Ships were lost during these dark voyages, and said to have had the most horrific lives of all men, a life in fact often not worth living because of the lack of fresh air and fresh water aboard. During the last nine months of sailing, not only were the prisoners confined in 'close-quarter-confinement' with rats, lice, flies, mosquitoes and cockroaches, but they were also constantly under threat of having their lice and rats killed by their captors, so that the dead bodies could be used as 'creeping' material for their ship's holds.
For many on board, it was a living death. 'The death rate was appalling, and when [these prisoners] landed, they were in a state of nervous collapse, and very difficult to deal with,' said the official record of the voyage. '[It was] a condition like that of animals. These people were not men but merely walking skeletons. It was only humanly possible to keep going by continually snatching a few hours of sleep between the long spells of work at the pumps...' On one occasion, the ship was so full of rats that the crew would have had to remove the prisoners as well if they tried to dump the rats overboard: 'The stench was awful. It was difficult to imagine what could be so disgusting, but the dead bodies covered the floor, and the sailors had to pick their way carefully, for they found themselves at times trampling on human bodies. In one day sixteen men died and by the end of the voyage, with a population of over three hundred souls aboard, sixty-eight men had died.'
Another ship, the _Erebus,_ carrying a similarly shipload of prisoners, suffered the same fate. 'In this ship,' wrote the naval historian William James, 'out of every three who went aboard, two had died or been killed by neglect.'
In June 1813, almost three years before the American Civil War began, a British man-of-war was moored at the Philadelphia Navy Yard in America, waiting for the _Jersey_ transport to arrive. She had taken on supplies in Britain and was bringing them to the New World as part of the blockade of Napoleon's France. The _Jersey_ was soon followed by several other vessels, which together became known as 'the convoy'. The _Jersey_ carried five hundred prisoners of war. These poor men, mostly from the Baltic, had had a tough life on board the ship, but when they came to the New World, with all the hopes of a new start that such voyages carried with them, it was even harder.
The new American government had imposed a strict rule on all ships coming to the United States. Nowhere else in the Western world were captives as deprived of rights as they were in the new nation. The right to live was a fundamental one to the Americans, and they insisted on these prisoners being allowed to live, not just for a few weeks or months, but as long as they survived. Prisoners were not sent to a workhouse and given a small pension when they reached the New World: a British official claimed that 'They have not worked, neither did they eat for the enemy... the more laborious and the more hungry they were... the greater is the number.'
There was no escape, no respite, no hope. Those men who had died soon after the ship had left the old world were buried at sea. Their bodies were tossed into the sea as if they were so much rubbish, and then weighted with chains and iron cannonballs to sink them to the bottom of the ocean. The _Jersey_ would carry only enough provisions for her own crew of thirty-eight men and the _Erebus_ would come ashore with only four hundred barrels of beef, eighty barrels of pork and eighty barrels of bread.
The _Erebus_ arrived at Philadelphia at 10 a.m. on 20 July 1813, six days after the _Jersey._ The city's population had trebled since the end of the war with Britain, and Philadelphia's population at the start of 1813 was already over 110,000. There was so much enthusiasm for the prisoners of war that even before the _Erebus_ arrived in the harbor, a large open area in the docks had been reserved for their landing.
As the ship anchored, her guns were fired off as a signal to the thousands of people gathered to see the prisoners of war disembark. Crowds of people watched from all the vessels in the harbor, the ships of the fleet, or from the shore. More than three hundred ships were anchored there, and people came from hundreds of miles away. The people had been told to come in carriages and on foot and so, by mid-afternoon, it was estimated that there were a quarter of a million people on the waterfront. The sun was shining brightly, but it was hot, and many of the people arrived in the city for the first time, having come from their workhouses or prisons. Some of the people had been there for days and had set up little tents on the grassy banks along the waterfront.
In the harbor, the _Erebus_ 's master waited for a ship called the _Stromboli_ to come and take his prisoners ashore. The _Stromboli_ had taken on board from an Irish vessel the men who had escaped death from the _Erebus._ A large crowd of people were also waiting for the _Stromboli._ The two ships had set off an hour earlier but now, with the wind against them, and the tide on the turn, it took the crew ten hours to get the prisoners ashore and to bring them in the right direction.
When they came into view, there was a great cheer from the thousands of people on the quay, but most of the people were far too excited to applaud or cry out: in the rush and scramble, some of the prisoners had already been seized and carried away from the ship and the crowd before the people on shore could see them. The man-of-war fired guns and rockets to order the people back, but no one obeyed her.
In the meantime, many others had been ferried in boats from the ships to land. The boats left the ships twice a day. The prisoners were put into them and rowed ashore, but the first boats to land that day were also commandeered by people who had heard that men who were alive but naked had been brought ashore. Many of these men, most of whom had been seized in Europe, had been chained and blindfolded, and had been held in inhumane conditions. One of these prisoners was a German soldier named Daniel Martin. He was a slave of the English officer Major Henry Salt, who had chained him to his bed with a long rope, so that, during the night, Martin had been tied up in the darkness and had nearly died. If he had gone in the landward direction, he would have been seized by a crowd, but luckily he was being taken towards the ship and the shore and was passed over to the _Erebus._ A crowd surrounded him and wanted to seize him, but, having been held as a prisoner, he was now a sailor. He had, in fact, been chosen by the man who had captured him to be one of the crew of the _Erebus,_ so that, having been a slave, he could now become a free man. Another prisoner, who was blindfolded in order to hide his race and had been chained, also arrived at the _Erebus_ while the prisoners were being carried ashore. He was immediately taken by his guard to be blindfolded again, but, like Daniel Martin, he managed to break free and ran off into the crowd. At first the American people thought that he was an escaped convict.
One of the men who was coming ashore was a seaman, John Johnson, who had run from the _Erebus_ when she had reached Halifax, and had been recaptured in order to return to the ship. As he was coming ashore, he met a man who he did not recognize. The man, who was dressed in a blue naval coat, had a wooden leg and was carrying a leather wallet. He called Johnson by name. Johnson recognized him instantly and he was overjoyed to see him. It was his brother James, his other brother George and his wife, who had come to meet him, and the three men embraced each other. Johnson later said that: 'To me, there were four in the world, so it was hard indeed when four were taken away and I alone was left.' He, James, George and his wife started to walk to the house, but they did not get far before they were stopped by a gang of men, who forced them to stop and to go back to the house where they had been staying. They demanded that the three men surrender the navy coat that Johnson had been wearing and the bag that he had carried. When Johnson refused, the three men hit him on the head and he passed out.
When he came round, he was back on board the ship with the survivors of the _Jersey._ The _Erebus_ was anchored off a little island, to the south-west of the city, where the people had established a temporary camp. Here, the men, who had been chained on the ship for six months, were allowed to come ashore. They were already weak and sick. James had been sent back to the prison, but Johnson and George decided to come ashore to meet with the friends and relations who had
