All of the different guards behaved with “great cruelty” toward the prisoners. The veteran Thomas Andros attributed the brutish behavior to their view that the Americans were “rebels and traitors” rather than prisoners of war. Accordingly, no punishment, no torment, and no deprivation was too extreme. “We had,” Andros explained, “risen against the mother-country in an unjust and wanton war.” So “they seemed to consider us as not entitled to that humanity which might be expected by prisoners taken in a war with a foreign nation.”
Ironically, even though the Germanic mercenaries were feared by the Americans and had gained a reputation for their brutality in war, several prisoners commented that the Hessian guards were not as bad as the British, Scottish, or American loyalists. Dring was one of them, saying the prisoners “always preferred the Hessians, from whom we received better treatment.” The mercenaries were simply following orders and did not care one way or another about the Americans, but the British and Scottish guards loathed the prisoners and enjoyed attacking them. One account even claimed the prisoners debated whether or not the British and Scottish guards vied in a sort of sick competition to see who could be the cruelest. An example of this was documented by Thomas Andros. When a bag of apples was once brought aboard the Jersey, the guards made it into a “cruel sport” whereby the apples “were hurled promiscuously into the midst of hundreds of prisoners crowded together as thick as they could stand, and life and limbs were endangered in the scramble.” So desperate were the prisoners and so savage was the melee that, rather than attempt to get an apple, Andros “fled to the most distant part of the ship” to save himself.
The British guards had grown disillusioned with the long war and were repulsed at having to serve on the disease-infested prison ship. Any sense of humanity, Dring observed, had quickly “withered,” and “self-preservation appeared to be their only wish.” The good news for the prisoners was that the guards, like the crew of the ship, limited their interaction with the detainees. Therefore, they almost never ventured belowdecks, where the prisoners were housed. When prisoners asked questions, the guards would typically not answer them. Guards were even forbidden by Commissary David Sproat, under threat of punishment, “to relieve the wants of the distressed.” Instead, the guards simply “pointed to their uniforms, as if to say, ‘We are clothed by our Sovereign, while you are naked.’” Dring also remembered that when the guards did talk, they always referred to the prisoners as “rebels” or simply cursed them. Once, a prisoner named Thomas Philbrook was dragging a corpse to the upper deck to be placed in the dead boat. A guard recognized him and spat, “What! You alive yet? Well, you are a tough one.”
The “refugees,” however, were the worst. While the Hessians were “just following orders,” the American loyalists viewed their brethren with “scorn and hatred” and routinely acted with great “severity” and “violence.” So much so that when these loyalists were assigned to the ship, it created great “tumult” among the prisoners who “could not endure the sight of these men, and occasionally assailed them with abusive language.” Indeed, the entire mood on the prison ship changed when the loyalists reported for their tour of duty. There were frequent, bloody clashes between prisoners and the loyalist guards.
A prisoner for fourteen months, William Burke of Newport, Delaware, documented many of these “cruelties” by the loyalists. He saw, for instance, “many American prisoners put to death by the bayonet.” The problem was made worse because the loyalists were, at times, stationed along the gangways that the prisoners used to move about the ship. Dring remembered, “We dared not approach near them for fear of their bayonets.” Instead, the prisoners resorted to crawling on their stomachs along the booms in order to move fore and aft on the ship.
Not surprisingly, when one of the loyalist guards completed his tour of duty, prisoners would gather by the ladder or crowd around the portholes and cheer!
Each daybreak was met by the sound of boots on the upper deck. Whether they were British, Scottish, Hessian, or American “refugees,” it was always the same. The guards walked the old, creaking planks of the ship to the hatch. Keeping their bayonets and swords at the ready, they threw open the entrance to the holds and, with a handkerchief or sleeve shielding their noses and mouths from the onslaught of the stench, yelled, “Rebels! Turn out your dead!” And so the day began for the prisoners on the Hell Ship.
Throughout the long nights, as the prisoners tried to sleep in the dark, dank holds, they heard the sentries above call out every hour, “All’s well!” Of course, all was not well belowdecks. Life was unbearable in the severely overcrowded, disease-riddled ship. Aside from the lack of food and water and the barbaric treatment by the guards, another source of constant torment was the lack of basic hygiene. The prisoners were permitted to wash only occasionally and then only with salt water. The result was that most prisoners saw their skin turn sallow and brittle from the salt. There simply was not enough fresh water to ration it for drinking, cooking, and washing. As a result, when it rained, men desperately stripped naked and tried to wash their clothing and themselves.
Dring was shocked every time he looked at his fellow prisoners. They had all become covered in filth, “their long hair and beards matted and foul; clothed in rags; and with scarcely a sufficient supply of these to cover their disgusting bodies.” Many had no clothing at all, except bare remnants of what they had initially worn when first captured. Prisoners tried but were usually unable to get a razor or soap, much less needle, thread, or anything to repair or make clothing. Some had scissors or shears, so they clipped one another’s beards or hair. Even then, recalled Dring, such effort, “though conducive to cleanliness, was not productive of much improvement in their personal appearance.”
