The real horror of the hospital ships was that they were filled with diseased and dying men. To be sent there was, in effect, a death sentence. Thomas Andros recalled that only three of his thirteen crewmates who went aboard the hospital ships survived their stay, while Andrew Sherburne lost eight of his thirteen mates, and nearly all of them died “exceedingly fast.” Another prisoner said of the death toll on the hospital ships, “I verily believe that not one out of a hundred returned or recovered.”
Sherburne became ill in January 1783 and was taken to the hospital ship Frederick. It was so crowded that two men had to share a “wretchedly unsanitary” bunk. Sherburne bunked with a young man from Massachusetts named Wills, whose health was declining “fast.” He remembered that, a few nights later, Wills succumbed and, in his struggles, died “stretched across me.” Sherburne was so weak he could not move the body and repeatedly begged the nurses to help him, but had to wait thirty minutes for the corpse to be removed. Andros had a similar experience on a hospital ship, remembering waking up to find that the man with whom he shared a cot had died during the night.
Even without the dead bunkmate, Sherburne was unable to stand to “relieve” himself and had the misfortune to bunk near a porthole. In the winter, cold wind froze the prisoners and “snow would blow through the seams onto my bed.” Sherburne remembered one particularly bad storm when, “in the morning, the snow was three or four inches deep up on my bed.” He awoke shivering and had to rub his hands and feet together to keep from freezing. Frostbite set in on one of his legs. It did not kill him, but for the remainder of his life Sherburne suffered numbness and pain and was forced to wear a laced stocking on the leg.
The young boy survived the frigid winter and time on the hospital ship because his uncle, who was also imprisoned on the Jersey, managed to save one dollar. He gave it to his nephew before the boy was transferred to the hospital ship. Sherburne used it to purchase a cup, a spoon, some sugar, and a “few” oranges from a nurse. The oranges, he believed, kept him alive. But when Sherburne recovered and was sent back to the Jersey, he could not find his uncle. He discovered that while he was gone his uncle had become ill and was sent to a different hospital ship, where he died. He also learned that his friend Daniel Davis, a gunner from their privateer, had frozen to death on the Jersey during the bad storm. Sherburne spent days looking for others from his privateer, but only one member of his crew and mess was still on the Jersey, a boy named Stephen Nichols.
The weather remained very cold and Sherburne never fully recovered, and soon afterward he was sent to another hospital ship, the Weymouth. There he found John and Abraham Fall, two brothers who had served on his privateer. They bunked together and Sherburne was on a cot next to them. One night Sherburne heard Abraham complaining to his brother to “get off of him.” It turned out that John had died. Soon after, Abraham passed away. Sherburne was stricken with grief over the loss of two more friends. His own bunkmate on the hospital ship was one of the nurses who had recently contracted a disease from a patient and was himself now a patient. During the bitterly cold winter, severe frostbite afflicted the man’s legs and feet. Sherburne remembered watching the flesh rot and the nurse’s toes eventually fall off.
The idea that these ships served as floating hospitals was, in the words of one prisoner, a “mockery.” Prisoners suffered aboard them without the “least sympathy or attention.” It seemed, the prisoner concluded, that the hospital ships were moored next to the Jersey simply for “historical record,” certainly not for “humanity.”
Given the wretched conditions aboard both the hospital ships and the Jersey, the prevalence of sickness and disease, the brutality of the guards, and the exceedingly high likelihood that the prisoners would not live to see their families again, the men struggled with hopelessness and despair. Many prisoners became severely depressed, others simply went mad. Dring alluded to this affliction, the worst aboard the Jersey, as “sickness of the heart.” It was followed by homesickness, especially among the many teenagers. Missing their families, the boys were in a near constant state of “dejection and anguish.” Dring observed that these boys “died that most awful of all human deaths, the effect of a broken heart.”
Such torment and sadness were most prevalent during the initial days in captivity. When they first boarded the old hulk, young sailors typically “became dismayed and terror stricken.” Many gave up and died quickly. He was reminded of a poem he knew, which helped him to understand their suffering:
Denied the comforts of a dying bed,
With not a pillow to support the head;
How could they else, but pine and grieve and sigh,
Detest that wretched life, and wish to die?
Though a strong and stoic man, Dring admitted that he struggled to keep his will to live. The despondency struck him mostly at night. The distressing sounds of diseased and dying prisoners and the constant buzzing drone of mosquitos, rather than the somber serenade of the night breeze, made sleep difficult, even for men exhausted by illness and long hours of tedious work. Nighttime also brought out the “vermin.” Rats infested the ship. “These loathsome creatures,” he bemoaned, “would be my constant companions and unceasing tormentors” each night. Dring wore a black handkerchief around his neck but once took it off and placed it with his meager possessions. He discovered it was immediately covered in rat droppings.
As days turned into weeks, and weeks blurred into months of captivity, even the hardiest of men fell into despair. Some men found religion, and their only hope came from daily prayer. Thomas Andros was one of them, and he longed for the presence of a preacher. But no man of the cloth, representative of government, or comforter ever appeared on the ship. Others drew strength from their shipmates. Dring made friends during his two years of captivity. They had “been through the furnace” together, and formed an unbreakable bond that would help them survive. But other prisoners wished that death would “not long delay to release them from their torments.” As time went by, the surviving prisoners found that even the prospects of release or escape failed to inspire them.
