Prison ship - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

A prison ship, historically sometimes called a prison hulk
Hulk (ship)
A hulk is a ship that is afloat, but incapable of going to sea. Although sometimes used to describe a ship that has been launched but not completed, the term most often refers to an old ship that has had its rigging or internal equipment removed, retaining only its flotational qualities...

, is a vessel used as a prison

Prison

A prison is a place in which people are physically confined and, usually, deprived of a range of personal freedoms. Imprisonment or incarceration is a legal penalty that may be imposed by the state for the commission of a crime...

, often to hold convicts awaiting transportation to penal colonies. This practice was popular with the British government in the 18th and 19th centuries.

History

The vessels were a common form of internment in Britain and elsewhere in the 18th and 19th centuries. Charles F. Campbell writes that around 40 ships of the British Navy were converted for use as prison hulks. Other hulks included , which became a prison ship at Woolwich

Woolwich

Woolwich is a district in south London, England, located in the London Borough of Greenwich. The area is identified in the London Plan as one of 35 major centres in Greater London.Woolwich formed part of Kent until 1889 when the County of London was created...

in February 1840, One was established at Gibraltar

Gibraltar

Gibraltar is a British overseas territory located on the southern end of the Iberian Peninsula at the entrance of the Mediterranean. A peninsula with an area of , it has a northern border with Andalusia, Spain. The Rock of Gibraltar is the major landmark of the region...

, others at Bermuda

Bermuda

Bermuda is a British overseas territory in the North Atlantic Ocean. Located off the east coast of the United States, its nearest landmass is Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, about to the west-northwest. It is about south of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and northeast of Miami, Florida...

, at Antigua

Antigua

Antigua , also known as Waladli, is an island in the West Indies, in the Leeward Islands in the Caribbean region, the main island of the country of Antigua and Barbuda. Antigua means "ancient" in Spanish and was named by Christopher Columbus after an icon in Seville Cathedral, Santa Maria de la...

, off Brooklyn

Brooklyn

Brooklyn is the most populous of New York City's five boroughs, with nearly 2.6 million residents, and the second-largest in area. Since 1896, Brooklyn has had the same boundaries as Kings County, which is now the most populous county in New York State and the second-most densely populated...

in Wallabout Bay

Wallabout Bay

Wallabout Bay is small body of water in Upper New York Bay along the northwest shore of the New York City borough of Brooklyn, between the present Williamsburg and Manhattan bridges, opposite Corlear's Hook on Manhattan to the west, across the East River...

, and at Sheerness

Sheerness

Sheerness is a town located beside the mouth of the River Medway on the northwest corner of the Isle of Sheppey in north Kent, England. With a population of 12,000 it is the largest town on the island....

. Other hulks were anchored off Woolwich

Woolwich

, Portsmouth

Portsmouth

Portsmouth is the second largest city in the ceremonial county of Hampshire on the south coast of England. Portsmouth is notable for being the United Kingdom's only island city; it is located mainly on Portsea Island...

, Chatham

Chatham, Medway

Chatham is one of the Medway towns located within the Medway unitary authority, in North Kent, in South East England.Although the dockyard has long been closed and is now being redeveloped into a business and residential community as well as a museum featuring the famous submarine, HMS Ocelot,...

, Deptford

Deptford

Deptford is a district of south London, England, located on the south bank of the River Thames. It is named after a ford of the River Ravensbourne, and from the mid 16th century to the late 19th was home to Deptford Dockyard, the first of the Royal Navy Dockyards.Deptford and the docks are...

, and Plymouth-Dock/Devonport. Private companies owned and operated the hulks holding prisoners bound for penal transportation

Penal transportation

Transportation or penal transportation is the deporting of convicted criminals to a penal colony. Examples include transportation by France to Devil's Island and by the UK to its colonies in the Americas, from the 1610s through the American Revolution in the 1770s, and then to Australia between...

British use during the American War of Independence

During the American War of Independence, more Americans died as prisoners of war on British prison ships

Prisoners in the American Revolutionary War

During the American Revolutionary War the management and treatment of prisoners of war was very different from the standards of modern warfare. Modern standards, as outlined in the Geneva Conventions, expect captives to be held and cared for by their captors...

through intentional neglect than died in every battle of the war combined. During the war, 11,500 men and women died due to overcrowding, contaminated water, starvation, and disease on prison ships anchored in the East River

East River

The East River is a tidal strait in New York City. It connects Upper New York Bay on its south end to Long Island Sound on its north end. It separates Long Island from the island of Manhattan and the Bronx on the North American mainland...

; the bodies of those who died were hastily buried along the shore. This is now commemorated by the "Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument

Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument

The Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument in Fort Greene Park, in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, is a memorial to the more than 11,500 prisoners of war who died in captivity, known as the prison ship martyrs. The remains of a small fraction of all those who died on the ships are in a crypt below...

