The Hulks
The idea of sending undesirables to another country can be traced back to Elizabethan times when, in 1598, it was enacted that ‘incorrigible rogues’ who refused to live within the law might be banished to distant parts. Throughout the seventeenth-century Britain sent prisoners to America, notably to Virginia and Maryland, and many English, Scottish and Irish political and religious prisoners were sent to Barbados and Jamaica in the West Indies. Official sanction came with the Transportation Act of 1718, a measure prompted by the familiar public concern of a perceived growth in crime. Between 1718 and 1775, more than 30,000 convicts were transported across the Atlantic. However, this ceased when the American War of Independence started in the mid-1770s.
Britain needed to find an alternative system or destination urgently as prisons were already overcrowded and their condition a scandal. In something of a knee-jerk reaction, it was decided to house prisoners in old revamped fighting ships. The Hulks Act represented a fundamental break with the past and also contributed to the creation of a convict system very different to that of North America. These ‘hulks’ were moored on the River Thames at Woolwich and Deptford, as well as in other places such as Chatham, Plymouth and Portsmouth. The hulks were often unsanitary and overcrowded. When the first hulks were moored on the Thames at Woolwich it was intended to be a short-term measure. They continued for a further eighty years (1776-1857); the decision to send convicts to Australia came in 1786 and continued until 1868, and over 160,000 convicts were despatched ‘Down Under’.
With regard to the hulks, the government from the start exercised a general supervision but their everyday operation was in the hands of contractors who tendered for the job, intending it to be a profitable business. It was soon discovered that far from being a cheap expedient, convict labour in the hulks was an expensive one because issues of security meant that the prisoners actually worked shorter hours than free labourers and, as is inevitable with forced labour, they did as little as they could possibly get away with. With the hulks being moored close to land and the work carried out by convicts ashore there was always a possibility that they would make a break for freedom. Effective security was expensive. In Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, his famous character Abel Magwich escapes from a hulk in the River Medway, in north Kent.
Illustration of an old hulk at Deptfford.
Some of the hulks were based close to each other on the south bank of the River Thames at Woolwich and Deptford, downstream from London. They housed only male prisoners, many of whom suffered from hernias owing to the physically demanding nature of the work they had to do. John Howard, the prison reformer, reported that of 632 prisoners admitted to one of them, Justitia, between August 1776 and March 1778, 176 (or 28 per cent) of them had died!
The hulks became full to bursting point and were notorious for their living conditions. Of all the places of confinement used in Britain, they were the probably the most demoralising. They were filthy, insanitary and overcrowded for much of the time. For example, records for the hulk Surprize, moored at Cove, near Cork, in 1834 show that there were 747 bowel infections; 1240 cases of ’the itch’; 392 of ‘the cough’; 560 of ‘feverish cold’ and 284 ‘herpetic eruptions’.
Hardened criminals lived cheek-by-jowl with bemused and terrified first-time offenders – among whom were children, some not yet in their teens. Bullying, violence and abuse were rife. In 1847 it was revealed that an elderly man had been given thirty-six lashes of the cat o’ nine tails for being just five minutes late for the early morning muster.
In the nineteenth century, those sentenced to transportation almost always found themselves temporarily housed in a hulk while awaiting a convict ship. A few weeks in a hulk were not an effective preparation for the hazards of a journey of several months to Australia, let alone for what might be awaiting the convicts when they got there. In some cases, prisoners supposedly awaiting transportation were ‘temporarily’ accommodated in hulks but remained in them until the expiry of their sentences.
The hulks were grim places for all concerned, and understandably those with the opportunity to do so tried to find a little light relief. In 1854 an official enquiry into incidents aboard the hulk Victoria at Portsmouth culminated in the court-martial of Lieutenant Charles Knight of the Royal Marines. It was alleged that on the night of the 17 September he brought two ‘improper’ women on board and proceeded to act ‘improperly’, plying both with large quantities of alcohol and possibly taking sexual liberties.
