A prison ship is a current or former seagoing vessel that has been modified to become a place of substantive detention for convicts, prisoners of war or civilian internees. Some prison ships were hulked. While many nations have deployed prison ships over time, the practice was most widespread in 18th- and 19th-century Britain, as the government sought to address the issues of overcrowded civilian jails on land and an influx of enemy detainees from the War of Jenkins' Ear, the Seven Years' War and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.
The terminology "hulk" comes from the Royal Navy meaning a ship incapable of full service either through damage or from initial non-completion. In England in 1776, during the reign of King George III, due to a shortage of prison space in London, the concept of "prison hulks" moored in the Thames, was introduced to meet the need for prison space. The first such ship came into use on 15 July 1776 under command of Mr Duncan Campbell and was moored at Barking Creek with prisoners doing hard labour on the shore during daylight hours.
The vessels were a common form of internment in Britain and elsewhere in the 18th and 19th centuries. Charles F. Campbell writes that around 40 ships of the Royal Navy were converted for use as prison hulks. Other hulks included HMS Warrior, which became a prison ship at Woolwich in February 1840. One was established at Gibraltar, others at Bermuda (the Dromedary), at Antigua, off Brooklyn in Wallabout Bay, and at Sheerness. Other hulks were anchored off Woolwich, Portsmouth, Chatham, Deptford, and Plymouth-Dock/Devonport. HMS Argenta, originally a cargo ship with no portholes, was acquired and pressed into service in Belfast Lough Northern Ireland to enforce the Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Act (Northern Ireland) 1922 during the period around the Irish Catholics' Bloody Sunday (1920). Private companies owned and operated some of the British hulks holding prisoners bound for penal transportation to Australia and America.
HMP Weare was used by the British as a prison ship between 1997 and 2006. It was towed across the Atlantic from the United States in 1997 to be converted into a jail. It was berthed in Portland Harbour in Dorset, England.
Use during the American Revolutionary War
During the American War of Independence, the British used a system of prison ships to imprison American prisoners of war. Many of these prison ships were moored in Wallabout Bay near New York City, which was a major British stronghold during the conflict. Conditions onboard these ships were abysmal due to overcrowding, the poor quality of the ships, mistreatment from guards and contaminated water and food. Waves of disease frequently spread through the ships, which combined with starvation killed 12,000 American prisoners of war. The bodies of those who died were mostly hastily buried along the shore, and were commemorated by the Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument in Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn.
Christopher Vail, of Southold, who was aboard one such prison ship, HMS Jersey in 1781, later wrote:
When a man died he was carried up on the forecastle and laid there until the next morning at 8 o'clock when they were all lowered down the ship sides by a rope round them in the same manner as tho' they were beasts. There was 8 died of a day while I was there. They were carried on shore in heaps and hove out the boat on the wharf, then taken across a hand barrow, carried to the edge of the bank, where a hole was dug 1 or 2 feet [30 or 60 cm] deep and all hove in together.
In 1778, Robert Sheffield, of Stonington, Connecticut, escaped from a British prison ship and told his story in the Connecticut Gazette, printed July 10, 1778. He was one of 350 prisoners held in a compartment below the decks.
The heat was so intense that (the hot sun shining all day on deck) they were all naked, which also served well to get rid of vermin, but the sick were eaten up alive. Their sickly countenances, and ghastly looks were truly horrible; some swearing and blaspheming; others crying, praying, and wringing their hands; and stalking about like ghosts; others delirious, raving and storming,--all panting for breath; some dead, and corrupting. The air was so foul that at times a lamp could not be kept burning, because of which the bodies were not missed until they had been dead ten days.
Some British scholars have written that for prisoners of war held in hulks at Chatham, Portsmouth and Plymouth, living conditions on board and the mortality amongst prisoners were misrepresented by the French for propaganda purposes during the Wars and by individual prisoners who wrote their memoirs afterwards and exaggerated the sufferings they had undergone. Memoirs such as Louis Garneray's Mes Pontons (translated in 2003 as The Floating Prison), Alexandre Lardier's Histoire des pontons et prisons d’Angleterre pendant la guerre du Consulat et de l’Empire, (1845), Lieutenant Mesonant's Coup d’œuil rapide sur les Pontons de Chatam, (1837) the anonymous Histoire du Sergent Flavigny (1815) and others, are largely fictitious and contain lengthy plagiarised passages. Reputable and influential historians such as Francis Abell in his Prisoners of War in Britain, 1756–1814 (1914) and W. Branch Johnson in his The English Prison Hulks, (1970) took such memoirs at their face value and did not investigate their origins. This has resulted in the perpetuation of a myth that the hulks were a device for the extermination of prisoners and that conditions on board were intolerable. The truth appears to be much less lurid and when the death rates of prisoners are properly investigated a mortality of between 5 and 8 per cent of all prisoners, both on shore and on the hulks seems to have been normal.
Use to accommodate criminal prisoners
The first British use of a prison ship was the privately owned Tayloe, engaged by the Home Office in 1775 via contract with her owner, Duncan Campbell. Tayloe was moored in the Thames with the intention that she be the receiving point for all inmates whose sentences of transportation to the Americas had been delayed by the American Rebellion. Prisoners began arriving from January 1776. For most, their incarceration was brief as the Home Office had also offered pardons for any transportee who joined the Army or Navy, or chose to voluntarily leave the British Isles for the duration of their sentence. By December 1776 all prisoners aboard Tayloe had been pardoned, enlisted or died, and the contract ceased.
While the Tayloe was still in use, the British Government was simultaneously developing a longer-term plan for the use of transportees. In April and May 1776, legislation was passed to formally convert sentences of transportation to the Americas, to hard labour on the Thames for between three and ten years. In July 1776, Tayloe's owner Duncan Campbell was named Overseer of Convicts on the Thames and awarded a contract for the housing of transportees and use of their labour. Campbell provided three prison ships for these purposes; the 260-ton Justitia, the 731-ton former French frigate Censor and a condemned East Indiaman, which he also named Justitia. Collectively, these three prison ships held 510 convicts at any one time between 1776 and 1779.
Conditions aboard these prison ships were poor, and mortality rates were high. Inmates aboard the first Justitia slept in groups in tiered bunks with each having an average sleeping space 5 feet 10 inches (1.8 m) long and 18 inches (46 cm) wide. Weekly rations consisted of biscuits and pea soup, accompanied once a week by half an ox cheek and twice a week by porridge, a lump of bread and cheese. Many inmates were in ill health when brought from their gaols, but none of the ships had adequate quarantine facilities, and there was a continued contamination risk caused by the flow of excrement from the sick bays. In October 1776 a prisoner from Maidstone Gaol brought typhus aboard. It spread rapidly; over a seven-month period to March 1778, a total of 176 inmates died, or 28 percent of the prison ship population.