"Deep and dreadful as the coloring of this picture may appear, it is but a taint and imperfect sketch of the original. You must remember a thousand unutterable calamities; a thousand instances of domestic as well as national anxiety and distress; which mock description. You ought to remember them; you ought to hand them down in tradition to your posterity, that they may know the awful price their fathers paid for freedom."
SUGGESTED BY A VISION OF THE JERSEY PRISON SHIP
O Sea! in whose unfathomable gloom A world forlorn of wreck and ruin lies, In thy avenging majesty arise, And with a sound as of the trump of doom Whelm from all eyes for aye yon living tomb, Wherein the martyr patriots groaned for years, A prey to hunger and the bitter jeers Of foes in whose relentless breasts no room Was ever found for pity or remorse; But haunting anger and a savage hate, That spared not e'en their victim's very corse, But left it, outcast, to its carrion fate Wherefore, arise, O Sea! and sternly sweep This floating dungeon to thy lowest deep
It was stated in the portion of the eloquent oration given in our last chapter that more than 11,000 prisoners perished on board the Jersey alone, during the space of three years and a half that she was moored in the waters of Wallabout Bay. This statement has never been contradicted, as far as we know, by British authority. Yet we trust that it is exaggerated. It would give an average of more than three thousand deaths a year. The whole number of names copied from the English War Records of prisoners on board the Jersey is about 8,000. This, however, is an incomplete list. You will in vain search through its pages to find the recorded names of many prisoners who have left well attested accounts of their captivity on board that fatal vessel. All that we can say now is that the number who perished there is very great.
As late as 1841 the bones of many of these victims were still to be found on the shores of Walabout Bay, in and around the Navy Yard. On the 4th of February of that year some workmen, while engaged in digging away an embankment in Jackson Street, Brooklyn, near the Navy Yard, accidentally uncovered a quantity of human bones, among which was a skeleton having a pair of iron manacles still upon the wrists. (See Thompson's History of Long Island, Vol. 1, page 247.)