The Forgotten Prison Ships: Floating Tombs in New York Harbor
The war for American independence was fought on fields and in forests. But one of its deadliest battlegrounds floated silently in New York Harbor. It was not marked by flags or trumpet blasts. It had no generals, no strategies, no victories. Only death. These were the British prison ships, moored off the coast of Brooklyn, and by the end of the Revolution they had claimed more American lives than any battlefield. The most infamous of these vessels was the HMS Jersey.
Once a British warship, it had been stripped of its sails and left to rot in the waters of Wallabout Bay. It did not sail. It waited. Converted into a floating prison, the Jersey became a grim holding cell for captured American soldiers, sailors, and privateers. Some were taken after naval engagements. Others were civilians swept up in raids or accused of aiding the Continental cause. Most were never formally charged. They were simply confined. Conditions aboard the ship were nightmarish. Cramped holds. Stagnant air. Rotting food. Little clean water. No sanitation. Disease spread quickly, with smallpox, dysentery, and typhus cutting down men faster than any musket.
The ship was overcrowded, often holding over a thousand men at once, though it had not been built to house even half that. Every morning, bodies were carried up to the deck and tossed into the harbor without ceremony. There were so many that locals came to speak of the tide bringing bones. Some prisoners scrawled their names on the wooden beams, carving memory into the walls as their health faded. Others sang or prayed or scratched letters that never reached their families. Few escaped. Even fewer survived long enough to be released in a formal exchange. The Jersey earned a name whispered with dread. It was not a prison. It was a tomb. Estimates vary, but historians believe more than eleven thousand Americans died aboard British prison ships during the war.
That number exceeds the combined American deaths at the battles of Bunker Hill, Saratoga, and Yorktown. These were not the casualties of strategy. They were the casualties of neglect, policy, and dehumanization. After the war, the prison ships were left to rot. No immediate monuments were built. For decades, the bones of prisoners washed ashore or were found in shallow graves nearby. It was not until the early nineteenth century that a formal effort was made to honor them.
Today, a monument stands in Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn. It rises in silence, a tall granite shaft above the city. It marks the sacrifice few know, and fewer understand. In the mural, I represented this story not through the ship itself, but through a shoreline. A figure stands beside a bay. A tide creeps forward. Small white objects rest near the edge. A piece of wood. A bone. A shape that could be a plank or a rib. The image is not labeled. It is not literal.
But it asks the viewer to notice what the water brings in. Not victory. Not spoils. But remains. These men did not die in battle. They died in confinement. They were not remembered for heroism. They were remembered, if at all, by numbers. Yet their loss was real. Their suffering marked the Revolution with a cruelty often edited out. And their sacrifice demands space in the national story. To forget the prison ships is to forget that freedom was not only declared. It was endured.
