On this episode of Our American Stories, Robert P. Watson, author of The Ghost Ship of Brooklyn, tells this previously untold story of the American Revolution.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Discover about that war.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
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 2 (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
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 reputation as
(02:17):
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 turned into
(02:38):
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. They're supplemented
(03:01):
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 name
(03:23):
strikes terror into people.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
So this is.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
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
had a large population of loyalists and royalists. That was
(03:47):
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
fill with food and powder and cows and horses and
things of that effect. So she's stripped down to the
bear essentials and sets sail. So the British how takes
(04:12):
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.
After all, Washington's on the run and his armies depleted,
and how has most of his army prisoner. So they're
(04:33):
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
strip a ship down, so it's only the hull of
(04:53):
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
moored her in Brooklyn in a place called Wallabout Bays,
(05:16):
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 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
(05:40):
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 and you get caught,
you're going to hell. And that's the ghost ship, and
(06:00):
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
the ship for those purposes psychological.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
War and torture.
Speaker 3 (06:20):
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
a gruesome routine. Every morning they row from the shoreline
(06:42):
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 2 (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 w 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 have to carry
(08:00):
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 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,
(08:22):
and 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 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
(08:44):
they 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. 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 1 (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
(09:45):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
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 of a 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 be given either rotted meat,
(11:02):
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 the make matters worse. When they would queue up
(11:24):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
No more food.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
So of course there was a mad fight to get
in line, and the youngest of the week is the sickest,
would be at the end of the line. And of
course it's 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 2 (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
hard attack, 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
(13:22):
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 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. 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 hebro I guess Thomas Dring. He's
kind of a Maguiver 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 go 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 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
(15:49):
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 I have British prisoners, including officers. Now,
I'm happy to say Washington never resorted to that type
(16:10):
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 to end
this war, we have to bite the bullet. Dring goes
back on board the ghost ship, but happily Dring becomes
(16:32):
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 a 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
(16:54):
New England, and after months a librarian in 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 named Christopher Hawkins who wrote
his story two hundred years I said, I'm on my way,
(17:14):
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 to meet you. He said,
do you want me to have security not let him in?
(17:35):
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 he'll talk.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
At the end of the day, I walk in.
Speaker 3 (17:46):
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, his
father before him, and they passed them out. He said,
(18:08):
I read your book, and my great great great grant
grandfather's on page one hundred and fifty two, hundred and
seventy and I'll 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 1 (18:27):
And a terrific job on the production and editing by
our own John Elfner, himself a history teacher in Illinois.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
My dad was a history teacher.
Speaker 1 (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 2 (19:04):
And my goodness, what hell on earth? And it was
designed that way.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
The HMS Jersey retrofitted, talked and turned into a hell ship,
and more men died again along that ghost ship than
died in all of 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. Historians have written
so much about the American Revolution that it's hard to
believe there's anything left to.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Discover about that war.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
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 2 (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
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 reputation as
(02:17):
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 turned into
(02:38):
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. They're supplemented
(03:01):
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 name
(03:23):
strikes terror into people.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
So this is.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
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
had a large population of loyalists and royalists. That was
(03:47):
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
fill with food and powder and cows and horses and
things of that effect. So she's stripped down to the
bear essentials and sets sail. So the British how takes
(04:12):
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.
After all, Washington's on the run and his armies depleted,
and how has most of his army prisoner. So they're
(04:33):
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
strip a ship down, so it's only the hull of
(04:53):
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
moored her in Brooklyn in a place called Wallabout Bays,
(05:16):
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 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
(05:40):
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 and you get caught,
you're going to hell. And that's the ghost ship, and
(06:00):
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
the ship for those purposes psychological.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
War and torture.
Speaker 3 (06:20):
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
a gruesome routine. Every morning they row from the shoreline
(06:42):
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 2 (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 w 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 have to carry
(08:00):
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 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,
(08:22):
and 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 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
(08:44):
they 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. 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 1 (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
(09:45):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
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 of a 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 be given either rotted meat,
(11:02):
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 the make matters worse. When they would queue up
(11:24):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
No more food.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
So of course there was a mad fight to get
in line, and the youngest of the week is the sickest,
would be at the end of the line. And of
course it's 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 2 (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
hard attack, 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
(13:22):
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 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. 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 hebro I guess Thomas Dring. He's
kind of a Maguiver 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 go 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 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
(15:49):
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 I have British prisoners, including officers. Now,
I'm happy to say Washington never resorted to that type
(16:10):
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 to end
this war, we have to bite the bullet. Dring goes
back on board the ghost ship, but happily Dring becomes
(16:32):
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 a 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
(16:54):
New England, and after months a librarian in 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 named Christopher Hawkins who wrote
his story two hundred years I said, I'm on my way,
(17:14):
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 to meet you. He said,
do you want me to have security not let him in?
(17:35):
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 he'll talk.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
At the end of the day, I walk in.
Speaker 3 (17:46):
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, his
father before him, and they passed them out. He said,
(18:08):
I read your book, and my great great great grant
grandfather's on page one hundred and fifty two, hundred and
seventy and I'll 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 1 (18:27):
And a terrific job on the production and editing by
our own John Elfner, himself a history teacher in Illinois.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
My dad was a history teacher.
Speaker 1 (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 2 (19:04):
And my goodness, what hell on earth? And it was
designed that way.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
The HMS Jersey retrofitted, talked and turned into a hell ship,
and more men died again along that ghost ship than
died in all of 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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