The Ghost Ship of Brooklyn

by Robert P. Watson

  One of the sites used as an anchorage for prison ships was Wallabout Bay, a small, shallow inlet shaped like a kidney off the East River.

  The region had originally been home to the Iroquois, Algonquian, and other native peoples. Among the first Europeans to arrive in what would become New York were the French in the 1520s. The Dutch established settlements there as part of New Amsterdam and New Netherlands at the dawn of the seventeenth century. The first Europeans to settle along the shores of Wallabout Bay, however, were several families of French-speaking Walloons who arrived from Holland and the vicinity in the 1620s. It is believed that a trader-turned-politician named Joris Jansen Rapelje was first to build a house at Wallabout Bay. The small Dutch settlement he helped found was known as “Waal Bocht” or “Walloon’s Bend.” The name stuck.*

  Hugging the northwest edge of Brooklyn, the bay’s shoreline was cloaked with grasses and marshy meadows. Rolling, sandy bluffs rimmed the bay, and a few narrow footpaths led to the edge of the water. Small shrubs rather than trees lined the coast and, from the nearby village of Bushwick, an uninspiring creek named for the bay meandered through the marshlands and emptied into the brackish, stagnant waters. At the time of the Revolutionary War, it was a quiet and sparsely populated area. A few farmhouses owned by the Johnson, Remsen, and Tyerson families dotted the landscape. The bay, however, was not used by fishermen or boaters, as the mudflats along the soggy shoreline made it rather inaccessible. Clouds of mosquitos and other bugs also swarmed along the bay in summers, preying mercilessly on anyone unlucky enough to be there.

  Today Wallabout Bay is nestled along a bend on the East River between the Manhattan Bridge to the west and Williamsburg Bridge to the northeast. It is directly opposite Corlears Hook and across the East River from Chinatown on Lower Manhattan.

  The British selected the location in 1776 because they controlled Brooklyn and all of New York City. Moreover, the waters of Wallabout Bay were calm, yet the mudflats and marshes made it nearly impossible to boat, swim, walk, or crawl. Escape would be difficult. Wallabout Bay was chosen for another reason as well. Worried about the spread of contagion, the British moved the disease-infested prison ships out of New York harbor to the abandoned bay. Yet the bay and ships were still a visible reminder of what would happen should any colonist dare challenge His Majesty.

  As the war dragged on far longer than the British had imagined, the hulks became the primary means of dealing with prisoners and Wallabout Bay emerged as the main location for the fleet of floating dungeons. During the course of the war there were as many as sixteen prison ships at Wallabout Bay. They held soldiers from the Continental Army, seamen from captured American merchant ships, nearby residents charged with disloyalty, and Dutch, French, and Spanish sailors. But the crews of captured American privateers constituted the main population on board the prison ships.

  The first prison ship of the war to arrive at Wallabout Bay was the HMS Whitby. It was moored near Remsen’s Mill on October 20, 1776, and hulked soon afterward. On orders from Commissary General Joshua Loring, the large transport ship took on its first prisoners in early December. The Whitby held roughly 250 prisoners, including soldiers from the Continental Army, most of whom were from Connecticut, and a few political detainees from New York City. Surviving accounts of the prison ship are alarming. According to one prisoner, “Bad provisions, bad water and scanted rations were dealt to the prisoners. No medical men attended the sick, disease reigned unrelieved, and hundreds died from pestilence, or worse, starved on board this floating prison.”

  A letter written by a prisoner named Timothy Parker only a few weeks after the ship was put into service states, “Our present situation is most wretched; more than 250 prisoners, some sick and without the least assistance from physician, drug, or medicine, and fed on two-thirds allowance of salt provisions… allowed to walk the main deck only between sunrise and sunset. Only two at a time allowed to come on deck to do what nature requires, and sometimes denied even that, and use tubs and buckets between decks, to the great offence of every delicate, cleanly person, as well as to great prejudice of all our healths.” Parker concluded, “We have no prospect before our eyes but a kind of lingering inevitable death.”

