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 (00:10):
And we continue with our American stories.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
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 prisonship run by
the British during the Revolutionary War. Professor Roberts tells the
(00:35):
story in his book The ghost Ship of Brooklyn.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Let's take a listen.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
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
(01:12):
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
(01:33):
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,
(01:54):
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
(02:37):
turned into a supply ship. In the seventeen seventies, the
British went to push back on these pesky colonials who
were 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.
(03:00):
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
(03:23):
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
(03:43):
had a large population of loyalists and royalists. That was
that they were folks who were pro crown. 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 halls were
with food and powder and cows and horses and things
(04:04):
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 at the most.
(04:27):
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 and sails. You
(04:50):
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 hawked her, and they
(05:12):
moored her in Brooklyn in a place called Wallabout Bay.
It's 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 bored up
the portholes, and what happens is disease tears through the
ship and virtually everybody on board died. And that's when
(05:35):
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
would say, essentially, if you pick up arms against us
(05:56):
and you get caught, you're going to hell. And that's
the ghost ship, and there's 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 diabolically use this ship for those purposes. Psychological war
(06:19):
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 a death toll is extraordinary.
There's a gruesome routine. Every morning they row from the
(06:41):
shoreline a boat out to the ship and the commandant
of the ship, his name is Sprot and he's wicked.
Brot would row everybody out to the ship and he
would say there.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
He would point there, there is your hell, and.
Speaker 3 (06:55):
They would look at these ghostly, gaunt faces in the portholes,
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
(07:18):
sickest end up lying down by the portholes. 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 on a hard floor.
(07:39):
There's a big tub. They used it for human waste.
That tub would overflow, and the problem 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 to carry the
(08:00):
corpses 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 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
(08:22):
two things would happen. Sprote 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 goast 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
(08:44):
would put men on the 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. The men were rowing back, they
would watch as a pig or a coyote or a
dog or a buzzet or something would come out and
(09:06):
start to eat their comrades. And then they'd go back
on the boat, put below decks, and the hatch would
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 met 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 as
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.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
No more food.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
So of course there was a mad fight to get
in line, and the youngest the week is the sickest,
would be 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
(12:01):
and she would bring apples or tobacco or scissors so
they could 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. So they start 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
(14:26):
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,
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
(14:46):
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
arm off and threw him in the So all night
long the men are hearing him grown until he dies.
That's Dring's situation. Well, what Dring does is he goes
(15:08):
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's going to 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
(15:28):
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 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
(15:51):
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. Now, I'm happy to say
Washington never resorted to that type of barbarism. Washington won't
(16:13):
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
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
(16:38):
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,
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,
(16:59):
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
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
(17:23):
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
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
(17:43):
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
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,
(18:05):
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 a'b be darns. So we got the letters
we donated, 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 Elfner, 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 learn 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 and turned into a hell ship.
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 (00:13):
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 prisonship run by
the British during the Revolutionary War. Professor Roberts tells the
(00:35):
story in his book The ghost Ship of Brooklyn.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Let's take a listen.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
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
(01:12):
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
(01:33):
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,
(01:54):
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
(02:37):
turned into a supply ship. In the seventeen seventies, the
British went to push back on these pesky colonials who
were 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.
(03:00):
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
(03:23):
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
(03:43):
had a large population of loyalists and royalists. That was
that they were folks who were pro crown. 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 halls were
with food and powder and cows and horses and things
(04:04):
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 at the most.
(04:27):
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 and sails. You
(04:50):
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 hawked her, and they
(05:12):
moored her in Brooklyn in a place called Wallabout Bay.
It's 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 bored up
the portholes, and what happens is disease tears through the
ship and virtually everybody on board died. And that's when
(05:35):
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
would say, essentially, if you pick up arms against us
(05:56):
and you get caught, you're going to hell. And that's
the ghost ship, and there's 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 diabolically use this ship for those purposes. Psychological war
(06:19):
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 a death toll is extraordinary.
There's a gruesome routine. Every morning they row from the
(06:41):
shoreline a boat out to the ship and the commandant
of the ship, his name is Sprot and he's wicked.
Brot would row everybody out to the ship and he
would say there.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
He would point there, there is your hell, and.
Speaker 3 (06:55):
They would look at these ghostly, gaunt faces in the portholes,
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
(07:18):
sickest end up lying down by the portholes. 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 on a hard floor.
(07:39):
There's a big tub. They used it for human waste.
That tub would overflow, and the problem 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 to carry the
(08:00):
corpses 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 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
(08:22):
two things would happen. Sprote 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 goast 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
(08:44):
would put men on the 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. The men were rowing back, they
would watch as a pig or a coyote or a
dog or a buzzet or something would come out and
(09:06):
start to eat their comrades. And then they'd go back
on the boat, put below decks, and the hatch would
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 met 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 as
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.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
No more food.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
So of course there was a mad fight to get
in line, and the youngest the week is the sickest,
would be 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
(12:01):
and she would bring apples or tobacco or scissors so
they could 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. So they start 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
(14:26):
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,
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
(14:46):
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
arm off and threw him in the So all night
long the men are hearing him grown until he dies.
That's Dring's situation. Well, what Dring does is he goes
(15:08):
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's going to 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
(15:28):
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 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
(15:51):
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. Now, I'm happy to say
Washington never resorted to that type of barbarism. Washington won't
(16:13):
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
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
(16:38):
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,
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,
(16:59):
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
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
(17:23):
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
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
(17:43):
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
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,
(18:05):
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 a'b be darns. So we got the letters
we donated, 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 Elfner, 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 learn 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 and turned into a hell ship.
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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