Another source of comfort for some of the prisoners was religion. However, Thomas Andros recorded that he never saw a Bible on the Jersey and the ship received no visits by clergy, even during the daily burials. Such comforts that would render hope for the prisoners were likely prohibited by decree from the commissary David Sproat. Andros was greatly disturbed by the absence of clergy and religious services on the ship and the general lack of prayer among many prisoners, who, he noted, seemed to have lost their faith on account of the ordeal. “I know not that God’s name was ever mentioned, unless it was in profaneness or blasphemy,” Andros complained. Rather, it seemed to him that “when they most needed religion, there [then] they treated it with the greatest contempt.”
Some prisoners such as Andros, who had become increasingly devout during his ordeal, attributed their survival to faith. During his captivity, Andros tried to remember sermons and scripture. He also found comfort in a poem in Latin he had heard as a child and recited often during the most trying hours on the Jersey:
Which things,
most worthy of pity,
I myself saw.
And of them was a part.
Additionally, the officers among the prisoners had organized codes of conduct for those aboard the Hell Ship, one of which was to observe the Sabbath. The Rhode Islander Thomas Dring recorded that one of the prisoners finally agreed to serve as a proxy preacher. The man, whose name was Cooper, was not a man of the cloth, but rather a “common sailor.” Dring and other prisoners described Cooper as well educated and possessing good manners. The Virginian was also quite charismatic and articulate, allowing him to capture the prisoners’ attention with his stories, the most popular of which was about his running away from home to become a sailor. Each Sunday, when the prisoners were permitted on the upper deck, Cooper would climb atop the spar. From there, his thundering voice would call upon his fellow prisoners. The Virginian would recite the bylaws developed by the sailors, share personal stories, and offer them heartfelt words of faith and hope.
While reading the bylaws, Cooper made reference to the prisoners before him who had developed the “Rules of Conduct” as “the framers.” Poetically he evoked their memory, suggesting that they were “in all probability sleeping in death, beneath the sand of the shore before our eyes.” The man the prisoners called “the Orator” and “the Elder” also encouraged the prisoners to adhere to these codes, noting that in them was a token of civility and the hope of survival.
Cooper peppered his “sermons” with warnings he had received before his capture that, should he become a sailor, he would end up aboard the dreaded Jersey. The notorious Hell Ship, he had been told, would send him to meet his maker. “The first of these predictions has been verified,” warned Cooper, “and I care not how soon the second proves equally true, for I am prepared for the event. Death, for me, has lost its terrors, for with them I have been too long familiar.” This particular sermon resonated with the other prisoners because, like Cooper, many of them had known about the old hulk before they were captured; it had become synonymous with British oppression. While it had inspired some to fight, others had whispered the name in hope that they would never be captured and put aboard Hell.
But one Sunday, Cooper, from his perch atop the spar, went too far. He roared that Satan had sent his demons to torment the prisoners and chief among these tormentors was David Sproat, the commissary of prisoners, whom he called the “most active of these infernal agents.” The prisoners listening worried that the guards would beat or kill “Parson Cooper,” and they begged the Orator to cease making statements that could get him in trouble. However, Cooper refused, stating firmly that their “keepers could do nothing more, unless they should put him to the torture.” But even that, the parson declared, did not scare him. Rather, he hoped his words would convince Sproat and the guards to permit members of the clergy to come aboard the ship.
No preachers arrived. But aides to Commissary Sproat did arrive and ordered that Cooper be brought to them. The guards dragged Cooper to the upper deck, and Sproat’s agents then took him away in a boat. The parson waved while sailing away. Cooper’s removal greatly disturbed the prisoners, who revered the gifted orator and had come to rely on his weekly sermons for hope. Most of the prisoners believed Cooper had been killed by Sproat. Dring held out hope that he was from a powerful family who had purchased his freedom. They never found out what became of him.
The prospects of escaping the Jersey or being released from the imprisonment were slim. As was mentioned earlier, one option was to purchase freedom, but few prisoners carried enough money with them at the time of incarceration or had family members with the means to secure their release. Another option was impressment. The British were in need of sailors and often resorted to “pressing” sailors from the American colonies and elsewhere into service, not infrequently at the tip of a bayonet. The Royal Navy secured new “recruits” by taking patients from hospitals, swooping in on drunks in pubs, and having press gangs seize mariners from merchant vessels. But they also used prisoners.
The British came to be so reliant on impressment that a bizarre plan was formulated in the last full year of the war by the son of the legendary British general Lord Jeffrey Amherst. The young officer imagined an entire military unit consisting of naval prisoners that would be sent to fight for the Crown in the West Indies and elsewhere. Although the proposal never came to fruition, the British did press countless numbers of Americans into service. Press gangs operated at the discretion of the captains of warships but were also a part of Royal Navy policy. Admiral Mariot Arbuthnot was responsible for pressing many hundreds—and possibly thousands—of Americans into service on his warships. The admiral’s press gangs targeted imprisoned sailors and privateers in New York by either offering them the chance to get off the prison ships or simply forcing them into service. The British were so desperate that they even visited the disease-plagued Jersey.
