Hessian Auxillaries Transported to America
Extract from the Diary of the German Poet and Adventurer, J. G. Seume, a Hessian Soldier and Participator on the Voyage.
From: 1776 C.E. To: 1783 C.E.
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Extract from the Diary of the German Poet and Adventurer, J. G. Seume, a Hessian Soldier and Participator on the Voyage.
On the English transporter we were pressed and packed like salted herrings. To save room the deck, low as it was, had been partitioned off, and we lay instead of in hammocks, in these bunks, one row above the other. The deck was so low that a grown man could not stand upright, and the bunks not high enough to sit in. These bunks were intended to hold six men each but after four had entered, the remaining two could only find room by pressing in. The situation was, especially in warm weather, decidedly not cool: for one man to turn from one side to the other alone was absolutely impossible, and to lie on one's back was an equal impossibility. The straightest way and the hardest edge were necessary.
After having roasted and sweated sufficiently on one side, the man who had the place to the extreme right would call: round about turn! and all would simultaneously turn to the other side, then having received quantum sabis on this one the man to the left would give the same signal.
The maintenance was on an equal scale. Today bacon and peas—peas and bacon tomorrow. Once in a while this menu was broken by porridge or peeled barley, and as an occasional great feast by pudding. This pudding was made of musty flour, half salt and half sweet water and of very ancient mutton suet.
The bacon could have been from four to five years old, was black at both outer edges, became yellow a little farther on and was white only in the very centre. The salted beef was in a very similar condition. The biscuits were often full of worms which we had to swallow in lieu of butter or dripping if we did not want to reduce our scanty rations still more. Besides this they were so hard that we were forced to use canon balls in breaking them into eatable pieces. Usually our hunger did not allow us to soak them, and often enough we had not the necessary water to do so.
We were told (and not without some probability of truth) that these biscuits were French, and that the English, during the Seven Years' War had taken them from French ships. Since that time they had been stored in some magazine in Portsmouth and that they were now being used to feed the Germans who were to kill the French under Rochambeau and Lafayette in America—if God so wotted. But apparently God did not seem to fancy this idea much.
The heavily sulphured water lay in deep corruption. After a barrel had been hoisted up and opened, the deck was pervaded by a conglomeration of very evil odours indeed. It was full of worms as long as a finger and had to be filtered through a cloth before it could be drunken. And even then it was dangerous to breathe above it. Rum and sometimes a little strong beer helped to make it somewhat more drinkable.
Herded together in this manner, forced to breathe putrid air, to eat bad food and to drink foul water, these youths, old men, students, merchants and peasants, many of them but insufficiently clothed, were tossed about for months upon the Atlantic.
Many of the sufferings undergone by us on this voyage were no doubt unavoidable, and many of the recruits were used to a hard life—nevertheless, many of the things they endured were the result of an intentional deficiency of care taking and of a great greed.
What can be said of the British Quartermasters-Department which sent these people to sea without proper food and drink? What of the Duke of Brunswick who sent his subject to Canada without durable boots or stockings and without overcoats? Often enough have men borne a hard life cheerfully, because they knew the why and wherefore, but these poor fellows suffered on account of a quarrel which was not their own, suffered only that their masters might pay their debts or enjoy new pleasures.
Pfister, A., and Johann Gottfried Seume. Voyage of the First Hessian Army From Portsmouth to New York, 1776. Chas, Fred, Heartman, 1915.
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