accordingly Mr. Larpent, an Englishman, and Charles King, an American, were appointed to investigate the matter; and their investigation was made on 26 April. When their report was sent to Mr. Adams, the Minister of the United States to the British Court, it was accompanied by a letter from Charles King, in which he states his own independent opinion.
"In considering it of much importance that the report, whatever it might be, should go forth under our joint signatures, I have forborne to press some of the points which it involves, as far as otherwise I might have done; and it therefore may not be improper in this letter to enter into some little explanation of such parts of the report. Although it does appear that a part of the prisoners were, on that evening, in such a state and under such circumstances as to have justified, in the view which the commander of the depôt could not but take it, the intervention of the military force, and even in a strict sense the first use of firearms, yet I cannot but express it as my settled opinion, that by a conduct a little more temporizing this dreadful alternative of firing upon the unarmed prisoners might have been avoided. … When the firing became general, as it afterwards appears to have done, and caught with electric rapidity from the square to the platforms, there was no plea nor shadow of excuse for it, except in the personal exasperation of the soldiers: nor for the more deliberate, and therefore more unjustifiable, firing which took
place into three of the prisons … after the prisoners had retired into them, and there was no longer any pretence of apprehension as to their escape.
"As to whether the order to fire came from Captain Shortland, I yet confess myself unable to form any satisfactory opinion, though perhaps the bias of my mind is that he did give such an order."
