[Illustration:  THE PRISON SHIP “JERSEY".]

After about one-third of the captives made with this writer had been seized and carried away to serve against their country on British war-ships, the rest were conveyed to the “Jersey,” which had been originally a 74-gun ship, then cut down to a hulk and moored at the Wallabout, at that time a lonely and deserted place on the Long Island shore, now about the center of the Brooklyn river front.  “I found myself,” writes the captive, “in a loathsome prison among a collection of the most wretched and disgusting objects I ever beheld in human form.  Here was a motley crew covered with rags and filth, visages pallid with disease, emaciated with hunger and anxiety, and retaining hardly a trace of their original appearance....  The first day we could obtain no food, and seldom on the second could prisoners secure it in season for cooking it.  Each prisoner received one-third as much as was allotted to a tar in the British navy.  Our bill of fare was as follows:  On Sunday, one pound of biscuit, one pound of pork, and half a pint of peas; 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, etc., etc.  If this food had been of good quality and properly cooked, as we had no labor to perform, it would have kept us comfortable; but all our food appeared to be damaged.  As for the pork, we were cheated out of more than half of it, and when it was obtained one would have judged from its motley hues, exhibiting the consistency and appearance of variegated fancy soap, that it was the flesh of the porpoise or sea-hog, and had been an inhabitant of the ocean rather than the sty.  The peas were about as digestible as grape-shot; and the butter—­had it not been for its adhesive properties to retain together the particles of biscuit that had been so riddled by the worms as to lose all their attraction of cohesion, we should not have considered it a desirable addition to our viands.  The flour and oatmeal were sour, and the suet might have been nosed the whole length of our ship.  Many times since, when I have seen in the country a large kettle of potatoes and pumpkins steaming over the fire to satisfy the appetite of some farmer’s swine, I have thought of our destitute and starved condition, and what a luxury we should have considered the contents of that kettle aboard the ’Jersey.’...  About two hours before sunset orders were given the prisoners to carry all their things below; but we were permitted to remain above until we retired for the night into our unhealthy and crowded dungeons.  At sunset our ears were saluted with the insulting and hateful sound from our keepers of ‘Down, rebels, down,’ and we were hurried below, the hatchways fastened over us, and we were left to pass the night amid the accumulated horrors of sighs and groans, of foul vapor, a nauseous and putrid atmosphere, in a stifled and almost suffocating