334 HISTORY OF BROOKLYN.

scanted rations, were dealt to the prisoners. No medical men attended the sick, disease reigned unrelieved, and hundreds died from pestilence, or were starved, on board this floating prison.1 I saw the sand-beach, between the ravine2 in the hill and Mr. Remsen’s dock, become filled with graves in the course of two months; and before the first of May, 1777, the ravine alluded to was itself occupied in the same way. In the month of May, 1777, two large ships were anchored in the Wallabout, when the prisoners were transferred from the Whitby to them; these vessels were also very sickly, from the causes before stated. Although many prisoners were sent on board of them, and none exchanged, death made room for all. On a Sunday afternoon, about the middle of October, 1777, one of the prison-ships was burnt; the prisoners, except a few, who, it was said, were burnt in the vessel, were removed to the remaining ship. It was reported, at the time, that the prisoners had fired their prison, which, if true, proves that they preferred death, even by fire, to the lingering sufferings of pestilence and starvation. In the month of February, 1778, the remaining prison-ship was burnt at night, when the prisoners were removed from her to the ships then wintering in the Wallabout.”

“Better the greedy wave should swallow all,
Better to meet the death-conducting hall,
Better to sleep on ocean’s oozy bed,
At once destroyed and numbered with the dead,
Than thus to perish in the face of day,
Where Wee ten thousand deaths one death delay.”

In 1779, the “Prince of Wales” and the “Good Hope”3 were used

1 A prisoner (see the Trumbull Papers, p. 76) thus speaks of the Whitby, in 1776: “Our present situation is most wretched; more than two hundred and fifty prisoners, some sick, and without the least assistance from physician, drug, or medicine, and fed on two-thirds allowance of salt provisions, and crowded promiscuously, without regard to color, person, or office, in the small room of a ship, between decks, and allowed to walk the main dock only from sunrise to sunset. Only two at a time permitted to come on deck to do what nature requires, and sometimes denied even that and use tube and buckets between decks, to the great offence of every delicate, clean;y person, and prejudice of all our healths.”

2 Where Little street now is.

3 We find the “GOOD HOPE” first mentioned In October, 1778. She then lay in the North River, and in January, ’79, was designated, with the “PRINCE OF WALES,” as the depot for prisoners of privateers arriving in New York. In August, 179, forty-seven American prisoners were returned, under flag, to New London, who were taken out of