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.

[C19fan]

You are right Magwitch was not directly involved with Miss Havisham but the man he fought on the marches, Compeyson was. From wikipedia:

More than 20 years earlier, he fell in with a con man named Compeyson, the other convict he was fighting on the marshes in Pip’s childhood. Unlike him, Compeyson was a smooth talker who could pass off as a gentleman.

At the time Magwitch met Compeyson, Compeyson had another confederate named Arthur who was deathly ill. Arthur and Compeyson “had been in a bad thing with a rich lady (who turns out to be miss Havisham) some years afore, and they’d made a pot of money by it.” Now, Arthur was dying and going insane too, although Compeyson showed little concern. Arthur dies after hallucinating his late wife taking him to the afterlife.

Magwitch realises he should have taken warning from the example of Arthur about Compeyson’s perfidy but did not and was betrayed as a result. The two had several misdemeanour brushes with the law, but after four or five years were brought up on a felony charge of passing stolen notes. Compeyson set up Magwitch to take the greater part of blame by telling him they would put up separate defences. As a result, at trial, Compeyson passed off as the dignified gentleman, while Magwitch had to sell his belongings to hire Jaggers. Magwitch received a fourteen-year sentence while Compeyson was given half of the time.

They were put in the same prison-ship, but Magwitch could not get at him. At one point he did get ahold of Compeyson but was immediately seen and placed in the “black-hole” of the ship, from which he promptly escaped and made his way to shore, where he was hiding among the graves when he encountered the then-seven-year-old Pip. Young Pip’s mention to Magwitch of the other person he encountered on the marshes made Magwitch realise Compeyson was there, too, apparently driven to escape by his terror of Magwitch. Magwitch attacked and beat Compeyson until he was stopped by the arrival of the soldiers. Compeyson was again given a light punishment for his escape, but Magwitch was retried and sent for life imprisonment, though he later was released on condition of never returning to England.