The Ghost Ship of Brooklyn

by Robert P. Watson

  The squadron sailed home in 1779 to a hero’s welcome, and Sherburne was reunited with his brother, who was back from his service on a privateer. He also discovered he had a new baby sister. Sherburne’s take from the prize was thirty-five gallons of rum, one ton of sugar, twenty pounds of cotton, and fifty dollars. He and his family were now wealthy.

  Like so many other young privateers and sailors, the successful voyage did not quench Sherburne’s appetite for adventure or, in his case, need for redemption. Sherburne tried his luck again, going back to sea in the fall of 1779 with the Ranger and the other two frigates. They captured a few small merchant ships and then sailed south past Florida. However, in May 1780, the squadron ran into gale winds. During the storm, he and other young boys were sent up the masts to trim the sails. There, high above the ship, the wind and salty spray tore at the flesh while the rough seas tossed the boys about like rag dolls.

  While the youngsters were busy at work and fighting for their lives, the weight of the sailors and ferocity of the storm snapped one of the wooden beams, sending several members of the crew crashing back to the deck and into the sea. Sherburne clutched the torn rigging and held on for dear life. Soon his wet hands lost their grip and he slipped momentarily, but somehow managed to catch hold of a rope. Sherburne dangled dangerously high above the violent waves. Miraculously, he eventually climbed safely down to the deck, exhausted, soaking wet, and trembling with fear. But it was about to get worse.

  As they were sailing to Charleston to resupply and repair the damaged masts and sails, the small squadron encountered five larger British ships. The British gave chase, pursuing the three American frigates to Charleston harbor. The Americans found temporary shelter in the harbor, as the sandbars and the shallow depth prevented the larger British warships from entering the inlet. But the British warships blockaded any escape and then opened fire. During the battle, one of the British ships dispatched small launches with guns to establish a battery just offshore at James Island. The Ranger moved into position on the other side of the harbor to engage the battery, and after a ninety-minute exchange the battery was destroyed. Unfortunately, while trying to sail to another part of the harbor to avoid British fire, the Ranger became caught on a sandbar. During the time the ship was unable to navigate, several cannonballs struck her hull. In desperation, Sherburne and other crewmembers threw equipment overboard to lighten the ship and raise her draft, while others went overboard in rowboats in an effort to tow her free.

  Watching the rowboats from his position on the upper deck, Sherburne heard a whistle and instinctively dove for cover behind one of the large guns—just in time. A cannonball exploded near him, sending shrapnel and wood flying across the deck. Sherburne escaped injury, but others standing beside him were not so fortunate. He recalled the feeling of absolute terror during the fight and attributed his miraculous survival to a higher power.

  The American ships were sitting ducks in the harbor and were taking fire. They were also running low on ammunition. With the Ranger battered and Charleston under assault, it was decided to abandon the ship and help the poorly defended city. Sherburne and his crewmates grabbed weapons and went ashore, where they were immediately thrust into the middle of a heated battle. The British soon overwhelmed the city’s defenders and the crews of the three frigates. The Americans surrendered on May 12, 1780, and were taken prisoner. During the surrender, Sherburne’s life was likely saved when the British inexplicably allowed the petrified teen to accompany the officers from his ship. The officers were housed separately and given better rations. The other young boys on the Ranger were not so fortunate.

  Not long after the surrender, a smallpox outbreak struck the city and swept through the ranks of the sailors. However, the officers had themselves and young Sherburne inoculated. Many of the sailors imprisoned in Charleston succumbed to the disease. Eventually the captain of the Ranger worked with negotiators from a cartel, and the British agreed to release the officers.* Sherburne’s luck held when the captain and boatswain agreed to take him with them.

  But Sherburne was not out of harm’s way just yet. The small boat used by the officers to sail to Newport, Rhode Island, had meager rations and their water supply was “foul.” Sherburne and a few of the officers soon became violently ill, so much so that when they arrived in Rhode Island they were quarantined by the port until they showed no further signs of disease or sickness. While biding their time, Sherburne was so desperate to wash away the filth and lice that covered his body that he waded into a small river. Not realizing just how weak he had become, he nearly drowned for a second time in his life (the first having been when he was a toddler) and had to be rescued by one of the officers.

