Prison hulk Laurel

Richard aboard a Prison Hulk 

Richard was convicted of larceny on 24 October 1803, and (including pre-trial time), spent about a year in Newgate prison in Bristol before being moved to the south coast of England in preparation for transportation to New South Wales. He was put aboard the prison hulk “Laurel” moored at Portsmouth on 4 August 1804 [i]. When he joined the Laurel he was listed as 27 years of age [ii] . He spent 17 months on board Laurel prior to his journey to Australia.

The Laurel was the Dutch ship "Sirene", captured at the Battle of Saldanha Bay in South Africa in 1796. It was renamed HMS Daphne before being made a prison ship at Portsmouth in 1798. It remained in service there for some 28 years. Typically, prison hulks had masts, rigging and rudders removed. Guards lived in barracks built on deck. Dock-side ports (windows) were usually secured shut to prevent escape by the prisoners, but this only exacerbated poor ventilation and subsequent disease on board. Prison diets were often poor consisting mainly of ox-cheek, salted meat, oatmeal, bread or biscuit. Water was drawn from the river so dysentery was common.

Prison hulks were acknowledged even at the time as places of appalling misery and disease. As the National Maritime Museum  indicates "during the first 20 years of their establishment (from about 1776) the hulks received around 8000 convicts. Almost  one in four of incarcerated convicts died on board. Hulk fever, a form of typhus that flourished in dirty crowded conditions, was rife, as was pulmonary tuberculosis" [National Maritime Museum,  London, in Portcities.org.uk].

However, it is possible that luck was on Richard's side with his transfer to the Laurel. We have an account of two inspections of the hulk by James Neild Esq; one in 1802 (when Laurel was a hospital ship) and another in September 1807 some 16 months after Richard left for New South Wales (J Neild, 1810). James Neild was a prison reformer, Treasurer of the Society for the Discharge and Relief of Persons Imprisoned for Small Debts, and a Justice of the Peace.

In 1807, Neild found that there was "allocated to the Laurel on the Gosport side of Portsmouth,  a plot of ground. about 100 feet square which produced cabbages and other garden-stuff sufficient to  supply every convict with vegetables, one, two and sometimes three days in a week".  Also the Surgeon  "visits the ship once or twice a week". Richard's transfer to the Laurel may have been a piece of luck given that the usual diet for inmates at Newgate prison in Bristol was known to be poor, consisting mainly of  daily allowance of bread. It may be that the superior vegetable diet on board the Laurel improved Richard's health sufficiently for him and his fellow convicts to survive the long sea voyage to New South Wales. Also, there was active work available at Portsmouth, which was not permitted in any form at Newgate.

Of course, it is not completely certain that the better conditions that James Neild described were in place when Richard was a prisoner on the Laurel a few years earlier, but it does seem very likely. Prior to 1804, Laurel had been a hospital ship at Portsmouth and the vegetable garden was probably for the benefit of sick prisoners initially.  In July 1804, (only a month before Richard arrived), Laurel was converted to a normal "receiving" prison hulk and it is likely that the vegetable garden remained alongside Laurel throughout this whole period because it was noted in Neild's second visit in 1807, and it may have remained much longer. 

Neild reported that conditions on the three hulks he  visited at Portsmouth (Captivity, Laurel and the the hospital-ship Sagesse) were better than many. The fit and healthy prisoners from the Captivity and Laurel were employed in the dockyards and if they worked well, received the dock yard  allowance of one biscuit, one pint of small beer [iii] and a halfpenny worth of tobacco each day. Those unable to work, and the convalescents, spun oakum [iv] and cut wood which was sold in parcels to the ships of war.

Neild noted that Laurel had a complement of 196 convicts at the time of this inspection, of which  94 slept on the lower deck. The upper deck was divided into 3 wards : "19 convicts in the fore ward, 26 in the middle and 57 in the aft ward, where the best-behaved were placed".  He noted that contrary to the usual practice, he found every porthole on the Captivity and the Laurel open to provide good ventilation. Despite these markedly better conditions, deaths on board the hulks at Portsmouth were still common; about one death every month on the Captivity and one every second month on the Laurel.

Home Office records show that 101 convicts were taken aboard the convict ship Fortune in January 1806 from hulks in Woolwich and Portsmouth (HO 13/17). Richard was among those taken from the Laurel.  Fortune was part of a small fleet that left Spithead for New South Wales on 28 January 1806 (see the page "Fortune 1806" on this site).

Acknowledgement  Information for this page, particularly the Quarterly Lists for Laurel, was provided by Peter Bennett, genealogist from Oxfordshire, UK.

REFERENCE NOTES

[i] The UK Prison Hulk Registers and Letter Books, 1802-1849 records the date of Richard's arrival on the Laurel as 10 March 1805. This seems to be an error because the Quarterly Lists for Laurel (T38/318 Treasury) records Richard's date of entry as 4 August 1804. His first allocation of clothing and other goods (including leg irons and a bed) were made in the quarter ending 30 September 1804, as follows:

Quarter Ending

30 September 1804 1 jacket, 1 breeches, 1 shoes, 2 shirts, 1 stockings, 1 bed,  1 blanket, 1 irons

31 December 1804 1 stockings, 1 handkerchief, 1 waistcoat

31 March 1805 1 jacket, 1 breeches, 1 shoes

30 June 1805 1 stockings

30 September 1805 1 shoes, 2 shirts, 1 stockings, 1 handkerchief

31 December 1805 1 stockings

31 March 1806 1 waistcoat  (Note: Discharged Jany.9 for New S Wales).

[ii]  Richard's recorded age of 27 on arrival at the Laurel on 4 August 1804 is one piece of evidence confirming that he was born in 1777. The best evidence suggests Richard was the son of Jeremiah and Elizabeth Woodbury, baptised in Holcome Rogus, Devon, on 18 October 1777.

[iii]  Small beer was weak (low alcohol) beer.

[iv]  Oakum is hemp or manila fibres that have been unpicked from old and condemned ropes, which are then spun, tarred and used for caulking the under-water seams of wooden ships to make them watertight. Unpicking was a slow and tedious process and very hard on fingers and thumbs (P Kemp, The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea. 1990). 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kemp, P (1990) The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea. Oxford University Press.

Neild, J (1810) State of the Prisons in England, Scotland and Wales. John Nicholls and Sons. Fleet Street, London.

Page created on 29 September 2013.