In fact, about eight American prisoners died every day on the Jersey.Īnd what happened to their bodies? Some were thrown overboard, but most were taken to a nearby shoreline and buried in shallow graves. About 1,400 men were imprisoned on the Jersey at one time, but it is estimated that the number of prisoners who spent time on that ship was several times that number because so many of them died. The most infamous of the prison ships was the HMS Jersey, which was anchored off the coast of New York. “They preferred to linger and die rather than desert their country’s cause,” Thomas Dring, one of the American prisoners, said of his colleagues. We now know that very few of the prisoners did this, which means thousands of men chose death over joining the British. The British had a policy under which prisoners could earn their freedom if they agreed to switch sides in the war and take up arms against the rebellious colonists. Sheffield’s account was so horrifying, in fact, that it might have convinced a lot of colonists who were still “on the fence” about the Revolution to turn against the king.
“Their (the prisoners’) sickly countenances and ghastly looks were truly horrible some sweating and blaspheming some crying, praying and wringing their hands, and stalking about like ghosts and apparitions other delirious and void of reason, raving and storming, some groaning and dying - all panting for breath, some dead and corrupting.” This statue between the graves of Andrew Jackson’s two brothers honors his mother, Elizabeth, who died from a disease she caught treating prisoners of war on a ship in Charleston, South Carolina. Sheffield said prisoners were chained up naked and that the air was foul and the conditions so dark that it was often days until a dead body was discovered. When he got home, Sheffield wrote a detailed account of his experiences that was published in several American newspapers in the summer of 1778. One of the few soldiers who did manage to escape from a prison ship was Robert Sheffield. An artist’s depiction of what it looked like on the prison ship HMS Jersey. Four were either shot or drowned one was bayoneted by a guard and died the next day the sixth realized he had no chance to survive and climbed back up the anchor chain to the ship. In October 1781, six prisoners tried to escape from one of the prison ships in New York. Many of them couldn’t swim others were too weak to try. You might ask why the soldiers didn’t jump overboard and try to swim to shore and escape. Disease was rampant, and thousands of men died of smallpox or cholera. Captured soldiers and sailors were chained up, packed in, fed very little and given little, if any, medical care. Augustine, Florida.Ĭonditions on these ships were appalling. Most were located off the coast of New York, but there were also prison ships in Philadelphia Charleston, South Carolina and St. To make sure American prisoners didn’t escape, the British turned some old ships into prisons. They chose not to follow those procedures because King George III declared the rebelling Americans to be traitors, not foreigners. When the war started, the British had humane procedures for handling prisoners captured in wars with foreign countries. Since the British won most of the battles in the Revolutionary War, especially early on, the British had a lot of American prisoners. You can talk about the battles of Bunker Hill, Saratoga and Kings Mountain all you want, but more Americans died on British prison ships than in all the battles of the Revolutionary War combined. From a column originally penned for “Comet Earthquake and Fire Canoe” - Tennessee History for Kids’ new fourth-grade reading booklet.
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