Local history

1793 to 1815 - prison hulks moored in the Medway

During the reign of Elizabeth I, the sentence of transportation began to be used as the most severe punishment available to the law below the death penalty. This meant that thousands of people were sent over to the American colonies, where cheap labour was constantly in demand. With the end of the American War of Independence in 1776, this stopped and a crisis developed in the English penal system.

It was partly solved by housing many convicted criminals sentenced to hard labour on ageing warships, which could be anchored near the site of work on the banks of the Thames. These were the hulks. During the Napoleonic wars, their numbers grew to accommodate prisoners of war and spread to other rivers and estuaries, making them one of the features of life in the Medway Towns for many years.

The enormous numbers of prisoners of war brought to this country between 1793 and 1815 called into service more than 60 hulks. Some of the most notorious were moored off Chatham, such as the Brunswick, where 460 prisoners were crowded at night into a deck measuring 125 x 40 feet and with a ceiling only 4 feet 10 inches high.

Despite these conditions, some prisoners spent their long days making the most extraordinary decorative objects out of bone, straw and hair. These they sold to local people and visitors and some of their efforts - including spectacular ship models - are on display at the Guildhall Museum today.

After the end of the war, hulks remained on the Medway, housing civilian prisoners. It is a Medway hulk from which Magwitch escapes in Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, which is described in the book as lying "out a little way from the mud of the shore, like a wicked Noah's ark."

The last of the English prison hulks was destroyed by fire at Woolwich in 1857, on 14 July - Bastille Day.

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