Latest / Midnight Signals: History, Folklore and Unexplained Mysteries / The HMS Jersey: The Ship That Killed More Americans Than the British Army

Transcript

The HMS Jersey: The Ship That Killed More Americans Than the British Army · Midnight Signals: History, Folklore and Unexplained Mysteries

• 0:00
  [gentle music] More Americans died inside a single rotting British prison ship than on every battlefield of the Revolutionary War combined.
• 0:09
  The British called it the HMS Jersey, but the men packed into its hold called it hell. It sat anchored in Wallabout Bay for seven years, and the records indicate the British never needed to execute a single prisoner.
• 0:23
  The ship did the killing for them, and then the numbers were buried so thoroughly that most of us never learn the truth.
• 0:31
  In the early summer of 1776, British forces seized New York City and turned it into their primary base of operations in North America.
• 0:40
  The capture created an immediate problem that military commanders hadn't fully planned for, which involved finding space for the thousands of prisoners they expected to take.
• 0:49
  Land jails in the city had already filled beyond capacity, and building new prisons would cost money and manpower the British didn't want to spend.
• 0:57
  So they turned to an old naval solution that England had been using for decades.
• 1:02
  In 1776, Parliament passed the Hulks Act, which formally authorized the Royal Navy to convert decommissioned warships into floating prisons.
• 1:12
  The idea seemed simple because they would take an aging vessel that wasn't seaworthy anymore, strip out the sails and rigging, pack it with prisoners, and anchor it somewhere convenient.
• 1:23
  By the end of the war, the British would use at least 16 of these hulks in New York Harbor alone, but the Jersey became the most infamous by a wide margin.
• 1:33
  One of the first ships selected for this duty was a 60-gun fourth rate vessel that had launched at Plymouth Dockyard back in 1736.
• 1:41
  She sailed in active naval campaigns for years, but by the time the American Revolution began, the HMS Jersey leaked in several places and her timbers rotted beyond repair.
• 1:52
  The British towed her across the Atlantic, anchored her in Wallabout Bay near what we now call the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and began loading her with captured American sailors, soldiers, and even civilians accused of aiding the rebellion.
• 2:07
  Some of the men who boarded the Jersey had already survived combat at sea or capture by privateers, and they arrived expecting the rough but survivable conditions of a standard military prison.
• 2:18
  What they found instead was a vessel so rotted that her lower decks flooded with several inches of standing water at high tide, and her hull had become a breeding ground for the insects and parasites that would soon feed on the prisoners themselves.
• 2:31
  The Jersey wasn't the only prison ship in the harbor, but she became the worst because the British kept her longer and packed her fuller than any of the others.
• 2:40
  Wallabout Bay offered the perfect location for a prison because it was close enough to guard easily, but far enough from Manhattan that escapees would have to swim through cold tidal water to reach shore.
• 2:52
  She stretched about half the length of a football field and weighed roughly 1,000 tons, but her size didn't matter anymore because she wasn't going anywhere.
• 3:00
  The Jersey had become a cage, and the water around her formed the lock.
• 3:05
  New prisoners arrived in small boats rowed by British marines, and as they approached the blackened hull, many of them must have realized they weren't coming back.
• 3:15
  The guards herded them toward a narrow opening in the side of the ship, and as the men climbed down into the darkness below deck, the air changed immediately.
• 3:24
  It grew thick, hot, and foul, and the stench of human waste mixed with bilge water and rotting wood created a smell that survivors would describe for the rest of their lives.
• 3:36
  British guards reportedly pointed to the hatches and told the new arrivals that they had found their cage.
• 3:41
  The space originally housed a few hundred sailors at most, but the British packed in over 1,000 men at a time, leaving nowhere for them to go.
• 3:50
  The prisoners slept in hammocks slung so close together that a man couldn't turn over without hitting his neighbor, and when the hammocks filled up, newcomers slept on the damp floorboards in the gaps between the beams.
• 4:03
  Some men tried to carve their names into the wooden walls so that someone might know they had been there, but most of those markings rotted away before anyone on the outside could read them.
• 4:13
  Sunlight barely reached the lower deck since the British had sealed most of the gun ports and hatches to prevent escape, which meant the hold stayed in near total darkness for days at a time.
• 4:24
  Candles and lanterns were scarce, so men learned to navigate by touch and memory, and they listened to the tide slapping against the hull to figure out whether it was day or night outside.
