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ORIGINAL: ericbabe

Yes.

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. Their officers were imprisoned elsewhere. The following day a ship arrived with provisions: ship's biscuit, beans, lard, salt and bread. On another trip the supply ship dropped off tents for the junior officers and the sick. 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.

The prisoner population of Cabrera included at least twenty-one women—a few officers' wives and the rest cantiniéres and camp followers. Some of the young and pretty ones (and even those not so young and pretty) turned to prostitution to survive, others continued their trade as wine-merchants on the island. It was reported that, on the whole, the women, keeping themselves busy, fared better than the men on the island. Most of the women eventually went to England when the officers were transferred there in 1810. A small number of babies were born, but what happened to them was not reported.

It was this final departure of the officers to England, as well as the realization that they were going to never be repatriated, which seemed to have led to a decline of morale among the men. Throughout 1810 to 1812 more prisoners arrived on the island to replace those who died. More than 9,400 men passed through Cabrera, though the population was always considerably less due to the high death rate. There were only, at most, 100 escapes from the island prison.

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.

Spanish prisoners in France were also harshly treated, often forced to work as laborers building canals and draining marshes. On the Peninsula, especially, brutality followed brutality. In March 1809 Napoleon wrote to Gen. Clarke, the French Minister of War, of a column of Spanish prisoners: "Twelve thousand prisoners have arrived from Saragossa. They are dying at the rate of 300 to 400 a day: thus we may calculate that not more than 6000 will reach France…You will order a system of severity—these people are to be made to work, whether they like it or not. The general number of them are fanatics, who deserve no consideration whatever."

ORIGINAL: ericbabe

For what it's worth, it was much easier to liberate prisoners in the original "Crown of Glory" and players overwhelmingly did not like having to deal with POWs.