Royal Navy Prisons and Prison Ships

Throughout history, man’s inhumanity to man has perhaps best been exemplified by the brutal conditions to which prisoners of war have too often been subjected. Whether due to physical torture or psychological terror, the end result for many prisoners has been either death or a survival that would make death seem a better alternative.

Interior of the HMS Jersey

Few places in history have harbored worse conditions for prisoners than did New York during the Revolutionary War. Since New York served as the principle British base in North America during the conflict, it was here that the most gut-wrenching atrocities were perpetrated. This is not to suggest that Americans were saintly in their treatment of British prisoners of war. It is simply to say that the historical record on the British side is far more revealing.

The principle reason why the British treated American prisoners so poorly is because they did not recognize captured Americans as prisoners of war. Since to their minds the revolution was a traitorous act, American rebels captured by the British deserved to die a traitor’s death. What happened to these individuals as a consequence of falling into British hands was of no great concern to either the British military or British citizenry.   

HMS Jersey

British prisons in America were mostly in old decrepit ships known as “prison hulks,” the worst of which was HMS Jersey, a former 60-gun fourth rate ship of the line that was dismantled at the start of the war. Save for a fortunate few who managed to escape its clutches, being sentenced to this horrific hulk of oak was tantamount to a death sentence. Stripped of its spas and rigging and lower decks, Jersey was anchored in Wallabout Bay (later to become the site of the Brooklyn Navy Yard). Once hauled aboard, captured American sailors and soldiers were shoved below into a black hole of purposeful neglect and untold misery. On average, eight American prisoners died each day in Jersey, their bodies picked up each morning by a boat and taken ashore to the mud flats for a quick and unceremonial burial.

During the course of the rebellion, 11,500 men and woman died aboard these prison hulks, more than twice the number of Americans who died in every battle of the Revolution combined. On one prison hulk, the Whitby, desperate prisoners set the ship ablaze, preferring a quick death by fire to a slow and painful death by starvation.

In England, American prisoners were treated somewhat better, in large part because they normally shared a compound with French prisoners. Great Britain was also at war with France at the time, and captured French military personnel were awarded prisoner of war status. One such prison is profiled in A Matter of Honor, Volume I of the Cutler Family Chronicles. The compound is Old Mill Prison in Falmouth, England, and it is here that protagonist Richard Cutler is incarcerated following his capture during the raid on Whitehaven. (See a previous blog, Raid on Whitehaven.) In Old Mill he meets fellow prisoners and future naval heroes Silas Talbot, the second captain of USS Constitution, with whom Richard serves briefly in The Power and the Glory (published October 2011 by the Naval Institute Press), and Richard Dale, commodore of the first Mediterranean squadron in A Call To Arms (to be published in October 2012). Following is an excerpt from chapter seven:

“Diversions from soul-dulling drudgery were created by bored men and mandated by their morose conditions. Whittling had become a popular past-time, an activity encouraged by wardens who ensured that ample supplies of wood were made available around the inner yard. They even gave prisoners, upon request, small knives with blunted tips to use for whittling. Such curios as model ships, ladles, and makeshift mallets were sculpted from wood and sold to local citizens visiting Old Mill on Sunday afternoons. Whatever coins the prisoners received was more often than not snapped up by other locals hawking their wares in every corner of the compound. Barter was also a mainstay of commerce. In exchange for a toy pistol Richard had fashioned from a slab of oak, an elderly woman agreed to post a letter he had written to his family in Hingham [Massachusetts], telling them simply where he was and that he was in good health. She was a kind and caring woman, for she had paid good money for an object that any discerning eye would agree was a poor replica of a pistol. Richard felt certain she would actually post the letter; whether it would ever reach Hingham was another matter.”

   

Not much to write home about, perhaps, but one has a hard time imagining local citizens and merchants of New York fancying a row out to the prison ship Jersey on a summer Sunday afternoon, to buy or sell anything.. 

Terror in Whitehaven, 1778

Attack on Whitehaven
painting by Col. Charles Waterhouse

In the 1770's the town of Whitehaven was one of England's busiest seaports. Located near the shores of the Irish Sea, it looked out upon the Solway Firth that comprised the westernmost boundary between England and Scotland. Because Whitehaven was near where John Paul Jones was born and raised in the Scottish Stewartry of Kirkcudbright, it was where Jones decided to launch his one-ship invasion of England. Although this raid was strongly opposed by most of his officer corps, especially by First Lieutenant Thomas Simpson, it was sanctioned by a host of American dignitaries, including America's emissary in Paris, Benjamin Franklin.

John Paul Jones monument
in Whitehaven

Just after midnight on April 23, 1778, Jones ordered two ship's boats lowered away from the weather deck of the Continental sloop of war Ranger. Thirty sailors and Marines clambered down into the boats. Jones objectives: to first spike the guns of the English fort protecting the entrance to the harbor and the firth, and then to set fire to the three hundred or so vessels nested together at anchor in the harbor -- most of them either coastal merchantmen or coal transports. If the fires spread to the town, so much the better. Jones had no military objectives. Whitehaven held no strategic importance to him or to anyone else. It was simply a town that Jones had sailed in and out of many times in his boyhood, and it was here that he proposed to strike fear and panic among the citizens of Whitehaven – and by extension, among the entire British nation.