• 4:35
  The lack of ventilation turned the lower deck into an oven during summer months, and in winter, the cold Atlantic air crept through the rotting seams and chilled the men to the bone.
• 4:45
  Rats scurried through the hold in packs, and the prisoners soon learned that sleeping with their hands over their faces kept the rodents from gnawing at their noses and lips while they slept.
• 4:55
  Food arrived sporadically, and when it did, it was often spoiled, moldy, or infested with weevils.
• 5:03
  Clean water was even harder to come by, and many prisoners drank from the same barrels for weeks until the water turned green.
• 5:10
  The guards allowed some prisoners up on deck for fresh air, but the privilege was unpredictable and sometimes revoked for weeks at a time as punishment for minor infractions, or simply because the guards didn't feel like supervising them.
• 5:24
  Men who stayed below deck for too long developed a pale, grayish complexion that survivors called prison ship skin, and their eyes grew accustomed to darkness so completely that daylight hurt them.
• 5:36
  None of this happened by accident, and none of it was temporary. The conditions formed the system, and the system was designed to break men quickly.
• 5:45
  What the prisoners couldn't see was that the ship had already started killing them, and the death toll would climb to numbers that no battlefield in the entire war ever matched.
• 5:55
  The Jersey's real killer wasn't the British Army or a firing squad. Disease moved through the hold instead, and it spread with terrifying speed.
• 6:04
  Dysentery spread from man to man within days because there were no separate latrines and no way to dispose of waste except to throw it over the side, which prisoners were often too weak to do.
• 6:15
  Smallpox broke out in waves that killed dozens at a time, and corpses were dragged up to the deck at night and dumped into the bay before dawn so the British wouldn't have to record the numbers.
• 6:27
  Yellow fever and typhus added to the toll, and the lice that infested every blanket and shirt carried infection from one body to the next across the lower deck with relentless efficiency.
• 6:38
  Scurvy rotted the prisoners' gums and loosened their teeth until they couldn't eat the hard bread that formed most of their rations, and starvation finished what disease began.
• 6:47
  One survivor, an 18-year-old sailor named Andrew Sherburne, returned home so emaciated that his own brother had to help peel the rags off his body, and his family described him as a walking skeleton.
• 7:00
  Another prisoner, Thomas Dring, spent months on the Jersey and later wrote a memoir titled Recollections of Life on the Prison Ship Jersey, in which he described the daily horror of watching men die beside him and wondering when his own turn would come.
• 7:15
  Christopher Hawkins, a teenage privateer who had been captured at sea, managed to escape the hulk by stealing a small boat and rowing to shore under cover of darkness, but he was one of the very few who ever made it out alive.
• 7:28
  Some historians estimate that as many as 12 men died per day on the Jersey during the worst months of 1780 and 1781, and the number of dead rose so high that the British stopped keeping accurate lists because the paperwork would have revealed the magnitude of what was happening.
• 7:45
  No British soldier ever needed to pull a trigger because the environment they had created did the work for them.
• 7:51
  In March of 1777, Parliament passed North's Act, which suspended habeas corpus for American prisoners and allowed the British to prosecute them for treason.
• 8:02
  This legal change meant the guards viewed their captives not as prisoners of war, but as criminals who had rebelled against the Crown, and that shift in status removed any obligation to treat them humanely.
• 8:13
  The British also saw a practical advantage in the suffering. Officers regularly walked through the hold and offered a simple deal to any man who could still stand.
• 8:24
  If you agreed to switch sides and join the British Navy or the loyalist forces, you received food, water, and a chance to live. If you refused, you stayed in the hold and waited to die.
• 8:36
  The ship was recruiting and killing at the same time, and it performed both tasks with mechanical efficiency.
• 8:43
  When historians finally tallied the dead, the scale of what happened in Wallabout Bay became impossible to ignore.
• 8:50
  Approximately 11,500 American soldiers, sailors, and civilians died aboard British prison ships in New York Harbor between 1776 and 1783.
• 9:01
  The HMS Jersey accounted for the single largest share of those deaths, and the total figure exceeded every American battle death of the entire Revolutionary War combined.
• 9:11
  The Department of Defense currently lists 4,435 Americans as having died in combat during the eight years of the war, which means the prison ships killed roughly two and a half times as many men as every musket, cannon, and bayonet on every battlefield from Lexington to Yorktown.
