The Ghost Ship of Brooklyn
Page 32
attack on Hessian base at, 6, 28n
Washington’s victory at, 140
Trinity Church (New York City), 5
Trumbull, Jonathan, 79, 189, 193
Tyburn, hangings at, 74, 74n, 132n
U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 216
U.S. House of Representatives, 221
U.S. Merchant Marines, 217
USS Connecticut, 223
vaccinations, smallpox, 15, 97–98, 99, 122–123
Vail, Christopher, 185
Van Cortland’s Sugar House (New York City), 30
Vancouver, George, 75
van Horne, Isaac, 32
Vaux, Calvert, 222
Vernon, Edward, 13, 14–15
Virgil, 231n
Virginia Gazette (newspaper), 192–193
Wallabout Bay
graveyard, 80
hospital ships in, 81, 125–127
prison ships in, 6, 8, 42, 76–77
Walpole, Robert, 12–13, 15
War of Jenkins’ Ear, 12–15
War of Spanish Succession, 11
warships
classification of British, 16
Continental Navy, 44
conversion to prison ships, 17
Washington, George, 186
attack against Hessians at Trenton and, 6, 28n
on British practice of impressment, 139
brother Lawrence and, 15
Burgin and, 157–158
Common Sense and, 186n
complaints about conditions aboard the Jersey, 124
complaints to Howe about treatment of American prisoners, 40, 41, 132, 136–138, 139
crossing Delaware into Pennsylvania, 28
defense of New York, 20–26, 54, 75
efforts to improve treatment of American prisoners, 39–41, 188
Ethan Allen and, 132
inability to negotiate for privateer prisoners, 135
Lee and, 133n
on losses on the Jersey, 214
at Newburgh, 212, 212n
prisoner exchanges and, 140, 141–143, 187–188, 189, 194–195, 196, 199, 201–202, 203, 204
return to New York City at war’s end, 210
statue of, 219
on support for independence from Britain, 180
Washington, Lawrence, 15
Washington Park, 222–223
Waterman, William, 163–165
water rations, 33, 98, 108, 109–110
weather, conditions for American prisoners and, 33–34, 39, 124, 127
Weinman, Adolph Alexander, 224
Wells, Levi, 189
Wentworth, Thomas, 13, 14
West, Charles E., 5, 211
Whipple, Christopher, 96
Whitman, Walt, 4–5, 221–222
Williams, John Foster, 62–64
Wilson, James, 91
wood, for cooking aboard the Jersey, 108
Woolwich Dockyard, 75
work parties, from HMS Jersey, 110–111, 172–173
yellow fever, 120, 191, 233
Yorktown
battle of, 6, 206
surrender at, 196
Young, Samuel, 32
Zuran, Pierre, 216
* The long war lasted until Athens surrendered in the year 404 B.C.E.
* There has since been a monument erected to their memory in Brooklyn.
* The historical record remains unclear as to whether Jenkins actually brought along his severed appendage, with some recent sources questioning the authenticity of the story.
* This line of warships was very popular. A total of fifteen “fourth rate” ships carrying sixty guns were built in England in the 1730s. Another twelve carrying fifty guns were also constructed.
* As many as thirty thousand German soldiers, many of them from Hesse-Cassel, were contracted by the British to fight in the war.
* Washington’s mistakes while in command during the Jumonville Affair and the Fort Necessity campaign in 1754 contributed to the start of the French and Indian War.
* The battle is also known as the Battle of Long Island and the Battle of Brooklyn Heights.
* It was from this encampment that Washington would cross the Delaware River and launch his daring Christmastime attack against the Hessian base at Trenton. The success of the battle would temporarily bolster his army, his command, and the larger war effort.
* King’s College is now Columbia University.
* After Howe was recalled by London in 1778, Elizabeth and her two children moved back to England, but her husband stayed in New York. The Lorings were reunited after the war and had additional children, leaving history to ponder the full nature of the affair.
* Howe recorded in his orderly book the following entry: “A spy from the enemy by his own full confession, apprehended last night, was executed this day at 11 o’clock in front of the Artillery Park.”
* Today the location is between Williamsburg and the Manhattan Bridge.
* Edgar Stanton Maclay’s A History of American Privateers (1899) estimates the total number of ships sailing as privateers at 136 in 1776, 73 in 1777, 115 in 1778, 167 in 1779, 228 in 1780, 449 in 1781, and 323 in 1782.
* “John Bull” is the personification of an Englishman, a term that originated from the main character of the 1712 book of the same title by John Arbuthnot.
* A boatswain manages the ship’s crew and supplies.
