmouth, England, and finally saw sunshine and breathed fresh air. The enclosure had no light, so the prisoners couldn’t see each other, and lice covered all their bodies. Aboard the AdamantĪllen wrote that the British tortured the prisoners by giving them only a small amount of water, though the men all came down with diarrhea and fever. Interior of a British POW ship, the Jersey, during the American Revolution. Allen partly knocked him down despite his handcuffs. Not only were they to eat in those cramped and filthy quarters, Allen reported, ‘but every blackguard sailor and tory aboard insulted them.’ One lieutenant spat in his face as he was herded into the small space. Then the British tortured him again by herding him aboard the Adamant.ĭuring the 40-day voyage to England, Allen and 33 other prisoners were confined in a small enclosure, 20 feet by 22 feet. Sailors came below to insult him.Įthan Allen won a brief reprieve, when he spent a little more than a week on another vessel under a British captain who treated him well. He sat on a chest, days and most nights, guarded round the clock by men with bayonets. His leg irons weighed 30 pounds and consisted of an eight-foot long iron bar and the irons shut tight around his ankles. They took him to the Gaspee schooner of war and bound his hands and feet in irons. I shall not execute you now but you shall grace a halter at Tyburn, God damn you. Richard Prescott hurled a typical insult at Ethan Allen upon his capture: They also threatened to hang him in England. They often confined him with privates, though he considered himself an officer and a gentleman. How the British Tortured Allenįrom the beginning the British tortured Allen psychologically as well as physically. More revolutionaries died as prisoners of war than on the battlefield. They seemed delighted at the downfall of the man who captured Fort Ticonderoga.Įthan Allen then spent more than two years as a prisoner of war.ĭuring the American Revolution it was no small matter to be taken prisoner by the British. 25, 1775, British troops captured Allen, a Continental Army colonel, when he retreated from a poorly planned attack on Montreal.
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