Pip returns at dawn the next day with a meat pie and a file for the convict. Later that day he finds himself joining a group of soldiers who are hunting for Magwitch and another convict. They find both men together in a ditch. The soldiers handcuff the convicts and lead them back to the river where there is a boat waiting to collect them and return them to their floating prison. '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.'
The bleak reports in the newspapers of the early nineteenth century give the impression that most ships ended their days dramatically: lost with all hands during a gale; driven ashore and smashed to pieces on the rocks; or wrecked on the hidden hazards of the Goodwin Sands or the constantly shifting shoals of the East Coast and the Thames Estuary. In the days before radar and reliable engines there were all too many merchant ships and fishing boats lost around the shores of Britain every year, but this was rarely the fate of the wooden warships. Remarkably few men-of-war of Nelson's era were wrecked or lost at sea and none were sunk in action. Of the 126 74- and 64-gun ships built in British yards between 1755 and 1783 (the period dominated by the designs of Sir Thomas Slade) only seventeen were wrecked, four were burnt and three were captured by the enemy. The remaining 122 ships died slow, lingering deaths as their seams opened up and wet rot and dry rot gradually softened and crumbled their oak timbers to the point where they had to be sent to the breaker's yard to be destroyed. The average lifespan of a warship of the Slade era was twenty-seven years. Some lasted for forty-five years or more, but the later years of most warships were spent not on active service but in retirement.
The fate of the majority of Nelson's ships was to be hulked. That is to say they were decommissioned, their crews were paid off, their masts and guns were removed, and they were put to use in the various royal dockyards as hulks. Many were converted into receiving ships: these were used as floating barracks for sailors between commissions or for the accommodation of volunteers and pressed men before they were assigned to a warship. Some of the hulks became store ships for coal or gunpowder. Some were converted into floating hospital ships or convalescent ships or were used as quarantine ships (called lazarettos) for men suspected of having infectious diseases. A few became sheer hulks or floating cranes, and several were even used as breakwaters. During the Napoleonic wars many old warships were converted into prison ships for the thousands of French prisoners of war captured during the various battles of the period. They can be seen in several contemporary paintings, moored two deep in a long line down the centre of Portsmouth Harbour, their mutilated hulls bearing little resemblance to the warships they once were. In each ship were crammed anything from 500 to 1,000 prisoners. They were given no work, they got no exercise, and they barely survived on the rations provided by dishonest contractors who supplied them with bad fish, inadequate amounts of beef and potatoes, and inedible bread so that they looked like 'a generation of dead men rising for a moment from their tombs, hollow-eyed, wan and earthy of complexion, bent-backed, shaggy bearded, and of a terrifying emaciation.'
In addition to the ships for prisoners of war there were the convict ships. These came into existence in the 1770s when the American War of Independence put an end to the long-standing system of transporting convicted criminals to the American colonies. English judges continued to sentence people to transportation but, with the gaols already overcrowded, some other solution was urgently needed and it was decided, as a temporary expedient, to house the convicts in floating hulks. A law was enacted in July 1779 which decreed that any man convicted of grand larceny or similar offence normally punishable by transportation could henceforth be punished by being confined on board ships or vessels properly converted for that purpose and that they should be 'employed in hard labour in the raising sand, soil, and gravel from, and cleansing the River Thames, or any other river navigable for ships of burthen . . .' The temporary expedient lasted for eighty years. In addition to heaving sand and gravel from the Thames, the convicts were set to work on many other tasks, mostly in and around the dockyards. The work was either mindlessly repetitive, like picking oakum or chipping the rust off roundshot, or involved heavy manual labour: unloading iron and shingle ballast from ships, removing and stacking timber in the dockyards, unloading coal, breaking stones, and cleaning out sawmills, tanks and drains.
The offences for which the convicts were punished varied from the serious to the trivial. At Maidstone Assizes in March 1782, for instance, ten men were sentenced to hard labour on the Thames. James Robinson and Jonathan Bassett got three years for breaking into a house at Deptford and stealing two pairs of shoe buckles, five silver seals and a pair of silver salt spoons. John Watts was sentenced to two years for stealing three chickens from an outhouse at Eynesford belonging to Sir John Dyke. Samuel Mackew got two years for entering a dwelling house at Milton and stealing a silver pint mug and two silver milk pots. And Stephen Woolley got one year for breaking into a store in Sheerness dockyard and stealing 'sundry pieces of new and old iron, part of His Majesty's naval stores'. These men got off relatively lightly. The majority of the men on the convict ships were not only sentenced to hard labour in the dockyards but were later transported to Australia which proved a convenient alternative to the former American colonies.
Initially there were just two convict ships, the Justitia, an old Indiaman, and the Censor, a former frigate, which were moored in the Thames near Woolwich so that the convicts could be put to work in the dockyard and the Royal Arsenal. By the end of the Napoleonic war in 1815 there were five convict ships. The Justitia was still moored at Woolwich. In addition there was the Retribution at Sheerness, the Portland moored in the bleak expanse of Langstone Harbour near Portsmouth; and in Portsmouth Harbour itself were two convict hulks, the Captivity and the Laurel.
In July 1815 Mr John Henry Capper, a 41-year-old civil servant who had been a clerk in the Home Office, was appointed to take charge of the prison hulks. His official title was 'Superintendent of the several ships and vessels for the confinement of offenders under sentence of transportation', and he was to remain in this post for the next thirty-two years. It is a pity that we have no idea what he looked like and have only his twice-yearly reports to the Home Office to go on. He comes across as a Dickensian character, a senior functionary in the Circumlocution Office perhaps, not so grand as Mr Tite Barnacle but considerably more conscientious than Mr Wobbler. He is at pains to assure his masters that everything is always under control. He does not entirely ignore problems but does his best to make them appear as local difficulties of little consequence. The opening paragraph of his report of 24 July 1823 is entirely typicaclass="underline" 'Sir, I have the honour of reporting to you, that the Prisoners on board the respective Convict Ships have since my last Report, continued to behave in a very orderly manner (with the exception of a few Convicts at Woolwich, who attempted to escape) and that they have fulfilled their tasks of labour when on shore, to the satisfaction of the persons under whom they have been employed.' He goes on to stress how much the prisoners have earned by comparison with the overall expense of the hulks, and reveals that 'the health of the Prisoners has been generally very good, and although an indication of scurvy had manifested itself in one of the ships in a rather formidable shape, that disease, has, by timely attention, been subdued without the loss of one prisoner.'