The Pennsylvania _Packet_, September 4, 1781, published a letter from the _Jersey_, which said: “We bury six, seven, eight, nine, ten, and eleven men in a day; we have two hundred more sick and falling sick every day.” This will illustrate the terrible mortality aboard the ship. In his _Recollections of Brooklyn and New York in 1776_, Johnson says of the prisoners dying on the _Jersey_: “It was no uncommon thing 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 be thrown in and a man with a shovel would cover them by shovelling sand down the hill upon them. Many were buried in a ravine of the hill; some on the 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. Ramsen’s barn along the mill pond, to Rapelje’s, and the sandy island between the floodgates 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 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 the dead bodies washed out of their graves by the tides. We believe that 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 bones of the dead lay exposed along the beach, drying and bleaching in the sun, and whitening the shore, till reached by the power of a succeeding storm; as the agitated waters receded, the bones receded with them into the deep.... We have, ourselves, 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.” “The _Jersey_ at length,” declares Stiles, “became so crowded, and the increase of disease among the prisoners so rapid, that even the hospital ships were inadequate for their reception. In this emergency, bunks were erected on the larboard side of the upper deck of the _Jersey_ for the accommodation of the sick between decks. The horrors of the old hulk were now increased a hundred-fold. Foul air, confinement, darkness, hunger, thirst, the slow poison of the malarious locality in which the ship was anchored, the torments of vermin, the suffocating heat alternating with cold and, above all, the _almost total absence of hope_, performed their deadly work unchecked. ‘The whole ship, from her keel to the taffrail, was equally affected, and contained pestilence sufficient to desolate a world—disease and death were wrought into her very timbers.’”