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Updated: June 9, 2025
"In the first place, I am of a thirsty family. My father kept a wine-shop and my mother was a cantiniera, and both drank as much as they sold. I inherited an unfortunate addiction to the wine-skin, which upon several occasions has brought me into trouble and the black-hole.
"Can't help it, sir, even if you order me pack-drill, or even black-hole and a flogging. Why, its ridickerlus for you as an officer to tell your men to forsake you and leave you in the lurch." "But, my good fellow " "Ah, I haven't done yet, captain. You've worried me and gone on till it's mutiny in the ranks, and I refuse to obey." "Well, George," said my father, "you hear this; what do you say?"
Caldwell and Aunt Victoria had gone to see Aunt Grace Mary, so Harriet was in charge of the children, and to save herself further trouble, she took them up to a black-hole there was without a window at the top of the house, and locked them in. The place was quite empty, so that they could do no harm, and they did not seem to mind being locked up.
The place was commonly used as a sort of black-hole for the imprisonment of any refractory member of the royal household, or soldier on guard guilty of neglect of duty. Circular in shape, it contained a large pillar, to which iron rings and chains were attached. The walls were of stone, the roof arched with ribs springing from the pillar that supported it, and the floor was paved.
We remained at Hilsea Barracks for nearly a year, where we acquired the appellation of the "Red Knights," from our clothing being all of that colour. I do not recollect anything of importance that occurred to me at that place, except that I was condemned to pass a week in the black-hole there, for what the soldiers called "eating my shoes."
In this manner, sleeping and playing by turns, I managed to pass my time in the black-hole for one whole day and night, by no means unpleasantly; when, about nine o'clock the next morning, I heard the well-known voice of the drum-major asking for me, and desiring that I might be liberated.
Then, upon his next return, they shut him up in a dark den appropriately called the black-hole, a restraint which, of course, increased his zest for light and liberty, and in the first moment of freedom a moment greatly accelerated by his own strenuous efforts in the shape of squalling, bawling, roaring, and stamping, unparalleled and insupportable, even in that mansion of din in the very instant of freedom he was off again; he ran away from work; he ran away from school; certain to be immersed in his dismal dungeon as soon as he could be recaught; so that his whole childhood became a series of alternate imprisonments and escapes.
My business is to report offenses and to execute orders; I don't give 'em." "Mr. Hawes, was he sent to the black-hole for doing what the chaplain had set him to do by way of a moral lesson?" "He was sent for scribbling a pack of lies without my leave." "What! when he had the permission of your superior officer." "Of my superior officer?" "Your superior in the department of instruction, I mean.
He did not like to mortify Ethel by telling her his intense disgust, and he knew he was about to do what she would think a great injury by speaking to his father on the subject; but he thought it for her real welfare, and took the first opportunity of making to his father and Margaret a most formidable description of Ethel's black-hole.
The black-hole cells were beneath the prison, and we broke through the floor, into one of them, from our bay. A large mess-chest concealed the process, in the day-time. We worked in gangs of six, digging and passing up the dirt into the night-tubs. These tubs we were permitted to empty, every morning, in a tide's way, and thus we got rid of the dirt.
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