The Wretched Prison Ships (Patriots in Brit Ships during RevWar)

Newsday ^ | 5-24-08 | George DeWan

[Pharmboy]

Death, disease and injury were the fate of thousands held at sea

More Americans died in British prison ships in New York Harbor than in all the battles of the Revolutionary War.

There were at least 16 of these floating prisons anchored in Wallabout Bay on the East River for most of the war, and they were sinkholes of filth, vermin, infectious disease and despair. The ships were uniformly wretched, but the most notorious was the Jersey.

Following the Battle of Long Island in August, 1776, and the fall of New York City soon after, the British found thousands of prisoners on their hands, and the available prisons in New York filled up quickly. Then, as the British began seizing hundreds of seamen off privateers, they turned a series of aging vessels into maritime prison ships.

There were more than a thousand men at a time packed onto the Jersey. They died with such regularity that when their British jailers opened the hatches in the morning, their first greeting to the men below was: "Rebels, turn out your dead!" Christopher Vail, of Southold, who was on the Jersey in 1781, later wrote:

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.

[Pharmboy]

These were as ghastly as could be...

[silverleaf]

have any remains in the mass graves on the beach ever been discovered? Are there any memorials?

[Pharmboy]

This was the worst of them, the Jersey...it is said that 8,000 patriots died in her.

The RevWar/Colonial History/General Washington ping list

Special Memorial Day ping...

[Pharmboy]

As they were building the Brooklyn Navy Yard, bones of these men kept coming to the surface. There are more undoubtedly still there. There is a fine memorial in Ft Greene Park in Brooklyn.

[Pharmboy]

Indeed. The 18th century Brits were famous for it. “Rum, buggery and the lash” was not the best recruiting slogan, though true it was.

[silverleaf]

Well, at least nowadays the Brit military has done away with the lash.

[cripplecreek]

“Rum, buggery and the lash”

It doesn't work so great for picking up the ladies either, trust me.

[Pharmboy]

Now THAT’S funny. (But when that line DOES work, you must have a night to remember...)

[Travis McGee]

Andrew Jackson: Life Before the Presidency

http://millercenter.org/academic/americanpresident/jackson/essays/biography/2

Soldier, Prisoner and Orphan

The Revolutionary War ended Jackson’s childhood and wiped out his remaining immediate family. Fighting in the Carolina backcountry was especially savage, a brutish conflict of ambushes, massacres, and sharp skirmishes. Jackson’s oldest brother Hugh enlisted in a patriot regiment and died at Stono Ferry, apparently from heatstroke. Too young for formal soldiering, Andrew and his brother Robert fought with American irregulars. In 1781, they were captured and contracted smallpox, of which Robert died shortly after their release. While trying to retrieve some nephews from a British prison ship, Andrew’s mother also fell ill and died.

An orphan and a hardened veteran at the age of fifteen, Jackson drifted, taught school a little, and then read law in North Carolina. After admission to the bar in 1787, he accepted an offer to serve as public prosecutor in the new Mero District of North Carolina, west of the mountains, with its seat at Nashville on the Cumberland River. Arriving in 1788, Jackson thrived in the new frontier town. He built a legal practice, entered into trading ventures, and began to acquire land and slaves.

[aculeus]

Memorial bump!

[Blue Jays]

The young Andrew Jackson saw more by his early teenage years than many will see in a lifetime. Fascinating narrative.

[C19fan]

Pretty standard operating for the British to throw POWs and criminals into floating prison ships. Remember Pip running into Magwitch escaping from a prison hulk at the beginning of Dickens Great Expectations.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Pharmboy.

[ntnychik]

Here’s a link to the U.S Merchant Marine site. Scroll down for excellent links, including the Prison Ship Martyr’s Monument, a listing of 8000 American dead, and an article on the HMS Jersey.

http://www.usmm.org/revolution.html

[sinanju]

That was Winston Churchill’s phrase and I still think he secretly was referring to their boarding (”public”) school system (hold the rum).

[sinanju]

That first chapter of “Great Expectations” was so full of plot holes I’m still scratching my head...

Wonderful description of the former fen country but who was the fellow convict Magwitch enlisted Pip to aid who then ran down Magwitch and got them both recaptured? Or something like that?

[C19fan]

The chap, whose name I forget, was an accomplice of Magwitch who was part of the team that absconded part of Miss Havisham’s fortune. I think that guy, whose name escapes me, was the one who fooled Miss Havisham into believing he loved her and wanted to marry her and then jilted her on the altar.

[sinanju]

It’s only been ten years or so, I’m pretty sure that there was not mention of any connection between Magwitch and Miss Havisham. We are never given a list of Magwitch’s crimes, only that he was transported to Australia, finished his sentence and made a fortune sheep herding, or some such and broke his parole by smuggling himself back to England.

No mention of Miss Havisham ever having been robbed or defrauded, just left at the altar and going nuts as a result. That said, I’d like to know who was the maker of her wedding dress, which Dickens describes her wearing for thirty+ years. I read the book after seeing the ‘98 movie version with Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow. Anne Bancroft’s take on Miss Havisham was a lot more engaging than the literary original.

[Pharmboy]

He may have popularized it, but it was around long before Sir Winston and it referred to The Royal Navy. I believe you are mixing up two different descriptions—one of the navy and one of the Brit public schools.