  The young sailor eventually made it back home, only to discover that his father had died and his brother had never returned from his last mission on a privateer. Andrew Sherburne was not yet fifteen.

  It took the teen fully two months to recover his health, but Sherburne, like Thomas Dring, Christopher Hawkins, Thomas Andros, and Ebenezer Fox, did not learn his lesson. When a young captain out of Kennebunkport, Maine, who turned out to be more of a snake oil salesman than a mariner, approached Sherburne with the promise of “a short cruise” to “make your fortune,” the lad enlisted with the privateer. Privateering “had now become the order of the day,” he remembered, explaining his hasty decision. The newly built eight-gun schooner, Greyhound, was crewed by around twenty-five boys from New England, a few of them “not a dozen years old,” several officers, and two captains. The ship sailed north toward Canada.

  Soon after setting sail, the Greyhound was caught in a storm and Sherburne “very narrowly escaped being thrown off” the “pitching and rolling” ship. Later, while sailing on the St. Lawrence River, he observed his fellow privateers plundering civilian vessels and homes with no regard for whether they were loyalists or patriots. Homesick and regretting his decision, Sherburne confessed, “I endeavored to suppress all gloomy reflections and make the best of a bad bargain.” It did not work.

  The lawlessness of the privateers and his captain’s increasingly erratic and reckless behavior raised concerns in the boy, who now requested to take leave of the ship. His request was denied, but Sherburne began planning to desert at first opportunity. Meanwhile, the Greyhound joined with another privateer and he was transferred to the other ship. There he encountered a captain named Arnold who was far worse than the commander of the Greyhound. Captain Arnold was mentally unstable and violent, and he had a perverse taste for young boys, causing the teen to fear for his life and spend most of his time aboard the privateer hiding, especially at night. Sherburne and the other boys were saved from the reign of terror when the captain disappeared while the ship was off the Canadian coast. The details were unknown to the crew, but it appeared that he stripped naked and jumped overboard. Of course, it is also possible one of the members of the crew killed or threw him overboard at night. The only clue remaining was his clothing, which was still on the ship.

  Sherburne began to believe that both he and the ship were cursed. In a way they were. With no one to pilot or navigate the ship, it was dead in the water and was soon commandeered by an American privateer carrying twenty guns; rather than assist their fellow countrymen, its crew boarded the ship and looted what remained of the crew’s supplies and provisions. Americans were now attacking Americans. It seemed as if the cruise could not get any worse, but soon more bad weather struck and the small privateer began taking on water. Floundering, the ship was captured by the British warship Fairy. It was likely the better of two bad fates that awaited the crew.

  Sherburne and his crewmates were sailed all the way to England, where they were charged with “rebellion, piracy, and high treason on His Britannic Majesty’s high seas.” After giving his name, place of birth, age, father’s occupation, and details about his privateer, Sherburne was sent to the Old Mill Prison in Plymouth.

  The boy expected to die. There were few prisoner exchanges or releases at the t
ime and one of the only ways out of prison was to join the Royal Navy, which he began contemplating. But Sherburne had contracted yet another disease and was too weak for the Royal Navy to accept him. He resigned himself to the inevitable. While he was awaiting death, an opportunity presented itself one night when the prisoners noticed that far fewer guards were patrolling the prison yard and walls than normal. The prisoners in Sherburne’s cell had managed to remove the grate in their window in anticipation of just such an opportunity. Malnourished and skeletally thin, the boy was able to squeeze through the small opening, so his fellow prisoners sent Sherburne out the window.

  Sherburne’s memoir is not clear as to whether he was supposed to get help and rescue the other prisoners or simply make a run for freedom. The absence of detail indicates he was not able to rescue the other American sailors, but at least one of his friends in prison was soon released, suggesting that perhaps Sherburne did notify authorities to arrange for a prisoner release. Either way, while on the run Sherburne met a physician who treated him. The kind man contacted an American cartel and negotiated for them to take Sherburne home. It took fifteen months of travel, but the teen eventually made it home again. His family had long ago given him up for dead. After his incredible ordeal, he promised them he would never leave again.

