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Ask a rheumatologist about COSENTIX. And we continue with our American stories. Historians have written so much about the American Revolution that it's hard to believe there's anything left to discover about that war. But Robert Watson, a history professor at Lynn University in Florida, Is about to share with us a discovery he made when researching a terrible prison ship run by the British. during the Revolutionary War.
Let's take a listen.
So history still has her secrets. We think we know all there is to know about major episodes in history like the Revolutionary War. But lo and behold, not only are there still some secrets waiting, but some real shockers. One of them involved an infamous ship known as Hell Afloat or the Ghost Ship. Twice as many Americans died on this one ship than died in the entirety of combat during the Revolutionary War.
Twice as many men.
So, how did that happen? It starts with the construction of a ship called the HMS Jersey. It was a marvel, a weapon of mass destruction for the day and age. Dozens and dozens of major guns, multiple decks, multiple masts, an amazing, amazing ship.
However, despite these advanced technologies, this ship seemed to be cursed. She loses virtually every battle she's in off the coast of Colombia. The crew catches a tropical disease, wipes out the crew. The captain of the ship dies mysteriously.
So it gets a reputation as being a cursed ship.
So no one wanted to serve on the ship, no one wanted to captain her. But she has one more major mission. The Revolutionary War. She stripped of her elegance, her halls were filled with food and powder and cows, and she turned into a lowly supply ship. She's stripped down to the bare essentials and she sets sail.
They go to New York City. Why New York City?
Well, Hal takes New York City easily, but now he has a new problem. Thousands of prisoners, and he doesn't know what to do with them. They're not going to build prisons because the British believe the war will be over in a matter of days or weeks or months at the most, after all Washington's on the run and his army's depleted.
So they're trying to figure out what they do about all these prisoners, and then they have an idea. Why don't we get a massive warship or two or three and we should hawk them? Hawking a ship means you take the rudder off, the wheelhouse off, the masts and sails. You strip a ship down so it's only the hull of the ship.
So they decided they would strip that down and make it a floating prison.
Well, now which ship are they gonna pick? It was obvious. The HMS Jersey, the ghost ship, hell afloat. She was already cursed. She was already demoted to a supply ship, and she was massive.
So they stripped her down, they hawked her, and they moored her in Brooklyn in a place called Wallabout Bay. It's about 100 yards off coast. They put her in the water, she looked like a coffin. And they loaded her up with 1,000 American prisoners of war. And then they nailed down the hatches, they bored up the portholes, and what happens is disease tears through the ship, and virtually everybody on board died.
And that's when the British got a terrible idea, an evil idea. Why don't they use that ship for propaganda? They would announce through broadsides, that is, sort of a poster meets newsletter. They would tack them to a pub door.
So these broadsides would say, essentially, if you pick up arms against us and you get caught, You're going to hell, and that's to ghost ship. And there's only one way off the ship. Horizontal.
So then after most of the men, a thousand die, they loaded up with another thousand and this repeats itself. This ship is for years in Brooklyn and the commandant of the ship, his name is Sproat, and he's wicked. In the morning mist in this mucky bay, Sproat would row everybody out to the ship and he would say, there, he would point, there, there is your hell. And they would look at these ghostly, gaunt faces in the portholes, and he would say, that's your future. It's so crowded, men are literally on top of one another.
The weakest, the youngest, the sickest end up lying down by the portholes. And even though they're boarded up, it snows, it rains, a lot of them would freeze to death. The main problem for them was there was something called the tub. There was a big tub. They used it for human waste.
And in the morning, they would hear the footsteps above, or the hatch would be loosened, and they would yell down, Rebels, bring out your dead. And somebody would have to carry the corpses up, but a couple men would have to carry the tub up. and then they would dump the tub in the water and two things would happen. Sprope would order that they lower the buckets with a rope into the water and that would be their water supply.
So if you did not drink on the ghost ship, you died. And if you drank on the ghost ship, you died because you're basically drinking a foul human excrement. The second thing that would happen is they would get the dead boat. They would put corpses on the dead boat and they'd row them ashore. And the men on the shoreline would describe that they would only be able to throw two or three, at the most maybe four shovels of dirt before they would put the corpses in, so they weren't even covered.
