Monday, January 2, 2022 – FROM HART ISLAND THE PROSPECT OF REFORMED JUVENILES
MONDAY, JANUARY 3, 2022
562nd Issue
A Remarkable Trip
by a Group of
Wayward Boys
Stephen Blank
On September 12, 1871, the New York Commissioners of Public Charities and Correction (which managed the institutions on Blackwell’s Island) submitted a report to Mayor A. Okley Hall that described the “practice-cruise of the school-ship Mercury from her anchorage at Hart’s Island to Sierra Leone during the winter of 1870-71”.
It turns out that a bunch of dead-end New York boys did crew a large sailing ship across the Atlantic on an oceanographic mission. Read on for another incredible New York story.
It all begins on Hart Island.
Hart Island is an 85-acre island east of City Island. During the Civil War, it was used as a military facility and a Confederate prisoner of war camp; in 1868, it was sold to New York City to be a municipal prison and a potter’s field. Soon after, the State authorized the Commissioners of Public Charities and Correction to establish an industrial school on Hart’s island for “incorrigible” boys.
The Commissioners discuss the founding of the industrial school in their report: “With the increase of the population of the city there had been a greatly increased number of boys committed to the care of the Commissioners by the magistrates for slight misdemeanors and vagrancy. Others, and in large numbers had been committed by their parents as incorrigible, or because of evil associates, who were leading them to ruin.”
These boys were sent to the Industrial School on Hart’s Island, but their numbers increased so rapidly that the Commissioners “were embarrassed as to the disposition which should be made of them.” Without a long probationship, they couldn’t be recommended as apprentices “because of their reckless and wayward character” nor could they be discharged fearing “they would return to the vagrant life or fall in with the former associates”. So, “under these circumstances, it was deemed expedient to establish a nautical school…providing for them a sure and honest means of livelihood suited to their adventurous spirit.”
This wasn’t the first time this had been attempted. Other cities – Baltimore, Boston, New Bedford among them – had created similar projects several years earlier. Indeed, in New York, two other groups sought to start maritime training programs: the Chamber of Commerce wanted an “honest boys’ ship” under its control or at least a share in the management of the project, and Randall Island’s House of Refuge wanted its own school ship for its delinquent residents. But the
But the Commissioners of Public Charities and Correction owned the big guns – several Commissioners had long maritime experience and several others were top Tammany chiefs. So, in 1869, the New York Senate authorized the establishment of a nautical training ship by the Commission, in connection with its newly established industrial school, but failed to provide funds to make this happen. Then, apparently behind the leadership of State Senator William M. (Boss) Tweed, the ball began moving and a former Havre line packet, the clipper ship Mercury was acquired in the summer of 1869. Later that summer, 35 Hart Island “naval pupils in neat and attractive uniforms” visited Tweed’s Greenwich estate.
Hopes were high about the new program: “The industrial school gives great promise of success, and your Committee trusts that it will develop into some positive system whereby the 20,000 or 30,000 children in our City growing up with only the education of the street, may be rescued from idleness and immorality and reared to honest pursuits.”
Mercury embarked on an initial trial run on September 10 for a four-day sail throughout Long Island Sound. A subsequent New York Times report indicated that “everything connected with the trip worked charmingly, and . . . the boys entered into the spirit of the occasion with a gusto that seemed quite promising.” Several other training trips took place over the next few months as the boys shook down into a working crew.
In November 1869, Harper’s Weekly investigated this new development. “It is quite recently that practical philanthropists directed their attention to the homeless boys of large cities.’’ Refuges were established but boys escaped, back to the life they had left. Then a good idea “first appeared in Boston for training neglected boys for seamen.” In a typical Harper’s fashion, the new Hart’s Island nautical school program is fulsomely praised.
The School-Ship “Mercury” and School Between Decks on the School-Ship “Mercury”, Harper’s Weekly, November 27, 1869
None of this was easy. The navy ship Albany rammed Mercury as it lay at anchor off the Battery in November 1869 and Mercury’s first executive officer was fired after he ran the ship aground south of Cape Henry, Virginia in April 1870. The young sailors posed their own problems. Of the first group of around 250, 39 were discharged after a few months for various reasons and 18 deserted. In addition to the boys and the ship’s officers, 22 adult petty officers and seamen were on board, as well, all on salary, to form the police for the ship and to provide a corps of practical instructors in seamanship, as well as to perform the more arduous duties on shipboard.
