Rebels at sea, p.22
Rebels at Sea, page 22
In short let the disease be what it will, you must take his Mixture.
That all-powerful “mixture” was a combination of salts, balsam, crushed roses mixed with sugar (marinated for three months), and Jalap, a laxative made from the dried roots of a Mexican plant in the morning glory family.
In addition to eating, building things for sale, and visiting the market, prisoners filled their days by writing letters, reading local newspapers or books, wrestling, gambling, cleaning their barracks, talking among themselves, or just doing nothing. Some prisoners even ran makeshift schools, teaching their illiterate peers how to read and write. Visitors also provided a pleasant diversion. Perhaps the most enthusiastic visitor of the war was Thomas Wren, a Presbyterian minister in Portsmouth. He began appearing at Forton early on, giving the Americans money, clothes, and medicine collected from the locals. He also offered the prisoners spiritual counsel and shared news of the war or from their friends back home.†
There was one other activity that took up a great deal of the typical prisoner’s day: dreaming of freedom. The easiest method to escape the confined life of a prisoner was to sign on to a British naval ship. American prisoners were often urged to do so by visiting British naval officers, but not many took the opportunity. Various analyses estimate that the defection rate of Americans at the two prisons in Britain ranged from 5 to 8 percent, while one study claims that the figure for Mill Prison was around 12 percent. Such relatively low numbers are hardly surprising. Many American prisoners were fiercely loyal to their new country and the cause of independence, and they looked down on fellow countrymen who switched sides. Caleb Foot, who was captured on the Salem privateer sloop Gates and sent to Forton, noted that some of his fellow crewmen had “entered on board of his majesty’s ships . . . which is to the shame of America.”
In late December 1778, a group of Americans at Mill Prison drew up a statement that decried defections and proclaimed their collective resolve to not be seduced into British service. “We, whose names are hereunto subscribed, do, of our own free and voluntary consent, agree firmly with each other, and hereby solemnly swear, that we are fully determined to stand, and so remain as long as we live, true and loyal to our Congress, our country, our wives, children and friends, and never to petition to enter on board any of His Britannic Majesty’s ships or vessels.” More than one hundred men signed the document. Forton’s American inmates signed a more threatening document in which they promised to give any turncoat thirty-nine lashes and lop off one of his ears. Years after the war’s end, Franklin praised American prisoners in England who “refused all the allurements that were made use of, to draw them from their allegiance to their country—threatened with ignominious halters, they still refused.”
The patriotism of American prisoners was most apparent on their nation’s birthday. William Russell, captured on the privateer Jason and sent to Mill Prison, wrote in his journal on July 4, 1780, “To-day being the anniversary of American independence, the American prisoners wore the thirteen stars and stripes drawn on pieces of paper on their hats with the motto, Independence, Liberty or Death. Just before one o’clock we drew up in line in the yard and gave thirteen cheers for the thirteen United States of America and were answered by the French prisoners. The whole was conducted in a decent manner and the day spent in mirth.”
Another path out of prison was to be traded for British prisoners being held in France. Franklin worked tirelessly to affect such trades, but these cartels were rare occurrences nonetheless, and barely lessened prison populations. The last option for getting out of jail was to escape, which a surprising number of Americans were able to do.
Although solid figures are hard to come by, British records for Forton claim that 536 prisoners escaped between June 1777 and April 1782. But this number cannot be treated as accurate. It counts multiple attempts by the same individuals, and there is no information on how many were recaptured—and many certainly were, given the number of entries in prisoner diaries mentioning escapees being brought back and punished. Another source estimates that as many as eight hundred men escaped from Mill and Forton during the war, and that escape rates were on the order of 18 and 30 percent, respectively. But these numbers are unreliable, too, for the same reasons. Despite the lack of firm statistics, it is clear that escape attempts were numerous, and that many were successful.
Prisoners jumped the wall, dug tunnels, slipped out of the hospitals where security was lax, and broke into underground sewer pipes, wading through offal until reaching the nearby bodies of water and swimming to freedom. They also employed what was referred to as a “gold key,” bribing guards to look the other way while they walked out through the main gate. Once outside the prison walls, the escapees needed help. This often came in the form of sympathetic Englishmen, including Wren and other ministers, who would shelter them and provide food, money, and connections that enabled them to make it onto a boat and out of Britain.