" in Fort Greene Park

Fort Greene Park

Fort Greene Park is a municipal park in Brooklyn, New York, comprising 30.2 acres .The park includes the high ground where the Continental Army built Fort Putnam during the American Revolutionary War. The site was chosen and the construction supervised by General Nathanael Greene...

in New York City. One such British ship during the War of Independence was the .

Christopher Vail, of Southold, who was aboard Jersey in 1781, later wrote:

'When a man died he was carried up on the forecastle and laid there until the next morning at 8 o'clock when they were all lowered down the ship sides by a rope round them in the same manner as tho' they were beasts. There was 8 died of a day while I was there. They were carried on shore in heaps and hove out the boat on the wharf, then taken across a hand barrow, carried to the edge of the bank, where a hole was dug 1 or 2 feet deep and all hove in together.'

In 1778, Robert Sheffield of Stonington, Connecticut

Stonington, Connecticut

The Town of Stonington is located in New London County, Connecticut, in the state's southeastern corner. It includes the borough of Stonington, the villages of Pawcatuck, Lords Point, Wequetequock, the eastern halves of the villages of Mystic and Old Mystic...

, escaped from one of the prison ships, and told his story in the Connecticut Gazette, printed July 10, 1778. He was one of 350 prisoners held in a compartment below the decks.

"The heat was so intense that (the hot sun shining all day on deck) they were all naked, which also served the 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. The air was so foul that at times a lamp could not be kept burning, by reason of which the bodies were not missed until they had been dead ten days."

British use in Napoleonic Wars

A typical British hulk, the former man-of-war , was decommissioned after the Battle of Trafalgar

Battle of Trafalgar

The Battle of Trafalgar was a sea battle fought between the British Royal Navy and the combined fleets of the French Navy and Spanish Navy, during the War of the Third Coalition of the Napoleonic Wars ....

and became a prison ship in October 1815. Anchored off Sheerness

Sheerness

in England, and renamed HMS Captivity on 5 October 1824, she usually held about 480 convicts in woeful conditions and , which became a prison hulk in 1818 at Deptford

Deptford

. Another famous prison ship was the which served from 1812–1815. The prison hulks housed prisoners of war and captured crews from French corsairs in horrific conditions of neglect, filth, disease, and starvation. Maritime historians estimate that between 1803 and 1814, 12,845 imprisoned Frenchmen died in British prison hulks.

British use in New South Wales

In New South Wales, Australia, hulks were also used as juvenile correctional centers. Vernon (1867–1892) and Sobraon (1892–1911) - the latter officially a "nautical school ship" - were anchored in Sydney Harbor. The commander of the two ships, Frederick Neitenstein (1850–1921), introduced a system of "discipline, surveillance, physical drill and a system of grading and marks. He aimed at creating a 'moral earthquake' in each new boy. Every new admission was placed in the lowest grade and, through hard work and obedience, gradually won a restricted number of privileges."

Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...

assembled a small fleet of ships in the Bay of Lübeck

Bay of Lübeck

The Bay of Lübeck is a basin in the southwestern Baltic Sea, off the shores of German lands of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Schleswig-Holstein. It forms the southwestern part of the Bay of Mecklenburg....

to hold concentration camp bound prisoners. These consisted of the passenger liners Cap Arcona and the , and the vessels Thielbek

Thielbek

The Thielbek was a 2,815 GRT freighter that was sunk along with the SS Cap Arcona and the Deutschland during British air raids on May 3, 1945 while anchored in the Bay of Lübeck with the loss of 2,750 lives...

and Athen

Athen

Athen may refer to:* Athens, capital of Greece - Athen in German, Norwegian, and Danish* SS Athen , German merchant ship lost off Portland Bill in the English Channel in 1906, and now a dive site....

. All were destroyed on May 3rd, 1945 by British aircraft, the inmates were either killed by bombing or strafing, burned alive on the ships who did not sink due to the low depth of the water at the anchorage or drowned while trying to reach the shore due to the water's low temperature of 8° C.

Military regime in Chile

Reports from Amnesty International

Amnesty International

Amnesty International is an international non-governmental organisation whose stated mission is "to conduct research and generate action to prevent and end grave abuses of human rights, and to demand justice for those whose rights have been violated."Following a publication of Peter Benenson's...