Indeed, problems with the wayward boys continued through the life of the program. On August 25, 1870, a facility employee acting as a boatswain took 25 Mercury boys on a rowing session. At a pre-arranged time and with a pre-arranged signal, the boys knocked the boatswain overboard and rowed to shore where all but two of the boys fled. Ten of the boys were promptly recaptured. Thirteen remained at large several days later. Such “escapes” do not appear to have been uncommon. A few years later, on June 2, 1873, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported that “Fifteen boys ran away last night from the school ship Mercury, lying at Hart’s Island and are in hiding on Long Island.” Boys will be boys.
What about the industrial school on Hart Island? Apparently, nothing much ever came of it. It never functioned effectively as a trade school as originally intended. Only the nautical school actually began operations.
The school ship did not limit its training activities to short jaunts in Long Island Sound. In the fall of 1870, the Commissioners decided to winter the ship in a milder climate, giving the boys a better opportunity to improve in seamanship and navigation. and scientific survey techniques. This led to a much grander project. It would cross the Atlantic in winter, to the coast of Africa and there begin a scientific oceanographic study. Equipped for a four mouths’ cruise, Mercury sailed on December 20 with a full complement of officers, twelve men, and two hundred and fifty-nine boys, and arrived at Sierra Leone on February 14. It soon commenced the deep-sea soundings across the ocean.
The results seem to have had real scientific value. Water temperature readings confirmed a theory that a cold current from the poles underlies the surface-waters of the tropical seas. The tables and charts of the daily measurements carrying out the United States Coast Survey instructions were included in the report. Those readings, plus the sea water and ocean bed specimens, were turned over to NYU Professor Henry Draper. Draper’s conclusions and commentary became part of the Commissioners’ report – which Draper published soon after as a book.
Draper’s report and book
The voyage was viewed as Mercury’s finest hour and was a publicity coup for the nautical program. This wasn’t the last of Mercury’s ocean trips. An annual spring cruise to the West Indies became a key element of its program. An April 5, 1873 article in the New York Times gushed over the return of the Mercury from one of these spring voyages: “It is almost impossible to enumerate all that has been accomplished by this cruise… for it may be safely said that when the ship left New York it had on board many young scapegraces, who in time have grown to be vagabonds and outcasts; but in place of these the ship brings home a crew that will make good seamen, who have made a Winter passage of the Atlantic, and aided in navigating the ship a distance of nearly 15,000 miles. In doing this they have provided themselves with a self-supporting occupation, and are in a position to make themselves respectable members of society.”
Its achievements notwithstanding, the “Panic of 1873” and depression that followed sank Mercury as well as rivalry with other city agencies. By 1874, New York City was feeling the financial pinch. An analysis of the expense of running the nautical school showed high costs but a relatively low number of program graduates who actually entered the Navy or the Merchant Marine. In fact, by then the Board of Education had acquired its own training ship, the St. Mary: The Times headlined “A Chance for Public School Boys to Learn a Profession.” The Times now stated “We have serious doubts, also, whether the School-ship Mercury is a desirable branch now that the Executive has its own school ship, to be supported at public expense. The expense might be better employed in making Hart’s Island School a real ‘industrial school,’ which should teach trades and help to pay the costs of the institution.”
St. Mary’s, NYC Board of Education’s own school-ship circa 1874 – 1907
But it was not just the cost, but the downfall of Boss Tweed and the rise of reformers opened the way for the Chamber of Commerce to get the legislative mandate for the school ship it wanted: one run by the NYC Board of Education with Chamber in-put; a good boys’ boat, not a bad boys’ brig.
With the loss of funding, the Department of Charities and Correction’s Board of Commissioners decided to close the nautical school, to take steps so that “the school ship Mercury be laid up in ordinary,” to transfer boys involved in the nautical school “to the care of the Warden on Hart’s Island,” and to dispense with the services of the officers and seamen of the Mercury involved with training the boys.
It’s all here. Ships and incorrigible boys; money, influence and Boss Tweed; spring trips to the Carribbean; competition among city agencies. Thank you for reading.
Stephen Blank
RIHS
December 30, 2021
MONDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
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WEEKEND PHOTO OF THE DAY
FORT TRYON PARK
Ed Litcher and Laura Hussey got it!!
Stephen Blank
Sources
Harper’s Weekly, November 27, 1869
http://historicpelham.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-nautical-reform-school-ship-mercury.html
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 2, 1873
New York Times, December 9, 1874
New York Times, Dec. 28, 1874
Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS
Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website
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