"_
This is one of the most terrible indictments of the human race that
was ever written. Let us hope that it is not wholly true.
In 1833 the Rev. Thomas Andros published his recollections under the
title, "The Old Jersey Captive." We will give an abstract of them. He
begins by saying: "I was but in my seventeenth year when the struggle
commenced. In the summer of 1781 the ship Hannah, a very rich prize,
was captured and brought into the port of New London. It infatuated
great numbers of our young men who flocked on board our private armed
ships in hopes of as great a prize. * * * I entered on board a new
Brig called the 'Fair American.' She carried sixteen guns. * * * We
were captured on the 27th of August, by the Solebay frigate, and
safely stowed away in the Old Jersey prison ship at New York, an old,
unsightly, rotten hulk.
"Her dark and filthy appearance perfectly corresponded with the death
and despair that reigned within. She was moored three quarters of a
mile to the eastward of Brooklyn ferry, near a tide-mill on the Long
Island shore. The nearest distance to land was about twenty rods. No
other British ship ever proved the means of the destruction of so many
human beings."
Andros puts the number of men who perished on board the Jersey as
11,000, and continues: "After it was known that it was next to certain
death to confine a prisoner here, the inhumanity and wickedness of
doing it was about the same as if he had been taken into the city and
deliberately shot on some public square.
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