  The letter also described another facet of life aboard the prison ships—that they were among the first places in America that were integrated, which offended some of the white prisoners. Parker remembered being “crowded promiscuously together without regard to color, person or office, in the small room of a ship’s between decks.” Another white prisoner complained of being “huddled together with negroes.” There was not enough room onboard for all the prisoners to lie down at the same time, much less respect the segregationist norms of the time.

  There are other disturbing accounts. Robert Sheffield of Stonington, Connecticut, managed to escape in June 1778 and offered a third-person description of the Whitby: “The steam of the hold was enough to scald the skin and take away the breath—the stench enough to poison the air all around. On his descending these dreary mansions of woe, and beholding the numerous spectacles of wretchedness and despair, his soul fainted within him.” He was also shocked by the prisoners, saying, “Their sickly countenances and ghastly looks were truly horrible; some swearing and blaspheming; some crying; others delirious, raving, and storming; some groaning and dying—all panting for breath; some dead and corrupting.” Most problematic was the air, which was “so foul at times that a lamp could not be kept burning, by reason of which the boys were not missed till then had been dead ten days.” Sheffield was later recaptured and placed back aboard the ship.

  Ichabod Perry, a seventeen-year-old private from Fairfield, Connecticut, lived through his incarceration on the Whitby. In his later years he penned an account of the ship for his children, claiming that one-third of the prisoners died from “no air” belowdecks. Perry shockingly maintained that he was once so starved he “could eat [his] own flesh without wincing.” The young man ended up eating wood to stay alive.

  Another Connecticut prisoner named David Thorp, from nearby Woodbury, remembered that four days a week he and the seven other men in his “mess” received only a little oatmeal with worms in it. The rations the other three days of the week consisted of two ounces of salted beef and a hard biscuit. Thorp and his fellow prisoners once went for three days without water.

  Perry and Thorp were released in February 1777 during a prisoner exchange likely organized by Jonathan Trumbull, the governor of Connecticut. Although they could barely walk, the boys eventually made it home. The Connecticut Gazette documented the experiences of Perry, Thorp, and other home-state heroes who survived the Whitby. In an article published in February 1777, Lieutenant William Sterrett, who, like most of the prisoners, was captured in the fighting in Brooklyn on August 27, 1776, recalled that when he was being processed on board the ship his “clothing was stolen” and he “was abused by the soldiers.” Those captives with wounds, he said, were “allowed to perish from neglect.”

  Not surprisingly, such newspaper accounts as this one, which likened the ship to Dante’s hell, shocked the public. Later, when even more gripping newspaper reports appeared with alarming frequency about an even more notorious ship, they would help rally the patriots’ cause.

  That first winter, the Whitby was the only prison ship at Wallabout Bay. Yet so many prisoners died that, after only two months, the makeshift graveyard was full and a new site had to be dug nearby. One survivor recalled that “during two months in the spring the entire beach, between the ravine and Remsen’s Dock, was filled with graves; and before the first day of May, the ravine itself was filled with the remains of hundreds who died from pestilence, or were starved to death in this dreadful prison.” By May 1777, the beaches near the Whitby could accommodate no more bodies. The guards devised a new solution, which was described by James Little of Connecticut years later in his application for a war pension. In the morning, “dead bodies were hoisted on deck, a cannonball fastened to them, and th
ey were thrown overboard with the shout of ‘there goes another damned Yankee rebel.’”

  That same month, two larger ships—the Kitty and a ship whose name has been lost to history—were towed to the bay to replace the Whitby, which was sold for scrap. Each one held roughly 250 prisoners. But the conditions on the replacement ships were just as bad, prompting some of the prisoners on a Sunday afternoon in October 1777 to set one of the ships ablaze. In the words of an eyewitness, the prisoners chose a quick death, “even by fire, to the lingering sufferings of pestilence and starvation.” Another prisoner wrote, “So great was their suffering, that they were induced to set fire to the ships, which were burnt, hoping thus either to secure their liberty, or hasten their death.” Many prisoners died in the fire, but some helped others escape out of portholes into the water.

