The Ghost Ship of Brooklyn

by Robert P. Watson

  Not long afterward, Andros was again nearly captured. To get out of the cold rain, he had snuck into another barn, but was caught by the farmer. Andros apologized and asked for food. The farmer and his wife took him into their home and fed him. They recognized from his ghostly appearance that he had been on the prison ships and told him they opposed the British. Two other escaped prisoners had arrived at their farm days earlier, presumably also from the prison ships. It seemed that everyone was aware of the Jersey, which worried the farmer. Citing his concern that a loyalist neighbor or soldier might see the escaped prisoner in his home, the farmer asked Andros to be on his way. Before leaving, Andros gave the farmer the three coins he had in his pocket to thank them for feeding him and not turning him in.

  Andros was racked with guilt about having stolen food over the previous several days. He originally had justified it as an act of desperation, but came to believe that his behavior would “not stand the test of the Day of Judgment.” God had taken care of his needs, even though he was unworthy. But then another sign of providence appeared. While seeking shelter in another barn, Andros found it held several horses and realized too late that it was a military stable. Before he could escape, a soldier appeared holding a sword and asked, “Who goes there?” Andros responded, “A friend,” and then asked in as calm a voice as he could muster, “Where is the well? I want to get some water.” Amazingly, the soldier did not arrest him but showed him to the well.

  Lying and quick thinking would again save his life when four soldiers found him picking apples in a field. “Have you any cider?” they asked, mistaking him for the farmer. “No,” replied Andros, “but we expect to make some next week; call then and we shall be glad to treat you.” But the ordeal of his escape had become almost too much to bear. Andros’s nerves were worn from the many brushes with recapture. He began to “sink under such trials,” his soul pained by his constant thievery, the lies he needed to tell, and his inability to repay the poor farmers who fed him. And his fever returned, draining the little strength he still had. Andros could go no longer. He collapsed and everything went black.

  Upon awakening, Andros discovered that a family had found and sheltered him. In his state of delirium, he told them the truth about his escape. Luckily for him, they turned out to be patriots, like the other families he had encountered on his escape. After burning his ragged clothing, they gave him new garments, allowed him to bathe, and showed him to a spare bedroom. It was the first real bed Andros enjoyed since initially leaving Connecticut. In the morning, the couple sent him on his way, rested and with a full stomach. Their charity was too much for Andros to bear. Finally, after many days on the run and this act of mercy, he broke down and sobbed uncontrollably. Andros would later say he learned a lesson in compassion and humility.

  Arriving in Sag Harbor on the end of Long Island, Andros encountered two of his crewmates who had also escaped the Jersey. The three of them found passage on a fishing boat whose captain agreed to drop them off in New London. He was nearly home, he thought. But the boat was stopped by an American privateer who suspected the fishermen of trading with the British. The privateer threatened to fire on them unless their captain allowed the ship to be inspected in New London. The privateer’s suspicions proved correct: the fishermen had in fact been trading illegally and even carried the confiscated wares on board!

  Andros could not believe the turn of events. He had survived the Jersey, the long trek to freedom, and countless close encounters, only to wind up facing the wrath of fellow American privateers. However, on the way to New London the fishermen managed to elude the privateer and escape. Andros was horrified to discover that both privateers and fishermen preyed on their fellow Americans, looting any ship they could. The captain did, though, make good on his promise to put the three former prisoners ashore in Connecticut. In port, Andros observed the crew members accost a woman and steal her necklace. Andros was disgusted by the entire situation.

  He had traveled 150 miles and made it to Norwich by the end of October. At that point his fever returned and Andros found himself too sick to go any farther. To come this far only to die so close to home would be a sign that he had fallen from God’s favor. But Andros’s eldest brother had heard news that prisoners had arrived in Norwich and had traveled to see if his little brother was among them. Andros was finally taken home and reunited with his mother, but his fever “raged” for another three weeks, reducing him to a state of “derangement.” A preacher and physician were summoned to the house. Both announced that Andros would soon meet his maker. The family began preparations for the funeral.

  Somehow Andros recovered. He attributed his relapse to God’s wrath because he had stopped praying. Filled with “guilt, remorse, terror, and despair,” Andros asked God for forgiveness and promised that if he lived, he would devote his life to serving Him. As spring was about to arrive, Andros’s health finally recovered enough for him to make good on his promise. He became a preacher.

  16

  Turning Point

  American, on thy own plains expire,

  A glorious victim to the hostile fire;

  In thy own ship expect the deadly blow,

  But be no captive to this tyrant foe;

  Yield not alive to glut their greedy jaws,

  First faint, first perish in thy country’s cause;

  Prefer to meet the winged, wasteful ball,

  And cut to atoms for lov’d freedom fall.

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

  In the words of the historian John Ferling, “Perhaps more than any defining moment in American history, the War of Independence is swathed in beliefs not borne out by the facts.” Indeed, even though the Revolution is often “a child’s first encounter with history,” there are many misconceptions about the founding of the nation.