Perhaps the toughest challenge—even more so than the hellish nights trapped belowdecks—was seeing their futures in the ghostly stares of the walking dead around them and the corpses dragged daily off the ship. Dring recalled another poem whose words seemed written for the Hell Ship:
Night and day,
Brooding on what he had been,
what he was;
’Twas more than he could bear.
His longing fits
Thickened upon him.
His desire for Home
Became a madness.
12
Negotiations
Conveyed to York we found, at length, too late,
That Death was better than the prisoner’s fate
There doomed to famine, shackles, and despair.
Condemned to breathe a foul, infected air,
In sickly hulks, devoted while we lay,—
Successive funerals gloomed each dismal day
—Philip Freneau, “The British Prison-Ship” (1781)
There was an ever-present answer to the suffering on board the Jersey, and it came in the form of a pardon. A regiment of refugees “with green uniforms” was stationed at Brooklyn. Healthy prisoners were invited to join them by swearing an oath of loyalty to His Majesty the King. Surprisingly, despite “their unbounded suffering” and “their dreadful privation,” very few prisoners accepted the terms. In the words of one of the prisoners, most defiantly “preferred to linger and die, rather than desert their country’s cause.” Many prisoners were inspired by such patriotism, including Dring, who boasted, “During my whole period of my confinement, I never knew a single instance of enlistment from among the prisoners on the Jersey.”
Andros also said that “no one [was] seduced into the British service,” despite the offers from the guards. The men had become hardened in their love of country. The British had hoped that the brutality a
board the Jersey would help end the war, but for countless patriots horrified by the gruesome accounts of the infamous prison ship and for a few prisoners, it produced the opposite effect.
But there was another way off the ship: prisoner exchanges.
One of the earliest factors to impact negotiations for prisoner exchanges was the detainment of an American hero—Ethan Allen, the legendary patriot and leader of the Green Mountain Boys. It was Allen who captured Fort Ticonderoga, near Lake Champlain, in May 1775. After his subsequent attempt to sack Montreal, however, Allen was captured on September 25. Allen was one of those prisoners sent back to England to be incarcerated. The voyage was brutal. He and thirty-three other Americans had their wrists and ankles put into irons and were confined in the dark, crowded bowels of a schooner named Gaspee. The irons were so tight that he could not even rest on his side, and when the British learned who he was, they spat in his face and confiscated his clothing, boasting as they gave him rags instead, “Those will be good enough for you to be hanged in!” For forty days Allen and his men suffered from poor ventilation, rats and lice, little food or water, and no provision for bathing or washing. The two tubs used for human waste overflowed and were not emptied, which made all the prisoners sick. Later on the journey, nearly all the prisoners contracted fever. Their only comfort was one pint of rum each day.
The Gaspee landed at Falmouth and the prisoners were paraded in public as a curiosity for local residents to see. Allen spent well over two years in Pendennis Castle in Cornwall and aboard prison ships. Fortunately, the conditions there were far better than on the prison ships in Wallabout Bay. The main challenge was the constant harassment by the guards and warden, who threatened, “You shall grace the halter at Tyburn, God damn ye!”* But Allen’s long incarceration caught the attention of military and political leaders back home.
Even Benjamin Franklin weighed in on the plight of Allen and other American prisoners, complaining about the harsh conditions in the prisons and ships back in England and pressuring the British to conduct exchanges. Franklin also took matters into his own hands, sending funds and arranging for the release of prisoners and their passage back to America. Allen himself expressed concern for his fellow prisoners, writing, “I have seen several of the prisoners in the agonies of death, in consequence of very hunger, and others speechless and very near death, biting pieces of chips; others pleading for God’s sake for something to eat, and at the same time shivering with the cold. Hollow groans saluted my ears, and despair seemed to be imprinted on every of their countenances. The filth… was almost beyond description.” He concluded, “I have seen… seven dead at the same time, lying among the excrements of their bodies.”
So high-profile was the imprisonment of Allen that General Washington inquired about it. Washington wrote to his British counterpart, General Howe, that the hero had “been treated without regard to decency, humanity, or the rules of war; that he has been thrown into irons, and suffers all the hardships inflicted upon common felons.” This prompted General Howe to write back to London for instructions. In the meantime, the Continental Congress supported General Washington’s advice to keep captured officers such as General Richard Prescott under close control in the event it would be necessary to use them as leverage.
Allen and General John Sullivan were finally exchanged in May 1778 for General Prescott, who had been captured during the fighting in Montreal.† A year later, Allen published a gripping account of his ordeal as a series in the Pennsylvania Packet. It was later released as a book, and the story was described in numerous newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic, including the touching account of Allen’s son dying while his father was in prison. Allen’s imprisonment was well known throughout the colonies and further raised awareness of the cruelties of the British prison ships.
