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CHAPTER XXIII
A POET ON A PRISON SHIP
Philip Freneau, the poet of the Revolution, as he has been called, was
of French Huguenot ancestry. The Freneaus came to New York in 1685.
His mother was Agnes Watson, a resident of New York, and the poet was
born on the second of January, 1752.
In the year 1780 a vessel of which he was the owner, called the
Aurora, was taken by the British. Freneau was on board, though he was
not the captain of the ship. The British man-of-war, Iris, made the
Aurora her prize, after a fight in which the sailing master and many
of the crew were killed. This was in May, 1780. The survivors were
brought to New York, and confined on board the prison ship, Scorpion.
Freneau has left a poem describing the horrors of his captivity in
very strong language, and it is easy to conceive that his suffering
must have been intense to have aroused such bitter feelings. We give a
part of his poem, as it contains the best description of the
indignities inflicted upon the prisoners, and their mental and
physical sufferings that we have found in any work on the subject.
PART OF PHILIP FRENEAU'S POEM ON THE PRISON SHIPS
Conveyed to York we found, at length, too late,
That Death was better than the prisoner's fate
There doomed to famine, shackles, and despair,
Condemned to breathe a foul, infected air,
In sickly hulks, devoted while we lay,--
Successive funerals gloomed each dismal day
The various horrors of these hulks to tell--
These prison ships where Pain and Penance dwell,
Where Death in ten-fold vengeance holds his reign,
And injured ghosts, yet unavenged, complain:
This be my task--ungenerous Britons, you
Conspire to murder whom you can't subdue
* * * * *
So much we suffered from the tribe I hate,
So near they shoved us to the brink of fate,
When two long months in these dark hulks we lay,
Barred down by night, and fainting all the day,
In the fierce fervors of the solar beam
Cooled by no breeze on Hudson's mountain stream,
That not unsung these threescore days shall fall
To black oblivion that would cover all.
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