Despite a prolonged row ashore caused by shifting winds and a strong ebb tide, Jones realized his first objective. During the first inklings of dawn, he and his captain of Marines, Lt. Wallingford, entered the lightly garrisoned fort and spiked its cannon, temporarily disabling them. Jones, however, failed to realize his second objective, in part because the lanterns in both boats ran out of fuel sufficient to light a conflagration, and in part because a member of his raiding party, an Irishman, slipped away as dawn approached and ran along a harbor street of Whitehaven shouting out a Paul Revere-style warning. Only a single vessel, the collier Thompson, was set aflame, and the domino effect of one burning mast collapsing onto another mast did not materialize. Meanwhile, a fire alarm was sounded, Whitehaven's fire-fighting equipment was mobilized, and large numbers of townsfolk came running to the quays dressed in nightclothes and brandishing family weapons. Jones was forced to retreat to his two boats and back to Ranger, which he did without incident under the silence of the fort's spiked cannon.

We Americans do not like to think of ourselves as perpetrating any overt act of terrorism at any time in our history. But the raid on Whitehaven was one such act. As stated above, it had no military objective, other than perhaps to draw ships of the Royal Navy away from the Channel in pursuit of Ranger. Its primary purpose was to spread panic among British citizenry and it succeeded in doing just that. Britons were not accustomed to having their country invaded, even by a single ship, and few people living long the coast could rest easily at night knowing that ship was prowling offshore, ready, willing and able to strike again. As Midshipman Richard Cutler responds to Captain Jones in Ranger's after cabin when asked for his opinion of the proposed raid in A Matter of Honor, "It's a bold plan, Captain, because it does not rely on success. American Marines landing on British soil will have its effect, no matter the outcome." As it turned out, he was right.

What Became of John Paul Jones?

John Paul Jones*

Many people are aware that John Paul Jones was the one great naval commander to serve in the Continentail Navy during the American Revolutionary War.  His exploits in British waters as captain of Ranger and then of Bonhomme Richard are the stuff of legend.

Fewer people are aware of his earlier life.  Born on the southeast coast of Scotland in 1747, John Paul went to sea at an early age as a merchant sailor.  As master of his own vessel in the 1770s, he killed a member of his crew, a mutineer.  He claimed it was self-defense, but feared that a court in Tobago would find him guilty nonetheless.  So he fled to America, added "Jones" to his name, and for several years managed the Virginia estate of his deeased brother. Frustrated by the life of a gentleman farmer, he decided to join the navy.

Few people are aware, however, of what became of Jones after the Revolutionary War.  He remained in Paris, a city much to his liking and where he was revered, until he grew restless for action.  To quote from my novel For Love of Country:

"He [Richard Cutler] was referring to the rank of Rear Admiral bestowed upon Jones by her most Catholic majesty, the Tsarina of Russia, Catherine the Second. Three years ago, fed up with Congressional reluctance to invest in a navy, Jones had accepted the invitation of the Empress Catherine to join her Black Sea fleet in an attack against the crumbling Ottoman Empire. That fleet was under the titular command of a Romanov prince, Admiral Potemkin, vested with wresting Constantinople away from the Muslim Turks who had occupied the city for three centuries. Having liberated the Christians there, the Empress expected to receive, as just compensation for doing God’s work, a warm water port for her navy and an outlet to the Mediterranean Sea.

Once aboard the Russian flagship, Jones quickly concluded that Potemkin had no future as a naval commander. It took considerable effort and tact to convince Potemkin that Russia would be better served were he to hand over the reins of commander-in-chief to Jones, advice the reluctant prince finally accepted. At the Battle of Liman, having secretly reconnoitered the enemy fleet the night before from a rowboat, Jones destroyed fifteen enemy warships while killing three thousand Turks and taking sixteen hundred prisoners – all at the cost of one Russian frigate and eighteen Russian sailors. When reports of the stunning victory reached the capital, all Russia rejoiced except for one man, Prince Potemkin, who, stung by what he deemed a usurpation of his rightful glory, publicly accused Jones of molesting a ten-year-old girl selling butter in a St. Petersburg. square. Disgusted and disillusioned, Jones left Russia when the charges were dropped and returned to Paris, where details of his adventures were widely published."

Jones died in Paris in 1792.  In 1906 his remains were brought aboard the USS Brooklyn.  With three other cruisers acting as escorts, the "father of the U.S. Navy" sailed home on his final vovage.  Today, his coffin rests, appropriately, in Bancroft Hall at the United States Naval Academy.

*Painting by Charles Wilson Peale, c1781, published in the US before 

1923 and public domain in the US.