Rebels at sea, p.23
Rebels at Sea, page 23
Silas Talbot, captain of the privateer General Washington, was captured by the HMS Culloden in the fall of 1780 and sent briefly to the Jersey before being transferred to Mill Prison. He left the following damning portrait of his time on the prison ship: “There were about 1,100 prisoners on board. There were no berths or seats, to lie down on, not a bench to sit on. Many were almost without clothes. The dysentery, fever, frenzy and despair prevailed among them, and filled the place with filth, disgust and horror. The scantiness of the allowance, the bad quality of the provisions, the brutality of the guards, and the sick, pining for comforts they could not obtain, altogether furnished continually one of the greatest scenes of human distress and misery ever beheld. It was now the middle of October, the weather was cool and clear, with frosty nights, so that the number of deaths per day was reduced to an average of ten, and this number was considered by the survivors a small one, when compared with the terrible mortality that had prevailed for three months before. The human bones and skulls, yet bleaching on the shore of Long Island, and daily exposed, by the falling down of the high bank on which the prisoners were buried, is a shocking sight, and manifestly demonstrates that the Jersey prison ship had been as destructive as a field of battle.” Portrait painted in the uniform of a British officer, by Ralph Earl, 1785, courtesy of William R. Talbot Jr.
Legions of vermin infested the men’s clothes, skin, and hair, causing an interminable itch that no amount of scratching could alleviate. Some men, driven by insatiable hunger, picked the lice and fleas from their body and ate them.# The air was thick and fetid. In the summer, the men broiled belowdecks in temperatures that soared past 100 degrees, while in the winter they huddled even closer together than normal to keep from freezing to death, which many of the weakest did.
The prisoners were fed an abominable and stingy diet of rancid food and water. The bread was “moldy and filled with worms,” the peas “as indigestible as grape-shot,” and the beef was so solid that it “would have set the keen edge of a broad-axe at defiance to cut across the grain”; if it had a “streak of fat,” that “would have been a phenomenon.” The pork, which was rarely served and always “unsavory,” had “motley hues” and “the consistenc[y] and appearance of variegated fancy soap.” The butter was not butter at all but a mystery oil that “was so rank and putrid that we could not endure even the smell of it,” according to one prisoner. During New York City’s periodic food shortages, when British forces and the local population were placed on short rations, the prisoners’ fare was further reduced.
It was not only that the meat was of poor quality and improperly cooked. The Jersey was so close to shore that its keel was permanently wedged into the mud, and the depth of the water around the ship was just a few feet at low tide. Into this shallow water the waste of roughly a thousand men was dumped daily, and because tidal flushing was weak in the bay, most of that waste accumulated, further decaying. That foul salt water was drawn onto the ship and placed in the large copper kettle where the meat was boiled. Not only did the salt water infect the meat with its putridity, but it also corroded the kettle, releasing copper and, in effect, dosing the men with high concentrations of the metal.
Cruelty Presiding Over the Prison Ship, an engraving accompanying Joel Barlow’s poem Columbiad, circa 1807.
The drinking water, held in large barrels that were never cleaned, “was nauseous.” Whenever the sediment at the bottom was disturbed, either by ladling out water or through the addition of new water, the noxious sludge became suspended in solution, rendering the water “most disgusting and poisonous in nature.” The injustice of this situation was not lost on the prisoners, who could see the mill in Wallabout just a few hundred yards away on the shore, through which flowed “as fine water . . . as was perhaps ever drank.”
Living on top of one another and with already weakened constitutions, the inmates were stalked by dysentery, yellow fever, smallpox, and other maladies. The cries of the afflicted rent the air. According to Thomas Andros, who had been captured on the New London privateer Fair American in 1781, “the whole ship, from her keel to the taffrail** . . . contained pestilence sufficient to desolate a world; disease and death were wrought into her very timbers. . . . It fell but little short of the Black Hole at Calcutta. Death was more lingering, but almost equally certain.” Another prisoner later recalled that he found himself
among a collection of the most wretched and disgusting looking objects that I ever beheld in human form. Here was a motley crew, covered with rags and filth; visages pallid with disease, emaciated with hunger and anxiety, and retaining hardly a trace of their original appearance. Here were men, who had once enjoyed life while riding over the mountain wave or roaming through pleasant fields, full of health and vigor, now shriveled by a scanty and unwholesome diet, ghastly with inhaling an impure atmosphere, exposed to contagion, in contact with disease, and surrounded with the horrors of sickness and death.
The sickest of prisoners were transported to the nearby hospital ships, which were really just way stations on the road to oblivion. Few men ever returned alive.
Disposing of the dead was a constant task. After the deceased were brought up to the main deck and laid out on the grating, the other prisoners sewed them into blankets if there were any to be found. Covered or not, the dead were slid down a plank into a boat. Joining them were the prisoners chosen to dig the graves. Many volunteered for this duty, not out of reverence for the deceased but because it gave them a brief opportunity to leave the crowded ship, step on solid land, and breathe fresh air. Guards kept a watchful eye as the prisoners dug a shallow trench on the banks of Wallabout Bay, placed the bodies within, and quickly covered them with sand. The morbid act completed, the prisoners were marched back to the boat. Sometimes the gravediggers were allowed to bring a piece of turf back to the ship. When Dring did so, the offering was “sought after by” the other prisoners “with assiduity and passed around like a fragrant rose among them.”
