336 HISTORY OF BROOKLYN.

ships.1 Many other old hulks—the “Old Jersey,” the “John,”2 the “Falmouth,”3 the “Chatham,” the “Kitty,” the “Frederick,”4 the “Glasgow,” the “Woodlands,” the “Scheldt,” and the “Clyde,” were also converted into prison-ships.

Of all these, the “OLD JERSEY,” or the “HELL,” as she was called, from the large number confined in her—often more than a thousand at a time5—and the terrible sufferings which they there endured, has

Requir’st my lay—thy sultry docks I know,
And all the torments that exist below!
The briny waves that Hudson’s bosom fills
Drain’d through her bottom in a thousand rills;
Rotten and old, replete with sighs and groans,
Scarce on the waters she sustain’d her bones;
Here, doomed to toil, or founder in the tide,
At the moist pumps incessantly we plied;
Here doomed to starve, like famish’d dogs, we tore
The scant allowance that our tyrants bore.”

In December, 1780, her hull was advertised for sale by the naval storekeeper at New York, but was not purchased.

1 The HUNTER was originally a sloop-of-war. She was advertised for sale In December, 1780, but found no purchaser. Captain Dring (see his Narrative, p. 71) thinks she was mainly used as a store-ship and medical depot.

Alexan der Coffin, who was a prisoner in the JOHN, says (Hist. Martyrs, 32) that the treatment of the prisoners there “was much worse than on board the Jersey. We were subjected to every insult, every injury, and every abuse that the fertile genius of the British officers could invent and inflict. For more than a month, we were obliged to eat our scanty allowance, bad as it was, without cooking, as no fire was allowed.”

3 “I am now a prisoner on board the FALMOUTH, in New York, a place the most dreadful; we are confined so that we have not room even to lie down all at once to sleep. It is the most horrible, cursed hole, that can be thought of. I was sick and longed for some small-beer, while I lay unpitied at death's door with a putrid fever, and, though I had money, I was not permitted to send for it. I offered repeatedly a hard dollar for a pint. The wretch who went forward and backwark would not oblige me. I am just able to creep about. Four prisoners have escaped from this ship. One having, as by accident, thrown his hat overboard, begged leave to go after it in a small boat, which lay alongside. A sentinel, with only his side-arms on, got into the boat. Having reached the hat, they secured the sentinel and made for the Jersey shore, though several armed boats pursued, and shot was fired from the shipping.’—Conn. Gazette, May 25, ’80.

4 Sherburne, who was a patient on the FREDERICK hospital-ship, in January, 1783, says that it “was very much crowded; so that two men were obliged to lie in one bunk.” He and his bunk-mate were “obliged, occasionally, to lay &thwart each other, for want of room,” and the former finally died, stretched across Sherburne. He says “I have seen seven dead men drawn out and piled together on the lower hatchway, who had died in one night on board the Frederick.”

5 Andros (p. 12) says: “When I first became an inmate of this abode of suffering, despair, and death, there were about four hundred prisoners on board, but in a short