The 'Horrors of These Hulks'

Philip Freneau is perhaps best known as the sharp-tongued editor of the National Gazette during the 1790s. A staunch Republican, Freneau wielded the paper to aim partisan quivers at assorted Federalist targets, sparing few victims. Invective came easily to him. Yet none of Freneau's political squibs proved quite so personal as a 1781 poem, "The British Prison Ship," based on his six weeks' captivity on board two British hulks stationed in the Hudson and East Rivers in New York. There, the conditions of the rotting prison ships that held American patriots during the Revolution overwhelmed the future newspaper editor. In a salvo at the British, Freneau wrote:

 
One of the darkest chapters in American naval history had its Homer. But was anyone listening?¹

Revolutionary War historians typically and quite rightly note the development of the Continental Navy and extol the daring commanders who captained its ships. Although unable to assail British warships in fleet actions, the infant American Navy could engage in fierce ship-to-ship battles, dispatch commerce raiders against enemy merchant ships, and otherwise vex the Royal Navy. John Paul Jones, John Barry, Joshua Barney, and other naval figures contributed to the fight for independence. Tales of their bravery and courage abound. For example, Jones' stirring words "I have not yet begun to fight," uttered while he commanded the Bonhomme Richard against HMS Serapis, are embossed on the American memory, evoking naval pride.
 
In truth, however, these exploits tell but part of the story; not all patriot sailors secured victories. Capture by the British remained a possibility for some mariners, as did incarceration on board the British prison hulks in New York harbor. The story of these often-forgotten men represents another, less-well-studied, aspect of Revolutionary War naval history.²

Freneau's poetic abilities, first noticed when he was a student at the College of New Jersey (present-day Princeton University), gave him a certain literary cachet. Of particular note was his poem "The Rising Glory of America," read at his class commencement in 1771. Four years later, during the siege of Boston, he directed verses against British General Thomas Gage. Yet the sea also drew Freneau's attention, and after working in the Danish West Indies and serving in the New Jersey militia, he decided to volunteer on board ships. It was to be his downfall.

Once captured by the British in 1780, Freneau found a new outlet for his poetic talents, one that exposed the horrors of confinement in verse to patriot readers. He was fortunate enough to recover from a fever, survive confinement, and return home to New Jersey. The experience left its mark, however, with an emotionally scarred Freneau determined to inform his countrymen of British perfidy.³

The British prison fleet had started modestly in October 1776 with the arrival of the Whitby, a converted transport ship designed to hold American prisoners captured at the Battle of Long Island. More ships came on station over the next few years; some went to the Hudson or to the East River, but most finally anchored in Wallabout Bay off the Brooklyn coast. The hulks accommodated the growing number of maritime prisoners-Continental sailors, privateers, American merchantmen, and unlucky civilians such as Freneau. The prison ships presented a gloomy appearance to newcomers. As Freneau remarked, "No masts or sails these crowded ships adorn/Dismal to view, neglected and forlorn!" The Jersey ranked among the most notorious of the vessels. Anchoring in Wallabout Bay in 1778, her name became synonymous with the horrors of captivity. Perhaps as many as 1,200 overcrowded, malnourished prisoners resided in the former 60-gun man-of-war.⁴

Other smaller prison ships offered scant improvement. The Scorpion and the Hunter, the two vessels in which Freneau was confined, exposed inmates to wretched food, contagious diseases, and abusive guards. Death proved a very real specter. Although numbers varied, patriots believed that more than 11,000 people died in these hulks, a number that exceeded the American losses in any single land battle during the Revolution.⁵

Graphic images of captivity embedded themselves in the memory of the prison-ship survivors. If Freneau's verses, based on his vivid recollections, furnished a stinging rebuke to the British, other less-well-known captives penned accounts of confinement, too. Details of suffering abounded. Ebenezer Fox, a young New England farm-boy-turned-sailor, recalled his first exposure to the Jersey: "Here was a motley crew, covered with rags and filthy; visages palled with disease, emaciated with hunger and anxiety, and retaining hardly a trace of their original appearance."