• 9:27
  To put that into perspective, the Battle of Bunker Hill killed about 450 Americans, the Battle of Saratoga killed about 90, and the entire campaign at Yorktown killed fewer than 100.
• 9:39
  The Jersey and the other hulks in Wallabout Bay killed more than all of them combined, multiplied by several times over.
• 9:47
  The British kept poor records of the prisoners who died in the holds, and many of the dead were never identified because disease and decay stripped them of their clothing, their papers, and sometimes their faces before they were thrown overboard.
• 10:00
  In many cases, bodies had swollen beyond recognition within days of death, and the guards who dragged them above deck after dark couldn't match the corpses to any roster that might have existed.
• 10:12
  The figures grew so large that they stopped being tragic and started being statistical, and statistics are easy to bury.
• 10:20
  Textbooks mention Saratoga and Trenton, but they rarely mention that the single deadliest location in the entire Revolutionary War was a leaking wooden hulk anchored in a bay that now sits underneath a modern Brooklyn neighborhood.
• 10:33
  The ship itself was dismantled and sold for scrap after the war, which means nothing remains to touch or photograph, and a story without a physical object fades faster on its own.
• 10:44
  After the British evacuated New York in 1783, the prison ships were abandoned where they lay, and the bones of the dead remained in the mud and sand along the shore.
• 10:55
  Local citizens gathered what remains they could find and buried them in shallow graves and makeshift tombs near the waterfront, but the site kept getting disturbed by flooding and construction.
• 11:06
  For decades, Brooklyn residents complained that remains washed up with every high tide, and farmers who owned land along the bay reported plowing up skulls and rib cages while planting crops.
• 11:18
  The smell of decay lingered in the marshland for years, and the city eventually agreed to consolidate the remains into a more permanent burial site.
• 11:26
  In 1873, workers exhumed the bones from the original graves and moved them to a crypt near Fort Greene, but the memorial that finally rose above them took another 35 years to build.
• 11:38
  The delay came from more than money or planning. It grew out of a deeper question about whether the public wanted to be reminded of a defeat that didn't involve heroism or victory.
• 11:48
  The Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument, designed by architect Stanford White of the firm McKim, Mead, and White, opened in 1908 as a towering 149-foot Doric column topped with bronze eagle sculptures by Adolph Alexander Weinman.
• 12:04
  You can still visit it today in Fort Greene Park, though most people who walk past it on their way to a picnic or a tennis game have no idea that 11,500 bodies lie beneath their feet.
• 12:15
  President-elect William Howard Taft dedicated the monument on November 14th, 1908, and the inscription at its base honors the 11,500 men and women who died in the Wallabout Bay prison ships during the American Revolution.
• 12:31
  The crypt beneath the monument remains the largest single Revolutionary War grave in the United States, and it contains more American dead than most battlefields.
• 12:40
  Yet the monument receives a fraction of the visitors who travel to Lexington or Bunker Hill, and the name HMS Jersey means almost nothing to the average American.
• 12:51
  The reason is simple: death in battle carries honor, and death in captivity carries shame, even when the captivity is not your fault.
• 12:59
  We build monuments to victories, and we bury the evidence of the places where our enemies didn't even need to fight. The HMS Jersey was no accident, and it was no secret either.
• 13:11
  It was a machine that killed efficiently and quietly for seven years, and then history let it stay quiet for two centuries.
• 13:18
  The environment did what no army could do, and the records show that the British understood exactly what was happening.
• 13:25
  If you want to know where the real battlefield of the Revolutionary War was, it wasn't in a field in Massachusetts or a hill in Pennsylvania. It was a rotting wooden ship in a Brooklyn bay, and the tide did the burying.
• 13:38
  The next time someone tells you they know everything about how this country began, ask them if they've heard of Wallabout Bay. Most of them have never heard the name, and that is exactly the point.
• 13:50
  This has been Midnight Signals. I'm Russ Chamberlain, guiding you through the shadows where history meets mystery. Visit midnightsignals.net to continue the conversation, explore more episodes, and say hello.
• 14:04
  If you enjoyed tonight's journey, please like, subscribe, and share to help more listeners find the show.
• 14:10
  Until next time, stay vigilant, seek the hidden, and remember, in every silence there is a signal, and in every signal, a story waiting to be told. [outro music]