  But the act of desperation did nothing to stop the use of floating prisons. Nor did it alleviate the crowded conditions. On the contrary, after the fire “the prisoners, except a few, who, it was said, were burnt in the vessel, were removed to the remaining ship.” Shortly after the October fire, two hospital ships were moored in Wallabout Bay near the remaining prison ship. Only four months later, the conditions were so bad on one of the hospital ships that it too was set on fire at night, also by the prisoners.

  The war continued, and more patriots were captured. In 1778, another ship was towed into Wallabout Bay and was crammed with five hundred prisoners. By January 1780, so many prisoners had been captured that a small flotilla of vessels was brought from the North River to Wallabout Bay, including the Prince of Wales, the hospital ship Falmouth, the sloop Hunter (which was used as a hospital ship), the sloop Scorpion, the fire ship Strombolo, and the ironically named hospital ship Good Hope. Only two months after being anchored in the cursed waters off Brooklyn, the Good Hope burned as well.

  Throughout the war, ships came and went; some were burned, others were called back to service, and some, such as the Hunter, Scorpion, and Strombolo, were sold for parts. Ever more ships were needed to accommodate the burgeoning prison population. Old transports no longer needed for the return trip across the Atlantic and warships past their prime such as the Bristol, Chatham, Clyde, Glasgow, Providence, Scheldt, and Woodlands were hulked in waters throughout New York. Even in the final months of the war, more of these floating dungeons were deployed to Wallabout Bay, including the transport ship John and two hospital ships, Frederick and Perseverance.

  Prisons were soon a priority for His Majesty’s commanders, and it would not be long before one prison ship in particular would serve another, more sinister objective. It would also be the largest prison ship in the ghostly fleet at Wallabout Bay, one that would remain until the bitter end of the war.

  8

  Dead Reckoning

  No masts or sails these crowded ships adorn,

  Dismal to view, neglected and forlorn;

  Here mighty ills oppress’d the imprison’d throng,

  Dull were our slumbers, and our nights were long—

  From morn to eve, along the decks we lay,

  Scorch’d into fevers by the solar ray.

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

  A veteran of naval wars in the South Atlantic, Mediterranean, and elsewhere, the HMS Jersey had been a powerful warship. In her prime, she carried sixty-four guns with a crew of roughly four hundred and had ample space for equipment and provisions for long deployments at sea. But after three decades of service, the old fourth-rate warship was decommissioned in 1769 and sailed across the Atlantic without armaments to serve as a troop and supply vessel in the American colonies.

  Sometime in the 1770s before the start of the Revolutionary War, she was hulked in order to serve as a hospital ship, and by 1778 she was anchored in the East River near Tolmie’s Dock off Manhattan. The old wood planks of the Jersey had begun to rot. But the growing prison population during the war necessitated a change in the status of the old warship.

  The earliest account of the vessel serving as a prison ship dates to December 1778. The first mention of the ship in an American newspaper was on September 1, 1779, when a paper in New London, Connecticut, wrote about the story of a prisoner named Stanton who was captured on June 5 and imprisoned onboard the Jersey for three or four weeks before being transferred to a nearby hospital ship.

  In April 1780, the Jersey was towed to Wallabout Bay, where it was loaded with roughly four hundred prisoners. The number of prisoners on the old hulk, however, grew alarmingly, in part because the Jersey was designated as the receiving ship for all the hulks in the fleet. By 1781, 850 prisoners were on the ship. A year later, the ship held over 1,000 prisoners and had long since become a living hell for those trapped in her rotted, diseased holds. By 1783, reports indicate that 1,200 prisoners were somehow crammed below her decks. At one point in 1782, the ship was so grossly overcrowded that the Jersey’s captain ordered two hundred prisoners be moved to the transport ship John. Eventually the nearby transport and hospital ships became overcrowded, in large measure because of the number of sick prisoners from the Jersey. Astonishingly, war reports also show that fully half, and at times more than half, of the entire prison ship population of New York was incarcerated on the Jersey.

