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We might go on presenting much more of the correspondence on both sides, and detail all the squabbles about the number of prisoners exchanged; their treatment while in prison; and other subjects of dispute, but the conclusion of the whole matter was eloquently written in the sands of the Wallabout, where the corpses of thousands of victims to British cruelty lay for so many years.
Van Vorst, a person of the same name, in 1769, owned Pawles Hook, and a large farm at Pavonia, and is a lineal descendant from Van Vorst." So called from the Navesink tribe of Indians that inhabited these parts. At present they are erroneously denominated the Neversink, or Neversunk, mountains. Since corrupted into the Wallabout, the bay where the navy-yard is situated. Now spelt Brooklyn.
The American main force, 15,000 strong, was posted on a peninsula between Mill Creek and Wallabout Bay, and had constructed a strong line of intrenchments across the end of the peninsula. The intrenchments were strengthened by abattis and flanked by strong redoubts.
Not pleased with their isolated location, they soon removed to the northern shore of Long Island, and reared their log cabins upon the banks of a beautiful bay, which they called Wahle-Bocht, or "the Bay of the Foreigners." The name has since been corrupted into Wallabout. The western extremity of Long Island was then called Breukelen, which has since been Anglicised into Brooklyn.
After about one-third of the captives made with this writer had been seized and carried away to serve against their country on British war-ships, the rest were conveyed to the "Jersey," which had been originally a 74-gun ship, then cut down to a hulk and moored at the Wallabout, at that time a lonely and deserted place on the Long Island shore, now about the center of the Brooklyn river front.
He describes the marshaling of the Dutch hosts of New York by families, the Van Grolls of Anthony's Nose, the Brinkerhoffs, the Van Kortlandts, the Van Bunschotens of Nyack and Kakiat, the fighting men of Wallabout, the Van Pelts, the Say Dams, the Van Dams, and all the warriors of Hellgate "clad in their thunder-and-lightning gaberdines," and lastly the standard bearers and bodyguards of Peter Stuyvesant, bearing the great beaver of the Manhattan.
Remsen's dooryard, was a place of graves; as were also the slope of the hill near the house; the shore, from Mr. Remsen's barn along the mill-pond to Rappelye's farm; and the sandy island between the flood-gates and the mill-dam, while a few were buried on the shore on the east side of the Wallabout. The whole Wallabout was a sickly place during the war.
These lay in Gravesend Bay and there many of the prisoners taken in battle near Brooklyn in August, 1776, were confined, until the British took possession of New York, when they were moved to that city. In 1778 the hulks of ships were moored in the Wallabout, a sheltered bay on the Long Island shore, where the Navy Yard now is."
Wallabout Smith did not attain recognition until late in life. I gather that he must have been well over fifty when a former President of the United States declared that Wallabout Smith, by raising a family of four sons and two daughters, had done more for his country than all the laws enacted by the Legislatures of all the New England and Middle Atlantic States since the Spanish-American War.
He says: "The subject of the naval prisoners, and of the British prisons-ships, stationed at the Wallabout during the Revolution, is one which cannot be passed by in silence. From printed journals, published in New York at the close of the war, it appeared that 11,500 American prisoners had died on board the prison ships.
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