On this episode of Our American Stories, Robert P. Watson, author of The Ghost Ship of Brooklyn, tells this untold story of the American Revolution.
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Speaker 1 (00:11):
And we continue with our American stories.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Historians have written so much about the American Revolution that
it's hard to believe there's anything left.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
To discover about that war.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
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 prisonship run by the British during
the Revolutionary War. Professor Roberts tells the story in his
book The ghost Ship of Brooklyn.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Let's take a listen.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
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 called the HMS Jersey,
known as hell Afloat or the ghost Ship. Twice as
(01:11):
many Americans died on this one ship, then 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 in the seventeen thirties called
the HMS Jersey. This ship was really a weapon of
(01:32):
mass destruction for the day and age. It was a
marvel of technology and warfare. Whatever the threshold of technology
and warfare was for the seventeen hundreds was on this ship.
She had a crew of over four hundred, dozens and
dozens of major guns, naval guns, multiple decks, multiple masks,
(01:53):
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 Columbia, she's destroyed, the
crew catches a tropical disease, wipes out the crew. The
captain of the ship dies mysteriously, so it gets a
(02:16):
reputation as being a cursed ship. And of course folks
were a lot more superstitious back then, so no one
wanted to serve on this ship, no one wanted to
captain her. But she has one more major mission that
would be the Revolutionary War. During the Revolutionary War, she's
stripped of her elegance power and all the artillery. She's
(02:36):
turned into a supply ship. In the seventeen seventies, the
British want to push back on these pesky colonials who
are starting this revolution, so they sail a massive force
to America shores. It's led by General Howe and his brother,
Admiral Howe. They set sail with thirty two thousand men.
(02:59):
They're supplemented by nine thousand Hessian mercenaries. These are the
soldiers of Fortune, the biggest, most feared warriors of the time,
and they're led by a commander named Colonel Johann gottlieb Rawl.
He's almost a Dracula type of figure, and that he
tortures people in medieval ways. This sheer mention of his
(03:22):
name strikes terror into people. So this is the army,
the flotilla, the Armada that sets sail for America, and
they go to New York City. Why New York City, Well,
they need a place to launch their counter offensive and
to subdue the colonials. New York City at the time
(03:42):
had a large population of loyalists and royalists. That was
that they were folks who were pro crowned. Well, one
of the ships that sailed near Armada was the Jersey,
but she was stripped of her elegance and power. She
was turned into a lowly supply ship. Her hauls were
filled with food, food and powder, and cows and horses
(04:03):
and things of that effect. So she's stripped down to
the bear essentials and set sail. So the British how
takes New York City easily. But now he has a
new problem. He has 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
(04:25):
at the most. After all, Washington's on the run and
his armies depleted, and how has most of his army prisoner.
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 for two or three
and we should hawk them. But hawking a ship means
you take the rudder off, the wheelhouse, off the masts
(04:48):
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 going to 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
(05:09):
hawked her, and they moored her in Brooklyn in a
place called Wallabout Bays, about one hundred yards off coast.
They put her in the water. She looked like a coffin,
and they loaded her up with one thousand American prisoners
of war and then they nailed down the hatches, they
board up the portholes, and what happens is disease tears
(05:30):
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 pubdoor. So these broadsides
(05:51):
would say, essentially, if you pick up arms against us
and you get caught, you're going to hell. And that's
the ghost ship. Only one way off the ship, and
that's horizontal. So that would deter Americans from picking up
a weaponry or armaments, and it would also form a
proto type of psychological warfare. So the British decided to
(06:14):
diabolically use the ship for those purposes psychological war and torture.
So then after most of the men a thousand died,
they loaded up with another thousand, and this repeats itself.
This ship is for years in Brooklyn. Sailors that survived
the ship estimated that somewhere between five and twelve men
died every night, and the death toll is extraordinary. There's
(06:36):
a gruesome routine. Every morning they row from the shoreline
a boat out to the ship, and the commandant of
the ship, his name is sprot and he's wicked broat,
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 into
(06:58):
portholes and he would say, that's your future. In the
morning mist in this mucky bay, the men would be
boarded on the ship and their first appearance that they
see they would walk on board and there's no room
to sit down or lie down. It's so crowded that
men are literally on top of one another. The weakest,
the youngest, the sickest end up lying down by the portholes.
