HISTORY OF BROOKLYN. 349

cases, almost before they had become cold.1 Brought up each morning by the working-party and placed upon the gratings of the upper deck; their glazed eyeballs staring upwards towards the heavens; their ghastly and pinched features contorted with the suffering through which they had passed; their bodies stiff, stark, and naked (for their clothes, if they had any, were the perquisites of the so-called nurses), these corpses of the night awaited the only remaining insult which their captors could inflict upon themÑthe indignity of an unhonored and unknown grave. Soon the dead-boat was seen approaching from the Hunter, receiving her ghastly freight from the other vessels, on her way to the Jersey. Upon her arrival alongside, each corpse was laid upon a board, to which it was bound with ropes, a tackle attached to the board, and the whole lowered over the ship’s side into the boat, without further ceremony. “The prisoners were always very anxious to be engaged in the duty of interment; not so much from a feeling of humanity, or from a wish of paying respect to the remains of the dead (for to these feelings they had almost become strangers), as from the desire of once more placing their feet upon the land, if but for a few minutes. A sufficient number of the prisoners having received permission to assist in this duty, they entered the boat, accompanied by a guard of soldiers, and put off from the ship.” Captain Dring, who assisted on one occasion of this sort, thus describes the burial, which will afford a correct idea of the general method of interment: “After landing at a low wharf, which had been built from the shore, we first went to a small hut, which stood

1 Captain Coffin (Hist. Martyrs, p. 35) mentions “that a man of the name of Gavot, a native of Rhode Island, died, as was supposed, and was sewed up in his hammock, and in the evening carried upon deck to be taken with others who were dead, and those who might die during the night, on shore to be interred (in their mode of interring). During the night it rained pretty bard: in the morning, when they were loading the boat with the dead, one hammock was observed by one of the English seamen to move. He spoke to the officer, and told him that he believed the man in that hammock (pointing to it) was not dead. ‘In with him,’ said the officer; ‘if he is not dead, he soon will be.’ But the honest tar, more humane than his officer, swore he never would bury a man alive, and with his penknife ripped open the hammock, when, behold! the man was really alive. What was the cause of this man’s reanimation, is a question for doctors to decide: it was at the time supposed that the rain, during the night, had caused the reaction of the animal functions, which were suspended, but not totally annihilated.” This same man, Gavot, went afterwards in the same cartel with Coffin to Rhode Island.