“It has been generally thought that all the prisoners died on board the Jersey. This is not true. Many may have died on board of her who were not reported as sick, but all who were placed on the sick list were removed to the hospital ships, from which they were usually taken, sewed up in a blanket, to their graves. “After the hospital ships were brought into the Wallabout, it was reported that the sick were attended by physicians. Few indeed were those who recovered, or came back to tell the tale of their sufferings in those horrible places. It was no uncommon sight to see five or six dead bodies brought on shore in a single morning, when a small excavation would be dug at the foot of the hill, the bodies cast into it, and then a man with a shovel would quickly cover them by shovelling sand down the hill upon them. “Many were buried in a ravine of this hill and many on Mr. Remsen’s farm. The whole shore, from Rennie’s Point, to Mr. Remsen’s dooryard, was a place of graves; as were also the slope of the hill near the house; the shore, from Mr. Remsen’s barn along the mill-pond to Rappelye’s farm; and the sandy island between the flood-gates and the mill-dam, while a few were buried on the shore on the east side of the Wallabout. “Thus did Death reign here, from 1776 (when the Whitby prison ship was first moored in the Wallabout) until the peace. The whole Wallabout was a sickly place during the war. The atmosphere seemed to be charged with foul air: from the prison ships; and with the effluvia of dead bodies washed out of their graves by the tides. * * * More than half of the dead buried on the outer side of the mill-pond, were washed out by the waves at high tide, during northeasterly winds. “The bodies of the dead lay exposed along the beach, drying and bleaching in the sun, and whitening the shores, till reached by the power of a succeeding storm, as the agitated waves receded, the bones receded with them into the deep, where they remain, unseen by man, awaiting the resurrection morn, when, again joined to the spirits to which they belong, they will meet their persecuting murderers at the bar of the Supreme Judge of the quick and the dead. “We have ourselves,” General Johnson continues, “examined many of the skulls lying on the shore. From the teeth they appeared to be the remains of men in the prime of life.” We will quote more of this interesting account written by an eyewitness of the horrors he records, in a later chapter. At present we will endeavor to give the reader a short history of the Jersey, from the day of her launching to her degradation, when she was devoted to the foul usages of a prison ship.