by the Euryalus, a ship which a Select Committee on Gaols and Houses of Correction also recommended in 1835 be abandoned immediately. But authorities did nothing for another seven years, during which another 2500 boys under fourteen, some as young as eight or nine, were hustled aboard.26
Regardless of age, such boys were seen by authorities in simple terms: as prisoners who were no longer entitled to walk in the land of their birth and were being banished for the ‘good’ of the country, and perhaps for themselves.
The conscience of Britain was beginning to be stirred by social reformers like Elizabeth Fry, Quakers like Samuel Hoare, evangelical politicians like Thomas Buxton, lawyer-authors like Thomas Wontner, and reporter-authors like Charles Dickens, Henry Mayhew and George Reynolds. But authorities steadfastly wanted to cleanse themselves of unwanted ‘vermin’, drain away the ‘dregs’ and win the war on ‘wickedness’.
Young boys on the frontline were not spared, judged more on reputation and looks than the seriousness of their offences and denied benefits of understanding or mercy. So as two casualties of the war, Sparkes and Campbell had to be held in what a Royal Navy captain described as a ‘floating Bastille’.27
Prison-ship in Portsmouth Harbour, convicts going aboard, illustration and etching, Edward William Cooke, 1828. Image courtesy National Library of Australia, nla.obj-135934086.
5
A MATTER OF DISPOSAL
By the light of the torches we saw the black hulk laying 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 ships seemed in my young eyes to be ironed like the prisoners.
— Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Some boys leaving Millbank feigned illness in the hope of avoiding the HMS Euryalus and transportation. Others feigned good health in the hope, or chance, that the ultimate destination of Van Diemen’s Land might offer something advantageous. But irrespective of feigns or fancies, they were all being physically taken off the land of their childhood, land they would never step foot on again.
Walking up the gangway, Sparkes and Campbell would have experienced just as Dickens described: ‘No one seemed surprised to see him, or interested in seeing him, or glad to see him, or sorry to see him, or spoke a word, except that somebody in the boat growled at him as if to dogs “give way you!”’1
Their initiation to the floating, rotting Bastille was as if authorities wanted to scrub away their ‘wickedness’. One prisoner recalled:
We were stripped to the skin and scrubbed with a hard scrubbing brush, something like a stiff birch broom, and plenty of soft soap, while the hair was clipped from our heads as close as scissors could go. This scrubbing we endured until we looked like boiled lobsters, and the blood was drawn in many places.2
And any fellow hulk prisoners offering their friendship or services was, as one convict recalled, only ‘with a view to rob me of what little I had, for in this place there is no other motive or subject for ingenuity. All former friendships are dissolved and a man here will rob his best benefactor, or even messmate, of an article worth one halfpenny’.3
No friendships but a new number. Henry Sparkes was now recorded as 2434, and Charles Campbell, when he came aboard 1500 boys later, was 4012.4
No friends and no comforts. The hulks were wretched, foul-smelling places, with boys sleeping on bare boards, given brackish water and a poor diet with often tainted meat, scant medical care, and little or no religious or moral instruction. Mortality rates had been reduced but there was always on hand a ready supply of empty coffins. Thousands succumbed to typhoid and cholera, or became bearers of disease to Australia.
There were few concerns about numbers squeezed on board — some hulks held as many as 600 to 700 juveniles over three decks ‘without overcrowding’,5 at least according to official reports. The Euryalus had been home to 264 navy personnel but now it officially housed 400 offenders. Its design and small size — just 49 yards x 12.5 yards (45 m x 11.5 m) — defeated any attempt to adequately classify and separate prisoners. And in any event their age, size and convictions often provided few insights as to true ‘badness’ and where they ought to be housed: the upper deck designated for first-time offenders, the middle deck for those with more than one offence, and the lowest deck for the ‘worst’.
In what reforming journalist Henry Mayhew described as conditions ‘very like those found in the zoological gardens,’6 the first Euryalus chaplain, Reverend Thomas Price, presciently said that without greater classification and management based on criminality and behaviour, and adequate separation of the worst from the rest, his task of improving their morals and correcting the ‘evil….cannot possibly be accomplished’.7
Price was not optimistic about managing poor children ‘taken out of our streets, not only deplorably ignorant of all religious knowledge, but with habits opposed to every moral and social restraint’. It had been put to him that ‘such was the depravity of the boys that every attempt to moralise them would only terminate in disappointment’, and ‘I find much reason for the remark’.8
Sparkes and Campbell found themselves among boys of all ages, some listed as ten years or older but perhaps as young as eight or nine, and others as old as seventeen or eighteen, divided into small sections and corralled below deck for long periods. Their days were run on a military-like schedule under constant surveillance. Each morning around five, a wake-up call sounded for boys to open their portholes and stow their hammocks. Another signal sent them in small groups to hear prayers in ‘chapel’. Mustered on deck they waited in silent ranks for breakfast at about 6am, usually some gruel and a hunk of brown bread, before being ordered to clean the decks and begin their day’s labour around 8am, picking oakum or ‘tailoring’ crude clothing for hulk prisoners.
Groups of boys were monitored by older ‘head’ boys, chosen because of perceived ‘good conduct’ in prison. They were obliged to report any misbehaviour, real or perceived, such as a breach of the ‘silent system’, insolence, theft, refusing to work or fighting. Summary punishment was quickly decided and delivered. Officially, ‘in cases of convicts misbehaviour, mild and persuasive means of correction are first tried’. Such mild and persuasive means might mean reduced food rations, ‘confinement in a dark cell with no other food than bread and water, for not more than seven days…or moderate whipping which, in any case, is not allowed to exceed twenty four [sic] stripes.’9
Whipping or being ‘flogged’10 on the breech, usually by birch, was not a new punishment for most boys, and confinement in a small cell for up to a week in darkness and silence, with only bread and water as company, was more feared. Authorities saw this black hole as a greater terror for the wicked than the gallows and gibbet, one which might ‘break’ recalcitrant boys in the hope that solitude and silence would allow a small voice of conscience to be heard. But it could also instil an unbreakable resolve to resist and rebel.
Offences and attitudes were key features of new additions to a boy’s penal biography, an incessant and indelible inking of ‘badness’:
On board each hulk, a book is kept by the Overseer, in which are entered the names of all convicts; and on the first Sunday of every quarter, they are mustered, and the character of each convict, for the previous three months, is marked against his name, as follows: v.g. (very good); g. (good); in. (indifferent); b. (bad); v.b. (very bad).11
At noon the boys were fed more oatmeal gruel or boiled ox-cheek or soup, then allowed to trudge around the deck for an hour of air and exercise