Freneau, in a long-unpublished prose narrative, remembered losing his clothing and bedding on arriving in the Scorpion. Lying on a chest, he wondered if he could survive six to eight months in the "horrid prison." Thomas Dring, another New Englander, presumably entertained more depressing thoughts; he was imprisoned twice by the British, once in 1779 and again in 1782. Little prepared Dring for the Jersey's stench or the vermin that affixed themselves to him. Squalid conditions overwhelmed the senses.⁶

Prison food added to the captives' distress. They commonly received provisions of uncertain quality and quantity, depending on policy and circumstance. Those sent to the Hunter, the hospital ship, might expect a pound of bread and a pound of beef per day; those on half-rations a pound of bread and a half-pound of beef or mutton. All inmates could apparently share a cask of spruce beer every other day. This might sound tolerable. Yet, as Freneau observed, some of the meat came from the head or the shank of the animal, more suitable for soup than eating. John Ingersoll, another Hunter survivor, remembered sheep heads complete with wool and horns. At times Ingersoll was close to starvation.⁷

Away from the hospital ship, imprisoned sailors received two-thirds the rations typically given British sailors. The food included wormy bread, damaged peas, and stringy beef. Provisions on board the Jersey were cooked in a large copper kettle lined with verdigris (a result of seawater being boiled in the pot), leaving sailors susceptible to slow poisoning. More fortunate tars could buy provisions from visiting suppliers; other sailors had to fight among themselves for the few apples guards threw into the hold. As Freneau commented, "Here, doom'd to starve, like famish'd dogs we tore/The scant allowance, that our tyrants bore."⁸

Prison guards inflicted additional suffering on inmates. Jailers were not above stealing from prisoners nor were they opposed to applying rough measures. When a group of men in the Hunter botched an escape attempt, according to Freneau, guards fired into the ship's hold, killing one and wounding several. The following day, British officials placed the wounded on deck in irons to expose them to the June sun as a punishment. Prisoners soon learned to distinguish between different types of guards. They preferred Hessians to the English and especially to the Loyalists, or Refugees, as some prisoners referred to them. They tried to induce patriot captives to side with King George III. The patriots, for their part, disdained their Loyalist keepers and responded with abusive language.⁹
 
The greatest horror on board these ships was neither the food nor the guards but disease. Exercise above deck, although permitted by British officials during the day, could hardly compensate for the crowded conditions, inadequate food, and poor sanitation that turned the prison ships into floating charnel houses. Pneumonia, dysentery, scurvy, yellow fever, and smallpox weakened and often killed prisoners. A fortunate few managed to inoculate themselves against smallpox, but they could do little against the other illnesses that might besiege them. Those sent to the hospital ships found conditions scarcely better. On board the Hunter, Freneau recalled men "struggling in the agonies of death, dying with putrid and bilious fevers, lamenting their hard fate to die at such a fatal distance from their friends." Some inmate nurses in these ships played cards among themselves, leaving patients thirsty and unattended. Especially ghoulish nurses plundered the possessions of the dead, and some purloined the hair of their deceased charges to use as wigs. Normal codes of behavior and decency had disappeared.¹⁰

Death released many sailors from the hulks. Prison guards regularly cried out "Turn out your dead!" to begin the macabre process of removing corpses from the holds. The bodies were placed in blankets, which were hastily sewn up, and then rowed ashore for impromptu interment along the shore of Wallabout Bay. As Freneau observed, "Each day at least three carcasses we bore/And scratch'd them graves along the sandy shore." Burial details did not lack for volunteers; the duty was one of the few ways for prisoners to avoid the crowded conditions of the ships. Once on shore, prisoners dug shallow graves. No burial service or prayers followed. This was, after all, an excursion for the inmate gravediggers, not a solemn ceremony. Wind and surf soon exposed the remains. Years later one minister described the site as being spewed with bones and skulls.¹¹
 
What could patriot authorities do to ameliorate their countrymen's plight? Very little, apparently. General George Washington and the Continental Congress both decried the treatment of the prisoners, but without captured British naval personnel to exchange for the American sailors, they faced an impossible quandary. Such trades would still enable the British to substitute different troops from home. Ad-hoc cartels of one sort or another were the only recourse. Freneau, afflicted with aching joints, painfully trekked home to Mount Pleasant, New Jersey. Most patriot prisoners were less fortunate. They faced indefinite terms of confinement, unless they chose to enlist in the Royal Navy. Few tars accepted the British offer. Patriotic loyalties led them to spurn inducements to enlist in His Majesty's navy. Escape, although possible, provided no guarantee of success for prisoners, either. Western Long Island remained in enemy hands. It took the Peace Treaty of Paris in 1783 to release Jack Tars from the hulks.¹²

With peace, the British prison fleet discharged its prisoners. Freed captives could take some satisfaction at the sight of the Jersey slowly sinking into Wallabout Bay, the result of sea worms eating away her hull. No one wished to salvage such a ship. Nevertheless, the exposed timbers provided a symbol of the war's bloody cost for years to come. But Philip Freneau wished to impress another poignant memory of the prison ships on his countrymen. In "The British Prison Ship," Freneau not only sought to remind Americans about British misdeeds, but he wished to call attention to the hastily and improperly buried dead upon the shore. Should not something be done to honor their memory and give them proper repose? In Freneau's words,