Many escapees were captured not far from the prison by so-called five pounders, area residents who would turn them in for the £5 reward given by the Admiralty. Capturing prison escapees became a lucrative pastime for anti-American locals, and sometimes they got help from the prisoners themselves, who would connive with their captors and split the money. In the bargain, the prisoner got a little time outside the prison walls and a night of carousing before returning to prison a bit richer than before. Many of these entrepreneurial partiers were repeat offenders, with some performing the charade fifteen times.
But such actions had a cost. Escapees who were caught were cut to half rations and thrown into “stricter confinement” for as long as forty days, though usually far less time. Such confinement meant being put in the “black hole,” a pit that often had standing water within. Once there, a prisoner was allowed to climb out for only an hour a day to stretch his legs and get some fresh air.
One lucky prisoner who escaped from Mill was Samuel Cutler, a crewman on the Dalton. After spending months thinking about escaping and watching many of his fellow prisoners try—most were recaptured—Cutler’s turn came on the evening of October 26, 1777. With a steady rain and dark skies offering cover, he and fellow inmate William Morris bolted from the hospital. This was no spur-of-the-moment breakout but a long-planned attempt. Morris’s uncle was the famed American artist Benjamin West, who lived in London, and it was with the help of Morris’s connections that he and Cutler were able to pull off their daring escape. Friends on the outside, including West, collected £77 to finance the venture. Some of the money funded a well-placed bribe for a guard, which gave the Americans the opportunity they needed to squeeze through the (ineffective) prison bars on the window of their hospital room. The rest of the money paid for a new set of clothes—Cutler and Morris passed themselves off as Quakers—and the costs associated with their journey to freedom. It wasn’t only money that was critical but also the sympathizers offering shelter to the escapees.
At one point, Cutler and Morris nearly blew their cover. Traveling through Exeter, they took a room at an inn and asked the landlord, “What is the news?” The landlord gave them a searching look and replied, “The news is that two Americans have escaped from Mill Prison.” Fortunately for them, this gentleman was a friend to the American cause and didn’t expose them but rather urged them to be more careful in the future.
It took them nearly fourteen days to make it to London. They stayed with friends in the city for a little more than a week and even were bold enough to dine out, visit Lloyd’s Coffee House, and take in a play. Finally, on November 14, Cutler and Morris boarded a ship to Rotterdam, where more friends added to their funds and sent them off via coach to Paris. Both ultimately returned to America.
One of the largest escapes occurred at Forton not long after fifty-eight men from the North Carolina privateer Fair American entered the prison in November 1780. There were British locals living just fifty feet from the prison’s outer fence, and the men of the Fair American decided to make their escape by tunneling to one of those homes. The main problem was where to put all the soil. They solved it in a clever manner. The ceilings in the prisoner’s quarters contained multiple eighteen-inch-square openings for ventilators that extended to the roof and exhausted foul air from the prison. By removing the ventilator grates, the prisoners could get access to the attic. Digging as quietly as possible in the early morning hours, the men placed the extracted soil in bags, which were passed up into the attic, where the dirt was dumped. It was an impressive operation. A typical night’s haul was one hundred bags. They had tunneled forty feet when disaster struck. A roof tile that was dislodged when they replaced one of the grates fell onto the head of a guard who was standing watch outside. He rushed into the building so quickly that the men didn’t have time to cover their hole, and their plot was discovered. Later, when a contingent of guards asked the men where they had put all the dirt, they said that they had eaten it. Failing to discover the soil-filled attic, the guards apparently took the men at their word and forced the them to fill the tunnel with new dirt brought from outside.
The Fair American prisoners laid low for a while but then began digging another tunnel, this one a success. They broke through to the cellar kitchen of a nearby house and surprised an old woman, who started screaming for the prison guards. The prisoners quickly gagged her. Almost the entire crew of the Fair American emerged out of the hole, along with a few other privateersmen. All but two of them were soon recaptured, and many of them gave up voluntarily to share in the £5 reward.‡ One of the men who escaped, Fair American lieutenant Luke Matthewman, ultimately made it out of the country with Thomas Wren’s help, arriving in Philadelphia in mid-1781. The fate of the other successful escapee is unknown.
