As he boarded the cartel ship, Dring was overcome with emotion. He had remained stoic during his entire incarceration, and his resourcefulness had saved the lives of many of his fellow prisoners, but now Dring finally burst into tears. All around him no one spoke. The prisoners simply sat in silence. Dring recalled, “It seemed impossible that we were in reality without the limits of the old Jersey.” He glanced at his fellow crewmates, all of whom seemed to be worrying that something would go wrong. Dring “shuddered with the apprehension that we might yet be returned to our dungeons.”
And then it hit him: there were only thirty-five survivors from the crew of the Chance, but forty British prisoners. Fortunately, Lieutenant Tillinghast had devised a plan. The lieutenant read five names of the former mates aboard the Chance who had died, but looked calmly at five friends who shared the gunroom with Tillinghast and Dring. The officers immediately picked up on the opportunity and came forward pretending to be the five deceased sailors. The ruse worked. No one said a word.
As sunset loomed, the exchange was completed. The sloop hoisted off and slowly sailed out of Wallabout Bay. Dring stared at the rotting hulk, watching prisoners shuffle slowly about on the deck as he had done each day for so long. As the sloop made sail in the twilight of the dying day, Dring caught his last glimpse of the Jersey. He was filled with “indescribable feelings of disgust.” His five-month-long ordeal was over.
18
Death and Demise
By feeble hands their shallow graves were made;
No stone, memorial, o’er their corpses laid.
In barren sands, and far from home, they lie,
No friend to shed a tear when passing by;
O’er the mean tombs, insulting foemen tread,
Spurn at the sand, and curse the rebel dead.
—Philip Freneau, “The British Prison-Ship” (1781)
With the surrender by General Charles Cornwallis on October 18, 1781, at the decisive Battle of Yorktown, the die was cast for an American victory. There would not be another major engagement, but the war dragged on with smaller battles and skirmishes for another two years. In April 1782, the Continental Congress dispatched John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, and Henry Laurens to Paris to open negotiations. However, Laurens was captured by the British and imprisoned in the Tower of London until the end of the war. A preliminary peace accord was worked out on November 30, 1782, yet numerous impediments remained, including what to do about the prison ships.
During the final two years of the war, a change in posture by the British was apparent. It began with the resignation in 1782 of Sir Henry Clinton, the commander of British forces in North America since 1778. That May, General Sir Guy Carleton arrived in New York to assume command. General Carleton did something his predecessors had never done—he visited the prison ships. The general also indicated his interest in relocating many of the prisoners from the ships to Blackwell’s Island, in the East River. While some men were in fact taken to the island and the British began a gradual de-escalation of hostilities, they continued to seize prisoners and hold them aboard the Jersey.
Large groups of prisoners from the Jersey and other prison ships were released and exchanged throughout the early months of 1783, the final year of the war. Rather than “freeing” the prisoners, however, the prideful British claimed to only be “paroling” them. One by one, all the prison and hospital ships were abandoned. By August, the last ones were towed away, leaving only the unoccupied Jersey as the sole reminder of the horrors committed off the coast of Brooklyn. Throughout the drawdown, ads were taken out by the British in the loyalist newspaper Rivington’s Gazette offering to sell the ships or parts for salvage. One ad featured “the hulks of His Majesty’s sloops Scorpion and Hunter,” the former fire ship Strombolo, and others. Earlier ships were scrapped, then sold; these final ships were never sold. The British did not even try to sell the Jersey.
On Sunday, April 6, 1783, British officers boarded the Jersey and ordered the remaining prisoners be assembled on the upper deck. The dreaded Commissary David Sproat stepped forward and read a royal proclamation stating that the war was ending. There were no congratulatory remarks, no medical assistance provided, and no apologies offered. Three days later, smaller ships anchored nearby in Wallabout Bay to take the prisoners to various ports in New England, where large and curious crowds gathered to see the living ghosts of the most notorious ship of the time. The long-awaited homecomings in late 1782 and early 1783 were not what people had hoped. As described in a New London newspaper, “The prisoners at N.Y. are sickly. Twenty were buried on Christmas day from the Jersey.” According to the paper, the horrors on board the Jersey remained until the bitter end, becoming even worse after the other ships were abandoned and as supplies were completely exhausted. The British seemed to have given up completely on the ship. “We are creditably informed that 50 are buried weekly,” the paper claimed.
