"Your cannon, Joe, was a clap of thunder," said Harry. "We're going to get wet again."
"We needn't get wet," said Tom. "If we hurry up, we can get the tent pitched and put the things in it, so as to keep them dry."
They worked rapidly, for the rain was approaching fast, but it was not easy to pitch the tent on a side-hill. It was done, however, after a fashion, and the blankets and other things that were liable to be injured by the wet were safely under shelter before the storm reached them.
[to be continued.]
NEW YORK PRISON-SHIPS.
On the Long Island shore, where the Navy-yard now extends its shops and vessels around Wallabout Bay, there was in the time of the Revolution a large and fertile farm. A number of flour mills, moved by water, then stood there. The flat fields glowed with rich crops of grain, roots, and clover. Their Dutch owners still kept up the customs and language of Holland; at Christmas the kettles hissed and bubbled over the huge fires, laden with olycooks, doughnuts, crullers; at Paas, or Easter, the colored eggs were cracked by whites and blacks, and all was merriment. The war no doubt brought its difficulties to the Dutch farmers; they were sometimes plundered by both parties, and they had little love for King George. They lived on in decorous silence, waiting for the coming of peace, remembering how their ancestors in Holland had once fought successfully for freedom against the Spaniards and the French. But in front of the quiet farm at Wallabout, and anchored in the bay, were seen several vessels, decayed, unseaworthy, and repulsive. They were the prison-ships of New York. Here from the year 1776 a large number of American prisoners were confined until the close of the war, and the tragic tales of their sufferings and fate lend a melancholy interest to the Wallabout shore.
The largest of the prison-ships—the old Jersey—was crowded with miserable captives. She was an old man-of-war, worthless, decayed; her low decks and dismal hold were converted into a jail; her crowded inmates were only thinned by the hand of death. The old Jersey may well be taken as one of the best symbols of the terrors of war. Her miserable captives pined away for months and years, deprived of all that makes life tolerable. In the chill and bitter frosts of winter no fires warmed her half-clad inmates; in the hot summer they faded away beneath the pitiless heat. Disease preyed upon them, yet no physician, it is said, was suffered to visit them. They were clothed in rags and tatters; their food was so scanty and often so repulsive that they lived in continual starvation. The fair youth of Connecticut and Rhode Island, the young sailors of New York and New Jersey, confined in these floating dungeons, were the sacrifices to the ambition of King George. They died by hundreds and even thousands during the war; the whole shore was lined with the unmarked graves of the patriot dead; the prison-ships were the scandal of the time, and their starved inmates seldom bore long the pains of the merciless imprisonment. It is said that the bones of eleven thousand dead were found upon the shore, and reverently buried in a common tomb.
Yet the prisoners of the old Jersey and the other ships were not left always without sympathy and aid. Often a boat was seen sailing from the rich farms on the Wallabout, laden with provisions for the famished patriots. The Dutch farmers from their own diminished resources gave bountifully to the sufferers. The ladies of the household worked warm stockings with the busy knitting-needle; the spinning-wheel was never idle; the fair Dutch damsels, demure and prudent, blushing with the rich complexions of Amsterdam, were never weary of their charitable toil; and many a poor prisoner was saved and strengthened by the gifts of his unknown friends. As the war advanced, too, the successes of the Americans seem to have convinced the royal chiefs that they were at least deserving of tolerable treatment. Some of the worst abuses of the system were removed. Hospital-ships were provided; the sick were separated from the healthy; the Whitby, the most infamous of the floating jails, was abandoned. Yet still, an observer relates, the dead were carried away every morning from the old Jersey, and still the horrors of captivity in the prison-ships exceeded all that had been known in every recent European war.
Several curious escapes are related. Once, in 1777, as a boat hung fastened to the old Jersey unnoticed, three or four prisoners let themselves down into it quietly, cast off the rope, and drifted away slowly with the tide. It was evening, and the darkness saved them. Their escape was discovered, and guns were fired at random after them; but they floated unharmed along the East River, passed what are now the Fulton and South ferries, and reached by a miracle the New Jersey shore. Here they found friends, and were safe. At another time, in the cold winter of 1780, fifteen half-clad, half-famished prisoners escaped in the night on the ice; others who followed them turned back, overpowered by the cold. One was frozen to death. It is almost possible to see in fancy the miserable band of shivering fugitives fleeing over the ice of the restless river in the deep cold of the winter's night, chased by the fierce winds, half lost in the blinding snow. They made their way to the Connecticut shore. A very remarkable escape from the Old Sugar-House is related of a Boston prisoner. He dug a passage under Liberty Street from the prison to the cellar of the house on the opposite side of the way. The difficulty of making the excavation will be plain to every one who looks at the labors of a party of workmen opening a trench for gas-pipes or water. Yet the Boston boy burrowed under-ground until he found himself free.