Because the graves were so shallow and close to the edge of the bay, storms and the tides would regularly uncover the dead. Thus exposed, the bodies decomposed, their bones bleaching in the sun. So many men were buried along the banks that their remains formed a grisly wrack line of death, which slowly washed into the water. The gruesome scene played out within sight of the Jersey, giving the prisoners a terrible glimpse of their possible fate, which must have seemed only slightly worse than their current predicament.
Unlike their countrymen across the Atlantic in Mill and Forton Prisons, the men on board the Jersey did not have distractions such as sports, crafts, or visits from the clergy and others who might have offered a reprieve. Nor did they have a daily market where they could supplement their meager fare or buy clothes. But they did enjoy the modest services of Dame Grant, at least for a while. She was, according to Dring, “a very corpulent old woman” who was rowed out to the Jersey by two boys every other day in her boat. Sitting in the stern with her box of goods, she offered a variety of articles for sale, including fruit, sugar, and tobacco. Only a few of the prisoners had ready cash, and those who did buy from Dame Grant often felt guilty because so many of their peers could only gawk at her wares. Still, she did a brisk business, and her arrival was eagerly anticipated by the men. In 1782, Dame Grant caught the “contagion” from the prisoners and died: “although not in the flower of [her] youth, it was in the time of usefulness to us prisoners, and we regretted her loss, which was never after supplied.”
On prison ships, as at Mill and Forton, there were three main paths to freedom. One could voluntarily join the Royal Navy, although almost no inmates did. As Andros observed, “If there was any principle among the prisoners that could not be shaken, it was the love of their country. I knew no one to be seduced into the British service. They attempted to force one of our prize brig’s crew into the navy, but he chose rather to die, than perform any duty, and he was again restored to the prison ship.” Some prisoners who didn’t volunteer were nevertheless conscripted through impressment, a practice that accelerated as British forces became severely depleted due to battlefield losses and disease.
Being placed on a cartel was another way out, but those were relatively rare events for prisoners kept in America, too, especially prior to the peace negotiations in 1782.†† At most, cartels accounted for hundreds and perhaps a few thousand men held on prison ships being released. George Washington tried repeatedly to engineer prisoner swaps but was largely unsuccessful. Washington and Congress often couldn’t agree on the terms of exchanges, causing negotiations to breakdown. A large number of British prisoners in America were not under Washington’s or Congress’s control but rather were spread out across the states, which were responsible for them. Given that states, with a few exceptions, didn’t have the capacity to hold the prisoners, many were allowed to melt into the general populace, hiring themselves out to local farms and businesses. Offering up such prisoners for a cartel was virtually impossible. Those states, like Connecticut, that held British prisoners in jails were often unwilling to provide them for cartels, and when they did, the exchanges were relatively insignificant. When there were trades to be made, strategic considerations often intervened. While the British were eager to trade American privateersmen for British soldiers or navy men, Washington balked at such proposals, unwilling to return trained fighters when his army might soon face them again.
British authorities, too, were ambivalent about cartels, further complicating negotiations. And when Washington and other American leaders urged their British counterparts to exchange prisoners for humanitarian reasons, officials including Admiral Howe and Commissary General Sproat often lied, claiming that inmates were treated quite well, despite clear evidence to the contrary. Their dissembling only made it that much more difficult to strike a deal.
Cartels didn’t ensure that prisoners would survive the process of release. In early January 1777, after an eleven-day journey, a British ship with two hundred prisoners from the Jersey landed in Milford, Connecticut, and discharged its human cargo. According to the Connecticut Gazette, their “rueful countenances too well discovered the ill treatment they received in New York.” Twenty prisoners died during the trip, and another twenty-six perished soon after arriving.
The final path to freedom was escape, the route chosen by Christopher Hawkins. In the summer of 1781, when he was seventeen, Hawkins left the Smithfield, Rhode Island, farm where he worked and joined the Marianna, a Providence privateer. A sinewy young man, five foot ten, with blue eyes, black hair, and a fair complexion, Hawkins’s privateering career was brief. Within five days of sailing, the Marianna was captured by the frigate HMS Medea. Herded into the frigate’s cable tier, Hawkins found himself among more than two hundred American privateersmen so tightly packed that they could neither lie down nor sit. For three days, as the frigate sailed to New York, the prisoners suffered mightily. Some died, but those who survived didn’t lose their spirit. Often breaking out into song to annoy their captors, the Americans were particularly fond of a tune with a patriotic refrain: “For America and all her sons will forever shine.” Guards repeatedly yelled at them to shut up and threatened to shoot them, though they never did. When the frigate reached New York, Hawkins and his fellow privateersmen were sent to the Jersey.
