Billy Ruffian

EIGHTEEN A Hulk on the Medway 1815-36

During the first two weeks of January 1817 the southern counties of England were deluged by rain. In Kent the marshes surrounding the cathedral city of Canterbury were constantly flooded, and so high was the water level on the tributaries of the River Stour that the water-mills were prevented from working. The River Medway overflowed its banks at Maidstone and Yalding and the lower reaches of the river took on the appearance of the sea. Sheerness, perched at one end of the Isle of Sheppey, seemed more isolated than ever. The forts, the dockyard, and the houses huddled behind them, were almost marooned. On three sides were the swirling grey waters of the Thames and the Medway, and much of the marshland to the east of the town was under water.

A line of warships was anchored in this desolate, watery landscape, and beyond them, swinging from massive chains anchored to the riverbed, were two misshapen hulks. From a distance they seemed like vast and crudely built houseboats. Their massive hulls floated too high in the water. Their upper decks were hidden beneath overhanging wooden sheds with low pitched roofs and smoking chimneys. A naval man would have seen, from their size and the number of their gunports, that they had once been 74-gun ships, but they had little else in common with the ships which Nelson had led into battle. Instead of towering masts and taut lines of rigging, the hulks had two stumpy poles from which were hung clotheslines filled with flapping shirts. The curving sides of the hulks were disfigured by heavy wooden battens, nailed on to give protection against barges and other vessels bumping alongside. The gunports no longer revealed gleaming black gun barrels waiting to be run out, but were barred by iron grilles. Behind the bars in each ship were more than 400 convicts, condemned to several years' hard labour before being transported to Australia. One of these hulks was the Bellerophon.

Within a month of Napoleon and his suite leaving the ship, the Bellerophon had sailed back to the River Medway. But, instead of returning to the friendly noise and bustle of Chatham, Rochester and Frindsbury she was stationed off Sheerness dockyard at the mouth of the Medway. Her crew was paid off and the Navy Board agreed to her being converted into a prison hulk. The shipwrights and carpenters in the dockyard tore her apart and fitted long lines of cages below deck. During the summer of 1817 she was anchored near the hulk Retribution and received her first batch of convicts.

The forbidding appearance of the prison hulks, and the melancholy atmosphere of the surrounding marshes, are vividly depicted in the early chapters of Great Expectations, first published in 1860-61. For these descriptions, Charles Dickens drew on his childhood memories of the Cooling Marshes which border the estuaries of the Thames and Medway, and his later explorations of the area when he was living at his house in Gad's Hill. On the second page of the novel Dickens introduces us to Magwitch, a convict who has escaped from a prison hulk, 'a fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg.' He grabs hold of young Pip who has been looking at the graves of his father, his mother and his brothers in a deserted and overgrown churchyard. The convict is smothered in mud and ravenously hungry. When he learns that Pip lives nearby with his sister who is married to a blacksmith, he demands that Pip bring him some food as well as a file from the blacksmith's workshop. Pip hurries off in the gathering dusk. 'The marshes were just a long black horizontal line then, as I stopped to look after him; and the river was just another horizontal line, not nearly so broad nor yet so black; and the sky was just a row of long angry red lines and dense black lines intermixed.' On the edge of the river Pip can just make out the only two vertical features in the landscape: a beacon used as a mark by the sailors; and a gibbet with chains hanging from it which had once held a pirate. 'The man was limping towards the latter, as if he were the pirate come to life, and come down, and going back to hook himself up again.'

Pip returns at dawn the next day with a meat pie and a file for the convict. Later that day he finds himself joining a group of soldiers who are hunting for Magwitch and another convict. They find both men together in a ditch. The soldiers handcuff the convicts and lead them back to the river where there is a boat waiting to collect them and return them to their floating prison. 'By the light of the torches, we saw the black hulk lying out a little way from the mud of the shore, like a wicked Noah's ark. Cribbed and barred and moored by massive rusty chains, the prison-ship seemed in my young eyes to be ironed like the prisoners.'

