XVII.

Fresh meat was rarely furnished to the prison, according to the reports and statements of witnesses, and we should doubt that it was furnished at all, if it were not for the number of sections of the horns of cattle which are strewn about the enclosure, and which the prisoners had used for drinking dishes; still, many of these horns may have been taken from the cattle killed for the guards.

That the issue of fresh beef would have been beneficial to the men, there is no doubt; in fact, the experiment at Jamaica, which continued twenty years, proves it; for the troops who were fed with a larger allowance of fresh meat suffered far less from dysentery than any of the troops of the West India islands. There is always great difficulty in preserving the good qualities of fresh meat in hot climes, and, on the other hand, the use of salt meat in the same regions is apt to engender scorbutic disorders. Whenever putrefactive fermentation begins with any kind of meat, or any recently living nitrogenized substance, catalytic action takes place, ammonia is evolved, and the product is no longer pleasant to the taste or nutritious to the system. Food, when even exposed to vitiated air, becomes deteriorated in quality, just as good flour is rendered worthless by mixture with the damaged fungoid grain. Butchers' meat on the average affords but thirty-five per cent. of real nutritive matter, at least such was the opinion presented to the French Minister of the Interior by Vauquelin and Percy. Accepting this determination, we may form some idea of the relative value of the scanty allowance of the doubtful beef furnished to the prisoners, if it was furnished at all.

That bacon was furnished, there is no doubt; neither has the quantity been underrated by the sufferers themselves, as we shall presently see. And there is no reason why the quality should not have been most excellent, unless it had been selected for the purposes of cruelty. There is evidence that it was sometimes of very bad quality; but that it was generally and systematically selected to disgust the prisoners, we are unwilling to believe, although we have evidence that rotten bacon was furnished by contractors, and the fact boasted of by them. The influence and effect of this decomposed food may be surmised by the following remark of Donovan: "Flesh contains the elements of some of the most deadly poisons that are found even in the vegetable kingdom; a slight change in their mode of combination, or of the ratio of their quantities, may convert nutriment into a source of death."