The Ghost Ship of Brooklyn

INTRODUCTION

"A Vast and Silent Army"

On a crisp winter's morn in the closing days of the year 431 B.C.E., the Athenian statesman Pericles climbed a high platform for the painful but honored task of eulogizing his brethren who fell in the Peloponnesian War.^* The struggle against Sparta had started earlier that spring and would prove to be a long and bloody affair. Accordingly, this would be but one of many burials in Athens, though history would remember Pericles' funeral oration that day as one of the most important speeches of the ancient world.

It was customary in Athens for men lost in war to be honored at elaborate funerals. These ceremonies began a few days prior to the burial, when the fallen soldiers' remains were placed on public display, providing an opportunity for family members, friends, and other Athenians to gather to pay their respects and make offerings. Coffins were then carried in carts to a scenic spot on the outskirts of the city for the burial, with one of the coffins remaining empty—a haunting symbol of the dead who were still missing. After the processional, the heroes were laid to rest in a large sepulcher. The grand ceremony concluded with comments from an individual of great esteem.

And so it was that day that the famed orator Pericles offered his remarks. The account was recorded that day and retold by Thucydides, the Athenian historian and general who wrote the history of the Peloponnesian War. According to Thucydides, Pericles opened with these now-famous lines: "Most of my predecessors in this place have commended him who made this speech part of the law, telling us that it is well that it should be delivered at the burial of those who fall in battle. For myself, I should have thought that the worth which had displayed itself in deeds would be sufficiently rewarded by honors also shown by deeds; such as you now see in this funeral."

Noting that the fallen were part of something larger than themselves, Pericles maintained, "It is for such a city, then, that these men nobly died in battle, thinking it right not to be deprived of her, just as each of their survivors should be willing to toil for her sake." The statesman did more than recognize the dead as heroes. In a comparatively brief eulogy, he heralded the special qualities of Athenians and enshrined the sacrifices within the larger context of the struggle for freedom.

Two millennia later, President Abraham Lincoln also stood atop a viewing stand for a similar purpose: to commemorate a new national cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the site of a bloody clash that had taken place in early July 1863. That pivotal battle of the American Civil War claimed a staggering 23,000 Union casualties, along with roughly the same number on the Confederate side. The death toll overwhelmed the small farming community and prompted the need for the creation of a stately public resting place.

Although Lincoln was not the featured speaker—he followed musical performances and a lofty, two-hour disquisition by Edward Everett, the president of Harvard and a famed orator—his remarks echoed those of Pericles. In a surprisingly brief address, Lincoln not only honored "a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that a nation might live," but placed the sacrifices into the larger context of "a new birth of freedom." Like Pericles, the Great Emancipator also poetically noted that the deeds of those who had fallen would never be forgotten and their service would consecrate the sacred spot far beyond any words he offered.

Both Pericles and Lincoln confessed that they were humbled by the task before them. Yet both used the occasion to call upon their countrymen to remember and honor the fallen by continuing their work. "It is for us the living, rather," admonished Lincoln, "to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced." Both orations remain as among the most celebrated speeches in history, even prompting Professor Everett, the Gettysburg keynoter, to sheepishly later admit in a letter to Lincoln, "I wish I could flatter myself that I had come as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes." Indeed.

It is hard to imagine two more eloquent and fitting wartime eulogiums than those offered by Pericles and Lincoln, as it is hard for us today to imagine not honoring those who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country. Indeed, in ancient Greece the failure to commemorate those who died in war was seen as an unforgivable breach of honor and nothing less than an affront to patriotism. It was akin to a public rebuke, display of cowardice, or a dismissal of their deeds by another.

Yet, tragically, this was precisely the fate of countless thousands of men who died during the single bloodiest struggle of the entire American Revolution. For these wretched souls there was no grand homily, no public procession, no pomp or pageantry, no act of remembrance when their bodies were laid to rest. As one New Yorker living shortly after the tragedy lamented, for the prisoners aboard the ships "no degree of gratitude [has been] expressed, in written record or enduring memorial."^* Rather, for the starved and tortured prisoners, the end was marked with their bodies' being dumped unceremoniously into shallow, unmarked graves on the Brooklyn shoreline. Apallingly, their sacrifices have largely been forgotten.