The bleak reports in the newspapers of the early nineteenth century give the impression that most ships ended their days dramatically: lost with all hands during a gale; driven ashore and smashed to pieces on the rocks; or wrecked on the hidden hazards of the Goodwin Sands or the constantly shifting shoals of the East Coast and the Thames Estuary. In the days before radar and reliable engines there were all too many merchant ships and fishing boats lost around the shores of Britain every year, but this was rarely the fate of the wooden warships. Remarkably few men-of-war of Nelson's era were wrecked or lost at sea and none were sunk in action. Of the 126 74- and 64-gun ships built in British yards between 1755 and 1783 (the period dominated by the designs of Sir Thomas Slade) only seventeen were wrecked, four were burnt and three were captured by the enemy. The remaining 122 ships died slow, lingering deaths as their seams opened up and wet rot and dry rot gradually softened and crumbled their oak timbers to the point where they had to be sent to the breaker's yard to be destroyed. The average lifespan of a warship of the Slade era was twenty-seven years. Some lasted for forty-five years or more, but the later years of most warships were spent not on active service but in retirement.

The fate of the majority of Nelson's ships was to be hulked. That is to say they were decommissioned, their crews were paid off, their masts and guns were removed, and they were put to use in the various royal dockyards as hulks. Many were converted into receiving ships: these were used as floating barracks for sailors between commissions or for the accommodation of volunteers and pressed men before they were assigned to a warship. Some of the hulks became store ships for coal or gunpowder. Some were converted into floating hospital ships or convalescent ships or were used as quarantine ships (called lazarettos) for men suspected of having infectious diseases. A few became sheer hulks or floating cranes, and several were even used as breakwaters. During the Napoleonic wars many old warships were converted into prison ships for the thousands of French prisoners of war captured during the various battles of the period. They can be seen in several contemporary paintings, moored two deep in a long line down the centre of Portsmouth Harbour, their mutilated hulls bearing little resemblance to the warships they once were. In each ship were crammed anything from 500 to 1,000 prisoners. They were given no work, they got no exercise, and they barely survived on the rations provided by dishonest contractors who supplied them with bad fish, inadequate amounts of beef and potatoes, and inedible bread so that they looked like 'a generation of dead men rising for a moment from their tombs, hollow-eyed, wan and earthy of complexion, bent-backed, shaggy bearded, and of a terrifying emaciation.'

In addition to the ships for prisoners of war there were the convict ships. These came into existence in the 1770s when the American War of Independence put an end to the long-standing system of transporting convicted criminals to the American colonies. English judges continued to sentence people to transportation but, with the gaols already overcrowded, some other solution was urgently needed and it was decided, as a temporary expedient, to house the convicts in floating hulks. A law was enacted in July 1779 which decreed that any man convicted of grand larceny or similar offence normally punishable by transportation could henceforth be punished by being confined on board ships or vessels properly converted for that purpose and that they should be 'employed in hard labour in the raising sand, soil, and gravel from, and cleansing the River Thames, or any other river navigable for ships of burthen . . .' The temporary expedient lasted for eighty years. In addition to heaving sand and gravel from the Thames, the convicts were set to work on many other tasks, mostly in and around the dockyards. The work was either mindlessly repetitive, like picking oakum or chipping the rust off roundshot, or involved heavy manual labour: unloading iron and shingle ballast from ships, removing and stacking timber in the dockyards, unloading coal, breaking stones, and cleaning out sawmills, tanks and drains.

The offences for which the convicts were punished varied from the serious to the trivial. At Maidstone Assizes in March 1782, for instance, ten men were sentenced to hard labour on the Thames. James Robinson and Jonathan Bassett got three years for breaking into a house at Deptford and stealing two pairs of shoe buckles, five silver seals and a pair of silver salt spoons. John Watts was sentenced to two years for stealing three chickens from an outhouse at Eynesford belonging to Sir John Dyke. Samuel Mackew got two years for entering a dwelling house at Milton and stealing a silver pint mug and two silver milk pots. And Stephen Woolley got one year for breaking into a store in Sheerness dockyard and stealing 'sundry pieces of new and old iron, part of His Majesty's naval stores'. These men got off relatively lightly. The majority of the men on the convict ships were not only sentenced to hard labour in the dockyards but were later transported to Australia which proved a convenient alternative to the former American colonies.

Initially there were just two convict ships, the Justitia, an old Indiaman, and the Censor, a former frigate, which were moored in the Thames near Woolwich so that the convicts could be put to work in the dockyard and the Royal Arsenal. By the end of the Napoleonic war in 1815 there were five convict ships. The Justitia was still moored at Woolwich. In addition there was the Retribution at Sheerness, the Portland moored in the bleak expanse of Langstone Harbour near Portsmouth; and in Portsmouth Harbour itself were two convict hulks, the Captivity and the Laurel.