And then as the men were rowing back, they would watch as a pig or a coyote or a dog or a buzzard or something would come out and start to eat their comrades. There was too little food. The caloric intake that the prisoners on this ship got was about two-thirds to three-quarters of the calories one needs to stay alive. If you didn't eat, you died on the ghost ship. And if you did eat, you died slower on the ghost ship.
The food was prepared in what they called the Great Copper. The Great Copper was this huge boiling cauldron. The sprout would order that the buckets to fill up the cauldron, the great copper, were of course gathered after they dumped the human waste into the water. They were given some kind of oatmeal porridge type of thing that the men called burgu, and then hard tack, a biscuit that has the consistency of the heel of your shoe. The men would have to float it in the water, one, to get the bugs out, but a lot of them ate the bugs for protein, two, just so they wouldn't lose a tooth.
Each night they were given a little ladle full of water. They would save a little bit of water or maybe save a part of their hard tack because that was non-perishable. And then with the dead, they would strip parts of their clothing off and they had a little needle and thread. They made homemade flags. And what they did on Independence Day, when they would be allowed on the top deck for a short period of time, they would sing songs.
And one time they were singing and the guards ordered them to stop. And the men turned and faced the shoreline and they said they were going to sing so loud the people in New York are going to hear us. And they sang and sang and the guards said stop. And then there was a melee. The guards opened fire and drove the men below decks, hacking them to pieces.
Amazingly, somehow, some way, as unlikely as this is, a few men managed to survive this and a few others managed to escape to tell their tale. The hero, I guess, Thomas Dring, he's kind of a MacGyver figure. He was creative. He found gadgets and ways of doing things. He was a junior officer on a ship, and that ship was captured by a British warship.
So he and others were put below decks on the Ghost ship. At any rate, they're going to escape.
So they start clawing at and with little, you know, fork or a knife they steal, they dig a hole in the rotted ship.
Now they're going to squeeze through and escape at night when it's raining. uh stormy so that way nobody will hear them.
So Dring, being the guy that he is, he lets the other four go first. And as he sticks his head through the hole, he hears shots and screaming.
Someone on board told the guards, why would somebody tell them? Imagine you're so thirsty that you're dying and they offer you a cup of water. People were going to sell out their friends, and somebody did. We don't know the full story. But what we do know is they killed three of the four guys in the water.
Dring never went overboard. They brought the fourth back, opened up the hatch, took him downstairs, and hacked his arm off and threw him in the downstairs.
So all night long, the men are hearing him groan until he dies. That's Dring's situation.
Well, what Tring does is he goes to Sprote, the evil warden, and he says the war is about to end. This is within the last full year of the war.
Something's going to happen. One of these days, George Washington and his army is going to ride into here, and you're toast. Or one of these days the war is just going to be over and as you try to flee to get back to Britain, the mobs are going to tear you limb from limb, or we're going to rise up in desperation.
So I suggest you let me off the ship to go negotiate a prisoner exchange.
So Sprote actually agreed. He sent Dring and a surgeon to go meet George Washington. The order from Sprote was: if you don't come back within X number of days, I'll kill everybody.
So Dring actually meets George Washington. and he tells him about the ship. George knew about the ship. Washington, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, others wrote letters about this. They were appalled.
Washington contacted British commanders and told them, need I remind you? That I have British prisoners, including officers, and I'm happy to say Washington never resorted to that type of barbarism. Washington won't do the prisoner exchange. He has to bite the bullet. He says if we do a prisoner exchange, a thousand for a thousand, the British are getting a thousand soldiers back trained.
I'm getting a thousand farmers who are untrained in their corpses.
So to end this war, we have to bite the bullet. Dring goes back on board the ghost ship. But happily, Dring becomes his own captain, lives a long life, escaped, and wrote his story. And that is why we love history. And my goodness.
What hell on earth? The story of the ghost shipper Brooklyn here on our American Stories. Mm-hmm. I'm U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.
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