"After living and being treated in this way, subject to every insult
and abuse for ten or twelve days, we fell in with the Champion, a
British twenty gun ship, which was bound to New York to refit, and
were all sent on board of her The Captain was a true seaman and a
gentleman, and our treatment was so different from what we had
experienced on board the Ceres, that it was like being removed from
Purgatory to Paradise. His name, I think, was Edwards.
"We arrived about the beginning of October in New York and were
immediately sent on board the prison-ship in a small schooner, called,
ironically enough, the Relief, commanded by one Gardner, an Irishman.
"This schooner Relief plied between the prison ship and New York, and
carried the water and provisions from that city to the ship. In fact
the said schooner might emphatically be called the Relief, for the
execrable water and provisions she carried relieved many of my brave
but unfortunate countrymen by death, from the misery and savage
treatment they daily endured.
"Before I go on to relate the treatment we experienced on board the
Jersey, I will make one remark, and that is if you were to rake the
infernal regions, I doubt whether you could find such another set of
demons as the officers and men who had charge of the Old Jersey
Prison-ship, and, Sir, I shall not be surprised if you, possessing the
finer feelings which I believe to be interwoven in the composition of
men, and which are not totally torn from the _piece_, till by a
long and obstinate perseverance in the meanest, the basest, and
cruellest of all human acts, a man becomes lost to every sense of
honor, of justice, of humanity, and common honesty; I shall not be
surprised, I say, if you, possessing these finer feelings, should
doubt whether men could be so lost to their sacred obligations to
their God; and the moral ties which ought to bind them to their duty
toward their fellow men, as those men were, who had the charge, and
also who had any agency in the affairs of the Jersey prison-ship.
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