In July 1815 Mr John Henry Capper, a 41-year-old civil servant who had been a clerk in the Home Office, was appointed to take charge of the prison hulks. His official title was 'Superintendent of the several ships and vessels for the confinement of offenders under sentence of transportation', and he was to remain in this post for the next thirty-two years. It is a pity that we have no idea what he looked like and have only his twice-yearly reports to the Home Office to go on. He comes across as a Dickensian character, a senior functionary in the Circumlocution Office perhaps, not so grand as Mr Tite Barnacle but considerably more conscientious than Mr Wobbler. He is at pains to assure his masters that everything is always under control. He does not entirely ignore problems but does his best to make them appear as local difficulties of little consequence. The opening paragraph of his report of 24 July 1823 is entirely typical: 'Sir, I have the honour of reporting to you, that the Prisoners on board the respective Convict Ships have since my last Report, continued to behave in a very orderly manner (with the exception of a few Convicts at Woolwich, who attempted to escape) and that they have fulfilled their tasks of labour when on shore, to the satisfaction of the persons under whom they have been employed.' He goes on to stress how much the prisoners have earned by comparison with the overall expense of the hulks, and reveals that 'the health of the Prisoners has been generally very good, and although an indication of scurvy had manifested itself in one of the ships in a rather formidable shape, that disease, has, by timely attention, been subdued without the loss of one prisoner.'

Capper was particularly zealous in carrying out his duties during his first few years as Superintendent and was evidently keen to make a good impression on Lord Sidmouth, the Home Secretary. Sidmouth, who was the former Henry Addington, was a man of considerable influence. Educated at Winchester and Oxford, he had been an MP, Speaker of the House of Commons, first Lord of the Treasury, Chancellor of the Exchequer and President of the Council. He had been created Viscount Sidmouth in 1805 and had been Home Secretary since 1812. Capper had received from Sidmouth a detailed list of instructions which set out his responsibilities, and those of his staff. The instructions laid down how the convicts were to be treated, how many hours they were to work, how they were to be clothed, and their daily allowance of food. There was a strong emphasis on good discipline and cleanliness. Hammocks were to be taken down each morning and aired, the decks to be washed twice a week and swept every morning and afternoon. The surgeons appointed to the convict ships must 'inquire into the mental state as well as the bodily state of every sick person' and render the necessary assistance. The chaplains assigned to each ship must read prayers and preach a sermon every Sunday and visit every prisoner who requested spiritual aid.

The instructions to Capper emphasised that all healthy convicts must be sent on shore every day to labour. Following an inspection of his new domain, Capper despatched a report to Lord Sidmouth on 16 October 1815 in which he noted that there was no useful employment for those convicts imprisoned in the Portland Hulk in Langstone Harbour. Moreover the hulk was so rotten that it was not worth carrying out any alterations to its accommodation. He pointed out that there was at least four years' worth of work to be carried out in the dockyard at Sheerness and he therefore recommended that the 450 convicts on the Portland Hulk should be transferred to another ship at Sheerness. He suggested that the Lords of the Admiralty be requested to supply a suitable ship and he went on to make a specific recommendation: 'The class of ship, which I take the liberty of observing as most suitable for this service, would be a seventy-four, of about the same dimensions as the Bellerophon in the river Medway being of easy draft of water and lofty between decks.'

These words were to decide the fate of the Bellerophon. She was now twenty-nine years old. She had seen more than her fair share of action but she was capable of many more years of active service. The report on her sailing qualities completed by her captain in 1812 had found her to be a strong and well-built ship with no unusual symptoms of weakness. She had performed 'very well' or 'uncommonly well' on all points of sailing and her rate of sailing compared with other ships was 'in general superior'. But she was surplus to requirements. With Napoleon safely incarcerated on a remote island in the South Atlantic and with every prospect of a lasting peace coming out of the negotiations in Paris, Britain no longer needed a wartime navy.

At the time of Trafalgar in 1805 the navy had 241 ships of 20 guns or more (first to sixth rates), 310 smaller vessels in sea service, and some 90,000 seamen and 30,000 marines. By the summer of 1815 the numbers of men had dropped to 70,000 seamen and 20,000 marines but there were still 182 ships of more than 20 guns and 233 smaller vessels on the books. The Admiralty could no longer justify the expense of paying and victualling this number of sailors, nor could it justify maintaining the wartime level of warships. Of the twenty-eight ships which had taken part in the Battle of Trafalgar, ten had already been hulked or broken up, including the Téméraire, which had become a receiving hulk at Sheerness in 1813.

