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Authors: David Brandon
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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
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
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