The Ghost Ship of Brooklyn

by Robert P. Watson

  For the weakest among the prisoners it was even worse. A few large tubs were placed belowdecks and used as latrines. With the ship so severely overcrowded, these “receptacles of filth” often overflowed onto the floors, and the stench near them was unbearable. Yet, with limited space, some men had no choice but to bunk beside the excrement.

  The officers among the prisoners had it better. Far aft on the middle deck was the large gunroom. It had long ago ceased being used for weapons or ammunition, and was taken by the officers as their quarters. Since Thomas Dring of Rhode Island had served as a master’s mate, he and his few fellow officers from the privateer Chance slept there. As for the crew of the Jersey, they occupied rooms at the stern. This included the steerage, which provided bunks for the guards and sailors. The ship’s officers had a cabin under the quarterdeck in the back of the ship.

  The ship had been stripped so that virtually no furnishings or facilities remained. There were, however, a handful of compartments on the ship. The middle deck contained the steward’s room, which was near the stern and was where the prisoners received their daily ration of food. After receiving their rations, each assigned dining group, known by the military term “mess,” gathered in the corridors of the gangways to eat. These dark, creaking gangways were roughly five feet in width and connected one part of the ship to another. Prisoners were permitted to walk along them on the spar deck, which was covered, the only place on the upper deck offering them protection from the sun and rain. But because the ship was so crowded, prisoners had to organize themselves into “platoons” that would face, walk, and turn in the same direction, thus allowing large numbers of men to exercise or move about the ship in a somewhat orderly manner.

  The old ship had three main decks. Hatchways in the dead center of the ship led from one deck up or down to the next one. The two floors below the upper deck housed American prisoners, while European sailors were confined to the holds at the bottom of the ship, which the men referred to as the “lower dungeon.” Most of the American prisoners never stepped foot on that wretched deck, nor did they want to. Thomas Dring was one of them. The officer recalled seeing French, Spanish, and Dutch sailors ascending the steps from the dungeon and observing their “dismal” condition.* Ebenezer Fox, the young boy who ran away after the battles of Lexington and Concord in order to join the war, noted that most of the Europeans soon gave up all hope. He described their plight: “The inhabitants of this lower region were the most miserable and disgusting looking objects that can be conceived. Daily washing in salt water, together with their extreme emancipation, caused their skin to appear like dried parchment. Many of them remained unwashed for weeks, their hair long and matted, and filled with vermin, their beards never cut except occasionally with a pair of shears.… Their clothes were mere rags, secured to their bodies in every way that ingenuity could devise.”

  In England, American prisoners were treated “with contempt” and given far less food than their French and Spanish counterparts. Yet life aboard the Hell Ship was worse for the French sailors and the few Spanish and Dutch prisoners on board. For example, a report from July 10, 1778, listed “about 350 men confined between decks, half Frenchmen.” It also lists deaths aboard the ships, showing that the European prisoners suffered the highest rates.

  Fox observed that the sailors “suffered even more” than the few soldiers on board because the British did not recognize the American navy as legitimate. Nor did they consider privateers to be anything but pirates. Therefore, reasoned the British command, they were not worthy of prisoner-of-war status and were the recipients of the foulest treatment on the old hulks. Fox complained that “British officers were willing to treat fellow-beings whose crime was love of liberty worse than the vilest animals.”

  Thomas Dring, who was confined on the Jersey during the summer of 1782, said he never met or heard of a single soldier imprisoned on the ship. The prison population during his incarceration included only sailors from the nations at war with Britain. The majority, Dring claimed, were young American privateers. Of them, he observed, “Most of these were young men, who had been induced by necessity or inclination to try the perils of the sea, and had, in many instances, been captured soon after leaving their homes, and during their first voyage.”

  In an attempt to cope with the abysmal conditions on the Jersey, officers among the prisoners formed a system of governance and developed bylaws based loosely on existing military and naval codes. The goals of the bylaws were to control the worst proclivities and temptations of the men, boost morale, and maintain a degree of military order. All new prisoners were read the rules by an officer, who then asked them to enter “a willing submission” to the code. This included promoting cleanliness, respecting the Sabbath, and prohibitions against bad language, drunkenness, theft, and smoking between decks on account of the risk of fire.

  Typically, punishment was approved by consensus from the entire prison population, with the oldest officer presiding as judge. The most common violation on the Jersey was theft of personal property and food. Thomas Andros, the volunteer who fought with General Washington at Boston and Brooklyn, and for General Greene in Rhode Island, recalled the punishment as swift and severe, especially if the prisoner was caught stealing another’s provisions or food. The Connecticut veteran said that most prisoners adhered to and enforced the rules, but desperation drove people to steal. Andros also recalled that, since so many of the prisoners like Christopher Hawkins and Andrew Sherburne were young boys barely into their teens, there was a rule that bigger and stronger prisoners were not permitted to “tyrannize or abuse” their young or weak comrades.

