350 HISTORY OF BROOKLYN.

near the wharf, and was used as a place of deposit for the handbarrows and shovels provided for these occasions. Having placed the corpses on the hand-barrows, and received our hoes and shovels, we proceeded to the side of a bank near the Wallabout.1 Here a vacant space having been selected, we were directed to dig a trench in the sand, of a proper length for the reception of the bodies. We continued our labor until our guards considered that a sufficient space bad been excavated. The corpses were then laid into the trench, without ceremony, and we threw the sand over them. The whole appeared to produce no more effect upon our guards than if we were burying the bodies of dead animals, instead of men. They scarcely allowed us time to look about us; for, no sooner had we heaped the earth above the trench, than the order was given to March. But a single glance was sufficient to show us parts of many bodies which were exposed to view; although they had probably been placed there, with the same mockery of interment, but a few days before.2 Having thus performed, as well as we were permitted to do it, the

1 Sherburne (p. 109) says this was called the “Volley Bank.”

2 Andros (p. 14) says: “The first object that met our view in the morning, was an appalling spectacle—a boat loaded with dead bodies, conveying them to the Long Island shore, where they were very slightly covered with sand. I sometimes used to stand and count the number of times the shovel was filled with sand to cover a dead body. And certain I am, that a few high tides, or torrents of rain, must have disinterred them.”

General Johnson (Recollections of Brooklyn and New York in 1776) says: “It was no uncommon thing to see five or six dead bodies brought on shore in a single morning, when a small excavation would be dug at the foot of the hill, the bodies be cast in, and a man with a shovel would cover them, by shovelling sand down the hill upon them. Many were buried in a ravine of the hill; some on the farm. The whole shore, from Rennie’s Point to Mr. Remsen’s door-yard, was a place of graves; as were also the slope of the hill, near the house (subsequently dug away by Mr. John Jackson, and whence he obtained the bones for the ‘Dry-bone Procession’) ; the shore from Mr. Remsen’s barn along the mill-pond, to Rapelje’s farm, and the sandy island between the floodgates and the mill-dam, while a few were buried on the shore on the east side of the Wallabout. Thus did Death reign here, from 1776 until the peace. The whole Wallabout was a sickly place during the war. The atmosphere seemed to be charged with foul air from the prison-ships, and with the effluvia of the dead bodies washed out Of their graves by the tides. We believe that more than half of the dead buried on the outer side of the mill-pond, were washed out by the waves at high tide, during northeasterly winds. The bones of the dead lay exposed along the beach, drying and bleaching in the sun, and whitening the shore, till reached by the power of a succeeding storm; as the agitated waters receded, the bones receded with them into the deep. * * * We have, ourselves, examined many of the skulls lying on the shore. From the teeth, they appeared to be the remains of men in the prime of life.”