  But eventually Sherburne was enticed back to sea once more. This time it was with a friend from the Old Mill Prison in England. So many men from New England’s coastal villages had enlisted in the war or on privateers or were dead or in prison that captains now had trouble crewing their vessels. And so it was that the captain and owners of the privateer Scorpion managed to find only eighteen men and boys to crew a ship requiring more than twice that number. The shortage was such that Sherburne was even offered the job of boatswain on the eight-gun vessel.

  This voyage was doomed from the start. Only five days out from port a large British warship hunted them. The Scorpion escaped after the crew threw most everything overboard to lighten the ship for speed. After resupplying, they continued on their voyage to the West Indies, but did not capture any ships. Rather, the Scorpion was again chased by a British warship, this time off the coast of Guadeloupe. They eluded the warship, but were hunted off Montserrat and then a fourth time while on the way back to Virginia. After so many narrow escapes, the crew was exhausted, unnerved, and out of provisions.

  While seeking shelter and supplies in Virginia, they were hunted again—this time by a much larger British warship. As it was about to overtake them, the winds slowed, and the Scorpion’s captain ordered what remained of the ship’s guns and stores overboard. Sherburne and his crewmates also lowered their small launches and rowed for their lives, pulling the Scorpion away from their pursuer on the flat ocean. Sherburne remembered that they “rowed all day; we did not leave off even to eat.” By nightfall the effort seemed to have paid off. There was no sign of the hunter on the dark horizon, allowing Sherburne and his exhausted mates a few hours to finally sleep. But as they did, out of the dark emerged the forty-gun Amphion. The Americans were outgunned and outmaneuvered, and the battle lasted only minutes. The Scorpion was destroyed.

  So in November 1782 Sherburne found himself once again a prisoner. The thirteen surviving members of the Scorpion were taken belowdecks on the Amphion, where they joined a hundred prisoners from other privateers captured by the British ship. The conditions were deplorable and the prisoners lacked “sufficient room for each to stretch himself at the same time.” But Sherburne’s third trip to prison was about to be his worst. The men discovered that they were sailing to New York to be incarcerated aboard the Jersey. The Hell Ship, as Sherburne remembered, “had become notorious in consequence of the unparalleled mortality on board of her.” He and his crewmates began to panic at the mere mention of the ship’s name, recalling that their “prospects were more dubious than they had been before.”

  As the Amphion approached New York, some of the prisoners became nauseous and ill at the prospects of being put aboard the Jersey. Others attempted suicide or began planning an escape. In 1782, the crew of one American ship being detained by the British in Boston did just that. After discovering they were being taken to Brooklyn to be put aboard the most notorious ship of the war, the men mutinied rather than face the horrors of confinement on the Jersey. Remarkably, the prisoners succeeded in overpowering their captors and sailed their truce ship to Bermuda and to freedom. But a different fate awaited Sherburne and his crewmates.

  Sherburne was still a teenager when he was put aboard Jersey in November 1782. The first thing he noticed about the ship was the “half-starved, emaciated, and imperious prisoners” who were “suffering almost without a parallel.”

  7

  Floating Dungeons

  Thus do our warriors, thus our heroes fall,

  Imprison’d here, quick ruin meets them all.

  —Philip Freneau, “The British Prison-Ship” (1781)

  As was mentioned earlier, the British did not invent the practice of using old ships as floating dungeons during the Revolutionary War. Nor was the practice new for the Royal Navy. Earlier that century, Britain employed prison ships in their conflict with the Scots and incarcerated French sailors on derelict ships during the French and Indian War.* Indeed, the practice had a long, gruesome, and checkered history in Britain and around the world.

