New York - The Novel

abandonment. It was discouraging.
    Yet his real agony of mind came not from causes military or financial. It was moral.
    In the spring, the British government, alarmed by the entry of France into the war, had sent commissioners to New York to try once more to reach a settlement with the colonists. Master had met them before they went down to try their luck with the Congress. The best of them, in his opinion, was a man called Eden. Yet having enjoyed a lengthy talk with him, Master had returned home shaking his head.
    “It seems,” he told Abigail, “that their instructions from King George are to bribe the members of the Congress. I had to tell him, ‘They aren’t the British Parliament, you know.’”
    Only a day or two afterward did he reflect with some irony that, without even considering the matter, he had rightly assumed that the Congresshe opposed would have higher moral standards than the government he loyally supported.
    But the discovery that shook him came at the end of August.
    James’s letter from West Point had asked him to perform one service which his father had put off for some weeks now—only because he feared it might be time-consuming. At the end of August, feeling a little guilty, he decided he really must attend to it.
    One of James’s men had a brother who had been captured by the British. The family having received no word of him for more than a year, but believing he was in prison in New York, James asked if his father could discover what had become of the fellow. His name was Sam Flower.
    It took Master a whole day to find out that the unit to which Flower belonged had first been kept in a church building in the city, but then they had been sent across the East River. No other information was available.
    The next day was hot and sultry, so Master was quite glad to escape the unpleasantness of the city streets and take the ferry across the water to Brooklyn. The ferry dock lay across the water from the northern part of the town. From this point, the river made a turn eastward. On the Manhattan side, the buildings along the waterfront petered out. On the Brooklyn side, one came around the river’s corner to a great sweep of salt meadows, cordgrass, open water and mudflats whose Dutch name had long ago been transmogrified to Wallabout Bay. And there in Wallabout Bay lay the prisons Master was looking for.
    The hulks. Disused ships. Animal transports mostly. Huge, blackened, decrepit, dismasted, anchored with great chain cables in the muddy shallows, the hulks lay not a mile and a half from the city yet, thanks to the river bend, out of sight. There was the
Jersey
, a hospital ship, so-called. And the
Whitby
, an empty carcass since it had burned last year, its charred and broken ribs pointing sadly to the sky. But there were several others, and they were all crammed with prisoners.
    It was easy enough to hire a waterman to take him out to the ships. At the first vessel the fellow in charge, a burly, heavy-jowled man, was reluctant to allow him on board, but a gold coin changed his mind, and soon Master was standing with him on the deck.
    With the bright morning sun, and the line of Manhattan Island less than a mile away across the water, the outlook from the deck might have been pleasant. But despite the gold coin, the attitude of the custodian wasso suspicious and surly that, as soon as he set foot on deck, Master felt as if a grim cloud had suddenly settled over the day. When Master asked for Sam Flower by name, the fellow shrugged contemptuously.
    “I’ve two hundred rebel dogs below,” he answered. “That’s all I know.” When Master asked if he might go below to make inquiries, the fellow looked at him as if he were insane. He took him to a hatch, though, and opened it. “You want to go down there?” he said. “Go.” But as Master moved forward he was assailed by such a stench of urine, filth and rottenness that he staggered back.
    At this moment, from another hatch, an ill-kempt soldier with a musket appeared, followed by two figures. As soon as these two were on deck, the soldier banged the hatch closed behind them.
    “We let ’em up two at a time,” their custodian remarked. “Never more than two.”
    But Master hardly heard. He was staring at the men. They were not just thin, they were walking skeletons. Both were deathly pale; but one of them, with sunken eyes, looked feverish and seemed about to fall at any moment.
    “These men are starving,” said