While being a prisoner at Mill or Forton was not pleasant and could be dismal, it was not uniformly so. Writing to his wife from Mill on March 4, 1781, privateersman William Russell, who had been imprisoned for more than fourteen months, painted a picture of prison life that was far cheerier than the typical inmate commentary but nevertheless is broadly reflective of the relatively decent treatment most prisoners received. “Notwithstanding my long confinement, I bless God that I have not experienced the want of any of the necessaries of life in this prison, for with my industry§ and what I am allowed, I live comfortably for a prisoner. The usage we receive, if I am any judge, is very good, for we are allowed the liberty of the yard all day and an open market at the gate to buy and sell . . . besides we have comfortable lodgings. I have never been in the black hole once, for I have made it my study to behave as a prisoner ought.”
After two and a half years at Mill, Russell was released in June 1782 in a prisoner exchange and sent back to Boston, arriving there in mid-August. His reprieve was short. A few days after being reunited with his family, he joined another privateer, which was captured by a British warship on September 16. Back to prison Russell went, but this time he wasn’t sent to England. Instead, he was placed on the Jersey, one of the British prison ships in New York City. After just two months on board, he sent a letter to his wife, lamenting his situation. “I write with an aching heart to inform you of my miserable condition. I’m now in the worst of places and must suffer if confined here during the Winter, for I am short of clothing and the provisions is so scant that it is not enough to keep body and soul together. . . . This is the awfullest place I ever saw, and I hope God will deliver me from it soon.”
If anything, Russell’s description understates the circumstances in which he found himself. Throughout the war there were many cases of cruelty and inhumanity on both sides. But by far the worst experience any combatant had to endure was a stay on one of the British prison ships in New York. Most of the inmates didn’t make it out alive.
All told, there were seventeen prison ships in New York during the war, a few of which also served as hospitals.¶ The vessels were old naval warships and transports long past their prime. Stripped of their sails, rigging, spars, armaments, and most of their masts, they were transformed into floating hulks. The majority of the inmates were privateersmen, but the hulks also held naval seaman, soldiers, regular citizens, and French, Spanish, and Dutch combatants.
It was the sheer number of prisoners of war that created the need for prison ships in the first place. After the British took New York City in the summer of 1776, they placed the resulting mass of prisoners in makeshift jails throughout the city: in churches, government buildings, and sugarhouses (structures formerly used to refine and store sugar and molasses coming from the Caribbean). When these buildings filled up, inmates went to prison ships. The British treated this as a temporary solution, because they believed that the war would soon be over. But just like Mill and Forton Prisons in England, the prison ships in New York City would remain in use until nearly the end of the war.
As to how many prisoners were held on these ships, there is no definitive estimate. The extant records are poor, and some have disappeared. The late Edwin G. Burrows, the historian who delved most deeply into the data and contemporary reports, pointed to the total number most likely being between 15,700 and 22,000.
Most of the prison ships were moored in Wallabout Bay, a small, shallow inlet in the East River, located directly across the river from Manhattan, where the Brooklyn Navy Yard is today.
The relative distance from the city was a precaution against the spread of disease, which was rampant on the ships. The land on the edge of Wallabout was sparsely inhabited, adding to the ships’ isolation.
Brooklyn, circa 1766, showing Wallabout Bay toward the upper right-hand corner of the map.
