heat....  When any of the prisoners had died during the night, their bodies were brought to the upper deck in the morning and placed upon the gratings.  If the deceased had owned a blanket, any prisoner might sew it around the corpse; and then it was lowered, with a rope tied round the middle, down the side of the ship into a boat.  Some of the prisoners were allowed to go on shore under a guard to perform the labor of interment.  In a bank near the Wallabout, a hole was excavated in the sand, in which the body was put, then slightly covered.  Many bodies would, in a few days after this mockery of a burial, be exposed nearly bare by the action of the elements.”

Such was, indeed, the end of many of the most gallant of the Revolutionary privateersmen; but squalid and cruel as was the fate of these unfortunates, it had no effect in deterring others from seeking fortune in the same calling.  In 1775-76 there were commissioned 136 vessels, with 1360 guns; in 1777, 73 vessels, with 730 guns; in 1778, 115 privateers, with a total of 1150 guns; in 1779, 167 vessels, with 2505 guns; in 1780, 228 vessels, with 3420 guns; in 1781, 449 vessels, with 6735 (the high-water mark):  and in 1782, 323 vessels, with 4845 guns.  Moreover, the vessels grew in size and efficiency, until toward the latter end of the war they were in fact well-equipped war-vessels, ready to give a good account of themselves in a fight with a British frigate, or even to engage a shore battery and cut out prizes from a hostile harbor.  It is, in fact, a striking evidence of the gallantry and the patriotism of the privateersmen that they did not seek to evade battle with the enemy’s armed forces.  Their business was, of course, to earn profits for the merchants who had fitted them out, and profits were most easily earned by preying upon inferior or defenseless vessels.  But the spirit of the war was strong upon many of them, and it is not too much to say that the privateers were handled as gallantly and accepted unfavorable odds in battle as readily as could any men-of-war.  Their ravages upon British commerce plunged all commercial England into woe.  The war had hardly proceeded two years when it was formally declared in the House of Commons that the losses to American privateers amounted to seven hundred and thirty-three ships, of a value of over $11,000,000.  Mr. Maclay estimates from this that “our amateur man-of-war’s men averaged more than four prizes each,” while some took twenty and one ship twenty-eight in a single cruise.  Nearly eleven hundred prisoners were taken with the captured ships.  While there are no complete figures for the whole period of the war obtainable, it is not to be believed that quite so high a record was maintained, for dread of privateers soon drove British shipping into their harbors, whence they put forth, if at all, under the protection of naval convoys.  Nevertheless, the number of captures must have continued great for some years; for, as is shown by the foregoing figures, the spoils were sufficiently attractive to cause a steady increase in the number of privateers until the last year of the war.