There were other disciplinary problems associated with the hulks. A letter from John Henry Capper, Superintendent of Hulks, dated 17 July 1832, raises the perennial issue of how to prevent the presence of hardened criminals ‘polluting’ other novice offenders. Capper writes:
The great influx of youthful offenders matured in crime, who are daily received on board the Hulks from the several Gaols in Great Britain, make it advisable that a considerable number of Convicts should be sent to the Australian or other settlements during the present year; as it appears, judging from the report of their characters that, if discharged from any place of confinement in this country at the expiration of their sentences, there is but little hope of their pursuing an honest course of life.
The hulks were to remain in use as prisons and as temporary accommodation for those awaiting transportation for many more years. With squalor, disease, overcrowding, corruption and immorality in the prisons and in the hulks, it is not surprising that the authorities were forced at an early stage to look elsewhere for places to put convicts.
In 1846 The Illustrated London News described the inside of the hulks:
The cells throughout the hulk are numbered consecutively, beginning from the lower deck upwards; and prisoners of the worst character, during their period of punishment, are classed in the lower deck, and rise upwards as they progress in character, from the lower to the middle, and from the middle to the upper deck; so that the highest number, containing the men of best character, is on the upper deck.
The Woolwich Warren was a maze of workshops and warehouses where the convicts were put to work. Here the prisoners were employed in shipbuilding and painting, carrying timber for this purpose, removing chain-moorings, cleansing the river banks and in keeping the vessels clean, preparing the food of the convicts generally, and making and repairing their clothes. HMS Warrior was a hulk moored at Woolwich. It was built of English oak and served as a seventy-four-gun man of war, taking part in the Battle of Copenhagen. She was also involved in events leading up to the Battle of Trafalgar. In 1818 she became a receiving ship until being purchased by the prison authorities in 1840, after which she was used as a convict ship. The standards of hygiene on board the hulks were so poor that disease spread quickly. Gaol fever (a form of typhus spread by vermin) spread among them and dysentery was also widespread. Hundreds, probably thousands, of convicts died aboard the hulks at Woolwich and their corpses were unceremoniously dumped in the arsenal’s marshground. Added to this macabre image was the fact that on warm days the smell of the prisoners, dead and alive, would pollute the river from bank to bank.
In 1851 a mutiny broke out on board the Warrior, although this was put down by a detachment of Royal Marines and the prisoners were sent to Millbank Prison.
James Hardy Vaux was a prisoner on the Retribution at Woolwich during the early 1800s and gave an account of life on the hulk.
I had now a new scene of misery to contemplate. There were confined in this floating dungeon nearly six hundred men, most of them double-ironed... On arriving on board, we were all immediately stripped, and washed in large tubs of water, then, after putting on each a suit of coarse slop-clothing, we were ironed, and sent below, our own clothes being taken from us... On descending the hatch-way, no conception can be formed of the scene which presented itself.
Every morning, at seven o’clock, all the convicts capable of work... are taken ashore to the Warren, in which the Royal Arsenal and other public buildings are situated, and there employed at various kinds of labour; some of them very fatiguing; and while so employed, each gang of sixteen or twenty men is watched and directed by a fellow called a guard. These guards are commonly of the lowest class of human beings; wretches devoid of feeling; ignorant in the extreme, brutal by nature, and rendered tyrannical and cruel by the consciousness of the power they possess... They invariably carry a large and ponderous stick, with which, without the smallest provocation, they fell an unfortunate convict to the ground, and frequently repeat their blows long after the poor fellow is insensible.
The food the prisoners ate was basic to say the least, and consisted of ox-cheek, either boiled or made into soup, pease and bread or biscuit which were often mouldy. Each prisoner had two pints of beer four days a week and badly filtered water drawn from the river.
Resistance to the closing of the hulks had diminished by 1855 when the Penal Servitude Act ended transportation, replacing it with specific terms of imprisonment in English prisons. On 14 July 1857 The Times reported:
At 9 o’clock yesterday morning smoke was observed issuing from the convict hulk Defense, moored off Woolwich Arsenal, which, on closer examination was discovered to originate in the fore part of the ship... Every part of the huge vessel was soon filled with smoke and the whole of the inmates were hastily removed.