, the US Senate and Chilean Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Rettig Report

The Rettig Report, officially The National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation Report, is a 1991 report by a commission designated by then President Patricio Aylwin encompassing human rights abuses resulting in death or disappearance that occurred in Chile during the years of military rule...

describe Esmeralda (BE-43)

Esmeralda (BE-43)

Esmeralda is a steel-hulled four-masted barquentine tall ship of the Chilean Navy, currently the second tallest and longest sailing ship in the world.- Construction :The ship is the sixth to carry the name Esmeralda...

as a kind of a floating jail and torture chamber for political prisoners of the Augusto Pinochet

Augusto Pinochet

Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte, more commonly known as Augusto Pinochet , was a Chilean army general and dictator who assumed power in a coup d'état on 11 September 1973...

regime from 1973 to 1980. It is claimed that probably over a hundred persons were kept there at times and subjected to hideous treatment, among them the British priest Miguel Woodward.

Italy

Venice

Venice is a city in northern Italy which is renowned for the beauty of its setting, its architecture and its artworks. It is the capital of the Veneto region...

uses boats to ferry convicted criminals around the city.

United Kingdom

was used as a prison ship in Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland is one of the four countries of the United Kingdom. Situated in the north-east of the island of Ireland, it shares a border with the Republic of Ireland to the south and west...

in the 1970s for suspected Nationalist paramilitaries

Paramilitary

A paramilitary is a force whose function and organization are similar to those of a professional military, but which is not considered part of a state's formal armed forces....

and non-combatant

Non-combatant

Non-combatant is a term in the law of war describing civilians not taking a direct part in hostilities, as well as persons such as medical personnel and military chaplains who are regular soldiers but are protected because of their function as well as soldiers who are hors de combat ; that is, sick,...

activist supporters. The current president of the Nationalist political party Sinn Féin

Sinn Féin

Sinn Féin is a left wing, Irish republican political party in Ireland. The name is Irish for "ourselves" or "we ourselves", although it is frequently mistranslated as "ourselves alone". Originating in the Sinn Féin organisation founded in 1905 by Arthur Griffith, it took its current form in 1970...

, Gerry Adams

Gerry Adams

Gerry Adams is an Irish republican politician and Teachta Dála for the constituency of Louth. From 1983 to 1992 and from 1997 to 2011, he was an abstentionist Westminster Member of Parliament for Belfast West. He is the president of Sinn Féin, the second largest political party in Northern...

, spent time on the Maidstone in 1972. He was released in order to take part in peace talks.

In 1997, the United Kingdom Government established a new prison ship, HMP Weare

Weare (HM Prison)

HM Prison The Weare was a prison ship berthed in Portland Harbour in Dorset, England.The UK established The Weare in 1997 as a temporary measure to ease prison overcrowding. Weare was docked at the disused Royal Navy dockyard at the Isle of Portland...

, as a temporary measure to ease prison overcrowding. Weare was docked at the disused Royal Navy

Royal Navy

The Royal Navy is the naval warfare service branch of the British Armed Forces. Founded in the 16th century, it is the oldest service branch and is known as the Senior Service...

dockyard at Portland

Isle of Portland

The Isle of Portland is a limestone tied island, long by wide, in the English Channel. Portland is south of the resort of Weymouth, forming the southernmost point of the county of Dorset, England. A tombolo over which runs the A354 road connects it to Chesil Beach and the mainland. Portland and...

, Dorset

Dorset

Dorset , is a county in South West England on the English Channel coast. The county town is Dorchester which is situated in the south. The Hampshire towns of Bournemouth and Christchurch joined the county with the reorganisation of local government in 1974...

. On 9 March 2005 it was announced that the Weare was to close. Since then, the government has advertised for a contractor to supply 800 prison ship spaces to alleviate overcrowding.

The Weare was used as a floating barracks during the Falklands war, and was subsequently purchased by the New York State Department of Correctional Services

New York State Department of Correctional Services

The New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision or NYSDOCCS is the agency of New York State responsible for the care, confinement, and rehabilitation of approximately 63,000 inmates at 71 correctional facilities funded by the State of New York. The department employs...

for use as a rehabilitation centre for those involved in drug crime. The Weare is a flat bottomed barge, and its superstructure consist of steel containers stacked on top of one another provide five levels of category C accommodation. It arrived in Portland Harbour on 13 March 1997, but there was no planning permission. The application had been rejected at the beginning of February mainly on the grounds that it would be a blight to tourism.

Philippines

In 1987, Col. Gregorio Honasan, leader of various coup de etat in the Philippines was captured and was imprisoned in a navy ship temporarily converted to be his holding facility. However, he escaped after convincing the guards to join his cause.

United States

In the United States, the Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center

Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center

thumb|Entrance in [[Hunts Point, Bronx]]The Vernon C. Bain Center is an 800-bed jail barge used to hold inmates for New York City as part of the New York City Department of Corrections as part of the vast Rikers Island jail complex...

is a prison barge operated by the New York City Department of Correction

New York City Department of Correction

The New York City Department of Correction is responsible for New York City's inmates, housing the majority of them on Rikers Island. It employs 9,500 uniformed officers and 1,400 civilian staff, has 543 vehicles, and processes over 100,000 new inmates every year, retaining a population of inmates...

as an adjunct facility to Rikers Island

Rikers Island

Rikers Island is New York City's main jail complex, as well as the name of the island on which it sits, in the East River between Queens and the mainland Bronx, adjacent to the runways of LaGuardia Airport. The island itself is part of the borough of the Bronx, though it is included as part of...

