HISTORY OF BROOKLYN. 345

washing the upper docks and gangways, spreading the awning, hoisting the wood, water, and other supplies which were brought alongside, etc.—was performed by a “working-party” of about twenty of the prisoners, who received, as a compensation, a full allowance of provisions, a half-pint of rum, and, what was more desirable than all else, the privilege of going on deck early in the morning, to breathe the pure air. When the prisoners ascended to the upper deck in the morning, if the day was fair, each carried up his own hammock and bedding, which were placed upon the spar-deck, or booms. The sick and disabled were then brought up by the working party, and placed in bunks prepared upon the centre deck; the corpses of those who had died the night before were next brought up from below and placed upon the booms, and then the decks were washed down. The beds and clothing were kept on deck until about two hours before sunset, when the prisoners were ordered to carry them below. “After this had been done,” says Dring, “we were allowed either to retire between decks, or to remain above, until sunset, according to our own pleasure. Every thing which we could do conducive to cleanliness having then been performed, if we ever felt any thing like enjoyment in this wretched abode, it was during this brief interval, when we breathed the cool air of the approaching night, and felt the luxury of our evening pipe. But short, indeed, was this period of repose. The working-party were soon ordered to carry the tubs below, and we prepared to descend to our gloomy and crowded dungeons. This was no sooner done, than the gratings were closed over the hatchways, the sentinels stationed, and we left to sicken and pine beneath our accumulated torments, with our guards above crying aloud, through the long night, ‘All’s well!’”

What these “accumulated torments” of the night were, maybe best understood from Dring’s words: “Silence was a stranger to our dark abode. There were continual noises during the night. The groans of the sick and the dying; the curses poured out by the weary and exhausted upon our inhuman keepers; the restlessness caused by the suffocating heat and the confined and poisonous air, mingled with the wild and incoherent ravings, of delirium, were the sounds which, every night, were raised around us in all directions.”