Ebenezer Fox remembered that after his warship, Protector, was captured by two larger Royal Navy vessels, about one-third of his crew were forced into the service of His Majesty’s navy. Many did not go willingly. He recalled that most of these unfortunate souls were never heard of again. But even that fate seemed preferable to being taken to the Jersey. Fox had heard frightening tales from older sailors about the notorious prison ship. Yet, as he stated, “The idea we had formed of its horrors fell far short of the realities which we afterwards experienced.”
Fox was on the Hell Ship when Admiral Arbuthnot’s press gangs boarded in April 1780 hoping to find a few experienced sailors among the sick and malnourished prisoners. Fox remembered that “a British officer with a number of soldiers came on board. The prisoners were all ordered on deck, placed on the larboard gangway, and marched in single file round to the quarter-deck, where the officers stood to inspect them, and select such ones as suited their fancies without any reference to the rights of the prisoners.” Confused and afraid, Fox did as he was told. “We continued to march round in solemn and melancholy procession, till they had selected from among our number about three hundred of the ablest, nearly all of whom were Americans, and they were directed to go below under a guard, to collect together whatever things they wished to take belonging to them. They were then driven into the boats, waiting alongside, and left the prison ship.”
Even though Fox loathed the British, he and the others left behind were so sick and hungry that they “almost envied” their peers who were pressed into service.
The conditions were so hellish that Fox and a few others planned to escape. It would happen the next time British sloops anchored near the Jersey in order to press prisoners into service. As Fox described it, “[We] conceived the design of rising upon the guard, and seizing upon the sloop, and running her aground upon the Jersey shore.” However, the British guards were “watchful” and “well armed; while a guard of soldiers stood at the head of the companion way, to prevent any communication with the prisoners upon the deck.” Ther
e would be no escape for Fox.
Both Thomas Dring and Thomas Andros noted that they and their crewmates refused offers from the guards and officers aboard the Jersey to join the Royal Navy. These two prisoners proudly boasted of the patriotism of their comrades in choosing the wretched conditions of the Hell Ship over joining their enemies. However, for other prisoners the choice was not so easy or obvious.
Ebenezer Fox’s strength eventually wore out. After suffering for too long on the Jersey, he and a dozen other prisoners enlisted with a British regiment shipping off to Jamaica. He expressed guilt and tried to rationalize the difficult decision by saying, “Again we heard the tempting offers, and again the assurance that we should not be called upon to fight against our government or country, and with the hope that we should find an opportunity to desert, of which it was our firm intention to avail ourselves when offered, with such hopes, expectations, and motives, we signed the papers, and became soldiers in his Majesty’s service.”
The Royal Navy did not want to risk the chance that these new recruits would try to escape when near an American port or sabotage combat operations against an American warship or privateer. As such, pressed sailors were often shipped to distant waters, where they had little incentive to escape and virtually no chance of ever making it back home. Thus was the fate of Ebenezer Fox. One of the few to live to tell the tale was a young seaman named John Blatchford, who, along with more than eighty other sailors, was sent to the East Indies. He alone made it back home, in the year 1783.
There was one other way of coping with imprisonment on the nightmarish ship—resistance. And that is precisely what the prisoners on the Jersey did on July 4, 1782.
As is true for prisoners of war throughout history, several of the men confined belowdecks on the Jersey dealt with their bleak situation by fighting back against the oppressive guards. The prisoners used every trick and tool at their disposal to resist. Ebenezer Fox described one such tactic that took advantage of the swarms of rats, lice, mites, and other pests that filled the ship. The prisoners would put “vermin” inside an empty “snuff box.” When a British officer boarded the Jersey, they purposely opened the box and poured the creatures on his coat in order to infect him.
Perhaps the largest organized resistance occurred on July 4, 1782. With the war all but over, the prisoners planned to celebrate Independence Day with a demonstration of resistance and camaraderie. Planning began several days before July 4 when the prisoners started saving and hiding rations of food and water, gathered supplies and materials, and spread the word among fellow inmates. Hoping “to make ourselves merry,” the men made small American flags and thought of patriotic songs to sing. The celebration would occur when the prisoners were permitted on the upper deck, but in such a way as not to invite “trouble” or “insult” the guards. Yet that is precisely what happened.
While the guards on duty that day were not the feared Hessians or the vindictive loyalists, they included a group of aggressive and foul-tempered Scots, whom the prisoners deemed second only to the loyalists in terms of their aggressive and violent dispositions. On the morning of the fourth, the prisoners symbolically placed thirteen small flags on and around the booms of the ship. However, the guards ordered the prisoners to remove the flags. The prisoners refused, citing their right to mark the occasion with song and camaraderie. They stood in defiance and silent solidarity, tensions building. Then one of the prisoners began singing patriotic songs; soon all of them were singing. They were ordered by the guards to stop singing, but only sang louder.
The guards reluctantly gave in and permitted the men to sing, but did manage to block access to the upper deck so that no additional prisoners from the holds could join their comrades. Those stuck belowdecks ended up spending the entire day trapped in the dingy and stiflingly hot holds. Yet, from below, they joined in the chorus. Prisoners on deck and below celebrated all day, singing and sharing stories and sparse rations with one another.
