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The Medway prison hulks
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 cri
minals
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 (approximately 38 x 12m) and with a ceiling
only 4 feet 10 inches high (approximately 1.5m).
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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