The Admiralty and the Navy Board had never been sentimental about old ships, however illustrious, and so Mr Capper got his way. The ship which had once been called 'the Flying Bellerophon' was condemned to spend the next ten years of her life as a convict hulk. But first she had to be converted from a warship into a floating prison. In his report Mr Capper had particularly requested that he be allowed to supervise the fitting out of the ship and asked that she be brought into dock at Sheerness for that purpose. In December 1815 the Bellerophon was towed into the dock and work began on preparing her for her new role.

It took the shipwrights, carpenters and blacksmiths of the dockyard nine months to carry out the necessary alterations. Iron grilles were fitted in all the gunports on the upper deck and the gun deck, and small additional ports were created on the orlop or lower deck which were likewise fitted with grilles. In a 74-gun ship loaded with guns and ballast, the orlop deck was below the waterline and was used as a storage area, but on a convict hulk floating high in the water it provided an additional deck for the accommodation of prisoners. Being immediately above the bilges it was a foul-smelling and airless place and was allotted to the worst of the prisoners. In place of the precarious steps used by the sailors to enter and leave the ship a permanent gangway was constructed down one side of the ship. This led down to a landing stage at water level. Two wooden huts were built on the foredeck, one of them for the storage of hammocks and the other to be used as a laundry. Beside them was erected a large crane to facilitate the loading of water, provisions and stores. A platform was built above and behind the figurehead and on this was constructed a shed which formed a wash house and toilet for the prisoners.

While the alterations above deck entirely altered the outward appearance and character of the ship, the alterations below deck were even more drastic. In the first generation of convict ships the prisoners were simply locked down below decks at night. There was no adequate supervision and no attempt to separate young boys from grown men, which inevitably resulted in the physical and sexual abuse of those unable to defend themselves from the more violent and predatory prisoners. By the time that the Bellerophon went into dock for fitting out, it had been agreed that the interior layout of convict ships should allow for visual supervision of the prisoners by the warders at night, and that the prisoners should be locked into cells holding no more than eight men in each cell. In effect this meant creating two lines of iron cages down the side of each deck with a corridor down the middle. The result was similar to that of the lion house or monkey house in a traditional zoo, a resemblance that was remarked upon by visitors to the convict hulk Defence at Woolwich in the 1840s:

On reaching the top deck we found it divided by strong iron rails (very like those in the zoological gardens, which protect visitors from the fury of the wild beasts) from one end to the other, into two long cages as it were, with a passage between them. In this passage a warder was pacing to and fro, commanding a view of the men, who were slung up in hammocks, fastened in two rows, in each cage or compartment of the ship.

There were eighteen cells or cages for prisoners on the orlop deck, twelve on the lower deck and twelve on the upper deck. The supervising staff had their quarters in the stern where the Bellerophon's officers had recently been accommodated. There were separate cabins for the first mate, the second mate, the third mate, and the steward. There was a cabin set aside as a surgery and a room for the chaplain. The warders shared a ward room below. The captain of the hulk, who acted as prison governor, was allotted the great cabin recently occupied by Captain Maitland and lent to Napoleon during his three-week stay on the ship. There is no record of the appearance of the cabin at this period but the visitors to the convict hulk Defence were particularly struck by the contrast between the governor's quarters and the rest of the ship. According to one account, 'We next adjourned to the governor's comfortable breakfast-room, with its pretty stern-windows, and its light blue and white walls. The military salute of the convict-servant who entered from time to time, with his white apron about his loins, was the only reminiscence of the hulk as we sat at the morning meal.'

A major alteration to the interior of the Bellerophon, as with the other convict ships, was the construction of a large chapel which doubled as a schoolroom. A section was cut out of the gun deck to increase the height of the chapel. This created an upper gallery for visitors who wished to attend the church services, and provided a cavernous space in which all the inmates could be assembled for church services. The chapel was dominated by a majestic two-tier pulpit for the chaplain and a reader. The size of the chapel, and its fine panelling and supporting columns, emphasised the importance placed by the authorities on reforming the characters of the convicts. The total cost of fitting out the ship as a convict hulk was £12,081, which was a relatively small sum compared with the cost of building a new prison on dry land but was surprisingly expensive when it is recalled that the original cost of building the Bellerophon and fitting her with masts, yards and rigging was £38,000.

In his report to the Home Office of 10 July 1816 John Capper noted that 'The ship Bellerophon, fitting at Sheerness, as a convict hulk, will (I have every reason to expect) be ready by the end of this month, for the reception of the Portland's establishment.' The work was completed by Sheerness dockyard in September 1816 and in January 1817 Capper was able to report that the prisoners from the Portland in Langston Harbour had been transferred to the Bellerophon 'and have been constantly employed upon the public works carrying on under the directions of the Navy Board'.

