With their masts and rigging removed, they could be towed from site to site, and held around 300-500 prisoners awaiting transportation – men and boys from the age of 12. Pressed into service as temporary measures, they became part of the prison landscape for 80 years, until the system was finally disbanded. The hulks were immortalised in Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, first serialised in 1860-1. The novel was set in the early decades of the nineteenth century, where narrator Pip found himself an unwilling participant in the escape of a prisoner, Abel Magwitch. Having escaped from a hulk near to the foggy marshes of the Thames Estuary, Magwitch rose from amongst the graves to terrify young Pip. Eventually recaptured, he was escorted back to the ship, and it is here that the reader first encounters the hulks: ‘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’.
Prison hulks – repurposed ships used as floating prisons – were a notorious government response to prison overcrowding at the end of the 18th century.