There had long been a custom of prisoner exchanges in warfare, dating to the chivalrous ideals of combat during medieval times in Europe. While the Revolutionary War was being fought in America, prisoner exchanges were occurring on the other side of the Atlantic between the British and other European powers. However, a number of factors limited prisoner exchanges between the British and Americans, one of the foremost being the fact that the British did not recognize their former colonies as a legitimate nation and therefore did not consider colonials under arms to be soldiers. Rather, they viewed the Continental Army and especially the militias and privateers as rebels and criminals.
Furthermore, as one scholar has noted, “captured Americans created exceptionally awkward problems, since neither wholesale release nor wholesale trial for treason or piracy was practicable, and habeas corpus made indefinite imprisonment illegal.” The British somewhat resolved the dilemma on March 3, 1777, when the North Act temporarily suspended habeas corpus when it came to those charged with “high treason” in the American colonies and on the “high seas.” Although most captured American soldiers and sailors were never formally charged with a crime, they ended up being detained indefinitely on accusations of treason and piracy.
Another practical problem facing the Americans and British was that neither could afford to keep prisoners. After defeating the Americans in New York in the summer and fall of 1776, General Howe faced a far worse enemy—starvation and a winter without adequate clothing and provisions. These factors claimed more lives than colonial muskets. A historical account of the British headquarters in New York reveals the severity of the problem fully three years later: “Flour exhausted. Hessians at Brooklyn received damaged oatmeal. If the British could not feed their own soldiers, how could they accommodate thousands of American prisoners?” Indeed, this created yet another problem. Another record of the war stated, “The known shortage of provisions in New York during November and December, 1776, and January and February, 1777, from which the British Army suffered, had a good deal to do with the famine and mortality of the prisoners of war at that period. Washington himself attributes them to this cause.”
But the challenges presented an opportunity. Funds and food were in such short supply that in some cases the British decided to allow prisoners to purchase their freedom. At the same time, such an arrangement was an incentive to capture even more American prisoners. Prisoners would, perversely, help pay for the war.
There continued, however, a general unwillingness by the British to come to the negotiating table. But that changed when the Americans began winning battles and took prisoners of their own. Even though informal prisoner exchanges began, there never was an official policy on the matter. For the Americans, the individual states (through their governors or committees of prominent citizens), rather than the Continental Army, oversaw exchanges. During such negotiations, an officer was more valuable than an enlisted man, and Britain insisted on a level of deference for their captured officers. Indeed, when generals such as the American Charles Lee and British “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne were captured, both sides managed to secure their quick release.
In Europe, soldiers were typically exchanged rank for rank. For instance, when French privateers were captured by the British, they exchanged them in France for English sailors. Oftentimes the British would parole prisoners incarcerated in England—in Mill Prison near Plymouth, Fortran Prison near Portsmouth, smaller prisons in Liverpool and Weymouth, and Kinsale in Ireland. Such prisoners were even free to live in the town, but under certain restrictions. One condition used in Cape Breton in Newfoundland was that they work in coal pits. But when privateers were caught in American waters, a different fate awaited them.
The political situation among the upstart Americans was such that, even if Washington wanted to negotiate for the release of all prisoners, he was not in a legal position to do so. Privateers, for instance, were not a part of the Continental Army, volunteers were not regulars, and the militia units fought for the colonies where they were organized. The general also had trouble ordering American privateers to either imprison or hand over British sailors. Privateers often did what made them money. At the same time
, the privateer captains did not have the resources to detain prisoners and often purposely kept poor records. Nor did American prisoners taken from privateers have the same claims as those taken from the Continental Army or even the makeshift navy, because they were not regular soldiers. As one old account of the prison ship dilemma stated, “The men on the Jersey, if unable to purchase their liberty, could only wait for peace or death; they were the victims of circumstance.” Both sides were limited in their ability to release or exchange privateers.
But there were some efforts to improve the conditions in the prisons and on the prison ships, and to secure the release or exchange of the prisoners. In August 1775, only months after the first shots of the war, General Washington wrote to General Thomas Gage, the British commander at the beginning of the war, complaining about the inhumane treatment of the prisoners taken at Bunker Hill earlier that summer. Washington claimed Americans were being treated like common criminals and deserved the “Rights of Humanity.” Washington also expressed frustration that the British failed to distinguish between officers and enlisted men in their prisons. Gage was defiant, responding that because the king had not bestowed the officer’s rank or provided any rights to the prisoners, they were rebels and could be hanged.
Before leaving his post as commander of British forces in America, Gage wrote to Washington: “The Britons, ever pre-eminent in mercy, have outgone common examples, and overlooked the criminal in the captive. Upon these principles, your prisoners, whose lives by the laws of the land are destined to the cord, have hitherto been treated with care and kindness, and more comfortably lodged than the King’s troops.” The statements were anything but accurate.
Gage then accused Washington of mistreatment: “I understand there are some of the King’s faithful subjects… laboring like Negro slaves to gain their daily subsistence, or reduced to the wretched alternative to perish by famine, or take arms against their King and country.”
The Ghost Ship of Brooklyn Page 14