From the reports of John Capper and his chaplains, the Home Office instructions of 1815, and the observations of visitors to the Defence in the 1840s, it is possible to build up a detailed picture of the daily regime on the hulks. A typical day on board the convict hulk Bellerophon began around 4 am when the convict cook climbed out of his hammock. He made his way to the galley in the foc's'sle and got the fire going in the great stove which had once provided meals for the sailors of the Bellerophon. He raked the coals, and began heating up several gallons of cocoa in a giant copper pot. The rest of the convicts were still asleep in hammocks strung across the upper part of their caged cells and hung within a few inches of each other. At 5.30 the ship's bell sounded three bells. The warders began shouting at the men to get up and turn out. Within a few minutes all the men were up, dressed, and had their hammocks rolled up neatly. They then filed out of their cages onto the upper deck and stowed their hammocks in numbered lockers in the hammock houses. They clinked and clanked as they walked because every convict had to wear iron fetters on his legs. After a visit to the heads to relieve themselves, they returned to their cells, washed themselves in buckets, brushed their boots, scrubbed the plain deal tables, and waited for breakfast. At this point a roll call took place and the warders checked each cell to make sure everyone was present.

Each cell of eight or ten men formed a mess in naval fashion, and one man was detailed to be messman for the day and fetch the breakfast from the galley. This consisted of loaves of coarse bread which were brought along in a basket, and a large can of cocoa. The men ate and drank out of tin plates and mugs which they were expected to keep highly polished. Breakfast was eaten in a silence broken only by the sound of 400 jaws munching the dry bread. When they had finished, the convicts washed their mugs and plates and arranged them neatly on the tables.

At 7 o'clock the big brass bell on the upper deck sounded nine bells. All the duty warders assembled on deck to be inspected by their senior officers to ensure they were smart and sober. Two longboats, manned by convicts in seamen's glazed hats and jerseys, pulled alongside the gangway, raised their oars smartly in the air, and made fast. Under the eye of several armed warders the convicts filed up from below deck, and tramped down the gangway and into the longboats. The visitors to the prison hulk Defence were much impressed by the military precision of the embarkation of the convicts, and thought it exciting 'to see the never-ending line of convicts stream across the deck, and down the gangway, the steps rattling, as they descend one after another into the capacious boat, amid the cries of the officer at the ship's side - "Come, look sharp there, men! Look sharp!"'

Each boat took about a hundred men and, as soon as the first boat was filled, the oarsmen lowered their oars, pushed off and headed for the shore. By 7.30 the convicts were assembled in gangs in the dockyard and were ready for work. Before setting off, each man was searched by a warder to ensure that he was not concealing civilian clothing to enable him to pass himself off as a free dockyard employee and escape. Having satisfied themselves that all was well, the warders marched the men off to their workplaces. For the next four and a half hours the convicts were engaged in the various types of hard labour currently required by the dockyard officers: unloading ships, shifting and stacking timber, cleaning docks and drains, and filling with rubble and hard core the marshy area called Mayor's Marsh. At noon the men stopped work for lunch. They were rowed back to the Bellerophon for a meal of meat and potatoes. By 1 pm they were back in the dockyard and worked for another four and a half hours in the summer months, three hours in the winter.

At 5.30 pm (4 o'clock in winter) the men returned to the prison hulk. Supper was at 6 o'clock. The basic ration for each man was 6 ounces of bread and 1 pint of gruel (a thin porridge made from oatmeal) and this was augmented on certain days of the week by a pint of soup, and a few ounces of meat and potatoes. Having washed their tin plates and mugs and scrubbed clean their tables, the men had half an hour or so of relaxation which they spent reading or chatting among themselves until they assembled for evening prayers in the chapel. This was not compulsory but, according to the Bellerophon's chaplain, about 350 men out of the total of 435 usually attended. At 8 o'clock the tables and benches in each cell were cleared to one side, and the men slung their hammocks which had been brought down in the afternoon by some of the men left behind on the ship. They were allowed to talk and read until 9 o'clock when all talking stopped, the men climbed into their hammocks and the lights were extinguished. The warders locked each cell and at 10 o'clock the hatches were padlocked as added security.

