I have become adicted to Ancestry.com and am lucky enough that one side of my family can be researched way back into the dim times.
The other side has hit a brick wall and I have to wait until someone else in the world may have more information.
How is everyone else going?
The other side has hit a brick wall and I have to wait until someone else in the world may have more information.
How is everyone else going?
These records have just been released on Find My Past UK. I am happy to search names if anyone wants me to.
Prison ship (Hulk) registers1811-1843
Search records for around 8,900 prisoners held on prison ships between 1811 and 1843. Prison ships, or hulks, were ships used as floating prisons โ often ships were used that were no longer fit for battle but were still afloat.
This collection of records includes details of prisoners on the following hulks: Bellerophon, Euryalus, Hardy and Antelope, as well as a small number of records for Parkhurst prison.
You may find that your ancestors appear in more than one hulk as they could have been transferred from one hulk to another.
I have attached a sample of the kind of informationavailable from the prison ships.
No, just the ships mentioned in the first post. They werent transport ships though, they were basically jails and then they moved them from there to be transported. Lots of the prisoners were very young, mostly teenagers. I guess the real jails must have been overloaded.
I'll put some more info in the next post. It will be a bit of a scroller.
Prison ship (Hulk) registers 1811-1843
Bellerophon Hulk
The Bellerophon, like many other prison hulks, had been a Naval war ship which was decommissioned after the battle of Waterloo in 1815. On 2 September 1815 she was moored alongside the dockyard at Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppy and over the next two weeks her crew stripped her of everything that made her a warship. On 13 September the crew were paid off and the Navy Board agreed to her being converted into a prison hulk. By 16 October 1816 she was ready to take on board her first convicts.
Until 1823 it was the usual practice to imprison boys, some as young as eight, in the same hulks and the same cells as adult males. In 1823 the system was changed. John Henry Capper, Superintendent of the Convict Establishment, was ordered to separate the boys from the men and to provide separate accommodation for them. Accordingly the majority of the adult prisoners were transferred to other ships.
Sixty one boys between the ages of nine and 17 remained on board and on 19 February 1823 the first boys to be transferred from other hulks joined them. By the end of the first year, 348 boys had arrived on the Bellerophon.
The Bellerophon remained as a boys' hulk until the end of 1825. By this time, the authorities had decided that she was no longer suitable for the confinement of boys, apparently because the internal layout did not allow sufficient space for workshops.
In January 1826, John Henry Capper, superintendent of the convict establishment, reported that 'The Convict Boys, consisting of 350, under 16 years of age, have recently been transferred from the Bellerophon to the Euryalus at Chatham, the ship specially fitted for them.'
In April 1826, the Bellerophon, which had been renamed the Captivity Hulk, was taken into one of the docks at Sheerness, where she was re-coppered and prepared for a voyage to Plymouth. She sailed from Sheerness on 4 June, calling at Portsmouth to pick up some convicts, and arrived at Plymouth on 8 June.
By July 1826, she was stationed at Devonport, with 80 convicts on board. She remained as a convict ship at Devonport until July 1834 when John Henry Capper informed the home secretary that the convict stations at Plymouth and Sheerness had been abolished and the ships handed over to the Naval Department. On 21 January 1836 the Bellerophon (or the Captivity as it was now called) was sold for ยฃ4,030 and was broken up later that year.
Euryalus Hulk
The Euryalus was the former 36-gun frigate commanded by Captain Henry Blackwood which had kept watch on the enemy fleet at Cadiz in the weeks leading up to the Battle of Trafalgar.
The Euryalus remained in use as a boys' hulk until 1843, when it was broken up.
Hardy Hulk
The Hardy was a 14-gun brig, which launched on 7 August 1804. In January 1817 she was fitted out as a store-ship to be employed in carrying livestock between the Cape of Good Hope, St Helena and Ascension. On 31 October 1821 the Hardy arrived at Spithead from St Helena and in this year she was converted into a Convict Hospital Ship and stationed at Tipner Lake. On 6 August 1835 she was sold by Dutch auction for ยฃ105, the price having started at ยฃ400. During her time as a prison hulk she averaged around 100 convicts on board at any one time.
On 2 June 1823, 54 men were transferred from the Leviathan hulk to the York and from there to the Hardy. Unfortunately no date is given for this transfer โ it was presumably sometime between June 1823 and October 1824, as this is when some of the men on the Hardy received a pardon.
Punchy, just got a message from dilly, so have messaged you.
So sorry for whatever happened... it weren't me ๐
Anyway look in your message box okay? xx