Belatedly, however, these prison ship martyrs from the Revolutionary War would get their Pericles, their Lincoln. None other than Walt Whitman, one of America's most significant poets, sought in the mid-nineteenth century to memorialize the prisoners aboard the monstrous ship. The Long Island native lived near the site of the worst struggle of the Revolution and, during his lifetime, the bones of Americans who had died on the prison ships still occasionally washed ashore or were unearthed by construction projects. It pained the celebrated poet greatly that the burial sites had been desecrated when workers dredged the shoreline to build a new naval facility, and he cursed the "thoughtless boys" in town who played in the martyrs' crypts, often using the skulls and bones they found in games.

Whitman wrote an article in the Brooklyn Standard hoping to raise public awareness for a suitable commemoration for what he described as "a vast and silent army" of ghosts scattered in shallow graves along Brooklyn's waterfront. On July 2, 1846, he also published a poem in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. His intention was for the lyrics to be put to the melody of "The Star-Spangled Banner" and have the public gather by the site of the tragedy and sing the poem at the Independence Day celebration two days later. Whitman's first verse read,

Whitman was not the only one to attempt to commemorate the "vast and silent army" that died along Brooklyn's shoreline. There was another. In 1895 the noted attorney, scholar, and Brooklyn resident Dr. Charles E. West addressed a group of students at the Brooklyn Heights Seminary. Like the famed poet before him, West told his audience, "The horrors of the British prison ships of the Wallabout have never been revealed to the public eye." While the claim failed to acknowledge Whitman's earlier poems, Dr. West was correct in saying that the tragedy "for some unaccountable reason has been omitted from the leading American histories and very many ordinary well-informed people know practically nothing of the unparalleled cruelty of the British or the unflinching courage of the patriots who met martyr's deaths in defence of their country." West gave the address well over a century after the incident, and with the passing of years, the tragedy was again largely forgotten.

Here we are now, well over a century after West's speech and more than 230 years after the demise of the ghost ship of the Revolution. His complaint that "the muse of history sits silent by the tomb of the American martyrs, draped in mourning," still rings mostly true. Thankfully, there is today a lone obelisk known as the Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument that stands quietly on a small hilltop in Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn. It overlooks the reinterred remains of the prisoners and site of so much suffering so long ago.

But this solitary testament to the tragedy is overshadowed by the hustle and bustle of the city and so many other, more popular and frequented sites. Even the touching Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument at Trinity Church in New York City is rendered nearly inconsequential by the surrounding skyscrapers. Unfortunately, unlike Revolutionary sites in Boston, Philadelphia, and Williamsburg—with their many visible reminders, intact colonial buildings, and large historic districts—amid New York's skyline and onslaught of development few tangible connections to the prisoners' stories remain.

History remembers and celebrates Lexington and Concord, George Washington's surprise Christmas night attack against the Hessians at Trenton, and the triumphal American victory in 1781 over Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown. But the single bloodiest conflict of the Revolution does not appear in textbooks and has been discussed in only two scholarly books. It has yet to be made into a Hollywood film or musical score. The tragedy in the waters off Brooklyn is not featured in museums, taught in schools, or evoked today with either reverent pride or solemn remembrance during Independence Day ceremonies. In short, it has never captured the popular imagination.

We may have forgotten the story of Brooklyn's Wallabout Bay today, but prison ships were not always a mystery. Charles Dickens, for instance, in his classic book Great Expectations, features a ghostly prison ship. Dickens introduces the scene with a properly haunted location—a foggy churchyard next to a shrouded marsh during a dark night. Nearby, a search party is hunting an escaped prisoner still wearing irons on his legs. Dickens's character Pip has a frightening brush with the prisoner, a scene made all the more unnerving when the flickering light of the search party's torches reveals a "black hulk lying out a little way from the mud of the shore, like a wicked Noah's ark, cribbed and barred and moored by massive rusty chains." Dickens, a social critic and reformer, was likely inspired to include a prison ship in his novel because of their widespread and controversial use by the British. He most probably observed them, as prison ships were anchored off the towns of Portsmouth and Woolwich on the outskirts of London as well as at ports in the West Indies during Dickens's lifetime.

Yet most people have never heard of the Old Sugar House in New York City, Wallabout Bay, or the British prison ships of the Revolution. Nevertheless, these places were the scenes of some of the most gruesome events in the nation's history and constitute the ugly secret of the Revolutionary War. Ironically, few aspects of the Revolutionary War were as thoroughly documented yet as quickly forgotten as the prison ships. Captured ships were listed, prisoners' names were registered, and deaths recorded.