(07:21):
And even though they're boarded up, it's freezing, it snows,
it rains. A lot of them would freeze the death.
A lot of them would be frozen stiff in the morning.
The main problem for him was there was something called
the tub. There was no facilities. You just w on
a hard floor. There's a big tub. They used it
for human waste. That tub would overflow, and the problem
(07:44):
is some of the men had to bunk near the tub,
others were below it, and it would pour down the
cracks and in the morning they would hear the footsteps above.
The hatch would be loosened and they would yell down, rebels,
bring out your dead, and somebody would have to carry
the corpse up. But a couple men would have to
carry the tub up, and then they would dump the
tub in the water, and of course you'd be covered
(08:06):
in feces and urine. There was no water, not enough
water to clean. You had to stay like that until
you were above decks and it happened to rain, and
that could be a day, weeks, or who knows. When
they would dump the tub and carry up the corpses,
and two things would happen. Sprote would order that they
lower the buckets with a rope into the water and
(08:27):
that would be their water supply. So if you did
not drink on the ghost ship, you died. And if
you drank on the ghast ship, you died, because you're
basically drinking the foul human excrement. The second thing that
would happen is they would get the dead boat and
they would put men on the corpses on the dead
boat and they'd row them ashore. And the men on
(08:49):
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, 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. And then
they'd go back on the boat, put below decks, and
(09:09):
the hatch should be closed 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.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
And you're listening to one heck of a story being
told by Robert Watson. The ghost Ship of Brooklyn was
the book The ghost Ship of Brooklyn was real. My goodness,
I knew a lot about the Revolutionary War, but I
did not know that twice as many of our soldiers
died on that ship then died in combat. And when
(09:46):
we come back more of the ghost Ship of Brooklyn,
the hell Ship of Brooklyn. Here on our American stories,
(10:09):
and we continue with our American stories and with Robert Watson,
author of the ghost Ship of Brooklyn. Let's pick up
where we last left off.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
There was too little food. I estimated that 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. Therefore, 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, and the chef
(10:41):
was the men. The prisoners called him his majesty. The
chef not a compliment that was satirical. The Great Copper
was this huge boiling cauldron. This sprote 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. Then the men would be given either
(11:01):
rotted meat. They were given some kind of oatmeal porridge
type of thing that the men called burgoo, and then
hard tack, a biscuit that is 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 mate the bugs for protein two,
just so they wouldn't lose a tooth. So that's their
food intake. But to make matters worse, when they would
(11:23):
queue up to wait in line to get their meager portion,
the chef cruelly as it's boiling, he would get a
ladle and he would arbitrarily just throw scalding water in
the men's eyes and face. And when you got toward
the end of the queue of the line, he would
call off the mess. No more food. So of course
there was a mad fight to get in line, and
the youngest of the week is the sickest, would be
(11:45):
at the end of the line, and of course this
just expedited their demise. There were a handful of things
that kept the men alive. One was a portly older
woman they called her Dame Grant. Miss Grant would get
a young boy to rower aboard the ship and she
would bring apples or tobacco or scissors so they could
(12:05):
trim their hair. She reminded them of a mom or
the grandmother, some degree of normalcy and hope and home,
which would have motivated them to stay alive.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
Well.
Speaker 3 (12:16):
Unfortunately, on one of her visits to the ship, Dame
Grant caught one of the countless diseases that tore through
the ship, and Dame Grant died. There was a guy
they called him the Orator. He was a preacher and
soldier from Virginia, and he was on board and he
would jump up on the side of the ship and
give these motivational speeches and it kept the men going.
(12:40):
One day he didn't stop, and the guards told him
to stop, and he kept going and going, and they
told him and the men begged him to stop, and
he didn't. He was dragged off the ship and they
heard a shot from the shoreline and never heard of again.