Others were simply too ill or had been confined so long that they became “indifferent” to their personal appearance. Soon “ordinary cleanliness was impossible” and the prisoner’s skin began to hang from his emaciated body.
Several diseases tore through the Jersey during the years it was moored at Wallabout Bay, periodically decimating the population belowdecks. Thomas Andros, who had watched fellow soldiers die of disease during his years in uniform, called the Jersey “the King of Terrors” because every disease imaginable plagued the ship. Smallpox, dysentery, yellow fever, and other contagions ran rampant in the crowded holds and contributed to the shockingly high death toll. “The lower hold and the orlop deck were such a terror,” described Andros, “that no man would venture down into them.”* He poetically and powerfully concluded that “the whole ship, from her keel to the taffrail, was equally affected… that disease and death were wrought into her very timbers.”† The Hell Ship, it seemed, “contained pestilence sufficient to desolate a world.”
Thomas Dring recalled that contagion and disease were already widespread on the ship when he and his crewmates arrived. Many prisoners contracted one of the ship’s “putrid fevers” as soon as they stepped foot on the old hulk. Moreover, Andros and Dring complained, many men became ill because the healthy and sick were “mingled” together in close, confined spaces, especially after sundown, when they were forced belowdecks and the hatches sealed. Everyone ended up contracting some ailment.
Young Christopher Hawkins shared the assessment of his fellow prisoners: “The small pox and scurvy, with diverse fevers, raged from stem to stern; and lice and other vermin were [my] constant companions and tormentors.” Nor were the crew or guards safe. They also contracted the fevers and disease that infested the ship. In fact, according to Dring, disease was part of the reason the Jersey was “removed, and moored, with chains and cables,” to the “solitary and unfrequented” bay. There remained concern throughout the war that the “destructive contagion” on board was so bad that it might spread to Brooklyn and Long Island. The British intended the notorious prison ship to be a visible reminder of what would happen to those who took up arms against them, but it was so wretched that it also threatened the nearby population still loya
l to the Crown.
At any one time, there were usually a half dozen male nurses on board the Jersey. Their main role was to assist in accommodating the afflicted until they could be transferred by a small launch to one of the hospital ships. But several of the prisoners pointed out the misnomer of calling them nurses, as they were not trained. Many of the so-called nurses were themselves sick and were prisoners who volunteered their services solely in order to get extra rations.
There were also ten or so nurses selected from the prison population assigned to each of the nearby hospital ships, but most of them neither cared about nor helped their patients. Sherburne remembered them playing cards all day while the prisoners suffered. At night, the nurses never ventured belowdecks to tend to the sick and ignored the shrieks, moans, and requests from the dying men. When a prisoner died, the nurses confiscated any belongings and clothing to sell to other prisoners, prompting one prisoner to recall, “The nurses took more interest in their death, than they did in relieving their wants.” Sherburne offered a similarly dreary assessment of the hospital ships, concluding, “The depravity of the human heart was probably as fully exhibited in those nurses, as in any other class of men.”
Dring also suggested that it would have been more accurate to call the nurses “thieves,” as they were good at commandeering a sick or dead man’s belongings. He remembered one such incident aboard the Jersey clearly. Dring’s friend and crewmate Robert Carver, a gunner on board the Chance, had become very sick but was given no pillow or bedding. Carver knew the nurses would steal his extra clothing from his chest, so he put on several layers including a coat and hat even though “the weather was excessively hot.” When Carver became delirious, Dring took off his heavy coat and folded it like a pillow under his friend’s head, then went to get him some tea. As he was returning, he caught one of the “thievish” nurses with Carver’s coat. Dring demanded the nurse return it, but the man refused, saying it was the only perk the nurses had and that Carver would soon die anyway. Dring grabbed the nurse and forcibly took the coat. Carver, despite being a “strong and robust” man, died quickly. He was one of the last survivors of the privateer Chance. Dring would end up being the only member of his crew to survive the Jersey and after the war returned the coat to Carver’s family.
A surgeon was assigned to the HMS Hunter, a hospital ship floating next to the Jersey. However, according to Dring, the doctor rarely visited the Hell Ship and only “when the weather was good.” Andrew Sherburne said the physician visited the ship only once every several days while he was on board, and that his “stay was short.” Nor did the doctor “administer much medicine.” Philip Freneau, the famous “Poet of the Revolution,” was sent to the Hunter and remembered that a Hessian physician arrived from Brooklyn only a few times but usually ignored the sick. Yet that was fine with Freneau, who said of the doctor, “He kill’d at least as many as he cur’d.” The poet even stated that he preferred the “frequent blows” of the guard’s “cane” to the doctor’s treatments.
