Prison ship

The beached convict ship HMS Discovery at Deptford. Launched as a 10-gun sloop at Rotherhithe in 1789, the ship served as a convict hulk from 1818 until scrapped in February 1834.^[1]

Prison hulk HMS Success^[2] at Hobart, Tasmania, Australia.

A prison ship, often more precisely termed prison hulk, is a vessel (usually unseaworthy) salvaged as a prison, often to hold convicts or with the British, often civilian internees, awaiting transportation to a Penal colony. This practice was popular with the British government in the 18th and 19th centuries.

History

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.^[3] Other hulks included HMS Warrior, which became a prison ship at Woolwich in February 1840,^[4] 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.^[5] HMS Agenta, 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.

British use during the American War of Independence

Interior of the British prison ship Jersey

During the American War of Independence, more Colonist Americans died as prisoners of war on British prison ships through intentional neglect than died in every battle of the war combined.^{[6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14]} During the war, 11,500 men and women died due to overcrowding, contaminated water, starvation, and disease on prison ships anchored in the East River; the bodies of those who died were hastily buried along the shore.^[15] This is now commemorated by the "Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument" in Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn in New York City.^[15] One such British ship during the War of Independence was HMS Jersey.^[10]

Christopher Vail, of Southold, who was aboard 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 deep and all hove in together.'

In 1778, Robert Sheffield of Stonington, Connecticut, escaped from one of the prison ships, 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, by reason of which the bodies were not missed until they had been dead ten days."^[16]

British use in Napoleonic Wars

A clear distinction must be made between the use of hulks by the British for the accommodation of Prisoners of war during the Napoleonic Wars and their simultaneous use to hold criminal prisoners. (See below for the latter topic). Prisoners of war were 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. These topics are brought up to date in the commentary to the e-book version of Louis Garneray's The Floating Prison, (2012).^[17]

British use to accommodate criminal prisoners

The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up by J. M. W. Turner, 1838.

A typical British hulk, the former man-of-war HMS Bellerophon, was decommissioned after the Battle of Trafalgar and became a prison ship in October 1815.^[18] Anchored off Sheerness in England, and renamed HMS Captivity on 5 October 1824, she usually held about 480 convicts in woeful conditions.^[3] HMS Discovery became a prison hulk in 1818^[1] at Deptford.^[19] Another famous prison ship was HMS Temeraire which served in this capacity from 1813 to 1819.

British use in New South Wales

In New South Wales, Australia, hulks were also used as juvenile correctional centers.^[20] In 1813 a tender document was advertised in the Australian newspaper for the supply of bread to prisoners aboard a prison hulk in Sydney Harbour.^[21]

Vernon (1867–1892) and Sobraon (1892–1911) — the latter officially a "nautical school ship" — were anchored in Sydney Harbour. The commander of the two ships, Frederick Neitenstein (1850–1921), introduced a system of "discipline, surveillance, physical drill and a system of grading and marks. He aimed at creating a 'moral earthquake' in each new boy. Every new admission was placed in the lowest grade and, through hard work and obedience, gradually won a restricted number of privileges." ^[20]

World War I

At the start of the war cruise liners in Portsmouth Harbour were used to hold detained aliens.^[22]

Russian Civil War

Nazi Germany

The Cap Arcona, a passenger liner, was converted by Nazi Germany to hold concentration camp prisoners

Nazi Germany assembled a small fleet of ships in the Bay of Lübeck to hold concentration camp prisoners. They included the passenger liners Cap Arcona and Deutschland, and the vessels Thielbek and Athen. All were destroyed on May 3, 1945 by RAF aircraft; most of the inmates were either killed by bombing or strafing, burned alive, drowned while trying to reach the shore, or killed by the SS guards.

Modern uses

Military regime in Chile

Reports from Amnesty International, the US Senate and Chilean Truth and Reconciliation Commission describe Esmeralda (BE-43) as a kind of a floating jail and torture facility for political prisoners of the Augusto Pinochet regime from 1973 to 1980. It is claimed that probably over a hundred persons were kept there at times and subjected to hideous treatment, among them the British priest Miguel Woodward.^[23]

United Kingdom

HMS Maidstone was used as a prison ship in Northern Ireland in the 1970s for suspected Nationalist paramilitaries and non-combatant activist supporters. The current president of the Nationalist political party Sinn Féin, Gerry Adams, spent time on the Maidstone in 1972. He was released in order to take part in peace talks.

In 1997 the United Kingdom 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. Weare was closed in 2006.

Philippines

In 1987, Col. Gregorio Honasan, leader of various coup de etat in the Philippines was captured and was imprisoned in a navy ship temporarily converted to be his holding facility. However, he escaped after convincing the guards to join his cause.

United States

In the United States, the Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center is a prison barge operated by the New York City Department of Correction as an adjunct to Rikers Island, opened in 1992. However, it was built for this purpose rather than repurposed.^[24]

In June 2008 The Guardian printed claims by Reprieve that US forces are holding people arrested in the War on Terrorism on active navy ships, including the USS Bataan and Peleliu, although this was denied by the US Navy.^[25]

In 2009 the U.S. Navy converted the main deck aboard the supply ship USNS Lewis and Clark into a brig to hold pirates captured off the coast of Somalia until they could be transferred to Kenya for prosecution. The brig was capable of holding up to twenty-six prisoners and was operated by a detachment of Marines from the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit.^[26][27][28]

In 2011 the United States admitted holding terrorist suspects on ships at sea and claimed legal authority to do so.^[29]

Other types

Around the Mediterranean, convicts and prisoners-of-war were used as oarsmen on galleys as late as the 18th century.^{[citation needed]}

In literature

Charles Dickens' novel Great Expectations opens in 1812 with the escape of the convict Abel Magwitch from a hulk moored in the Thames Estuary. In fact, the prison ships were largely moored in the neighboring River Medway, but Dickens combined real elements to create fictional locations for his work.^{[citation needed]}

In the early stages of Victor Hugo's novel Les Misérables, Jean Valjean is a convict on the galleys at Toulon in France.

French artist and author Ambroise Louis Garneray depicted his life on a prison hulk at Portsmouth in the memoir Mes Pontons.

See also

• British prison hulks
• Convict ship
• Philip Morin Freneau
• Ambroise Louis Garneray
• Hell Ships

References

• Colledge, J.J. (1987). Ships of the Royal Navy: The Complete Record of All Fighting Ships of the Royal Navy From the Fifteenth Century to the Present. Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press. ISBN 0-87021-652-X. 

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Prison ships.

• American Prisoners of the Revolution by Danske Dandridge A Project Gutenberg document.
• British prison ships
• Long Island History
• Charles F. Campbell, The Intolerable Hulks (2001)
• Convicts to Australia, Prison hulks
• New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, Prison Ship Martyrs Monument