"Turn Out Your Dead!" The Prison Ship Jersey

“Rebels! Turn out your dead!”

Nope, it’s not a line from Monty Python’s Holy Grail. It’s what one unknown Patriot soldier reported was the regular good morning greeting from their British captors onboard their floating prison. 

If you’ve explored our new tour of the Battle of Brooklyn on The Liberty Trail New York, you already know about the horrors onboard The Jersey, the infamous floating prison ship that loomed in the waters near today’s Brooklyn Naval Yard. If you haven’t taken the tour yet, SPOILER ALERT: the Battle of Brooklyn resulted in over 1,000 Patriot POWs, and many of them eventually found themselves on prison ships in Wallabout Bay. Our tour stop at the Prison Ship Martyr’s Monument inside Fort Greene Park tells more of that story, and invites you to listen to one soldier’s account as he languished on The Jersey.

Some Patriot POWs called it Hell, but years before 1780 when it was converted to a floating prison, the HMS Jersey was about as a classic a man of war as you can get. In fact, if this ship could talk, it’d have a lot to tell you about its service in the Royal Navy, including the War of Jenkin’s War in 1739, in the Battle of Lagos in the Seven Years’ War in 1759, and her later conversion to a hospital ship. 

The Jersey can’t talk—but conditions onboard during her tenure as a prison ship were so horrendous you have to read it to believe it, and Patriot prisoners were not shy about sharing their experiences with family, friends, and local newspapers. Countless accounts of what Patriot prisoners experienced below decks while The Jersey floated in Wallabout Bay during the American Revolution help us better understand what life—and death—was like for soldiers aboard, and the ultimate sacrifice many gave in pursuit of American liberty. 

One soldier’s letter, published in the Continental Journal, and Weekly Advertiser on August 23, 1781, describes the despair, disease, and death prisoners faced daily: 

There is nothing but death or entering into the British service before me. Our ship’s company is reduced to a small number (by death and entering into the British service) of 19. There is a partial cartel arrived and bro’t 11 prisoners, and the names of many as makes up that number, sent from Boston by somebody, and damn the villain that trades that way tho’ there is many such in that are making widows and fatherless children a curse on them all. The commissary told us, one and all to the number of 400 men that the whole fault lays on Boston, and we might all be exchanged, but they never cared about us; and he said the Commissaries were damned rogues and liars. 

I am not able to give you even the outlines of my exile; but thus much I will inform you that we bury 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11 men in a day: we have 200 more sick and falling sick every day; the sickness is the yellow fever, small pox, and in short, everything else that can be mentioned. 

I had almost forgot to tell you that our morning’s salutation is, “Rebels! Turn out your dead!” 

And there’s plenty more where that came from. In 1865 New York physician Henry Reed Stiles, a grandson of a Revolutionary veteran and co-founder of the Long Island Historical Society, published an anthology of eyewitness accounts from those who experienced the horrors of ships like the Jersey. Letters from the Prisons and Prisonships of the Revolution is the real deal—no introduction or prologue, just a straight drop into the depths of the most honest, raw, and desperate experiences of the American Revolution. But you don’t have to take my word for it. You can read Stiles’ compilation for yourself courtesy of the Internet Archive. 

But when you do, spare a thought for those who perished onboard the Jersey and others, now reinterned beneath the Prison Ship Martyr’s Monument on The Liberty Trail—because even though delegates signed the Declaration of Independence in ink, the Battle of Brooklyn—arguably the largest battle of the war--asked Patriots to sign it in blood. 

Learn More: 

Henry Reed Stiles, Letters from the Prisons and Prisonships of the Revolution: Letters from the prisons and prison-ships of the revolution. : Stiles, Henry Reed, 1832-1909, ed : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

The Prison Ship Martyrs (U.S. National Park Service)

 Prisoners of the Deep: The Terror of HMS Jersey  — Fraunces Tavern® Museum