This was the daily routine for the majority of the convicts who were fit and able to carry out manual labour in the dockyards. On an average day about 300 men went ashore from the Bellerophon, leaving a hundred or more on board. Some of these carried out domestic duties such as scrubbing the decks, mending hammocks, making shoes, and washing the convicts' clothes and hanging them out to dry. Fifty or so men remained on board each day to attend school. The convicts took it in turns to do this and each man would attend school for one day in every nine or ten. The lessons were taken by the chaplain and a clerk or schoolmaster, and were heavily religious. There was some attempt to teach reading, writing and arithmetic but much of the time was spent learning or reciting verses from the Bible. The visitors commented:

It is a melancholy sight. Some of the scholars are old bald-headed men, evidently agricultural labourers. There, amidst sharp-featured men, are dogged-looking youths, whom it is pitiful to behold so far astray, and so young. And now the clerk who read the prayers may be seen teaching the men; but it is evidently hard work, and few, it is to be feared, care for the school, further than for the physical repose it secures them.

The chaplain on the Bellerophon was a man called Edward Edwards. He had been chaplain of the Portland hulk in Langstone Harbour and had been transferred to the Bellerophon at the same time as the convicts. He remained the ship's chaplain for the next nine years. His twice-yearly reports to John Capper have a ponderous and self-satisfied air about them but he seems to have been exceedingly zealous in his determination to improve the minds and morals of his flock. Much of his time was spent in the composition of his Sunday sermons. Aware that many of the men were 'very ignorant as well as obdurate', he would address them in plain and strong language, making sure that his diction was clear and correct. He made himself available in the afternoons for any prisoner who wanted his advice. He attended the daily evening chapel and afterwards he would sometimes visit the prisoners below deck 'and if I see or hear any thing amiss or tending to immoralise, I instantly administer reproof, and report the offender or offenders to the Commanding Officer, whom I always find ready and active to co-operate in the promotion of virtue and in checking vice.'

If his reports are to be believed Mr Edwards made remarkably good progress in reforming and educating the prisoners. In his second report as chaplain of the Bellerophon he noted that four-fifths of the convicts on the ship conducted themselves in a very becoming manner, 'yea, I may say, very many of them in an exemplary manner ... I feel exquisite satisfaction in stating my conviction that many of them are sincere and reclaimed.' He noted that 230 men and boys attended the school on board and the boys in particular were improved beyond expectation. Twenty were able to repeat the Thirty- nine Articles from memory and many were able to read the proper lessons, epistle and gospel on Sunday services. The chaplain was particularly pleased with the observations of a local clergyman who took the service one Sunday and said, 'Well, I am astonished! I do not think that there is in all England a congregation who conduct themselves during Divine Worship so orderly, and apparently so devout as yours do.'

This rosy picture is echoed in the reports of Mr Capper. He confirmed that the schools were attended with much zeal, the state of the prisoners' health was very good, and that 800 prisoners from the two hulks at Sheerness had been employed daily in the dockyard 'in a very advantageous manner'. There is no doubt that the governors of each convict hulk maintained a highly disciplined regime and provided a useful supply of manual labourers for work in the dockyards. Indeed Capper's reports go out of their way to show how the earnings of the convicts helped to offset the expenses of running the hulk establishment. But other commentators were damning in their observations on the whole system of incarcerating convicts in prison ships.

Peter Bossy, who was the surgeon of the Warrior hulk moored off Woolwich, produced a devastating report in which he showed that, of the 638 convicts on board the hulk in 1841, no fewer than 400 had to be admitted to the hospital and 38 men died. He noted that most of the men who died were housed on the lower deck or the middle deck, both of which were permanently damp, poorly ventilated and evil-smelling. Men with scurvy, scrofula, ulcers and infectious diseases were cooped up together in the worst possible conditions. When cholera broke out on board one of the hulks the chaplain refused to bury the dead in person but ordered the coffins to be transported to the marshes for burial and read the burial service at a mile distant from the graves. Patients admitted to the convict hospital ships faced conditions which were often worse than the prison ships themselves. In the Unite hospital ship the majority of patients were infested with vermin and had no regular supply of clean bed linen. No towels or combs were provided for prisoners and 'the unwholesome odour from the imperfect and neglected state of the water-closets was almost insupportable'.

W. Hepworth Dixon, who published a book on London prisons in 1850, observed that the hulk system debased and corrupted the prisoners, was condemned by every impartial person who was competent to give an opinion on the matter, and was only maintained because the labour of the convicts on public works was useful and valuable to the government. A report by the Directors of Prisons on the management of the hulk establishment particularly condemned the rotten and dilapidated condition of the ships and strongly urged the government to replace them with properly built shore-based prisons with decent sleeping cells for all the prisoners.