And the third thing that kept them going was on
Independence Day. In the days proceeding it, the men would
(13:01):
save They would given 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 hardtack,
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
(13:22):
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 that 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. And then they
(13:43):
didn't allow them back up for over twenty four hours,
and didn't feed them or give them any water. And when,
of course they opened up the hatches, many men are dead. Amazingly,
some men escaped. The hero I guess Thomas Dring. He's
kind of a magiver figure. He was create if he
found gadgets and ways of doing things. He was a
(14:04):
junior officer on a ship and that ship was captured
by a British warship, so he and others were put
below decks on the Gohot ship at any rate, they're
going to escape.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
So they start.
Speaker 3 (14:15):
Clawing at and with little 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 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
(14:37):
told the guards, and it was the Hessian guards that night.
Why would somebody tell them? Imagine you're so thirsty that
you're dying and they offer you a cup of water.
People are 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 drink never went overboard. They brought the fourth back,
opened up the hats, took him downstairs and hacked his
(14:58):
arm off and threw him in the So all night
long the men are hearing him groan until he dies.
That's Dring's situation. Well, what Dring does is he goes
to sprot the evil Warden and he says, the war's
about the end. This is within the last full year
of the war. He says, something's going to happen. One
of these days, George Washington, his army is going to
(15:19):
ride into here and your toast, or one of these
days the wars is 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 and negotiate
a prisoner exchange. So Sprote actually agreed. He sent Dring
and a surgeon to go meet George Washington. The order
(15:41):
from sprot was, if you don't come back with an
X number of days, I'll kill everybody. So Dring actually
meets George Washington and he tells me 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
(16:04):
I have British prisoners, including officers. Now, 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 one 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 the end this war, we have
(16:26):
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. I had
heard of this ship. I heard of these stories, but
I talked to many historians. Nobody had heard about it.
It wasn't in textbooks, that hasn't been made into a movie.
I knew most of the men on board were young,
(16:49):
and they were from New England fishing villages. So I
contacted archives up and down New England, and after months
a librarian and Providence, Rhode Island called me and said,
are you sitting down? We found a diary that's been
in the basement of this library for two hundred years.
It's a diary of a little thirteen year old boy
(17:09):
named Christopher Hawkins who wrote his story two hundred years
I said, I'm on my way so Christopher Hawkins not
only told the story, he wrote down the names of
everybody that escaped. So the Truman Library asked me to
kick off a history happy hour for them several years ago.
I go out to kick it off and the director says,
there's this older man that calls every day. He has
(17:32):
to meet you. He said, do you want me to
have security not let him in? He keeps calling. I said, nah,
I don't worry about it. So I go a day
early to do my research in the archives and one
of the archivists comes down and says, the director said
that this man keeps calling. He wants to see if
you'll talk. At the end of the day, I walk
in and there's a very tall kind man up there,
really up there in years. His name's Woody, and he
(17:52):
sees me and starts crying. It's Woody Hawkins. Christopher Hawkins
is great great great great grandson. And he had a
letters and he said, my dad tried to find out
my great great great grandfather's story, his father before him,
his father before him, and they passed them down. He said,
I read your book, and my great great great grand
grandfather's on page one hundred and fifty two hundred and
seventy and Abby Darns. So we got the letters we donated,
(18:16):
and it's the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia,
the National Archives, and I got to meet Christopher's descendant,
and that is why we love history.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
And a terrific job on the production and editing by
our own John Elfler, himself a history teacher in Illinois.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
My dad was a history teacher.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
And what great history does is bring us back in time,
not to judge the people during that time, but to
walk in their shoes. And boy, we learned that Americans
suffered for the inheritance the freedoms we have today. And
a terrific job on the storytelling by Robert Watson his
book The ghost Ship of Brooklyn. Buy one copy by
(18:57):
two you won't put it down. Get it at Amazon,
at your local bookstore wherever you get your books.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
And my goodness, what hell on earth? And it was
designed that way.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
The HMS Jersey retrofitted Hawked.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
And turned into a hell ship.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
And more men died again along that ghost ship than
died in all the combat in the Revolutionary War. The
story of the ghost Ship of Brooklyn here on our
American stories,
And we continue with our American stories.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Historians have written so much about the American Revolution that
it's hard to believe there's anything left.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
To discover about that war.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
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 prisonship run by the British during
the Revolutionary War. Professor Roberts tells the story in his
book The ghost Ship of Brooklyn.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Let's take a listen.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
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 called the HMS Jersey,
known as hell Afloat or the ghost Ship. Twice as
(01:11):
many Americans died on this one ship, then 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 in the seventeen thirties called
the HMS Jersey. This ship was really a weapon of
(01:32):
mass destruction for the day and age. It was a
marvel of technology and warfare. Whatever the threshold of technology
and warfare was for the seventeen hundreds was on this ship.
