page_title: Prison ship
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Prison ship / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Newspaper showing a woodcut of the dockyard under construction on HMD Ireland Island Bermuda. The hill towards the left was levelled by quarrying.
context_page_description: A prison ship, often more accurately described as a prison hulk, is a current or former seagoing vessel that has been modified to become a place of substantive detention for convicts, prisoners of war or civilian internees. While many nations have deployed prison ships over time, the practice was most widespread in seventeenth and eighteenth century Britain, as the government sought to address the issues of overcrowded civilian jails on land and an influx of enemy detainees from the War of Jenkins' Ear, the Seven Years' War and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.
context_section_description: 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 Royal Navy were converted for use as prison hulks. Other hulks included HMS Warrior, which became a prison ship at Woolwich in February 1840. One was established at Gibraltar, others at Bermuda (the Dromedary), at Antigua, off Brooklyn in Wallabout Bay, and at Sheerness. Other hulks were anchored off Woolwich, Portsmouth, Chatham, Deptford, and Plymouth-Dock/Devonport. HMS Argenta, originally a cargo ship with no portholes, was acquired and pressed into service in Belfast Lough Northern Ireland to enforce the Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Act (Northern Ireland) 1922 during the period around the Irish Catholics' Bloody Sunday (1920). Private companies owned and operated some of the British hulks holding prisoners bound for penal transportation to Australia and America.
  HMP Weare was used by the British as a prison ship between 1997 and 2006.  It was towed across the Atlantic from the United States in 1997 to be converted into a jail. It was berthed in Portland Harbour in Dorset, England.
caption: 1848 Woodcut of the Royal Naval Dockyard, Ireland Island, Bermuda, showing four prison hulks
exif: {}