HMS Jersey (1736)
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HMS Jersey was a British Royal Navy vessel most noted for serving as a prison ship in the American Revolutionary War.
The Jersey was built during a time of peace in England. Her first battle was in Admiral Edward Vernon's defeated attack on the Spanish port of Cartagena, Colombia, around the beginning of the War of Jenkins's Ear in October, 1739. The Jersey next saw action in the Seven Years' War. The Jersey also took part in the Battle of Lagos under Admiral Edward Boscawen on August 18-19, 1759.
In March of 1771, Jersey's masts were taken down and she was then made a hospital ship in Wallabout Bay, New York, which would later become the Brooklyn Navy Yard. When the American Revolution began, the British used her as a prison ship for captured Continental Army soldiers, making her infamous due to the harsh conditions in which the prisoners were kept. Thousands of men were crammed below decks where there was no natural light or fresh air and few provisions for the sick and hungry. Political tensions only made the prisoners' days worse, with brutal mistreatment by the British guards becoming fairly common. As many as eight corpses a day were buried from the Jersey alone before the British surrendered at Yorktown on October 19, 1781. When the British evacuated New York at the end of 1783, the Jersey was abandoned in the harbor.
Christopher Vail, of Southold, who was aboard 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.
In 1778, Robert Sheffield of Stonington, Connecticut, escaped from one of the prison ships, and told his story in the Connecticut Gazette. He was one of 350 prisoners held in a compartment below the decks.
Their sickly countenances and ghastly looks were truly horrible," the newspaper wrote on July 10, without identifying the ship. "Some swearing and blaspheming; some crying, praying, and wringing their hands, and stalking about like ghosts; others delirious, raving, and storming; some groaning and dying -- all panting for breath; some dead and corrupting air so foul at times that a lamp could not be kept burning, by reason of which the boys were not missed till they had been dead ten days.
The Department of Defense currently lists 4,435 US battle deaths during the Revolutionary War. Another 20,000 died in captivity, from disease, or for other reasons. Estimates of deaths aboard the New York prison ships vary around 8,000. Prisoner exchanges were hardly possible for two reasons: the British often captured far more prisoners than the Americans did, and George Washington did not favour exchanging veteran British soldiers for ragtag American troops, as it would only put his army at a greater disadvantage.
For other vessels of the same name, see HMS Jersey.
[edit] Memorial
The remains of those that died aboard the prison-ships were reinterred in Fort Greene Park after the 1808 burial vault near the Brooklyn Navy Yard had collapsed. In 1908, one hundred years after the burial ceremony, the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument was dedicated.
[edit] References
- Thomas Dring and Albert Greene; Recollections of the Jersey Prison Ship: From the Manuscript of Capt. Thomas Dring (American Experience Series, No 8)
- The Destructive Operation of Foul Air, Tainted Provisions, Bad Water, and Personal Filthiness, upon Human Constitutions; Exemplified in the Unparalleled Cruelty of the British to the American Captives at New-York during the Revolutionary War, on Board their Prison and Hospital Ships, Medical Repository, volume 11, 1808