She had a crew of over four hundred, dozens and
dozens of major guns, naval guns, multiple decks, multiple masks,
(01:53):
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 Columbia, she's destroyed, the
crew catches a tropical disease, wipes out the crew. The
captain of the ship dies mysteriously, so it gets a
(02:16):
reputation as being a cursed ship. And of course folks
were a lot more superstitious back then, so no one
wanted to serve on this ship, no one wanted to
captain her. But she has one more major mission that
would be the Revolutionary War. During the Revolutionary War, she's
stripped of her elegance power and all the artillery. She's
(02:36):
turned into a supply ship. In the seventeen seventies, the
British want to push back on these pesky colonials who
are starting this revolution, so they sail a massive force
to America shores. It's led by General Howe and his brother,
Admiral Howe. They set sail with thirty two thousand men.
(02:59):
They're supplemented by nine thousand Hessian mercenaries. These are the
soldiers of Fortune, the biggest, most feared warriors of the time,
and they're led by a commander named Colonel Johann gottlieb Rawl.
He's almost a Dracula type of figure, and that he
tortures people in medieval ways. This sheer mention of his
(03:22):
name strikes terror into people. So this is the army,
the flotilla, the Armada that sets sail for America, and
they go to New York City. Why New York City, Well,
they need a place to launch their counter offensive and
to subdue the colonials. New York City at the time
(03:42):
had a large population of loyalists and royalists. That was
that they were folks who were pro crowned. Well, one
of the ships that sailed near Armada was the Jersey,
but she was stripped of her elegance and power. She
was turned into a lowly supply ship. Her hauls were
filled with food, food and powder, and cows and horses
(04:03):
and things of that effect. So she's stripped down to
the bear essentials and set sail. So the British how
takes New York City easily. But now he has a
new problem. He has 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
(04:25):
at the most. After all, Washington's on the run and
his armies depleted, and how has most of his army prisoner.
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 for two or three
and we should hawk them. But hawking a ship means
you take the rudder off, the wheelhouse, off the masts
(04:48):
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 going to 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
(05:09):
hawked her, and they moored her in Brooklyn in a
place called Wallabout Bays, about one hundred yards off coast.
They put her in the water. She looked like a coffin,
and they loaded her up with one thousand American prisoners
of war and then they nailed down the hatches, they
board up the portholes, and what happens is disease tears
(05:30):
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 pubdoor. So these broadsides
(05:51):
would say, essentially, if you pick up arms against us
and you get caught, you're going to hell. And that's
the ghost ship. Only one way off the ship, and
that's horizontal. So that would deter Americans from picking up
a weaponry or armaments, and it would also form a
proto type of psychological warfare. So the British decided to
(06:14):
diabolically use the ship for those purposes psychological war and torture.
So then after most of the men a thousand died,
they loaded up with another thousand, and this repeats itself.
This ship is for years in Brooklyn. Sailors that survived
the ship estimated that somewhere between five and twelve men
died every night, and the death toll is extraordinary. There's
(06:36):
a gruesome routine. Every morning they row from the shoreline
a boat out to the ship, and the commandant of
the ship, his name is sprot and he's wicked broat,
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 into
(06:58):
portholes and he would say, that's your future. In the
morning mist in this mucky bay, the men would be
boarded on the ship and their first appearance that they
see they would walk on board and there's no room
to sit down or lie down. It's so crowded that
men are literally on top of one another. The weakest,
the youngest, the sickest end up lying down by the portholes.