There had been 171 prisoners aboard up till that day. Many of them were invalids and in the ‘last stage of disease’. They were safely evacuated thanks to the prompt action between the warders and the prisoners. All the prisoners were transferred to the convict hulk Unite further up the Thames. After eighty years the prison ships had come to an end – or had they? In 1997, the government established a new prison ship, HMP Weare, as a temporary measure to ease prison overcrowding. Weare was docked at the disused Royal Navy dockyard at Portland, Dorset. On 9 March 2005 it was announced that the Weare was to close. Since then, the government has looked into using private contractors to supply prison ship spaces in order to alleviate overcrowding!
Boarding the Convict Ship
After their incarceration on the hulk, the convict’s next punishment was to embark upon the ship that would take them on the long journey to Australia.
The journey from hulk or prison to embarkation port was one of public spectacle, as convicts either walked or travelled via carts. Pickpocket George Barrington noted in his journal that he said his farewells and assembled with the others at 4.45 a.m. to be escorted by the city guards from his prison to Blackfriars Bridge. Barrington remarked on the ignominy of being mingled with felons of all descriptions and the humiliation of the early morning walk which would be witnessed by spectators. Even for the renowned thief, this was a ‘punishment more severe than the sentence of my country that I had so much wronged’.
Convicts would arrive at Woolwich and Deptford on the Thames dressed in regulation jackets, waistcoats of blue cloth, duck trousers (a durable, closely woven heavy cotton or linen fabric), coarse linen shirts, yarn stockings and woollen caps. Women were issued with a regulation dress, although clothing for the women on the First Fleet in 1787 fell to pieces within weeks of the voyage. In chains, they boarded the ship and were then ordered into the hold where battens were fixed for the hammocks which were hung ‘seventeen inches apart’. Barrington, commenting on his feelings, wrote of ‘the want of fresh air’ which ‘rendered [the] situation truly deplorable’.
It was not uncommon for the prisoners to have waited months on the hulks before they embarked onto the convict ship. Psychological and physical trauma was also acknowledged to be a feature of embarkation. Commenting on the adjustment prisoners had to make from Pentonville Prison to convict ship, surgeon John Stephen of the Sir George Seymour wrote in 1845:
The sudden change from seclusion to the bustle and noise of a crowded ship produced a number of cases of convulsion, attended in some instances with nausea and vomiting, in others simulating hysteria and in all being of almost anomalous character. The recumbent position, fresh air, mild stimulants etc were found to be beneficial in all cases and after three days the convulsions disappeared.
Conditions in the prison quarters on the ship were cramped, dark, damp and lacking in ventilation. The voyage would present further challenges. In storms and heavy seas the water would sweep through the quarters, which kept the bedding constantly wet. In addition to this were the awful, putrid smells of wet and rotting timbers combined with the packed bodies of the prisoners. In the tropics the heat was unbearable.
Punishments on board varied from whipping, solitary confinement, shaving of heads (a punishment reserved mainly for female convicts), and placing in irons into a small black box for a number of days, to being put on bread and water. In 1832 John Clifton died of exhaustion after being ordered to walk with a bed on his back for two hours – a punishment for expressing his wish that the ship would catch fire. For attempted mutiny, execution was the most serious penalty, although many received a severe flogging. A list of offences that carried punishments was placed on the wall on the prison deck.
Further torments included a range of ailments prisoners would suffer from. Diarrhoea was by far the most common, followed by constipation and haemorrhoids. Large iron buckets were used as toilets, but these could not be emptied and cleaned out during the night. Scurvy, which arises from a lack of vitamin C, became a problem and is mentioned in many of the journals, as did boils, rheumatism, colic and catarrh – convenient catch-all, ‘catarrh’. The presence of hordes of rats was an unavoidable hazard; typhus was a dreaded disease facilitated by rats and lice. Cholera was another epidemic disease caused by dirty water.