  Not all Britons supported the war, just as not all colonists in America favored independence. Yet mobilization across the colonies to fight was quite impressive, especially considering that most people lived in sparsely populated farming villages and that there were few newspapers and roads. For example, when word spread on April 19, 1775, that the British army was marching from Boston to Lexington, hundreds of militiamen scrambled to arms within a matter of hours. The number soon turned into thousands, as the farmers, blacksmiths, and clerks who constituted the ragtag force repelled the British army and saved the arsenal in Concord. Days later, roughly sixteen thousand men from four colonies in New England answered the call of duty and assembled outside Boston. Massachusetts alone organized twelve regiments, each numbering from roughly 450 to 800, while 6,000 volunteers from Connecticut went to war that spring, a number that amounted to fully one-quarter of the colony’s males of military age.

  Perhaps over 100,000 men served in colonial forces. In 1781, George Washington commented on his countrymen, “A large majority are still firmly attached to the independence States, [and] abhor a reunion with Great Britain.” These numbers ebbed and flowed throughout the war. Farmers, for instance, were hesitant to fight because it meant abandoning their fields for an entire growing season or longer, and most battles were fought in the spring through the fall. Consequently, many of those who came forward to fight were those who had the least to lose: recent immigrants who were young and poor, without a profession or land. A shocking one in four militiamen from Pennsylvania were young immigrants living in abject poverty.

  As the war dragged on, losses mounted, and funding all but disappeared, American commanders often struggled with shortages of manpower. The colonies resorted to offers of money, clothing, land, and short enlistments in order to field armies, just as the Continental Congress was forced to address the revolving door of troop strength in 1777 by increasing the length of enlistments from three months to three years or until the conclusion of hostilities, whichever came first. There was even talk of a draft throughout the country, and in 1778 several states began conscripting men to supplement their volunteer units. At the same time
, New England’s political leaders began enlisting black soldiers.

  Not only were there fluctuations in troop strength during the war, but we will likely never know the exact number of colonists who supported the Revolution. What is certain is that some did while others remained loyal subjects to the Crown. Still others were likely conflicted about the issue or perhaps wanted only to continue selling their crops to England or importing goods from the mother country. One well-known theory on the topic is known as “the Adams Third,” which postulated that about one-third of colonists supported the war, one-third opposed it, and another third were uncertain or tried to remain neutral. The “rule” comes courtesy of John Adams’s postwar writings. Said Adams in a letter to a Massachusetts senator in 1815, “I should say that a full one third were averse to the revolution.… An opposite third… gave themselves up to an enthusiastic gratitude.… The middle third, composed principally of the yeomanry, the soundest part of the nation, and always averse to war, were rather lukewarm.”

  Letters written in 1813 between Adams and Thomas McKean, a former member of the Continental Congress, also discussed the degree of support for independence. While Adams is a very reliable source, his oft-repeated estimates may be about public support for the French Revolution, not the American Revolution. The great Founder was not clear in his “meandering” letter, which touched on many issues. Yet over time the number has often been repeated by scholars.* But Adams and McKean did discuss matters closer to home, with McKean recalling that “the great mass of the people were zealous in the cause of America” and Adams countering by reminding his friend of the strong loyalist sentiment of the time.

  Various estimates have been offered by historians such as Paul H. Smith, who suggested that roughly 16 percent of the population were loyalists. This matches the estimate by historian Robert Calhoon, who believed loyalists numbered about 15 to 20 percent of adult white men, while just over 40 percent of the population supported the cause of independence.

  It is difficult to determine the views of the average citizen, as paper was exceedingly rare and prohibitively expensive at the time, many people were illiterate, and newspapers seldom recorded the views of regular people. Nevertheless, at the time the Declaration of Independence was written, it appears that patriots held a slight edge over loyalists, at least among the colonies’ political and economic elite. As Adams summed up the debate in a letter to McKean, “Divided we ever have been, and ever must be.” The consensus among historians that the public was divided in its support of the Revolution echoes Adams’s clever quip.

  While there appears to have been more support for the war than opposition to it, “at most not more than a bare majority” backed the Revolution. Many recent immigrants from Europe may have had little loyalty to either side and probably tried to avoid involvement in the war altogether. In terms of raw numbers, the historian Thomas Fleming suggested that there were perhaps 75,000 to 100,000 loyalists in America during the war. The vast majority of them moved away at the end of the war. But not all loyalists fled, fought, or switched their allegiances. The loyalist Anglican minister Jonathan Boucher, for instance, did abandon his parish in Maryland as the Revolution was beginning but maintained his loyalty to both Britain and God. The reverend continued to preach in America, though he did so with loaded pistols in the pulpit!

  Without a majority of the population and local political establishment behind them, Britain was in an impossible position: despite their victories over the Continental Army, they could only control those parts of America where they had a military presence. British forces seized Philadelphia in 1777, Savannah the next year, and Charleston in 1780. But their rule was unenforceable outside of those communities. Foremost among the British strongholds was New York City, including the surrounding areas such as Brooklyn and the rest of Long Island. The loyalist population there grew as pro-British refugees from around the country fled to New York seeking protection from harassment, public humiliation, and the confiscation of property at the hands of zealous patriots and rowdy Tea Party mischief-makers.