 
Few heeded the call. Although discussions and observations about the hastily buried remains circulated in the post-war period, with even the Confederation Congress in the 1780s suggesting the need for a proper burial, most Americans contented themselves with words, not actions. The dead would lie unclaimed and scattered.¹³

Why the delay? Part of it might have been because of the status of sailors in general during the early republic. The qualities that enabled Jack Tar to endure harsh discipline and rough conditions on board ships in war also furnished him with a sense of independence ashore. Unconnected to local authorities and communities, Jack's swaggering gait distinguished him from other working men ashore. Not infrequently, sailors could be found in crowd actions in seaport cities, ready to demand their due and fight perceived injustice. As men of the Atlantic, plying their trades in merchant ships, whalers, and military vessels, they could win praise for their efforts; as men ashore, they remained suspect to municipal authorities once outside the bounds of shipboard authority.¹⁴

In New York, the "Jersey Dead," as the casualties of the prison ships commonly became known, did have defenders. Local political leaders at times attempted to drum up support for a proper burial or a memorial. Congressman Samuel Mitchell, a Jeffersonian Republican, presented a proposal before Congress in 1803 for a monument to the prison-ship victims. His request fell on deaf ears. The independent republic remained suspicious of memorials, equating them with monarchies. Even projects to erect memorials to Revolutionary War generals had failed to receive federal support. As for the prisoners' bones themselves, a local property owner, John Jackson, had already interred them on his land. But did this render sufficient honor to the prison-ship victims?¹⁵

The Tammany Society of New York, a Republican political club, thought not and planned to give the remains a lavish reinterment in 1808. They had obtained the bones from Jackson, hopeful that Congress would sponsor a memorial. As the nation reeled from the attack of HMS Leopard on the USS Chesapeake the previous year, and as President Thomas Jefferson's 1807 Embargo Act roiled Manhattan's seaport economy, nervous Republicans feared Federalist inroads among the electorate. A burial of the Jersey Dead sponsored by the Tammany Society might shore up Republican support among voters, they thought. Such an action would bestow upon the remains the burial they so desperately lacked, acknowledge the sacrifice of Revolutionary sailors, and remind New Yorkers of British atrocities in the war. Accordingly, the Tammany Society assembled the remains and organized a massive procession to honor the Jersey Dead.¹⁶

On 26 May 1808, the citizens of Manhattan and Brooklyn awoke to the sounds of cannon signaling the start of the funeral procession. From Manhattan, the entourage marched across the southern part of the city, embarked in 13 ships, sailed to Brooklyn, and reassembled to march to the new burial site near the navy yard. The Tammany Society dominated the proceedings. However, artisan groups, political figures, Revolutionary War veterans, and sailors also marched. Thousands turned out to watch the procession. Fittingly, the eulogist, the Reverend Benjamin De Witt, praised the Jersey Dead as patriots who deserved everlasting fame for their suffering. The coffins were then placed in a vault. The dead had finally been acknowledged and properly interred.¹⁷

Philip Freneau also had something to say about the burial. His unsuccessful attempts at editing various newspapers in later years had failed to silence his voice completely. As a prison-ship survivor, Freneau could speak on that topic with authority. In a poem, "Tomb of the Patriots," first published in the New York Public Advertiser on 19 May 1808, Freneau scolded the British:

Finally entombed, the Jersey Dead had received the last rites of the dead. As Freneau concluded in his last lines:

So the Jersey Dead had found a home in a burial vault near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Although talk of a monument persisted, the bones stayed in the vault as the borough of Brooklyn slowly grew and encircled the site. In time, complaints about the vault arose. People disliked living alongside the bones; others commonly blamed burial vaults for the effluvia thought to foster illness and disease. The tomb remained, however, dignified with a small antechamber decorated with an eagle. Nevertheless, the Jersey Dead seemed headed again for obscurity, the tomb increasingly forgotten and neglected. But all was not lost. By 1873 the bones of the prison-ship victims had found a new home in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Fittingly, in 1908, President-elect William Howard Taft attended the dedication ceremony for a memorial to the Jersey Dead, the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument, a 198-foot column that still towers above the tomb in Fort Greene Park. Twenty thousand New Yorkers gathered to witness the event.

No doubt Freneau would have approved. His last years, although marked by economic woes, could not obscure what he had done for American poetry in general and the prison-ship victims in particular. The torch had been passed to future generations to ensure that the monument remained intact to the nameless, yet not forgotten, victims of the Revolution about whom Freneau first wrote so eloquently.¹⁹