The Ghost Ship of Brooklyn Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2017 by Robert P. Watson

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  Da Capo Press

  Hachette Book Group

  1290 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10104

  www.dacapopress.com

  First Edition: August 2017

  Published by Da Capo Press, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

  ISBNs: 978-0-306-82552-1 (hardcover), 978-0-306-82553-8 (ebook)

  E3-20170706-JV-PC

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map of New York City in 1770

  Map of Wallabout Bay During the American Revolution

  Preface

  Introduction: “A Vast and Silent Army”

  1. Warship

  2. “The Glorious Cause”

  3. City of Prisons

  4. Privateers

  5. Patriots

  6. Adventure on the High Seas

  7. Floating Dungeons

  8. Dead Reckoning

  9. Welcome to Hell

  10. The Final Voyage

  11. Tempest

  12. Negotiations

  13. July 4

  14. Escape

  15. Run!

  16. Turning Point

  17. Freedom

  18. Death and Demise

  19. Rediscovery

  Postscript

  Photos

  Appendix I. “The Poet of the American Revolution”

  Appendix II. List of Prison Ships

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  To all prisoners of war: your sacrifices

  and service are not forgotten

  Map of New York City in 1770

  Map of Wallabout Bay During the American Revolution

  Preface

  The treatment of prisoners of war throughout history has been unimaginably horrific. Those soldiers and civilians unfortunate enough to be captured during times of conflict have been subjected to a bewildering array of abuses, including forced labor, starvation, torture, rape, and solitary confinement. Others were simply murdered. Tragically, every country, culture, and conflict has suffered such crimes. Some have been worse than others. The Aztecs, for instance, tied prisoners to stone slabs and cut out their hearts… while the prisoner was still alive. In the Second Sino-Japanese War, Imperial Japanese forces murdered tens—and possibly hundreds—of thousands of Chinese civilians in what became known as the “Nanking Massacre” or the “Rape of Nanking.” The Chinese would later return the cruelty, beheading captured Japanese soldiers and using their heads as soccer balls. And during the Nazi reign, Dr. Josef Mengele, the infamous “Angel of Death,” conducted savagely cruel medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners. Such incidents are all too common in the annals of history and are far too numerous to list.

  On the other hand, there have been efforts by the international community, individual governments, and human rights groups to limit such barbarous behavior. One such example is the Geneva Convention, a series of international treaties and agreements on the status and treatment of prisoners of war, first developed in 1864. The subsequent record has been mixed. In the wake of history’s bloodiest conflict, when approximately 3.3 million Soviet prisoners taken by the Axis powers died in captivity and Joseph Stalin and the Red Army, in turn, killed countless German prisoners and millions more of their own citizens, the world community came together in 1949 to ratify two new conventions. Sadly, none of this stopped the mistreatment of prisoners.

  Americans have been among those prisoners who have suffered during conflicts. This includes the Civil War, when the Confederacy treated Northern prisoners with neglect, disdain, and brutality. Perhaps the most reprehensible example was when roughly thirteen thousand Union soldiers incarcerated at the notorious Andersonville Prison in Georgia died from malnutrition, poor sanitation, disease, exposure to the elements, and abuse at the hands of individuals who had, until only a few years prior, been their fellow countrymen. In the twentieth century, the crimes against American servicemen in Germany, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam were particularly loathsome and numerous.

  The ensuing years have been plagued by campaigns of genocide around the world in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur, and elsewhere. As I write this preface, the headlines are dominated by news of public beheadings of prisoners by groups such as the self-proclaimed Islamic State and abuses directed at prisoners of war and political prisoners in China, Russia, parts of Africa, and much of the Middle East.

  Yet, long before the Geneva Convention, concerns over the mistreatment of prisoners arose during the Revolutionary War, when some of the most odious and vile crimes in American history occurred at the hands of the British and were directed against American soldiers and sailors fighting for independence. While the stories of the Boston Massacre, Boston Tea Party, and Paul Revere’s midnight ride are well known by any American schoolchild, the plight of American prisoners during the Revolution remains largely unknown. In particular, history has forgotten the struggles that occurred on an old, rotting prison ship moored off the coast of Brooklyn, despite the fact that as many as 11,500 prisoners may have died in her holds—a number roughly twice the total number of American lives lost in combat during the entirety of the war!

  This little-known story is shocking and grisly, but the struggles of those who escaped and, against all odds, survived are nothing shy of inspiring and heroic. They are also important, for they compel us to rethink our inaccurate view of how the British prosecuted the war, to remember the sacrifices made by so many forgotten patriots, and to explore one of the worst tragedies in American military history, one involving a wretched and cursed ghost ship that the British believed would frighten patriots into submission. It did not. It had the opposite effect and unintentionally ended up helping the colonists win the war.

  A note to the reader: The words of the prisoners aboard the hellish ship as well as the war records and letters of prison wardens and generals are all quoted verbatim in the following pages. Some of the spelling reflects the time period and varying degrees of literacy of the men and boys in the book.

  The book would not have been possible without the assistance of several people. First, I would like to thank my incredible literary agent, Peter Bernstein. I am also fortunate to have Robert Pigeon as my editor. It has been a pleasure to work with such a talented editor as Bob and the entire team at Da Capo Press and Perseus Books—Lissa Warren, Justin Lovell, Skyler Lambert, Michael Clark, Sue Warga, Jack Lenzo, and too many others to mention.

  I would like to acknowledge Jared Wellman, a librarian at Lynn University, for his help in tracking down old and obscure documents, and both Juan Tirado (who passed away in 2016 after a long and courageous struggle with cancer) and David Garcia for making photocopies of them for me. Nancy Katz and George Goldstein, M.D., read an early version of the manuscript and provided me with valuable feedback. Thanks also to Julie Stoner and Bruce
Kirby of the Library of Congress, Joanna Lamaida of the Brooklyn Historical Society, Dr. Daniel Rolph and Steven Smith of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Alicia Parks of the Museum of the American Revolution, the reference staff at the New York Public Library, and many other archivists and librarians for their help with accessing historic documents.

  Mostly, however, I would like to thank my family—Claudia, Alessandro, and Isabella—for their constant support. Lastly, this book is dedicated to all the men and women who have suffered the misfortune of being a prisoner of war. Your sacrifices are not forgotten.

  ROBERT P. WATSON

  Boca Raton, Florida

  INTRODUCTION

  “A Vast and Silent Army”

  The various horrors of these hulks to tell—

  These prison ships where Pain and Penance dwell.

  Where Death in ten-fold vengeance holds his reign,

  And injured ghosts, yet unavenged, complain:

  This be my task.

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

  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,

  O, God of Columbia! O, Shield of the Free!

  More grateful to you than the fanes of old story,

  Must the blood-bedewed soil, the red battle-ground be

  Where our fore-fathers championed America’s glory!

  Then how priceless the worth of the sanctified earth,

  We are standing on now. Lo! The slope of its girth

  Where the Martyrs were buried: Nor prayers, tears, or stones,

  Marked their crumbled-in coffins, their white, holy bones!

  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 attorne
y, 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.