* * *
"'But,' you will ask, 'was there no relief for these victims of
misery?' No--there was no relief--their astonishing sufferings were
concealed from the view of the world--and it was only from the few
witnesses of the scene who afterwards lived to tell the cruelties they
had endured, that our country became acquainted with their deplorable
condition. The grim sentinels, faithful to their charge as the fiends
of the nether world, barred the doors against the hand of charity, and
godlike benevolence never entered there--compassion had fled from
these mansions of despair, and pity wept over other woes."
Numerous accounts of survivors of the prison ships have been preserved
and some of them have been published. So great was popular sympathy
for them that immediately after the close of the Revolutionary War an
attempt was made to gather the testimony of the survivors and to
provide a fitting memorial for those who had perished. So far as I
have been able to learn most of the diaries and journals and other
testimony of the prison ship victims relates to the later years of the
war and particularly to the Jersey, the largest, most conspicuous, and
most horrible of all the prison ships.
I have been so fortunate as to have access to a journal or diary kept
by William Slade, of New Canaan, Conn, a young New Englander, who
early responded to the call of his country and was captured by the
British in 1776, shortly after his enlistment, and confined on one of
the prison ships, the Grovner (or Grovesner).
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