In 1832 the U.S. Congress finally passed a measure allowing veterans of the Revolutionary War to petition for pensions. Sadly, most of those who fought were by then long gone. For those still alive, the legislation offered a much-needed yearly stipend to anyone who could prove at least six months of wartime service. Unfortunately, most of the elderly petitioners had little to no proof of their service—maybe an old uniform, a scar from a gunshot or bayonet wound, an enlistment certificate, or discharge papers. What all of them had, however, were memories. The petitioners who came forward shared stories with court clerks who documented them and encouraged veterans to record their experiences in order to prove their status as veterans. We can be thankful that many put quill to paper.

Others were motivated by their families to write memoirs. In particular, five men and boys—Christopher Hawkins, Thomas Dring, Thomas Andros, Ebenezer Fox, and Andrew Sherburne—somehow survived the most cursed of all the prison ships and wrote detailed narratives of the experience. Together, these remarkable and gripping accounts of battles, captures, imprisonment, and escapes or releases offer a firsthand telling of perhaps the most dreadful event of the Revolutionary period.

In the words of Thomas Dring, an officer from Rhode Island, "Among the varied events of the war of the American Revolution, there are few circumstances which have left a deeper impression on the public mind, than those connected with the cruel and vindictive treatment which was experienced by those of our unfortunate countrymen whom the fortune of war had placed on board the Prison-Ships of the enemy." Christopher Hawkins echoed Dring's account of the ships. A young boy captured by the British and imprisoned aboard the worst of the ships, he described the ordeal in the opening lines of his journal, saying, "Among the various modes adopted by the British, during the Revolution, for taming the American people into submission to the English yoke, none were more barbarous and more revolting to humanities than the cruelties inflicted by means of the prison ships."

The macabre and grisly chapter in American history they described occurred in the waters just off the coast of Brooklyn. From 1776 to the very end of the war in 1783, the British occupied New York City and Long Island and made them the staging ground for their military operations in America. The waterways throughout the city soon filled with supply vessels, transport craft, and warships, prompting the British command to use older ships to incarcerate American soldiers and sailors captured in battle. Civilians suspected of supporting the colonial cause or refusing to swear an oath of allegiance to the Crown were arrested. They joined countless thousands of soldiers from the Continental Army and sailors from warships, merchant craft, and privateers who were imprisoned belowdecks in the cramped, diseased holds of these floating dungeons. As thousands perished, the prison ships moored in a shallow and otherwise forgettable body of water known as Wallabout Bay quickly became massive, ghostly coffins.

The most notorious of these ships was the HMS Jersey. More than a thousand prisoners at a time were held aboard the ship. The deplorable conditions belowdecks resulted in a half dozen to one dozen men, on average, dying every day from smallpox, dysentery, typhoid, or yellow fever as well as from the effects of malnutrition, polluted water, and torture. This single ship accounted for the lion's share of the misery and deaths of American prisoners during the war, an amount described as "obscenely high" by one source. In fact, more Americans died on board the ghost ship of Brooklyn than died in combat during the entirety of the Revolutionary War—by a factor of two!

The tragedy of the Jersey and other horrid prison ships was irrefutably "the darkest in the history of our Revolutionary struggle." An attorney from Brooklyn tasked with preparing a report on the floating dungeons after the war concluded that although there are always "occasional acts of inhumanity and cowardly brutality, committed in the heat of battle," this particular catastrophe could never be "excused." On the contrary, he argued that the ordeal was a chilling example of the "temporary triumph of passion and vengeance over reason and humanity."

To be sure, the British command intended the Jersey to be a weapon of terror. The threat of imprisonment in her deadly bowels, they reasoned, would deter even the most ardent of patriots from fighting. And so they crammed thousands into the dark, dank hull and moored the ship far enough from shore to prevent the disease that soon permeated her rotting timbers from inflicting the city, yet close enough to be seen and smelled by all who passed by. However, the plan backfired. As prisoners aboard the dreaded ship escaped and as colonial pamphlets and newspapers such as the Connecticut Courant, New York Journal, Pennsylvania Journal, and others told their gruesome stories, the "Old Jersey" quickly emerged as a powerful symbol of British oppression and cruelty. Like the Boston Massacre, an event that crystalized support for the cause of liberty a decade earlier, the horrors that occurred on the Jersey turned loyalists into patriots and ended up inspiring the struggle for independence.

This is the story of an old warship that, because of the obscenely high death toll and inhumane conditions below her decks, was nicknamed "Hell Afloat" or simply "Hell." She earned the reputation.