  As an officer, Thomas Dring was supposed to familiarize himself with the bylaws and enforce them. When he wrote his memoir of the war, the Rhode Islander still remembered many of the rules, in particular one of them. Dring, like many of the prisoners, was addicted to smoking and found the restrictions on lighting up and the difficulty in obtaining tobacco to be a challenge, particularly at night. When the prisoners were permitted to gather on the upper deck during the day, Dring and other smokers would borrow fire from the cook through a small window in the bulkhead and indulge their favorite habit. Like others living in the eighteenth century, Dring believed the smoke helped to purify the putrid air, and he even attributed his survival to tobacco.

  9

  Welcome to Hell

  But, what to them is morn’s delightful ray?

  Sad and distressful as the close of day.

  O’er distant streams, appears the dewy green,

  And leafy trees on mountain tops, are seen.

  But they no groves nor grassy mountains tread,

  Marked for a longer journey to the dead.

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

  When transferred to the Jersey, prisoners were typically released from the irons shackling their wrists and ankles and ordered into small launches. Marines stood watch nearby, guns at the ready. The nerve-racking process was overseen by the brutal commissary of British prison ships who frequently taunted his new charges, “I’ll soon fix you, my lads.”

  From the prisoners’ vantage point around the edge of the bay and in the predawn darkness, it would have been impossible to see the Jersey, but all would have known where they were headed. Like men condemned to carry the implements of their own executions, they were made to row the boats ferrying them to the old hulk. Arriving at Wallabout Bay in the shrouded moments before sunrise, the commissary would urge his new charges to “lean into the oars.” Finally, through the foggy morning light they saw the outline of a large “black hulk.”

  Thomas Dring never forgot the “dreaded” feeling he and his fellow officers experienced as they approached the ship. There on the upper deck, they observed a “multitude of human beings” milling about slowly. All the prisoners looked close to death. As the small launches docked beside the ship, the commissary broke the still silence. Pointing upward to the high decks of the old warship, he bell
owed in an “exulted manner… There, Rebels, there is the cage for you!”

  One of the many terrors about the Jersey was the man in charge of prison ships. Joshua Loring, the prison commissary, and Captain William Cunningham, the warden of the infamous Provost, were not the only sadistic prison officials. Joining them was the commissary of the prison ships, David Sproat. Described as “notorious” and a man who “gloated” over the death of prisoners, he was said by Dring to be “universally detested for the cruelty of his conduct and the insolence of his manners.” Subject to his brutality, Dring soon came to wish for a moment alone with Sproat in order to kill his tormentor.

  Commissary Sproat was a Scot who sailed to Pennsylvania in 1760. He worked as a land speculator and trader who amassed “a pritty little fortune.” Ever the opportunist, at the outset of the war he supplied the fledgling Continental Navy of John Paul Jones and was a business partner with fellow Pennsylvanians and patriots Robert Morris and James Wilson—that is, until he switched sides, presumably for financial gain. Like many other loyalists, Sproat considered himself a war “refugee” and joined a loyalist group headed by William Franklin, the deposed royal governor of New Jersey and son of the great scientist and Founder.*

  Sproat moved to British-controlled New York City in January 1779 and, thanks to his business connections, was appointed to oversee naval prisoners on October 13 by Admiral Mariot Arbuthnot, at the time the commander of the Royal Navy in New York. The Scot would eventually assume control over all prisoners at the very end of the war after the longtime commissary, Joshua Loring, departed for London in November 1782.

  Few reliable accounts of Sproat exist and they are divided about his service, but it is hard to come to any other conclusion than that he was ruthless and vicious in his administration of the prison ships.* Sproat routinely denied prisoners food, water, and medical attention, and even subjected prisoners to emotional torment and physical torture. He was also a shrewd propagandist who blamed prisoners’ deaths on the hesitancy of General Washington and the Continental Congress to exchange prisoners. And, like other greedy commissaries, he was known to sell provisions meant for his charges and pocket the profits. Indeed, the record of Sproat’s oversight of the Jersey is chilling, as the stories below reveal.

  As a seasoned veteran of many battles, including General Washington’s failed effort to hold New York City, Thomas Andros had seen more than his share of hardship, suffering, and death. Yet the Connecticut native was shocked by the conditions aboard the Jersey. Looking up at the old hulk from the loading platform while boarding, Andros described the unnerving sight of a “dark and filthy” vessel whose appearance “perfectly corresponded with the death and despair that reigned within.” To Andros, it was the embodiment of hell. The prisoners were confined in the dark, dank bowels of a rotting ship infested with disease and vermin, where human excrement piled up on the floors and maggots inhabited the meager rations of food they were served. Men entered Hell young and healthy; but, Andros warned, they departed the ship either gravely ill or in a makeshift coffin.

  The ship, he recalled, “through age had become unfit for further actual service” and had been stripped of everything, including the rigging and even the lion figurehead that had once graced its bow. “Nothing remained but an old, unsightly rotten hulk… about twenty rods” from the shoreline.* The ghastly sight of skeletal prisoners shocked him. Pallid, bony hands jutted out through the bars on the portholes waving hats and signaling to “stay away.”

