Prison ship
The first such ship came into use on 15 July 1776 under command of Mr Duncan Campbell and was moored at Barking Creek with prisoners doing hard labour on the shore during daylight hours.
Private companies owned and operated some of the British hulks holding prisoners bound for penal transportation to Australia and America.
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.
[18] The first British use of a prison ship was the privately owned Tayloe, engaged by the Home Office in 1775 via contract with her owner, Duncan Campbell.
[19] Tayloe was moored in the Thames with the intention that she be the receiving point for all inmates whose sentences of transportation to the Americas had been delayed by the American Rebellion.
For most, their incarceration was brief as the Home Office had also offered pardons for any transportee who joined the Army or Navy, or chose to voluntarily leave the British Isles for the duration of their sentence.
In April and May 1776, legislation was passed to formally convert sentences of transportation to the Americas, to hard labour on the Thames for between three and ten years.
[20] In July 1776, Tayloe's owner Duncan Campbell was named Overseer of Convicts on the Thames and awarded a contract for the housing of transportees and use of their labour.
[21] Many inmates were in ill health when brought from their gaols, but none of the ships had adequate quarantine facilities, and there was a continued contamination risk caused by the flow of excrement from the sick bays.
In April 1778 the first Justitia was converted into a receiving ship, where inmates were stripped of their prison clothing, washed and held in quarantine for up to four days before being transferred to the other vessels.
[33] In 1987, Colonel Gregorio Honasan, leader of various coups d'état in the Philippines was captured and was imprisoned in a navy ship then temporarily converted to be his holding facility.
HMS Maidstone was used as a prison ship in Northern Ireland in the 1970s for suspected Republican paramilitaries and non-combatant activist supporters.
[36] In June 2008 The Guardian printed claims by Reprieve that US forces are holding people arrested in the Global War on Terrorism on active naval warships, including the USS Bataan and Peleliu, although this was denied by the US Navy.
[38] The Libyan national Abu Anas al-Libi who worked a computer specialist for al-Qaeda was imprisoned in the USS San Antonio for the 1998 United States embassy bombings.
[39] In 2009 the US 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.
[40][41][42] 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 off Upnor in the neighbouring River Medway, but Dickens used artistic licence to place them on the Thames.
[43] French artist and author Ambroise Louis Garneray depicted his life on a prison hulk at Portsmouth in the memoir Mes Pontons.