  The ship was moored like a monstrous, condemned beast by heavy black chains. These old, rusting cables were affixed to the front and back of the ship at the midlevel deck, and angled down into the murky water. The Jersey sat roughly the length of a football field offshore in Wallabout Bay. Nearby, a few hospital ships clustered around her, spread out roughly two to three hundred yards to the southeast. There she sat as an ever-present reminder of what awaited anyone who dared challenge the might of the British.

  The old, black hulk looked the part. She could no longer sail. Her rotted hull leaked, causing the prisoners to shiver in wetness during heavy rains, and the ship had to constantly be pumped to prevent her from filling with water. The Jersey was rudderless and had been stripped of all masts, sails, and structures except for a tall, bare flagstaff at the stern—“seldom used” except to send signals—and a derrick at the bow for hoisting provisions such as water, wood, and food up to the top deck. Long gone were the cannons on the middle and lower decks. In their place, prisoners crowded her three main decks as well as the quarterdeck and forecastle, which covered part of the upper gun deck near the stern of the ship. A small canvas awning sat on the upper deck at the stern for use as a tent by the guards.

  A solitary accommodation ladder on the aft starboard side of the ship provided a way on and off the floating coffin for the crew. The derelict ship had a small gangway on the port side, midship, that angled down to a small, square wooden platform. It was from this point that rowboats and other small launches dropped off the condemned. There was only one other way off the ship, but that was reserved for the corpses wrapped in canvas or blankets. A guard remained stationed at the head of the ladder, a solitary sentinel to the purgatory that awaited the prisoners.

  A barricade was constructed near the head of the ladder that extended outward in both directions to the side of the ship. It was roughly ten feet in height and contained a heavy door and small holes through which muskets could be fired. This barricade provided protection for the guards in the event of a prisoner uprising. The drill was for them to gather behind the barricade, seal the door, and fire at the prisoners from the safety of the gun holes. The real deterrent to mutiny, however, was the poor physical condition of the prisoners. Most were too weak from starvation and illness to fight. Nor could the old ship sail, so it made little sense to attempt to commandeer it, and it was next to impossible to walk or swim in the mud and swamps that rimmed Wallabout Bay.

  All the portholes had been nailed shut. Iron bars in the shape of crosses eerily covered other possible exits, giving the ship a dismal, coffin-like appearance and sealing the wretched souls inside. The only openings were small notches in a twenty-inch square pattern drilled into the sides of the ship for ventilation. They ran
roughly every ten feet along the ship. These were the only sources of light and air for the prisoners, but proved to be wholly inadequate for either. Indeed, the air became so foul at times that lamps did not burn and the men trapped belowdecks were left gasping for a breath during the long nights of confinement.

  In short, the Jersey looked the part. A glimpse of the black, rotted hulk struck fear into the condemned being rowed out to the floating dungeon, as well as any passersby on shore.

  Shortly before sunset each night, all prisoners were ordered belowdecks and quieted. The hatchways were then sealed. The lucky ones gathered hammocks and bedding from storage in the spar deck and along the gangways on the middle deck. These hammocks were then hung on the middle deck, but the ship was so overcrowded that they had to be removed every morning and stored for the day. This routine was repeated every day. Prisoners occupied every available space, and the less fortunate ones bunked wherever they could find a few square feet on the old wooden floors. Worried that a fellow inmate might steal their personal possessions, some men chose to sleep on top of their bags and chests, which were stacked in rows in the gangways about ten feet from the sides of the ship. A few bunks in the stern port were designated for the sick and dying, although they were inadequate in number to hold the throngs of ailing prisoners, most of whom simply died quickly or were transferred to hospital ships.

  Because of concerns about fires being set or escape plans being hatched, candles and lanterns were not permitted at night, leaving prisoners confined in complete darkness. Nights amid the cramped spaces; stale, poisonous air; rats, and stifling heat were anything but a time for peaceful rest for the prisoners. Rather, the crowded decks soon became a chorus of “groans of the sick and dying” punctuated by sobbing and the “incoherent ravings of delirium.” Many prisoners complained that crazed men in the grip of disease or mental anguish would pace about the ship and stumble over them in the pitch black. Others were haunted by the ghostly, skeletal images they saw lying next to them as darkness descended across the ship.