(07:21):
And even though they're boarded up, it's freezing, it snows,
it rains. A lot of them would freeze the death.
A lot of them would be frozen stiff in the morning.
The main problem for him was there was something called
the tub. There was no facilities. You just w on
a hard floor. There's a big tub. They used it
for human waste. That tub would overflow, and the problem
(07:44):
is some of the men had to bunk near the tub,
others were below it, and it would pour down the
cracks and in the morning they would hear the footsteps above.
The hatch would be loosened and they would yell down, rebels,
bring out your dead, and somebody would have to carry
the corpse up. But a couple men would have to
carry the tub up, and then they would dump the
tub in the water, and of course you'd be covered
(08:06):
in feces and urine. There was no water, not enough
water to clean. You had to stay like that until
you were above decks and it happened to rain, and
that could be a day, weeks, or who knows. When
they would dump the tub and carry up the corpses,
and two things would happen. Sprote would order that they
lower the buckets with a rope into the water and
(08:27):
that would be their water supply. So if you did
not drink on the ghost ship, you died. And if
you drank on the ghast ship, you died, because you're
basically drinking the foul human excrement. The second thing that
would happen is they would get the dead boat and
they would put men on the corpses on the dead
boat and they'd row them ashore. And the men on
(08:49):
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, 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. And then
they'd go back on the boat, put below decks, and
(09:09):
the hatch should be closed 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.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
And you're listening to one heck of a story being
told by Robert Watson. The ghost Ship of Brooklyn was
the book The ghost Ship of Brooklyn was real. My goodness,
I knew a lot about the Revolutionary War, but I
did not know that twice as many of our soldiers
died on that ship then died in combat. And when
(09:46):
we come back more of the ghost Ship of Brooklyn,
the hell Ship of Brooklyn. Here on our American stories,
(10:09):
and we continue with our American stories and with Robert Watson,
author of the ghost Ship of Brooklyn. Let's pick up
where we last left off.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
There was too little food. I estimated that 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. Therefore, 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, and the chef
(10:41):
was the men. The prisoners called him his majesty. The
chef not a compliment that was satirical. The Great Copper
was this huge boiling cauldron. This sprote 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. Then the men would be given either
(11:01):
rotted meat. They were given some kind of oatmeal porridge
type of thing that the men called burgoo, and then
hard tack, a biscuit that is 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 mate the bugs for protein two,
just so they wouldn't lose a tooth. So that's their
food intake. But to make matters worse, when they would
(11:23):
queue up to wait in line to get their meager portion,
the chef cruelly as it's boiling, he would get a
ladle and he would arbitrarily just throw scalding water in
the men's eyes and face. And when you got toward
the end of the queue of the line, he would
call off the mess. No more food. So of course
there was a mad fight to get in line, and
the youngest of the week is the sickest, would be
(11:45):
at the end of the line, and of course this
just expedited their demise. There were a handful of things
that kept the men alive. One was a portly older
woman they called her Dame Grant. Miss Grant would get
a young boy to rower aboard the ship and she
would bring apples or tobacco or scissors so they could
(12:05):
trim their hair. She reminded them of a mom or
the grandmother, some degree of normalcy and hope and home,
which would have motivated them to stay alive.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
Well.
Speaker 3 (12:16):
Unfortunately, on one of her visits to the ship, Dame
Grant caught one of the countless diseases that tore through
the ship, and Dame Grant died. There was a guy
they called him the Orator. He was a preacher and
soldier from Virginia, and he was on board and he
would jump up on the side of the ship and
give these motivational speeches and it kept the men going.
(12:40):
One day he didn't stop, and the guards told him
to stop, and he kept going and going, and they
told him and the men begged him to stop, and
he didn't. He was dragged off the ship and they
heard a shot from the shoreline and never heard of again.
