The Prisoners of Cabrera: Napoleon's Forgotten Soldiers 1809-1814

by Denis Smith

After their surrender at the Battle of Bailen, 12,000 French prisoners of war were exiled to the bleak island of Cabrera in the Mediterranean, eight miles from Majorca, with only the clothes on their... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1568582129
• ISBN13: 9781568582122
• Release Date: November 2001
• Publisher: Basic Books
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.9" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

The more thing change the more they are the same

The POWs of all wars are all abused. Andesonville 28% Elmira 25% Cabrera 10 out of 12 thousand. 25,000 died in the concentration camps of the boer war the Batan death march,Bosnia cannibalism and a very interesting mention of the refeeding syndrome,when the POW of the nazi camps were fed a lot they died,when the survivors of Napoleon army got to Wilna they ate and died,when the men of Cabrera were punished with no food for ten days,hundreds died when they started eating again.The blood phosphate and the sodium and potassium are very important.The UN has a protocol to refeed the children of the man made famines with levine tube with progressive solutions.A great example of the four horsemen war,disease,famine and death (the pale rider)Not recommended for bedtime stories for the grand kid.God bless Jean-Charles

"A gripping, moving account"

I read this book in a week's time, for I couldn't put the book down.This is an excellent work by Dennis Smith. As I read, I tried to envision what the French soldiers endured as captives in Spain. Their being shuttled from one Spanish town to the next as no one knew how to deal with POWs in this period. Their facing threats of violence by the angered Spanish civillians. Their being holed-up in the prison warships, and suffering under the filthy conditions, until finally being disposed of to fend for themselves on the deserted island of Cabrera. And we Napoleon fans thought Napoleon's final exile on Saint Helena was bad??? Huh! Regarding its geography, Saint Helena is a remote island, yes. But after reading this harrowing account, Saint Helena is absolutely NO COMPARISON to the barren island of Cabrera. (...) many of the captive soldiers suffered and died under the inhumane conditions there.Yet, what I found encouraging was how the suffering French captives tried to make the best of their situation, despite the calamities. They managed to build a colony, ran businesses, and even built a theater in a cave, and held plays! The situation of the love affairs between the single women and Officers (both single and married) also served, understandably, as a distraction for the prisoners -- and for the reader, as well. A gripping, yet very disturbing, part of Napoleonic history I never knew about...until I read this book.

An extraordinary story

The Prisoners Of Cabrera by political scientist, biographer, and historian Denis Smith is a compelling and informative examination of the Napoleonic Wars in Spain, and carefully chronicles its most brutal events. Thousands of Napoleon's soldiers were sent to the island of Cabrera, with nothing to protect themselves from the elements, insufficient fresh water, and insufficient rations dropped off from Spain. Life was so harsh that approximately half of the prisoners died over the next five years until the survivors were repatriated to France. The Prisoners Of Cabrera is an extraordinary story and a welcome addition to military history shelves chronicling the Napoleonic Wars.

A Napoleonic Death Camp

For five years, from 1809 to 1814, a tiny sun-baked rock in the Balearic islands off Spain served as a prisoner of war camp for some 9,000 French (and allied) soldiers. The soldiers had surrendered to a Spanish army in one of the more humiliating French defeats of the Napoleonic wars. While the incident has received little attention in English-language accounts of the Peninsular war-this is the first, full-length account of the dramatic story of Cabrera in English-a number of the survivors left memoirs of their internment on this desolate islet. Now Canadian author Denis Smith tells the story of the prisoners who lived and died on this dry, barren rock.When Napoleon heard of the surrender of Dupont's army at Bailen he was enraged at the blow to France's aura of invincibility and wrote, "I do not suppose that it is necessary to make great preparations at Rochefort, because the British will surely not let these imbeciles pass, and the Spaniards will not give back their weapons to those who have not fought." Napoleon was right.On landing on Cabrera, most of the prisoners were stepping foot on solid land for the first time in four months. There they found no buildings except for an abandoned fort, no sign of human habitation and little more than scrub brush, lizards and rocks. 4500 French, Polish, Swiss and Italian conscripts were left to largely fend for themselves. Supplies arrived, in theory, every four days, while Spanish and British warships stood guard. There was a single spring of fresh water that dried up in the height of summer. The few goats and rabbits which shared the rocky islet with the French were quickly hunted down and eaten. By the end of the first month 62 men had perished (an annual equivalent death rate of 20%). Between May 1809 and Dec. 1809 approximately 1700 soldiers had died. By 1810 only 17 men from an Imperial Guard unit that had numbered 75 still lived. The unit's highest-ranking officer wrote that "they were all virtually naked, pale, and gaunt: left so long without provisions, they resembled skeletons." During one four-day period when food supplies were cut off more than 400 men died.Finally in May 1814 word came that the war was at an end and freedom at hand. "An incomparable happiness seized everyone," wrote one observer. "Some seemed to lose their minds...Others embraced, crying..." Search parties had to scour the island for hermits who were hold up in caves like troglodytes. Of the almost 12,000 men who had been imprisoned, any where from 4,000 to 10,000 (the later figure including those who had died at Cadiz) had died, their graves unmarked.The Prisoners of Cabrera is written in clear, scholarly prose. Smith does not overly sensationalize a story that really needs no such embellishments. Nor does Smith exhibit a false sense of outrage. It is incredible to me that the story of Cabrera has never received full-length treatment before. Such a dramatic story would seem a natural topic for a book. Denis Smith is to be com