FullReads

Philip Freneau, the poet of the Revolution, as he has been called, was of French Huguenot ancestry. The Freneaus came to New York in 1685. His mother was Agnes Watson, a resident of New York, and the poet was born on the second of January, 1752.

In the year 1780 a vessel of which he was the owner, called the Aurora, was taken by the British. Freneau was on board, though he was not the captain of the ship. The British man-of-war, Iris, made the Aurora her prize, after a fight in which the sailing master and many of the crew were killed. This was in May, 1780. The survivors were brought to New York, and confined on board the prison ship, Scorpion. Freneau has left a poem describing the horrors of his captivity in very strong language, and it is easy to conceive that his suffering must have been intense to have aroused such bitter feelings. We give a part of his poem, as it contains the best description of the indignities inflicted upon the prisoners, and their mental and physical sufferings that we have found in any work on the subject.

Conveyed to York we found, at length, too late,
That Death was better than the prisoner’s fate
There doomed to famine, shackles, and despair,
Condemned to breathe a foul, infected air,
In sickly hulks, devoted while we lay,–
Successive funerals gloomed each dismal day

The various horrors of these hulks to tell–
These prison ships where Pain and Penance dwell,
Where Death in ten-fold vengeance holds his reign,
And injured ghosts, yet unavenged, complain:
This be my task–ungenerous Britons, you
Conspire to murder whom you can’t subdue

* * * * *

So much we suffered from the tribe I hate,
So near they shoved us to the brink of fate,
When two long months in these dark hulks we lay,
Barred down by night, and fainting all the day,
In the fierce fervors of the solar beam
Cooled by no breeze on Hudson’s mountain stream,
That not unsung these threescore days shall fall
To black oblivion that would cover all.

No masts or sails these crowded ships adorn,
Dismal to view, neglected and forlorn;
Here mighty ills oppressed the imprisoned throng;
Dull were our slumbers, and our nights were long.
From morn to eve along the decks we lay,
Scorched into fevers by the solar ray;
No friendly awning cast a welcome shade,
Once was it promised, and was never made;
No favors could these sons of Death bestow,
‘Twas endless vengeance, and unceasing woe.
Immortal hatred doth their breasts engage,
And this lost empire swells their souls with rage.

Two hulks on Hudson’s stormy bosom lie,
Two, on the east, alarm the pitying eye,
There, the black Scorpion at her mooring rides,
And there Strombolo, swinging, yields the tides;
Here bulky Jersey fills a larger space,
And Hunter, to all hospitals disgrace.
Thou Scorpion, fatal to thy crowded throng,
Dire theme of horror to Plutonian song,
Requir’st my lay,–thy sultry decks I know,
And all the torments that exist below!
The briny wave that Hudson’s bosom fills
Drained through her bottom in a thousand rills;
Rotten and old, replete with sighs and groans,
Scarce on the water she sustained her bones:

Here, doomed to toil, or founder in the tide,
At the moist pumps incessantly we plied;
Here, doomed to starve, like famished dogs we tore
The scant allowance that our tyrants bore.
Remembrance shudders at this scene of fears,
Still in my view, some tyrant chief appears,
Some base-born Hessian slave walks threatening by,
Some servile Scot with murder in his eye,
Still haunts my sight, as vainly they bemoan
Rebellions managed so unlike their own.
O may I never feel the poignant pain
To live subjected to such fiends again!
Stewards and mates that hostile Britain bore,
Cut from the gallows on their native shore;
Their ghastly looks and vengeance beaming eyes
Still to my view in dismal visions rise,–
O may I ne’er review these dire abodes,
These piles for slaughter floating on the floods!
And you that o’er the troubled ocean go
Strike not your standards to this venomed foe,
Better the greedy wave should swallow all,
Better to meet the death-conducting ball,
Better to sleep on ocean’s oozy bed,
At once destroyed and numbered with the dead,
Than thus to perish in the face of day
Where twice ten thousand deaths one death delay.
When to the ocean sinks the western sun,
And the scorched tories fire their evening gun,
“Down, rebels, down!” the angry Scotchmen cry,
“Base dogs, descend, or by our broadswords die!”