After the last prisoners disembarked from the Jersey on April 9, the next day Commissary Sproat certified that the last prison ship was empty. The weakest and sickest among them, who had been transferred to Blackwell’s Island, were shipped home on May 3.
But the ordeal was not over for the prisoners, many of whom died on the way home or soon after being freed. Others never regained their health. One of them was William Drowne, a Rhode Islander who was a friend of Thomas Dring’s and had been captured by the HMS Belisarius in 1781. After being released in 1783, Drowne made it home, but the ghosts of the ship remained with him. Suffering from various maladies, Drowne eventually succumbed to them three years later. His story was all too common.
The old ship’s fate had been sealed long ago. Unfit for further service, and with her prisoners having been released, “the old hulk, in whose putrefactive bowels so many had suffered and died, was abandoned where she lay,” as one survivor remembered. Another commented, “The dread of contagion prevented everyone from venturing on board and even from approaching her polluted frame.” The Jersey sat as a haunted spectacle in the polluted waters of Wallabout Bay for only a short time before sinking. Severely rotted and with no prisoners to operate her bilge pumps, the old warship soon filled with water and sank in the exact spot where she had been moored. In the words of one nineteenth-century account, the memories of “the thousands who had written their names upon her planks” joined the old ship in her watery grave.
The slowly decaying remains of the old dungeon were visible in the shallow waters off Brooklyn for years to come, an eerie reminder of the bloodiest battle of the Revolutionary War. Andrew Sherburne returned to Brooklyn in 1788 to visit the site of his incarceration, writing, “I took an opportunity to visit the navy yard, directly opposite to which, formerly lay that dismal ship, the old Jersey. I passed over her remains, some of which I could see laying in the bottom of the East River.” Reminiscing as an old man in 1823, Sherburne counted his blessings and described the experience: “It caused my very soul to thrill when I passed over the remains of that wretched ship, and was approaching the shore to review the awful scenes I had witnessed, and the distressing suffering I had there endured through a long and tedious winter, more than forty years ago, and where more than two thirds of my shipmates had laid their bones.”
Reports survive from 1795 and 1803 of other individuals claiming to have seen the rotted oak skeleton of the ship below the water. Another eyewitness description is found in a letter written by the son of Captain Roswell Palmer, one of the survivors. Palmer’s son had been taken to the spot as a child and, “forty years after,” wrote to the son of another survivor that “at low tide the huge remains of her unburied skeleton” were still visible.
Slumbering on the muddy bottom, the Jersey soon became a ghost ship, all but forgotten by history.
In mid-August 1783, Sir Guy Carleton, the last British commander in her former colonies, received orders from London to evacuate New York City. It stood as the final British toehold in what had once been the Crown’s vast, lucrative colonies.
Carleton planned a quick and unceremonious departure for the remaining British soldiers and sailors as well as for any loyalists and liberated slaves who wished to leave America. As Carleton was preparing for the awkward departure, word arrived that, after a long and difficult negotiation, the peace treaty had finally been signed in Paris on September 3, 1783.
Evacuation Day finally arrived. At noon on November 25 the British abandoned the city. A large flotilla of warships and transports set sail from the harbor on Manhattan Island with roughly 29,000 loyalists in tow. Crowds of Americans whooped and hollered from the shoreline as the British slunk out of the city. A single cannon from one of the warships fired at the hecklers. Fittingly, and to the delight of the Americans, the shot fell far short of its intended target. The scene was a far cry from the majestic arrival of the Howe brothers seven years prior.