Not long after setting foot on board, Hawkins began plotting his escape. The consequences of failure were steep. A new regulation passed just months before the beginning of Hawkins’s internment declared that anyone caught attempting to escape would be summarily shot. Fear of that outcome was only one of the impediments to breaking out. The Jersey had about sixty British soldiers on board, and the hospital ship and a guardship, both moored nearby, had armed sentinels as well. There were yet more guards stationed at the edge of the bay. To get ashore, one would have to swim and wade, all the while running the risk of being picked off. Then there was the cold. It was early October, and both the air and the water were chilly.
Aware of all of these obstacles, Hawkins and one of his shipmates, William Waterman, were yet determined to try. All they needed was a stormy night. When one came, they took an axe and a crowbar stolen from the cook’s room and went to one of the gunports on the lower deck that was bolted shut with iron bars. Each time a peal of thunder rang out, they worked to dislodge the bolts and bars. After a few hours, they had wrenched the port open. They set the bolts and bars lightly back into place so as not to arouse the guards’ attention. They also hung a few shirts over their handiwork to hide the cut marks.
Their plan was to leave late at night and swim to a distant point on the shore to avoid the land-based sentinels. They estimated that they would have to cover one and a half miles. When Hawkins and Waterman told the captain of their privateer, Christopher Whipple, about their plot, he was shocked. A mile and a half would be hard enough of a swim in the current conditions, but Whipple said they had misjudged the distance. The point they were aiming for was more like two and a half miles away. Even if they made it clear of the ship and avoided being shot, they would never survive the swim. But Hawkins and Waterman would not be deterred.
A few days later, on a particularly dark evening, they went into action. They removed the bolts and bars from the gunport and slung their makeshift knapsacks, filled with extra clothes, over their backs. Using a rope held by other prisoners, Waterman descended into the water first, followed by Hawkins. A few hundred feet from the Jersey, Hawkins softly called out for Waterman three times but got no reply. Assuming that his accomplice had drowned, Hawkins pressed on, using the lights of the prison ships and the twice-hourly calls of the sentinels—“All’s well”—as guides to keep on course.‡‡ Two and a half hours later, having not only lost his knapsack but shed most of the clothes he had been wearing, Hawkins pulled himself ashore. Numb, cramped, nearly naked, and shivering, he stumbled into a nearby barn, entered, covered himself with hay, and fell into a fitful sleep.
The next morning was the start of his long journey home. Drinking from streams, scavenging rotten fallen fruit and rock-hard ears of corn, and sleeping in barns or out in the open, he traveled many miles. Just as he was becoming too weak to continue, he approached two boys in a field. They were shocked to see this almost naked, dirty, emaciated man before them and began to back away. Hawkins told them to not be afraid, and when they asked him where he had come from, he told them the truth and begged for clothes and food.
The boys, who were brothers, ran to tell their mother about the strange visitor and returned with pantaloons and buttered bread. They instructed Hawkins to go to the family barn. Soon their mother appeared and gave him a shirt and more food. Hawkins said he wanted to reach Sag Harbor, where he had contacts. The woman recommended that he go to Oyster Bay, where there was a man who would help him.
Skirting British sentinels on multiple occasions, Hawkins walked into Oyster Bay, where he was immediately accosted by Tory militiamen who thought he was a whaleboatman from Connecticut, come to steal from the locals. Exhibiting an astonishing lack of guile and imagination, Hawkins told them exactly who he was. His honesty got him placed under guard, as preparations were made send him back to the Jersey.
Supervision was lax, enabling Hawkins to escape once again. It was his remarkable luck a few days later to cross paths with Daniel Havens, the man he was trying to reach in Sag Harbor. Because Havens had business to attend to first, he directed Hawkins to continue on alone and wait at his house. Even before Havens had returned, his family had helped Hawkins obtain a spot on a sloop heading for the Connecticut shore. He reached Mystic a day later and from there made his way to Providence. Having had his fill of seaborne adventure, the young Christopher Hawkins gladly returned to the farm he had left back in 1781.
Americans were well aware of the suffering of their countrymen on prison ships. In 1777, the Continental Congress launched an investigation into widespread complaints about British brutality directed at “officers, soldiers, and [other] Americans” fighting for independence. An important thread of the investigation focused on conditions within prison ships. The resulting report concluded that the prisoners “were, in general, treated with the greatest barbarity,” and that “multitudes died.” Congress revisited the issue in 1781 and found that the situation had worsened, and “that notwithstanding every effort of Congress to obtain for our people, prisoners in the hands of the enemy, that treatment which humanity alone should have dictated, the British commanders . . . have persisted in treating our people, prisoners to them, with every species of insult, outrage and cruelty.”
American leaders were under no illusions that these reports would change British behavior. They were intended to document an important side of the war, and to serve as propaganda, however sincere the intentions behind them. The reports were printed in newspapers throughout the states, along with heartrending letters from prisoners and stories of daring escapes. One of the most unusual, popular, and affecting published accounts of life on a prison ship was written by Philip Freneau, the man who would earn the moniker “Poet of the American Revolution.”