  Loyalists were found throughout the colonies, including farmers in New York, German immigrants in Pennsylvania, Scots in North Carolina, Anglican clergy in Connecticut, and Iroquois Indians. Many of these loyalists, considering themselves to be war “refugees,” even fought alongside the British army.* Scholars have put the number of loyalists serving in the British army at nineteen thousand, along with another ten thousand fighting in loyalist militia units known as “associations.” Such numbers are high when one considers the limited population living in the colonies at the time.

  The exact number of Americans who were loyalists versus patriots will never be fully known; nor will the extent to which certain events contributed to the fluctuations in public support for the war effort. However, it is undeniable that one of the primary factors in rallying patriots to the cause was the Jersey.

  As young Christopher Hawkins said of the Jersey, “Of those confined within her walls, but few, comparatively, ever returned to their homes.” Hawkins went on to note that “occasionally a poor sufferer would escape to tell his dismal story to his countrymen, but such instances were rare.” Yet when this did occur, the harrowing tales of life aboard the Hell Ship alarmed the public. Likewise, the sight of emaciated, diseased prisoners arriving home ghost-like after a negotiated prisoner exchange was hard to forget. Moreover, because the British purposely sought to exchange only the sickest among the prison population, for every prisoner who survived the exchange there were often several who died en route or soon after making it home, which only increased the public’s shock and anger.

  Newspapers throughout the colonies, but most especially in Pennsylvania, New York, and Connecticut, began printing disquieting stories of the survivors. As early as January 1777, the Freeman’s Journal reported, “General Howe has discharged all the privates who were prisoners in New York. Half he sent to the world of spirits for want of food: the others he hath sent to warn their countrymen of the danger of falling into his hands, and to convince them by ocular demonstration, that it is infinitely better to be slain in battle, than to be taken prisoner by British brutes, whose tender mercies are cruelties.” The prison ships continued to serve as psychological weapons of terror, none more so than the Jersey, even though the British commanders’ plans ended up producing the opposite result: for every colonial worried about the threat of imprisonment on the ghostly ship, several others were inspired by British cruelty to take up arms.

  Survivors also told stories about how the British shipped prisoners to faraway lands. Holt’s New York Journal, for example, published the warning, “As every rebel, who is taken prisoner, has incurred the pain of death by the law martial, it is said that Government will charter several transports, after their arrival at Boston to carry the culprits to the East Indies for the Company’s service.” The article went on to say that patriots would be “forced into slavery with the East India Company” and that it was “the intention” of the king to put to death any “ring-leaders” of independence.

  The public clamored for news about the prison ships, and papers responded. On March 22, 1781, the Connecticut Journal proudly proclaimed, “Captain Calhoon with four others escaped from a prison ship to Long Island in a boat, March 8, notwithstanding they were fired on from the prison and hospital ships, and pursued by guard boats from three in the afternoon to seven in the evening.” Another newspaper in the state, the Connecticut Gazette, announced the details of a prisoner exchange on January 8, 1777: “A flag of truce vessel arrived at Milford… from New York, having about 200 prisoners.” The article described their “rueful countenances” and the “ill treatment they received in New York” before noting that “twenty died on the passage, and twenty since they landed.”

  A few years later in nearby New London, the local newspaper reported in the winter of 1782 that “130 prisoners landed here from New York, December third, in most deplorable condition. A great part are since dead, and the s
urvivors so debilitated that they will drag out a miserable existence.” The paper declared that it would “melt the most obdurate heart to see these miserable objects landed at our wharves sick and dying, and the few rags they have on covered with vermin and their own excrements.” The papers painted shocking visuals for their readers.

  One prisoner managed to get a letter off the ship, but was too afraid to reveal his name. The letter was reprinted in 1780 in the Connecticut Gazette. The touching story began, “I am now a prisoner on board the Falmouth, a place the most dreadful; we are confined so that we have not room even to lie down all at once to sleep. It is the most horrible, cursed, hole that can be thought of.” Another prisoner gave his name, Christopher Vail. He was on the Jersey in 1781, and recounted for the paper’s readers what happened when someone died on the ship: “When a man died he was carried up on the forecastle and laid there until the next morning at 8 o’clock when they were all lowered down the ship sides by a rope round them in the same manner as tho’ they were beasts. There was 8 died of a day while I was there. They were carried on shore in heaps and hove out the boat on the wharf, then taken across a hand barrow, carried to the edge of the bank, where a hole was dug 1 or 2 feet deep and all hove in together.”

  Robert Sheffield of Stonington, Connecticut, who escaped from a different prison ship in 1778, told a similar story in July 1778. In the article, he claimed that “the air was so foul that at times a lamp could not be kept burning.” The result was that prisoners who had succumbed to disease and starvation in the dark holds “were not missed until they had been dead ten days.”