One of the most scandalous aspects of the hulk establishment was that for many years it was the usual practice to imprison boys in the same ships and the same cells as adult males. Many of the boys were aged between ten and fifteen and a few were even younger. It has already been noted that the situation was at its worst in the early days of the convict hulks when the prisoners were simply locked below at night without any supervision. Of this period, the Victorian philanthropist Henry Mayhew wrote, 'The state of morality under such circumstances may be easily conceived - crimes impossible to be mentioned being commonly perpetrated.' When the second generation of convict ships, which included the Bellerophon, were divided into separate cells below decks, with a corridor running down the centre to allow a warder to patrol below decks at night, the situation was marginally improved but there were still eight or ten convicts in each cell and the men were still locked up with the boys.

In 1823 the system was belatedly changed. Mr Capper was ordered to separate the boys from the men and to provide separate accommodation for them. All the boys in the various convict hulks were moved to the Bellerophon and the adult prisoners on the ship were transferred to other ships in the convict fleet. In his report of 22 January 1824 Capper was able to record that 320 boys, most of whom were under fourteen years old, were now confined on board the Bellerophon, and that for the past eight months they had been employed in making clothing and other articles for the convict establishment. Capper had a low opinion of most of the boy convicts and was agreeably surprised by their behaviour under the new regime. Mr Edwards, the chaplain, thought that they generally conducted themselves in a becoming manner but found that all too many of them were illiterate, and had no ability to learn, 'and others are so depraved that they will not apply themselves.' He soon had them committing large chunks of the Bible to memory and within six months of their arrival on the Bellerophon was able to report that some of the boys had memorised 421 chapters of Holy Writ, with an average of twenty verses per chapter, and 131 boys were able to repeat the Church Catechism once a week.

For two and a half years the Bellerophon was a boys' prison. As if to hide this dark period in her life she was given another name. From 5 October 1824 she was officially called the Captivity hulk, though out of habit, or perhaps to avoid confusion, Mr Capper still referred to her as the Bellerophon in his reports. The daily regime was as rigid as it had always been but with the important difference that the boys were not taken ashore each day to do hard labour in the dockyard but spent all their time imprisoned on board the ship. Their days were a dreary round of prayers in chapel; inspections and punishments; washing down the ship; meals of gruel, bread and cheese (with the addition of boiled beef three or four times a week); and long hours spent in makeshift workshops. In spite of the oppressive conditions the boys seem to have been remarkably productive. In one year Mr Capper reported that they had made for the convict service more than 6,000 pairs of shoes, 15,500 garments, 'and various articles of cooperage and bedding'.

Neither Capper nor his chaplain give us any idea of the atmosphere and working conditions on the ship but Charles Dickens provides us with some insight into what it must have been like. The period when the Bellerophon was a convict ship for boys exactly coincided with the time that Dickens's father was sent to the Marshalsea Prison and Dickens's schooling was interrupted by his unhappy employment in a blacking warehouse. We therefore need look no further than the pages of Little Dorrit, David Copperfield or Nicholas Nickleby to get some idea of the conditions on board the Bellerophon. A visitor entering the chapel of the ship on a winter's morning would have been confronted with a scene similar to that which faced Nicholas Nickleby when he entered the schoolroom of Dotheboys Hall:

Pale and haggard faces, lank and bony figures, children with the countenances of old men, deformities with irons upon their limbs, boys of stunted growth, and others whose long meagre legs would hardly bear their stooping bodies, all crowded on the view together; there were the bleared eye, the hare-lip, the crooked foot, and every ugliness or distortion that told of unnatural aversion conceived by parents for their offspring, or of young lives which, from the earliest dawn of infancy, had been one horrible endurance of cruelty and neglect... there were vicious-faced boys, brooding, with leaden eyes, like malefactors in a jail; and there were young creatures on whom the sins of their frail parents had descended, weeping even for the mercenary nurses they had known, and lonesome even in their loneliness.

And in the riverside warehouse of Murdstone and Grinby, where the ten-year-old David Copperfield was sent to work, sticking labels on bottles, we catch a glimpse of a building not unlike the decayed hulk of a convict ship rising and falling with the tide:

It was a crazy old house with a wharf of its own, abutting on the water when the tide was in, and on the mud when the tide was out, and literally overrun with rats. Its panelled rooms, discoloured with the dirt and smoke of a hundred years, I dare say; its decaying floors and staircase; the squeaking and scuffling of the old grey rats down in the cellars; and the dirt and rottenness of the place . . .

