HISTORY OF BROOKLYN. 355

who were so frequently called upon, that in many cases they overdid themselves, relapsed, and died.”

Sherburne. mentions the sad case of two brothers, John and Abraham Fall, who lay sick upon a cot near his own. One night, when thus left to suffer in the darkness of this foul and miserable ship, Abraham Fall plead with his brother John to get off from him; and the sick around swore at John for his cruelty in lying on his brother; but John made no reply, he was deaf to the cries of his brother, and beyond the curses of the suffering crowd. In the morning he was found dead; and his brother Abraham, whose exhausted strength had given way under the pressure of the corpse, was in a dying state. The sick were unable to relieve them, and the nurses were not there.

Captain Dring also describes the case of a poor boy, only twelve years old, confined with him on the Old Jersey, and who had been inoculated for the small-pox. “He was a member of the same mess with myself,” Dring says, “and had always looked upon me as a protector, and particularly so during his sickness. The night of his death was a truly wretched one to me; for I spent almost the whole of it in perfect darkness, holding him during his convulsions; and it was heart-rending to hear the screams of the dying boy, while calling and imploring, in his delirium, for the assistance of his mother and other persons of his family. For a long time, all persuasion or argument was useless to silence his groans and supplications. But exhausted nature at length sunk under its agonies; his screams became less piercing, and his struggles less violent. In the midnight gloom of our dungeon, I could not see him die, but knew, by placing my hand over his mouth, that his breathings, were becoming shorter; and thus felt the last breath as it quitted his frame. The first glimmer of morning light through the iron grate fell upon his pallid and lifeless corpse.”1

The Jersey became, at length, so crowded, and the increase of disease among the prisoners so rapid, that even the hospital-ships were inadequate for their reception. In this emergency, bunks were erected on the larboard side of the upper deck of the Jersey, for the

1 Dring’s Narrative, p. 84.