. However, it was built for this purpose rather than repurposed.

In June 2008 The Guardian

The Guardian

The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...

printed claims by Reprieve that the US military is holding people arrested in the War on Terrorism

War on Terrorism

The War on Terror is a term commonly applied to an international military campaign led by the United States and the United Kingdom with the support of other North Atlantic Treaty Organisation as well as non-NATO countries...

on active navy ships, including the and , although this was denied by the US Navy.

In 2009 the U.S. Navy converted the main deck aboard the supply ship into a brig to hold pirates captured off the coast of Somalia

Somalia

Somalia , officially the Somali Republic and formerly known as the Somali Democratic Republic under Socialist rule, is a country located in the Horn of Africa. Since the outbreak of the Somali Civil War in 1991 there has been no central government control over most of the country's territory...

until they could be transferred to Kenya for prosecution. The brig was capable of holding up to twenty-six prisoners and was operated by a detachment of Marines from the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit

26th Marine Expeditionary Unit

The 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit is one of seven Marine Expeditionary Units currently in existence in the United States Marine Corps. The Marine Expeditionary Unit is a Marine Air-Ground Task Force with a strength of about 2,200 personnel. The MEU consists of four major parts: a command element,...

.

In 2011 the United States admits to holding -- not just transporting -- terrorist suspects on ships at sea, and claims legal authority to do so, despite the clear text of the Third Geneva Convention explicitly forbidding such use of ships: "Art 22. Prisoners of war may be interned only in premises located on land and affording every guarantee of hygiene and healthfulness."

Other types

Around the Mediterranean, convicts and prisoners-of-war were used as oarsmen

Galley slave

A galley slave was a slave rowing in a galley. The expression has two distinct meanings: it can refer either to a convicted criminal sentenced to work at the oar , or to a kind of human chattel, often a prisoner of war, assigned to his duty of rowing.-Antiquity:Contrary to the popular image of the...

on galleys as late as the 19th century.

In literature

Charles Dickens

Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...

' novel Great Expectations

Great Expectations

Great Expectations is a novel by Charles Dickens. It was first published in serial form in the publication All the Year Round from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. It has been adapted for stage and screen over 250 times....

opens in 1812 with the escape of the convict Abel Magwitch

Abel Magwitch

Abel Magwitch is a fictional character from Charles Dickens’ 1861 novel Great Expectations.-Synopsis:Charles Dickens setted his character Abel Magwitch to meet a man called Compeyson at the Epsom Races. Compeyson, Dickens wrote, had been brought up in a boarding school and was a good-looking and...

from a hulk moored in the Thames Estuary

Thames Estuary

The Thames Mouth is the estuary in which the River Thames meets the waters of the North Sea.It is not easy to define the limits of the estuary, although physically the head of Sea Reach, near Canvey Island on the Essex shore is probably the western boundary...

. In fact, the prison ships were largely moored in the neighboring River Medway

River Medway

The River Medway, which is almost entirely in Kent, England, flows for from just inside the West Sussex border to the point where it enters the Thames Estuary....

, but Dickens combined real elements to create fictional locations for his work.

In the early stages of Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo

Victor-Marie Hugo was a Frenchpoet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France....

's novel Les Misérables

Les Misérables

Les Misérables , translated variously from the French as The Miserable Ones, The Wretched, The Poor Ones, The Wretched Poor, or The Victims), is an 1862 French novel by author Victor Hugo and is widely considered one of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century...

, Jean Valjean

Jean Valjean

Jean Valjean is the protagonist of Victor Hugo's 1862 novel Les Misérables...

is a convict on the galleys at Toulon

Toulon

Toulon is a town in southern France and a large military harbor on the Mediterranean coast, with a major French naval base. Located in the Provence-Alpes-Côte-d'Azur region, Toulon is the capital of the Var department in the former province of Provence....

in France.

French artist and author Ambroise Louis Garneray

Ambroise Louis Garneray

Ambroise Louis Garneray was a French corsair, painter and writer. He served under Robert Surcouf and Jean-Marie Dutertre, and was held prisoner by the British for eight years.- Early life :...

depicted his life on a prison hulk at Portsmouth in the memoir Mes Pontons.

External links

American Prisoners of the Revolution by Danske Dandridge A Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks". Founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart, it is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books...

document.
British prison ships
Long Island History
Charles F. Campbell, The Intolerable Hulks (2001)
Convicts to Australia, Prison hulks
New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, Prison Ship Martyrs Monument

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.