reach England at all. One was wrecked in the English Channel and
another was seized by the French during a war with England. So in
1773, a few years before our Revolutionary War, the mines were
given up and the largest of them was changed into a prison.

At first there were no buildings at all. There was nothing but a
hole in the ground, closed by an iron trapdoor that opened into
the shaft, where a wooden ladder was fixed to the rock at one
side. At the bottom of the ladder there was a flight of rough
stone steps leading farther down into the mine. All was dark and
still except for the dripping of water along the galleries that
led away into the heart of the hill. One cavern was blasted out
to make more room and was fitted with wooden cells and bunks for
the prisoners to sleep in, and at night a guard was set to watch
the entrance up above and prevent any one from climbing the
ladder and getting out. When everything was ready, the committee
in charge of the work reported that it would be "next to
impossible for any one to escape from this prison."

The first prisoner sent there was a man named John Henson, who
was committed on December 22, 1773. He spent eighteen days alone
in the mine; then, on the night of January 9, 1774, he disappeared.
No one could imagine how he got out. But there was another shaft
leading up from the mine, a very deep one, where the copper ore had
been drawn out. It had no ladder in it and its opening had not been
closed, because it did not seem possible for a prisoner to escape
that way. Yet a woman drew John Henson up eighty feet through the
shaft in a bucket used for hoisting copper. After that, this shaft,
too, was carefully closed and a strong wooden guardhouse was built
over the entrance to the other one.