By late afternoon the guards had had enough of the celebration. Around four o’clock they ordered the prisoners to cease the merriment. The prisoners only sang louder and began cheering. Their order ignored and their patience wearing thin, the Scottish guards tore down the flags and “triumphantly demolished and trampled them under foot.” A few prisoners attempted to stop the act, but the guards responded with violence. Fighting soon broke out across the upper deck. Prisoners rushed the guards, but their advantage was short-lived. The guards eventually gained the upper hand, driving the prisoners belowdecks with bayonets and whips, shouting, “Down, Rebels, down!”
The guards finally succeeded in beating the prisoners down the stairway. That done, they locked the hatches. One account described the chaos and bloodshed: “The helpless prisoners, retreating from the hatchways as far as their crowded condition would permit, were followed by the guards, who mercilessly hacked, cut, and wounded everyone within their reach; and then ascending again to the upper deck, fastened down the hatches upon the poor victims of their cruel rage, leaving them to languish through the long, sultry, summer night, without water to cool their parched throats.”
At suppertime, the prisoners were denied food and water. This lasted through the night, but in defiance the prisoners started singing again. As the chorus grew louder, the guards shouted threats down to their charges, but their warnings were drowned out by the singing. Ultimately, the guards could stand the singing no longer. Around nine that evening, they opened the hatch and charged down the stairway “with lanterns in one hand and cutlasses in the other.” Steel flashed in the dim twilight and flickering wicks of lanterns, as swords were thrust into anyone unable to get away in time.
Men had nowhere to hide and little room even to move in order to avoid the attack. Soon the guards retreated up the ladders, and cries of wounded and dying prisoners echoed throughout the holds. Several men were killed, with accounts varying from ten to twenty-five, while many other prisoners were injured in the melee. A few of them later died from their wounds. The bodies of those killed on the upper deck during the uprising were simply thrown overboard.
Thomas Dring survived the Independence Day massacre by retreating to the gunroom. He described the ordeal that followed: “It had been the usual custom for each person to carry below, when he descended at sunset, a pint of water, to quench his thirst during the night. But, on this occasion, we had thus been driven to our dungeon three hours before the setting of the sun, and without our usual supply of water.” The situation was made worse because “the day had been sultry, and the heat was extreme throughout the ship.” Dring continued, “The usual number of hours during which we had been crowded together between decks; the foul atmosphere and sickening heat; the additional excitement and restlessness caused by the unwanted wanton attack which had been made; above all, the want of water, not a drop of which could be obtained during the whole night, to cool our parched lips; the struggles and groans of the dying; together formed a combination of horrors which no pen can describe.” Dring concluded, “Of this night I cannot describe the horror.”
Hatches were again fastened shut. Any request for a drop of water to quench a parched throat was met only by taunts from the guards above deck. Likewise, no medical attention—no dressing for the wounds, no gauze for the blood—was offered for the wounded who had survived the attack by the Scottish guards. Dring recalled that few prisoners slept that night, not only on account of their thirst but because of the groans and cries from wounded and dying prisoners. In the pitch blackness of the holds, Dring sat near a small grate and stared out into the dark sky all night. Sleep eluded him.
The next morning, the men awoke to a ghastly scene. Several of their fellow prisoners had died in the night or were barely clinging to life. Denied water all night, they were parched and eagerly awaited the morning meal with its ration of water. But it did not come. Mealtime usually occurred like clockwork on the Jersey, but the morning of July 5 came and went with no food, water, or access to the upper deck. Nor did th
e guards open the hatches for the usual morning ritual of collecting the dead. Desperation set in as a few delirious prisoners began to panic. Others worried they would be left to starve as a punishment for the celebration.
Finally, after several hours, the hatches opened and a mob of “thirsty wretches thronged to the water cask,” but the guards dispersed them at bayonet point and made them wait even longer. Cruelly, the prisoners could see the water but not drink it. The guards’ taunting was “more spiteful than violent.” Thomas Andros remembered trying to reach for the water cask and being attacked by a sentry. He barely escaped with his life.
Food rations also arrived very late that day, and the prisoners were not allowed access to fire to cook their food. The time allotted on the upper deck was limited for the next few days, as were the rations of food and water. It was a particularly difficult period for many of the prisoners. But finally the guards rotated off duty and a group of Hessians arrived, causing “great joy” among the prisoners.
The massacre on July 4 was not the only effort by prisoners to resist the guards; nor was it the only instance when the guards attacked their unarmed charges. For instance, after continual beatings and savage treatment aboard the ship Strombolo, the prisoners revolted. Several prisoners were wounded or killed in that uprising. Their bodies were piled on top of one another on the upper deck and left as a cruel reminder for the living. It had the desired effect, especially when a few wounded men too weak to stand were included in the pile. The prisoners watched in horror as one mortally wounded comrade piled among the dead gasped for breath and begged, “For god’s sake… a little water.” An officer kicked the prisoner in the face with his boot and screamed, “Damn you! Take that, you damn’d rebel rascal!”
The Ghost Ship of Brooklyn Page 16