All of the prison ships were dreadful, but the Jersey was by far the worst. “Such an accumulation of horrors was not to be found in any other one [prison ship], or perhaps in all collectively,” wrote a former prisoner after the war. “The very name of it struck terror into the sailor’s heart, and caused him to fight more desperately, to avoid being made a captive.” Nicknamed “Hell Afloat” by sailors who had the misfortune of being imprisoned on it, the Jersey had been a fourth-rate 64-gun British warship, launched in 1736. One hundred forty-four feet long and forty-two feet wide, its normal crew was four hundred. Before the start of the war, the Jersey had been transformed into a hospital ship and moored in the East River to serve the needs of the city. In late 1779, it was turned into a prison ship and towed to Wallabout Bay, where it was moored about a hundred yards from shore. The largest of the prison ships, the Jersey held at any one time between 850 and 1,200 prisoners. There is no consensus on exactly how many men, in total, languished on the Jersey during its more than three years as a prison, but it was most likely more than eleven thousand, and probably much more than that. As the early twentieth-century historian Danske Dandridge wrote, “Never before or since, in the dark annals of human sufferings, has so small a space enclosed such a heavy weight of misery.”
Arriving at the Jersey for the first time was itself a harrowing experience. When the men of the Providence privateer Chance were brought into New York Harbor as prisoners on board a British warship, they were immediately transferred to boats that took them to the Jersey. According to Thomas Dring, master’s mate on the Chance, seated in one of the boats was the “miscreant” David Sproat, who months earlier had assisted in the release of American privateersman John Greenwood. Now commissary general of naval prisoners, Sproat was “universally detested” for his cruelty. While the marine guards kept watch, the Americans rowed. They were harangued by Sproat, who yelled at them to pull harder. In no hurry, the Americans maintained their slow pace. This only enraged Sproat, who ominously said, “I’ll soon fix you, my lads.”
Nineteenth-century engraving depicting the interior of the prison ship Jersey.
As Wallabout Bay and the Jersey came into view, Sproat pointed, “then exultingly said ‘There, rebels, there is a cage for you.’ ” While Sproat was gloating, Dring looked at the dreaded hulk, bathed in the dying light of day. “A multitude of moving men [were] upon her upper deck.” Dring had spied the prisoners, who were being herded by armed guards from the main deck into the hold for the night. Seeing the boats coming nearer, a few of the prisoners “waved their hats and seemed to say ‘approach us not,’ at least we so construed it, and we afterwards found it verified.”
When the boats pulled alongside the Jersey, Dring found himself right next to one of the “air ports” on the side of the ship. In transforming the warships into prison ships, all the gunports had been sealed. To provide ventilation for the prisoners, the British cut twenty-four-inch square openings into the hull above the waterline. These air ports were placed ten feet apart and covered over by iron grates to keep the men from escaping. With so many prisoners belowdecks, the relatively small openings were relatively ineffective at circulating fresh air, and the limited light they admitted did little to lift the gloom within.
From one of the air ports, Dring later recalled, “came a current of foul air.” It brought back bad memories of the prison ship Good Hope, where he had spent four months in 1779 as an inmate before escaping. The smell precipitated an “accumulated nauseousness” that he found impossible to describe. While Dring was standing there waiting for orders to climb aboard, some of the Jersey’s inmates, speaking through the grates, addressed him. Given that night had fallen and there were no lights within the Jersey, Dring could not see his interlocutors; he could only hear their disembodied voices. They asked him what ship he had been on and how it had been captured. Upon receiving answers, one of the inmates replied that it was “a lamentable sight to them to see so many young men with health upon their countenances about to enter their infernal place of abode.” The inmate then added “that death had no relish for their skeleton carcasses, and that he would now have a feast upon fresh comers.”
And feast death did. Between six and twelve men died per day during the Jersey’s tenure as a prison. Every morning, as the sun rose, “there would be heard the loud, unfeeling and horrid cry” from the guards above: “Rebels, bring up your dead.” Given the squalid conditions on the Jersey, it is surprising the death rate wasn’t even higher. The hold was so packed that the prisoners slept almost on top of one another, and it was not uncommon to go to sleep next to a living person and wake up next to a dead one. The floor was smeared with bodily secretions of all kinds. Because only two prisoners at a time were allowed on the main deck at night, many of the men who were unable to relieve themselves while waiting their turn went to the base of the ladder to do so. On most mornings a pile of excrement twelve feet in diameter lay around the ladder’s bottom rung. Some men didn’t even make it that far, and ended up defecating on their fellow inmates, covering them in “bloody and loathsome filth.”