Soon thereafter, General Washington entered the city with the Continental Army behind him. Across the Harlem River, through Manhattan, and down to the Battery at the foot of Broadway they rode triumphant in a grand parade, passing not far from Wallabout Bay and the scene of so much suffering. It was Washington’s first time back in New York since retreating across the East River after the defeat at the Battle of Brooklyn on August 27, 1776. The humiliation of the defeat had long simmered in Washington, and he had always hoped to be able to retake the key city, though he never did. Now, though, after more than seven long years, the city was finally secured and back in American hands. After the festivities Washington put his trusted friend and artillery commander, General Henry Knox, in charge of the city.
Nine days later, on December 4, Washington gathered his officers at Fraunces Tavern, at the intersection of Pearl and Broad in the city. At an emotional banquet, the general bid them farewell. “With a heart full of love and gratitude, I now take leave of you,” said Washington with his voice cracking. “I must devoutly wish that your latter days may be as prosperous and happy as your former ones have been glorious and honorable.” Standing nearest to his commander, General Knox embraced his friend. And then, with tears on his cheeks, Washington invited every officer to come and shake his hand. One by one, the officers who had accomplished the impossible said good-bye.
After that, Washington rode to Annapolis to meet with the Continental Congress and resign his commission. There is no evidence he visited the old rotting hulk of the Jersey while in the city.
Although we will never know the final death toll aboard the Jersey, some partial records remain. Likewise, several newspaper articles from the Revolution, eyewitness descriptions from the time of the Revolution, and diaries of those who survived imprisonment on the ship exist; along with the work of a few historians, these allow for a reasonable estimate. All of the accounts are shocking, and most point to roughly 11,500 deaths on the Jersey.
One of the first tallies comes from General William Heath of the Continental Army, who arrived in New York five days after the last prisoners were released from the Jersey. Heath recorded that “11,644 American prisoners had died during the war in the prisons, and on board the prison-ships at New York.” Calling it a “surprising number,” he concluded that so many deaths occurred because the prisons and ships “were much too crowded, or not properly attended to in other respects.” Though Heath never stated how he arrived at the number, his total is very specific, suggesting it is not an estimate. However, Heath states that his total is for all prisoners in New York City, not just those who perished aboard the Jersey.
David Sproat was known to keep meticulous records, including dates that prisoners died. A few other wardens and officers on the ships did as well, and it is possible Heath had access to their war records. Yet none of those reports has survived. It is likely they were destroyed by the British at the end of the war, and for good reason, as the evidence would have been damning.
Although Heath’s death toll is for all American prisoners, other sources claim that roughly 11,500 men died on the Jersey alone. One of them was Charles West, a scholar from New York working in the nineteenth century. West was alarmed that history had largely forgotten the prison ship martyrs, and he sought to document their stories. As part of his research on the atrocities in Wallabout Bay, he concluded that over 11,000 American prisoners perished on the Jersey alone. Another nineteenth-century historian, George Taylor, put the number at 11,000 as well.
A third historian writing in the nineteenth century was Henry Onderdonk of Long Island. In discussing the revolutionary events of New York in his book, Onderdonk included the Jersey and quoted a story in a newspaper from nearby Fishkill written in May 1783, just days after the Jersey was finally abandoned. The article reads, “Tell it to the world, and let it be published in every Newspaper throughout America, Europe, Asia and Africa, to the everlasting disgrace and infamy of the British King’s commanders at New-York: That during the late war, it is said 11,644 American prisoners have suffered death by their inhuman, cruel, savage and barbarous usage on board the filthy and malignant British prison-ship, called the Jersey, lying at N.Y.” The author of the newspaper article was so appalled by the tragedy that he concluded, “Britons tremble, lest the vengeance of Heaven fall on your isle, for the blood of these unfortunate victims!”
