By Amy Crawford
Brooklyn Daily Eagle

FORT GREENE -- Between 1776 and 1783, as the British occupied New York, 16 ships anchored offshore from what is now the Brooklyn Navy Yard held thousands of Revolutionary War prisoners in cramped, squalid conditions. Over those seven years, some 11,500 died. Their bodies were buried in shallow graves or thrown overboard, only to wash up in Brooklyn, where they were collected and interred beneath a wooden memorial.

In the 1840s, Walt Whitman, who was then the editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, campaigned for a more fitting monument to “the prison ship martyrs.”