  Similar accounts of boarding the ship were recorded by Thomas Dring, who recalled that upon his arrival some prisoners issued warnings, but others asked for news of the war or hoped new prisoners were from their hometowns. One man issued a poetically foreboding message, saying it was “a lamentable thing to see so many young men in full strength, with the flush of health upon their countenances, about to enter that infernal place of abode.” The man then gasped out of the air hole words that sent shivers down the spines of Dring and his crewmates: “Death has no relish for such skeleton carcasses as we are, but he will now have a feast upon you fresh comers.”

  As if that warning was not unnerving enough, from the rowboat docked by the Jersey’s accommodation ladder new prisoners were greeted by a terrible stench that enveloped the landing platform. The vapor that wafted on the heavy morning air was, in Dring’s words, “far more foul and loathsome than any thing which I had ever met… and produced a sensation of nausea far beyond my powers of description.”

  It was 1782, and Dring and the other officers from his crew were taken up the ladder on the larboard side of the Jersey and processed as prisoners. He knew what was in store for his crew. “It was my hard fortune, in the course of the war,” he told them, “to be twice confined on board the prison-ships of the enemy.” Three years prior, he had been captured and imprisoned on the Good Hope. Now he was back in Wallabout Bay, a mere boat’s length from where he had spent more than four months before escaping overboard and swimming to the coastline of New Jersey.

  Dring had warned his shipmates of the Hell Ship’s reputation. The tales paralyzed the men with fear, especially a twelve-year-old cabin boy named Palmer. From the accommodation ladder in the faint light of dawn, the prisoners were assembled on the upper deck in small groups by the barricade door. Each man stated his name, rank (or his duty in the war, such as a seaman or sailor), hometown, and other information to the guards, all of which was recorded for the prison commissaries. The guards then conducted a quick inspection of their clothing, bags, and personal possessions. Much of it was confiscated, but Dring and other officers were generally allowed to keep the clothing they wore and one small bag of personal items. From there, they were led through another door on the starboard side of the old ship, down a ladder, and into the main hatchway.

  Dring brought a small bag filled with items from the Chance before it was captured. Oddly, the guards did not formally register the few men from the Chance when they came aboard the Jersey. It worked in Dring’s favor. Having no record, Dring was able to escape the added punishment doled out to repeat prisoners. Also, because he had been held captive on a prison ship before, the master’s mate had known to put on extra layers of clothing when he was captured. The layers could be removed during the “intolerable heat” of summers, but he would need them in the freezing winters. Most of the prisoners were not so fortunate.

  The boarding process was equally harrowing for Andrew Sherburne, who, like Dring, was imprisoned on the Jersey in 1782. The young boy from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with a head filled with dreams of adventure had run off to enlist on a privateer but was now facing almost certain death. Sherburne remembered that “a large proportion of prisoners had been robbed of their clothing.” He was one of them. Even officers from his ship were treated poorly and robbed, contrary to the protocol of the time.

  Another prisoner was Christopher Hawkins, the Rhode Islander who, like Sherburne, had gone to sea at thirteen. After his captain blundered into a confrontation with a powerful British warship, Hawkins and his crewmates were captured and taken aboard the warship HMS Sphinx in 1777. In New York City they were temporarily detained on the old transport ship Asia, anchored in the East River. Because the British needed more sailors, American merchant crews and privateers were often offered a deal—release from the miserable conditions aboard a prison ship in exchange for service in His Majesty’s navy. This was the deal offered to Andrew Sherburne’s crew when they arrived at a prison in England, and such was the arrangement offered to Hawkins. After three weeks on the Asia, Hawkins agreed to the arrangement and was transferred to the HMS Maidstone, a twenty-eight-gun warship that prowled the American coast.

  On board the Maidstone, young Hawkins—like Sherburne, who served his ship’s boatswain—worked as a waiter and servant to one of the officers. He was relieved to be off the prison ship and, aside from being harassed as a “mere boy,” Hawkins described his situation as “getting on quite comfortably in all respects.” His only real tormen
t was “the yearning wish” to go home to see his mother.

  The teenager did what he was told and made no trouble aboard the British warship, to the extent that he “quieted the apprehensions” about the possibility he would attempt to escape. The officers soon seemed to forget that he was a colonial and privateer. Accordingly, Hawkins was permitted to go ashore when the ship was in port. He patiently waited for his opportunity, which came when the Maidstone was back in New York City. Once ashore, the boy seized “an opportunity to make his escape, and return to North Providence.” After a precarious, “multiple-day trek through British lines,” he arrived home in November 1778. He had spent eighteen long months in the Royal Navy, but was finally home with his mother.

  Back in Rhode Island, Hawkins worked for a man named Obadiah Olney of Smithfield for just over two years. However, “a fit of roaming again came over him.” Against his mother’s wishes, the teenager went to Providence and, like the other boys in this book, enlisted with the crew of another privateer. Hawkins was assured that his chances of getting rich would be much better on a larger ship—in this case a brig armed with sixteen cannons—and his chances of getting caught far less. In 1781, the ship sailed to Newport to begin its marauding with Hawkins among the crew.