  In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the problem of prison overcrowding had risen to crisis levels in England, as did the crime rate, or at least public perceptions of criminal activity. In an effort to “get tough on crime,” British politicians tacked on an endless array of offenses that were eligible for the death penalty, and capital punishment soon became something of a spectator sport. The regular public executions at Tyburn attracted large, unruly mobs that jeered and threw garbage at the condemned as they approached the gallows.* Despite the frequent executions, however, crime and arrests outpaced the hangings, and prisons grew ever more crowded.

  At the same time, farmers displaced by the new mercantile order were moving to London in record numbers. Soon the streets filled with homeless beggars. Unemployment reached crisis levels. The situation was such that countless British citizens living in abject squalor volunteered to board ships to try their odds in America. In exchange for their passage, they agreed to live as indentured servants. For years, ships sailed from England to America loaded with indentured servants and the poor. Still, crime and prison overcrowding remained at crisis levels.

  One of the men appointed to address the situation was William Eden, the first Baron Lord Auckland. From the 1770s through the early 1800s, Eden served in a number of positions, including as a member of Parliament, minister of the Northern Department, and minister of trade; he even visited America at the start of the Revolutionary War in a diplomatic capacity to attempt to negotiate a cease-fire. Eden also promoted an array of proposals allegedly designed to reform the English penal system and improve the treatment of prisoners. But they included such draconian measures as shipping prisoners to Australia and exchanging prisoners for the sailors held for ransom by the Barbary pirates of North Africa. Eden also convinced both the admiralty and Parliament to support his bill to incarcerate prisoners on old warships.

  England was desperate for answers, and the compromise to the crisis was to utilize hulks to ease the overcrowding. In the words of Eden, “The fact is that our prisons are full and we have no way at present to dispose of the convicts but that what would be execrably bad; for all the proposals of Africa—desert islands—mines etc., means nothing more than a more lingering method of inflicting capital punishment.” Eden’s Hulk Bill passed in the House of Commons in May 1776, just a few weeks before General George Washington and General William Howe would square off for control of New York City. Ironically, the result of both the bill and battle would be the incarceration of thousands of soldiers and sailors on hulks.

  Old warships and support vessels were soon moored at Woolwich Dockyard on the Thames near London and berthed at Deptfor
d, Plymouth, and other ports along England’s southeastern coast as well as in Bermuda and the West Indies. Britain became so dependent on prison ships that they even hulked the legendary HMS Discovery, which had been captained by George Vancouver during his expedition to the Pacific and western coastline of North America. Of course, putting prisoners on derelict ships did not address the cause of crime. The abhorrent practice also brought with it disease, security risks, unsightliness (for people living nearby), and an alarmingly high death rate.

  When the Revolutionary War started, the British used such ships as a way of temporarily dealing with the large population of American prisoners. Additionally, many people in Britain did not want prisoners from the American colonies shipped back to England. The practice was not uncommon, senior commanders believed the war would be a short one, and there was little interest in putting forth the effort to build prisons for the colonial “criminals” who dared oppose them. None of these transport ships were, however, intended to be a long-term solution to the prison dilemma. The ships were also needed to resupply the war effort.

  When Parliament passed the Hulk Act in May 1776, word of the measure traveled across the Atlantic and arrived in New York around the time of the fighting in Brooklyn. General Howe immediately began hulking ships to be used as prisons. Prison ships in New York thus became an acceptable alternative to the gallows and a short-term compromise. And so, immediately after the fighting in Brooklyn during the summer of 1776, roughly four hundred prisoners were put aboard the transport ship Pacific, anchored off New York City.

  As the sugar houses and churches of the city ran out of space to accommodate more prisoners, a few other transports such as the Chatham, Glasgow, Grosvenor, Judith, Lord Rochford, and Mentor were ordered to make room for prisoners. These transports had originally carried soldiers, cattle, and supplies across the Atlantic in the summer of 1776 and were now anchored at Gravesend Bay off Lower Manhattan. Once the British gained control of the entire city, the ships were moved to the East River, the Hudson River, and elsewhere. Similarly, when the war spread to the American South, the British used the HMS Roebuck to house prisoners in Norfolk, Virginia, and, in 1780, in Charleston, South Carolina.