And the third thing that kept them going was on
Independence Day. In the days proceeding it, the men would
(13:01):
save They would given 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 hardtack,
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
(13:22):
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 that 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. And then they
(13:43):
didn't allow them back up for over twenty four hours,
and didn't feed them or give them any water. And when,
of course they opened up the hatches, many men are dead. Amazingly,
some men escaped. The hero I guess Thomas Dring. He's
kind of a magiver figure. He was create if he
found gadgets and ways of doing things. He was a
(14:04):
junior officer on a ship and that ship was captured
by a British warship, so he and others were put
below decks on the Gohot ship at any rate, they're
going to escape.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
So they start.
Speaker 3 (14:15):
Clawing at and with little 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 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
(14:37):
told the guards, and it was the Hessian guards that night.
Why would somebody tell them? Imagine you're so thirsty that
you're dying and they offer you a cup of water.
People are 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 drink never went overboard. They brought the fourth back,
opened up the hats, took him downstairs and hacked his
(14:58):
arm off and threw him in the So all night
long the men are hearing him groan until he dies.
That's Dring's situation. Well, what Dring does is he goes
to sprot the evil Warden and he says, the war's
about the end. This is within the last full year
of the war. He says, something's going to happen. One
of these days, George Washington, his army is going to
(15:19):
ride into here and your toast, or one of these
days the wars is 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 and negotiate
a prisoner exchange. So Sprote actually agreed. He sent Dring
and a surgeon to go meet George Washington. The order
(15:41):
from sprot was, if you don't come back with an
X number of days, I'll kill everybody. So Dring actually
meets George Washington and he tells me 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
(16:04):
I have British prisoners, including officers. Now, 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 one 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 the end this war, we have
(16:26):
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. I had
heard of this ship. I heard of these stories, but
I talked to many historians. Nobody had heard about it.
It wasn't in textbooks, that hasn't been made into a movie.
I knew most of the men on board were young,
(16:49):
and they were from New England fishing villages. So I
contacted archives up and down New England, and after months
a librarian and Providence, Rhode Island called me and said,
are you sitting down? We found a diary that's been
in the basement of this library for two hundred years.
It's a diary of a little thirteen year old boy
(17:09):
named Christopher Hawkins who wrote his story two hundred years
I said, I'm on my way so Christopher Hawkins not
only told the story, he wrote down the names of
everybody that escaped. So the Truman Library asked me to
kick off a history happy hour for them several years ago.
I go out to kick it off and the director says,
there's this older man that calls every day. He has
(17:32):
to meet you. He said, do you want me to
have security not let him in? He keeps calling. I said, nah,
I don't worry about it. So I go a day
early to do my research in the archives and one
of the archivists comes down and says, the director said
that this man keeps calling. He wants to see if
you'll talk. At the end of the day, I walk
in and there's a very tall kind man up there,
really up there in years. His name's Woody, and he
(17:52):
sees me and starts crying. It's Woody Hawkins. Christopher Hawkins
is great great great great grandson. And he had a
letters and he said, my dad tried to find out
my great great great grandfather's story, his father before him,
his father before him, and they passed them down. He said,
I read your book, and my great great great grand
grandfather's on page one hundred and fifty two hundred and
seventy and Abby Darns. So we got the letters we donated,
(18:16):
and it's the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia,
the National Archives, and I got to meet Christopher's descendant,
and that is why we love history.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
And a terrific job on the production and editing by
our own John Elfler, himself a history teacher in Illinois.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
My dad was a history teacher.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
And what great history does is bring us back in time,
not to judge the people during that time, but to
walk in their shoes. And boy, we learned that Americans
suffered for the inheritance the freedoms we have today. And
a terrific job on the storytelling by Robert Watson his
book The ghost Ship of Brooklyn. Buy one copy by
(18:57):
two you won't put it down. Get it at Amazon,
at your local bookstore wherever you get your books.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
And my goodness, what hell on earth? And it was
designed that way.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
The HMS Jersey retrofitted Hawked.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
And turned into a hell ship.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
And more men died again along that ghost ship than
died in all the combat in the Revolutionary War. The
story of the ghost Ship of Brooklyn here on our
American stories,
Host
Lee Habeeb
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