d moored in Wallabout Bay near New York City.
No pen can adequately describe the horrors of this prison; but some
extracts from the published recollections of men once imprisoned in
her noisome hold will give some idea of the miserable fate of those
condemned to be imprisoned on her.

Thomas Andros, a sailor taken by the British with the privateer "Fair
American," writes of the "Old Jersey:" "This was an old sixty-four-gun
ship, which, through age, had become unfit for further actual service.
She was stripped of every spar and all her rigging. After a battle
with a French fleet, her lion figure-head was taken away to repair
another ship. No appearance of ornament was left, and nothing remained
but an old unsightly rotten hulk; and doubtless no other ship in the
British navy ever proved the means of the destruction of so many human
beings. It is computed that no less than eleven thousand American
seamen perished in her. When I first became an inmate of this abode of
suffering, despair, and death, there were about four hundred prisoners
on board; but in a short time they amounted to twelve hundred. In a
short time we had two hundred or more sick and dying lodged in the
forepart of the lower gun-deck, where all the prisoners were confined
at night. Utter derangement was a common symptom of yellow-fever; and
to increase the horror of the darkness that surrounded us (for we were
allowed no light between decks), the voice of warning would be heard,
'Take heed to yourselves. There is a madman stalking through the ship
with a knife in his hand,' I sometimes found the man a corpse in the
morning, by whose side I laid myself down at night. In the morning the
hatchways were thrown open; and we were allowed to ascend on the upper
deck all at once, and remain on the upper deck all day. But the first
object that met our view in the morning was an appalling spectacle,--a
boat loaded with dead bodies, conveying them to the Long Island shore,
where they were very slightly covered."

Ebenezer Fox, another privateersman, has left his recollections of
this dreadful prison. His description of the food upon which the
unhappy prisoners were forced to subsist is interesting:--

"Our bill of fare was as follows: on Sunday, one pound of biscuit, one
pound of pork, and half a pint of pease; Monday, one pound of biscuit,
one pint of oatmeal, and two ounces of butter; Tuesday, one pound of
biscuit, and two pounds of salt beef; Wednesday, one and