* A cartel was a group of mediators who represented the prisoners and their families in their negotiations with the Royal Navy.
* Also known in Europe as the Seven Years’ War.
* The nickname for the execution spot, named for its location: Tyburn Road.
* During the Revolutionary War, the bay was at times still called “Whallabocht” or “Wallebocht.”
* France and Spain had been covertly providing military aid to the Americans since 1776. France and Britain went to war in 1778. Spain joined the following year and the Dutch the year after that.
* Benjamin Franklin was deeply upset by his illegitimate son’s support for Britain, which ended their relationship.
* There are two accounts that are more sympathetic to Sproat, one of them being the book David Sproat and Naval Prisoners in the War of Revolution (1909) by James Lenox Banks, whose defense of the brutal commissary seems inspired by the fact that he was a descendant of Sproat.
* A rod is roughly 5½ feet in distance, meaning the ship was moored just over 100 feet from land. But another report puts the Jersey at about 100 yards from the shoreline.
* The lines are from the epic poem Paradise Lost, written in 1667 by famed English poet John Milton.
* Suet is the hard, white fat on the loins and organs of sheep and cattle. Prisoners would prepare a pastry or mincemeat with it.
* The tafferel was a panel decorated with carvings, typically located on the upper part of the ship’s stern.
* The orlop was the lowest deck on large sailing ships.
† A taffrail is a carved panel, often with a painting or carving, on the flat upper part of a ship’s stern. It is sometimes referred to as “tafferel.”
* The Black Hole of Calcutta was the infamous dungeon in India. In 1756, a Bengali army of 50,000 marched on Fort William, which was defended by only around 170 British soldiers. After the fort fell on June 20, the surviving soldiers as well as English women and children were forced into the small, dank, disease-ridden dungeon. By the time the doors were opened, most had died.
* A halter is a rope or noose, and Tyburn was the location of so many executions in London that it came to be known as “God’s tribunal” and the hanging post was known as the “Tyburn tree.”
† General Richard Prescott had the dubious distinction of being captured twice. After a small unit of Americans snuck at night into his headquarters in Rhode Island, Prescott was caught in bed and further humiliated by not being allowed to dress. He was later exchanged for the American general Charles Lee, despite the fact that Lee had conspired against Geor
ge Washington and was also caught in his bedtime clothing after a night of illicit partying in New Jersey.
* Tories were colonists who supported the British during the war.
* Flax is a flowering plant cultivated for its seed. The fiber from the stalk is used as a textile.
* A gimlet is a T-shaped tool with a screw tip used to bore holes.
* “The Adams Third” was popularized in the famous book The Struggle for American Independence, written by Sydney George Fisher at the dawn of the twentieth century.
* Loyalist units fought at such battles as Camden, Cowpens, Guilford Court House, King’s Mountain, and elsewhere.
* General Washington ordered his officers to read Common Sense to the army in order to build support for the war.
* The narrow island is in the East River between Manhattan and Queens. In the nineteenth century it held a prison and asylum for the mentally ill. The island is now known as Roosevelt Island.
* Washington headquartered at Newburgh from April 1782 to August 1783, the longest period of time spent at any headquarters during the war.
* The Jersey was first used as a prison ship in December 1778. It was moved to Wallabout Bay in April 1780 and the final prisoners were removed from the ship in April 1783.
* No records have ever been found for the period November 21, 1777–August 2, 1778, and for December 25, 1780–February 14, 1781. And no records exist for the ships moored or anchored next to the Jersey, including the Falmouth, Hunter, John, Prince of Wales, Scorpion, and Strombolo.
* The Anti-Federalists were eventually known as the Democratic-Republicans.
† The policy, known as “impressment,” was implemented because Britain needed more sailors in its war against Napoleon.
* In some sources, the name is also spelled Romeyn.
* Washington Park had been renamed Fort Greene Park in honor of the famed general Nathanael Greene. The original Revolutionary-era structure, Fort Putnam, had been renamed for General Greene prior to the War of 1812.
* A charnel house is a building or vault for corpses and bones; the term is often used to connote death and destruction.
* Lenox’s father, Robert, was Sproat’s bookkeeper and relative.
† During the Revolution, the title “president” was used rather than “governor.”
* Andros borrowed the line from Virgil’s Aeneid, the epic poem written between 29 and 19 B.C.E. about Aeneas, a Trojan who comforts his tortured companions by reminding them that perhaps one day their recollections of the event would help to heal the horrors of it.
* Huguenots were French Protestants who had been persecuted in Europe by the Catholic Church.