Once again the number 11,644 is given, although this time it is for just the deaths aboard the Jersey. Still, questions remain about the reliability of these sources and reports. Two clues exist as to how the newspaper got the scoop on the fatality count. First, Fishkill is by the bank of the Hudson River, not far from General Washington’s wartime headquarters at Newburgh.* Second, the noted publisher of the New York Packet, Samuel Loudon, had fled there in order to continue covering the war after the British took New York. Either incident could explain how the local newspaper had numbers relating to the notorious prison ship. Other newspaper stories written in 1783—including for the Connecticut Gazette and Pennsylvania Packet—used the same death count for the old prison ship. Onderdonk, however, points out that none of the newspapers name a source, leading him to ponder whether the figure is “baseless conjecture.” Nonetheless, he concludes, “The number that perished was doubtless fearfully great, and needed no exaggeration.”
Another account from the time of the Revolution comes courtesy of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote about the Jersey. The author of the Declaration of Independence knew individuals who were imprisoned on the ships, including Philip Freneau. The noted author and poet was incarcerated on the Scorpion, and Jefferson took great interest in his good friend’s experience. As the American minister to France, Jefferson felt compelled to inform the French about the horrors of the British prison ships of Wallabout Bay. While living in France, Jefferson also met a Pennsylvanian named Richard Riddy who had been on the Jersey and was presently doing business in Paris. The future president took an interest in Riddy’s story and on August 17, 1786, recorded his deposition. The Pennsylvanian said that he had been captured in January 1783 and put aboard the Jersey. “While he was there,” wrote Jefferson of the interview, “David Sproate Commissary general of prisoners to the British army informed him that upwards of eleven thousand American prisoners had died on board the prison ship the Jersey, and shewed him the registers whereby it appeared to be so.”
While Jefferson was serving in Paris, a New Yorker named Henry Remsen Jr. was appointed as a clerk in the State Department. Remsen also took an interest in the legacy of the Jersey. The 11,000 number cited by Jefferson in the deposition was shocking to Remsen, who trusted Jefferson and rationalized that Sproat would have no reason to exaggerate the number. If anything, he had reason to understate it. Remsen therefore obtained Jefferson’s deposition of Riddy, which had been sent to Washington, and conducted his own inquiry about the death toll. In his notes, Remsen wrote that “there is a person living now on Long Island, who informed me that the number of American prisoners who were buried from on board the Jersey prison ship, along the shore on his land, could not be less in number than 10,000.” The individual in question was Remsen’s relative,
who lived on a farm by the burial ground at Wallabout Bay.
Another reliable source from the period is Elias Boudinot, one of the American prison commissaries. In a letter, Boudinot told the poet Joel Barlow that 1,100 prisoners died in an eighteen-month period on the Jersey, “almost the whole of them from the barbarous treatment of being stifled in a crowded hold with infected air, and poisoned with unwholesome food.” If one were to extrapolate Boudinot’s death toll over the total period of time in which the Jersey served as a prison ship, the number would be about 3,666. This is far smaller than 11,644, but a staggering number nonetheless.
A handful of contemporary historians have tried to calculate the number of fatalities on the Hell Ship using available accounts. Larry Lowenthal puts it at roughly 10,950 and “perhaps many more.” The historian Eugene Armbruster suggests that between 10,000 and 11,000 perished on the Jersey, comprising 7,000 Americans and 3,550 foreign sailors. Perhaps the most conservative estimate comes from the historian Howard Peckham, who in the 1970s estimated the total death count on all prison ships in Wallabout Bay at “a conservative 8,500.” On the other end of the spectrum, the author Edwin Burrows, who penned one of the very few reliable and scholarly accounts of prisoners during the Revolution, concluded that the number of Americans imprisoned and who died “was a lot larger than ever imagined.” While many historians believed that roughly 18,000 Americans were captured by the British during the war and just under half (roughly 8,500) of them perished, Burrows puts the number of captives at over 30,000, with over half of them (roughly 18,000) dying during captivity.
The Ghost Ship of Brooklyn Page 22