Captain Halstead died on the 17th of May, 1778, and, in July following, he was succeeded by Commander David Laird, under whom, either as a hospital, or a prison ship, she remained in Wallabout bay, until she was abandoned at the close of the war, to her fate, which was to rot in the mud at her moorings, until, at last, she sank, and for many years her wretched worm-eaten old hulk could be seen at low tide, shunned by all, a sorry spectacle, the ghost of what had once been a gallant man-of-war. This short history of the Jersey has been condensed from the account written in 1865 by Mr. Henry B. Dawson and published at Morrisania, New York, in that year. In an oration delivered by Mr. Jonathan Russel, in Providence, R. I., on the 4th of July 1800, he thus speaks of this ill-fated vessel and of her victims: “But it was not in the ardent conflicts of the field only, that our countrymen fell; it was not the ordinary chances of war alone which they had to encounter. Happy indeed, thrice happy were Warren, Montgomery, and Mercer; happy those other gallant spirits who fell with glory in the heat of the battle, distinguished by their country and covered with her applause. Every soul sensible to honor, envies rather than compassionates their fate. It was in the dungeons of our inhuman invaders; it was in the loathsome and pestiferous prisons, that the wretchedness of our countrymen still makes the heart bleed. It was there that hunger, and thirst, and disease, and all the contumely that cold-hearted cruelty could bestow, sharpened every pang of death. Misery there wrung every fibre that could feel, before she gave the Blow of Grace which sent the sufferer to eternity. It is said that poison was employed. No, there was no such mercy there. There, nothing was employed which could blunt the susceptibility to anguish, or which, by hastening death, could rob its agonies of a single pang. On board one only of these Prison ships above 11,000 of our brave countrymen are said to have perished. She was called the Jersey. Her wreck still remains, and at low ebb, presents to the world its accursed and blighted fragments. Twice in twenty-four hours the winds of Heaven sigh through it, and repeat the groans of our expiring countrymen; and twice the ocean hides in her bosom those deadly and polluted ruins, which all her waters cannot purify. Every rain that descends washes from the unconsecrated bank the bones of those intrepid sufferers. They lie, naked on the shore, accusing the neglect of their countrymen. How long shall gratitude, and even piety deny them burial? They ought to be collected in one vast ossory, which shall stand a monument to future ages, of the two extremes of human character: of that depravity which, trampling on the rights of misfortune, perpetrated cold and calculating murder on a wretched and defenceless prisoner; and that virtue which animated this prisoner to die a willing martyr to his country. Or rather, were it possible, there