Chapter 22 - Page 2

liberty, challenged
his insulter to combat. Often, as at Pendennis Castle, when no other
avengement was at hand, he would hurl on his foes such howling tempests
of anathema as fairly to shock them into retreat. Prompted by somewhat
similar motives, both on shipboard and in England, he would often make
the most vociferous allusions to Ticonderoga, and the part he played in
its capture, well knowing, that of all American names, Ticonderoga was,
at that period, by far the most famous and galling to Englishmen.

Parlor-men, dancing-masters, the graduates of the Albe Bellgarde, may
shrug their laced shoulders at the boisterousness of Allen in England.
True, he stood upon no punctilios with his jailers; for where modest
gentlemanhood is all on one side, it is a losing affair; as if my Lord
Chesterfield should take off his hat, and smile, and bow, to a mad bull,
in hopes of a reciprocation of politeness. When among wild beasts, if
they menace you, be a wild beast. Neither is it unlikely that this was
the view taken by Allen. For, besides the exasperating tendency to
self-assertion which such treatment as his must have bred on a man like
him, his experience must have taught him, that by assuming the part of a
jocular, reckless, and even braggart barbarian, he would better sustain
himself against bullying turnkeys than by submissive quietude. Nor
should it be forgotten, that besides the petty details of personal
malice, the enemy violated every international usage of right and
decency, in treating a distinguished prisoner of war as if he had been a
Botany-Bay convict. If, at the present day, in any similar case between
the same States, the repetition of such outrages would be more than
unlikely, it is only because it is among nations as among individuals:
imputed indigence provokes oppression and scorn; but that same indigence
being risen to opulence, receives a politic consideration even from its
former insulters.

As the event proved, in the course Allen pursued, he was right. Because,
though at first nothing was talked of by his captors, and nothing
anticipated by himself, but his ignominious execution, or at the least,
prolonged and squalid incarceration, nevertheless, these threats and
prospects evaporated, and by his facetious scorn for scorn, under the
extremest sufferings, he finally wrung repentant usage from his foes;
and in the end, being liberated from his irons, and walking the
quarter-deck where before he had been thrust into the hold, was carried
back to America, and in due time, at New York, honorably included in a
regular exchange of prisoners.

It was not without strange interest that Israel had been an eye-witness
of the scenes on the Castle Green. Neither was this interest abated by