During the winter of 1825-6 the authorities came to the conclusion that the Bellerophon was no longer suitable for the confinement of boys, apparently because her internal layout did not allow sufficient space for workshops. In January 1826 Mr Capper noted that 'The Convict Boys, consisting of 350, under 16 years of age, have recently been transferred from the Bellerophon to the Euryalus at Chatham, the ship specially fitted for them.' The Euryalus was the former 36-gun frigate commanded by Captain Henry Blackwood which had kept watch on the enemy fleet at Cadiz in the weeks preceding the Battle of Trafalgar. At the end of the action Collingwood had shifted his flag from the dismasted Royal Sovereign to the Euryalus and in the great storm following the battle the frigate had taken the damaged flagship in tow. The Euryalus was now converted into a boys' prison with proper workshops but, being much smaller than the Bellerophon, the accommodation for the boys was extremely cramped. A year later Capper was having to admit that the boys confined on board 'have, upon two or three occasions been refractory, and committed outrages on the persons of the Officers. The Ship in which they are confined is found too small . . .'

The prison authorities decided that the Bellerophon would be more useful at Plymouth than moored at the mouth of the Medway On 26 April 1826 she was taken into one of the docks at Sheerness, the old copper plates were taken off her bottom and she was re-coppered and prepared for the trip to Plymouth, a coastal voyage of some 300 miles. She sailed from Sheerness on 4 June, called in at Portsmouth en route to pick up a batch of convicts, and arrived at Plymouth on 8 June. Her progress was reported in the Plymouth Herald:

CONVICTS. On Wednesday last, the Captivity Hulk (late the Bellerophon, 74, having been fitted up for the reception of convicts) arrived here from Portsmouth, having on board 80 convicts, who are to be employed in the Dock Yard, in a similar manner as individuals of the same description at Portsmouth. The Hulk the following day came up the harbour. It is reported that the convicts of the four Western Counties are to be in future regularly sent here.

This is confirmed by Capper's report of 26 July 1826 which noted that the Captivity, now stationed at Devonport (the dockyard area of Plymouth) had 80 convicts on board. By the following January the number of convicts on board had been increased to 149 and the ship had acquired a chaplain, by the name of William Prowse. He was much impressed by the behaviour of the convicts which was Tar beyond what I had expected from persons of their former habits. Both during Divine Service and at the School they behave in a serious and becoming manner.'

For the next eight years the ship remained moored in the river at Plymouth, a melancholy sight among the sails of the ships and small craft moving to and fro and the smoke and activity of the nearby dockyard. By 1833 she had 445 convicts on board, ten more than she had accommodated in the days when Edward Edwards, the chaplain, was preaching his sermons and encouraging the men to learn the Thirty-nine Articles. However, the ship's days were drawing to a close. Capper had received instructions from Lord Melbourne, the Home Secretary, to reduce the number of convict ships and he solved the problem by drastically increasing the number of men transported to the colonies. In 1834 he reported that 4,216 convicts had been sent to the settlements in Australia and 400 had been sent to Bermuda. He was therefore able to abolish the convict hulks at Plymouth and Sheerness. In July 1834 Capper informed the Home Secretary that the hulks on these stations had been handed over to the Naval Department. In the ledger which had followed the progress of the Bellerophon in and out of the royal dockyards and had noted the cost of every repair carried out to her hull, masts and rigging there is a final entry which simply states, 'Sold 21st Jany 1836 for £4030.'

The navy would have sold the hulk to a firm of shipbreakers and the evidence suggests that the Bellerophon was broken up by John Beatson's yard in London. Beatsons was a well-established family firm situated on the south bank of the Thames at Rotherhithe. The yard was experienced in breaking up East Indiamen as well as warships and in previous years had broken up several third-rate ships. The largest ship to be broken up by Beatsons was another Trafalgar veteran, the 98-gun Téméraire. Like the Bellerophon, she had spent several years as a prison ship at Plymouth before being moved to Sheerness to become a receiving hulk. Her last journey to the breaker's yard in September 1838 was commemorated by Turner in his famous painting The Fighting Téméraire, a haunting image of a great ship being towed upstream by a steam tug. As steam-powered paddle tugs were increasingly being used around the coasts of Britain, it seems likely that the Bellerophon made her last journey in a similar manner. The writer William Thackeray wrote a lengthy review of Turner's painting. He described the tugboat as 'a little, spiteful, diabolical steamer' belching out a volume of malignant smoke, but his words for the Téméraire might equally well have been applied to the Bellerophon. Behind the furiously paddling tugboat, 'slow, sad, and majestic, follows the brave old ship, with death, as it were, written on her...