Even if a physician was brought aboard the ship, Andros admitted, the situation was such that “death was next to certain, and his success in saving others by medicine in our situation was small.” The exception was in the case of vaccinations. Andros estimated that about four hundred of the prisoners on the Jersey had never had smallpox and could have been saved with an inoculation. But the guards and crew did not permit the precaution. Rather, they let fate run its course. In fact, it is probable that this omission was by design, as it greatly increased the death toll and instilled fear among those on the ship and those under arms opposing Britain. Once, Andros remembered, two prisoners who arrived on the ship were physicians, which occasioned some hope among the men. But after a few days the commissary issued an emergency pardon or exchange and they were taken off the Jersey. It would not serve the ulterior motives of the British command to have the prisoners healthy and receiving care.
Either way, there was little that could be done for most of the prisoners; the surgeon ended up doing little other than recording the names of the dead.
The problem underlying all the others was overcrowding. While earlier prison ships and the latter hospital ships moored near the Jersey would hold, on average, about two hundred prisoners, the Hell Ship typically carried at least a thousand in its rotting holds, and by the last year of the war the population was up to twelve hundred. Young Hawkins described the ship as “cramped up with hundreds of others” belowdecks and “for most of the time… [they] were deprived of the light of day.” There were so many sick and dying prisoners on board that even the hospital ships floating nearby were overcrowded. The captain was frequently forced to establish temporary quarters on the upper deck for the sick and erect bunks at the starboard stern as a makeshift hospital. The overcrowding also added to the scarcity of food and water, exacerbated the spread of disease, and even caused injuries, as the men were prone to stepping on and tripping over one another at night.
As days turned into months and months into years for the prisoners, severe frustration and depression set in. Tempers flared belowdecks and there were fights among prisoners. Above deck, the violent treatment at the hands of the guards seemed to grow worse with time, and the death rate on board the old hulk also worsened. A half dozen prisoners a day were dying aboard the Jersey when she was first moored in Wallabout Bay, but that number increased to seven, eight, or nine a day by 1781, and was averaging a dozen a day by the end of the war. One prisoner estimated that eleven hundred men died on the Jersey and the hospital ships anchored near her in the winter of 1780–81 alone. A simple extrapolation of these surviving estimates and numbers over the time the ship served as a floating dungeon puts the total death count well above ten thousand. Overcrowding, concluded General William Heath of the Continental Army in a report, was the chief culprit. “Closely confined in great numbers,” he wrote, “produce[d] almost certain death.”
In a letter written on August 21, 1781, to Captain Edmund Affleck, an officer in the Royal Navy garrisoned in New York City, General George Washington complained about the overcrowded conditions on the Jersey and demanded relief for the prisoners. Captain Affleck replied later that month: “I take leave to assure you, that I feel for the distresses of mankind as much as any man, and, since my coming to the naval command in this department, one of my principal endeavors has been to regulate the prison and hospital ships. The government having made no other provision for naval prisoners than shipping, it is impossible that the greater inconvenience, which people confined on board ships experience beyond those confined on shore, can be avoided, and a sudden accumulation of people often aggravates the evil.”
While prisoners suffered during the hot, humid days of summer, where temperatures belowdecks routinely passed the 100-degree mark and there was no fresh air, winters presented the opposite problem. Alexander Coffin, a prisoner on the Jersey during the winter of 1782, said that most of the men lacked warm clothing and were forced to huddle together to “keep from freezing.” But it was often to no avail. One newspaper report summed up the hellish conditions, saying, “No fires warmed her occupants in winter, no screen sheltered them from the August sun; no physician visited the sick, no clergyman consoled the dying there.” The shocking description continued, “Poor and scanty food, the want of clothing, cleanliness and exercise, and raging diseases that never ceased their ravages, made the Jersey a scene of human suffering to which the Black Hole of Calcutta might be favorably compared.”*
There were, at various times, two or three hospital ships moored roughly two hundred to three hundred yards southeast of the Jersey. These included some combination of the Falconer, Frederick, Good Hope, Scorpion, Strombolo, Weymouth, and Hunter, which also held medical supplies and housed the physician and nurses. The sickest of the prisoners from the Jersey were transferred to one of the hospital ships but, as one prisoner cautioned, “the sick were seldome removed from them.” Thomas Dring knew of only three men who ever returned from one of those
ships. These floating hospitals were visible from the deck of the Jersey as ever-present reminders for the prisoners of what awaited them and may have had even higher death rates per capita than the Hell Ship. Accordingly, Dring said of these “terrible” hospitals that “their appearance was more shocking than that of our own miserable hulk.”
Despite the horrors on board, the hospital ships contained awnings and openings for fresh air. Because the prisoners sent there were so sick, the guards did not worry about their escaping. Therefore, the hatches remained open at night, which allowed for some fresh air and moonlight into the holds. Depending on the nurses on the hospital ships, the patients were occasionally treated to a pint of wine. But as the prisoner population continued to grow and as conditions aboard the Jersey grew ever more wretched, the hospital ships soon became overcrowded. In fact, in both 1781 and 1782, they became so grossly overcrowded that the sick had to be transferred back to the Jersey, disease and all. Some were placed back into the general prison population; others were housed on the lower gun deck or simply piled up on the upper deck.
The Ghost Ship of Brooklyn Page 13