JERSEY HMS 1736

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aukepalmhof
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JERSEY HMS 1736

Post by aukepalmhof » Wed Jul 11, 2012 9:06 pm

Built as a fourth rate ship-of-the-line by the master shipwright Peirson Lock at the Plymouth Dockyard, Plymouth for the Royal Navy.
19 April 1733 ordered.
November 1733 keel laid down.
14 June 1736 launched as the HMS JERSEY.
Tonnage 1,065 ton, dim.144 x 41.5 x 16.1ft, length of keel 116.4ft. Draught 13.10ft maximum.
Armament 24 – 24 pdr. lower deck, 26 – 9 pdr. upper deck, 10 – 6 pdrs. later added.
Crew 400.
September 1737 completed, used as guard ship.

August 1737 commissioned under command of Captain John Yeo.
Fitted out in Plymouth for the Mediterranean and sailed May 1738 with Haddock’s fleet to the Mediterranean.
1739 Was she back in home waters in Ogle’s squadron.
1740 Sailed for the West Indies and took part in the Cartagena operations between March/April 1741.
09 April 1741 was she it flagship of Rear-Admiral Sir Chaloner Ogle during it bombardment on Cartagena.
1742 In Newfoundland waters.
July 1742 till June 1743 under repair at Plymouth.
After completing repair in Byng’s squadron in the Bay, later in the English Channel.
1745 Sailed for the Mediterranean, in action against the 74 gun vessel LE ST ESPRIT near Gibraltar on 26 July 1745.
November 1745 in a convoy to Louisbourg.
1746 Again in service in the Mediterranean.
Till 1760 mostly in the Mediterranean, took part in the Battle of Lagos, Portugal on 19 August 1759, in which she suffered considerable damage.
June 1763 decommissioned.
April 1766 re-commissioned.
05 August 1766 sailed for the Leeward Islands.
December 1769 decommissioned.
February/March 1771 fitted out as a hospital ship in Chatham armed with 20 guns for the North American waters.
06 May 1776 sailed for North America under command of Commander David Laird.
December 1780 reclassed as a prison ship and used in New York as a prison ship for prisoners of war.
27 November 1783 abandoned at evacuation of New York.

Source: British Warships in the Age of Sail by Rif Winfield. Jersey Stamp Bulletin.

Wikipedia gives on the ship:

HMS JERSEY was a 60-gun fourth rate ship of the line of the Royal Navy, built to the 1733 proposals of the 1719 Establishment of dimensions at Plymouth Dockyard, and launched on 14 June 1736. She is perhaps most noted for her service as a prison ship during the American Revolutionary War.
JERSEY was built during a time of peace in Britain. Her first battle was in Admiral Edward Vernon's defeated attack on the Spanish port of Cartagena, Colombia, around the beginning of the War of Jenkins' Ear in October 1739. JERSEY next saw action in the Seven Years' War. JERSEY also took part in the Battle of Lagos under Admiral Edward Boscawen on 18—19 August 1759.
In December 1780, JERSEY’s masts were taken down and she was then made a prison ship in Wallabout Bay, New York, which would later become the Brooklyn Navy Yard. When the American Revolution began, the British used her as a prison ship for captured Continental Army soldiers, making her infamous due to the harsh conditions in which the prisoners were kept. Thousands of men were crammed below decks where there was no natural light or fresh air and few provisions for the sick and hungry. James Forten was one of those imprisoned aboard her during this period. Political tensions only made the prisoners' days worse, with brutal mistreatment by the British guards becoming fairly common. As many as eight corpses a day were buried from the Jersey alone before the British surrendered at Yorktown on 19 October 1781. When the British evacuated New York at the end of 1783, JERSEY was abandoned in the harbour, having had approximatively 8,000 prisoners on board.
One of the most gruesome chapters in the story of America's struggle for independence from Britain occurred in the waters near New York Harbor, near the current location of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. From 1776 to 1783, the British forces occupying New York City used abandoned or decommissioned warships anchored just offshore to hold those soldiers, sailors and private citizens they had captured in battle or arrested on land or at sea (many for refusing to swear an oath of allegiance to the British Crown). Some 11,000 prisoners died aboard the prison ships over the course of the war, many from disease or malnutrition. Many of these were inmates of the notorious HMS JERSEY, which earned the nickname "Hell" for its inhumane conditions and the obscenely high death rate of its prisoners.
Christopher Vail, of Southold, who was aboard JERSEY in 1781, later wrote:
'When a man died he was carried up on the forecastle and laid there until the next morning at 8 o'clock when they were all lowered down the ship sides by a rope round them in the same manner as tho's they were beasts. There were 8 died of a day while I was there. They were carried on shore in heaps and hove out the boat on the wharf, then taken across a hand barrow, carried to the edge of the bank, where a hole was dug 1 or 2 feet deep and all hove in together.'
In 1778, Robert Sheffield of Stonington, Connecticut, escaped from one of the prison ships, and told his story in the Connecticut Gazette, printed July 10, 1778. He was one of 350 prisoners held in a compartment below the decks.
"The heat was so intense that (the hot sun shining all day on deck) they were all naked, which also served the well to get rid of vermin, but the sick were eaten up alive. Their sickly countenances, and ghastly looks were truly horrible; some swearing and blaspheming; others crying, praying, and wringing their hands; and stalking about like ghosts; others delirious, raving and storming,--all panting for breath; some dead, and corrupting. The air was so foul that at times a lamp could not be kept burning, by reason of which the bodies were not missed until they had been dead ten days.
The Department of Defense currently lists 4,435 US battle deaths during the Revolutionary War. Another 20,000 died in captivity, from disease, or for other reasons. Estimates of deaths aboard the New York prison ships vary around 8,000. Prisoner exchanges were hardly possible for two reasons: the British often captured far more prisoners than the Americans did, and George Washington did not favor exchanging veteran British soldiers for ragtag American troops, as it would only put his army at a greater disadvantage http://www.history.com/topics/the-hms-jersey
Accounts of imprisonment on HMS JERSEY are American Heritage Magazine{August 1970/Volume 21/#5} and on prison ships American Heritage Magazine(April/May 1980/Volume 31/#3)
The remains of those that died aboard the prison ships were reinterred in Fort Greene Park after the 1808 burial vault near the Brooklyn Navy Yard had collapsed. In 1908, one hundred years after the burial ceremony, the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument was dedicated.
Jersey 2001 41p sg?, scott?
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