repeat of earlier meals. After another brief stint of silent walking on deck — popular ‘games’ of cards, dice and marbles were strictly forbidden — and a final muster to ensure they held no weapons or stolen goods, they were ordered to file below to the foul and cramped berths to prepare their hammocks and listen to an evening prayer before a final lock down at 8pm. By 9pm, with ‘profound silence’ ordered, the ship was ‘as quiet as if there was not a soul on board’, the eeriness broken only by the lap-lap of the Thames and the strike of the bell and an ‘all’s well’ call by guards every half-hour.13
On Saturdays the boys had a weekly wash ‘all over in tepid water and soap’.14 A few had visits from family vainly pleading for their boys to be released, but family was a foreign concept for most.
Authorities budgeted for each boy to have a roughly made shirt, jacket and pair of breeches, but just as police had often confiscated the stolen goods of street boys, hulk officials often pocketed the clothing money. When John Howard, inspirer of the Howard League for Penal Reform, inspected boys on the hulks he found ‘many had no shorts, some no waistcoats, some no stockings, and some no shoes’.15
As at Millbank, older and more villainous youths formed bullying gangs and implemented their own code of behaviour, often more abusive than overseers. Younger and smaller boys had to sharpen their footwork and harden themselves or accept being victims.
For boys like Sparkes and Campbell, what had passed for childhood had long become the pursuit of ‘manhood’. They had been inspired by wondrous tales of ‘robbers, pirates and loose women’ in the popular penny dreadfuls and colourful street theatre, and street gatherings where boys would ‘sit for six or eight hours together, relating and hearing tales of criminal heroes’.16 And in the flash dens of the Fagins they lived with older and more desperate offenders, and the ‘libidinous desires’17of puberty became contemporaneous with crime, with the needs and wants of food, shelter, alcohol and sex being met by criminality.
Self-interest, self-preservation and self-esteem was the key to life, one in which the boys’ code and hierarchy of conduct and justice saw bigger ‘nobs’ bully the small and weak to gain ‘power’, food rations or sexual favours. Those who did not bend to their will, or ‘noseys’ or ‘skunks’ who informed against them, risked being the victim of a malicious report and punishment by the hulk commandant or the nobs themselves. Thomas Dexter, a convict assigned as a nurse on a hospital ship serving the Euryalus, said the ‘nobs’ ‘have got such an ascendancy’ that boys were less fearful of incarceration than of ‘ill-treatment of one boy to another’.18
I have known it when three or four have been obliged to be locked up in a cell by themselves in order to shelter them from murder…they were called Noseys, that is those whom they considered had been to the officers to tell them anything that was going on, those who were particularly pointed out by the majority of prisoners on whom to wreak their vengeance.19
Bullying led some victims to self-mutilate to gain respite or a fuller meal in a hospital ward. ‘I have had patients come into the hospital who have declared that they have not tasted meat for three weeks together, but have been obliged to give their rations to those nobs, and they have fed upon gruel and the parings of potatoes.’20 Some applied a red hot copper button to their own skin and rubbed the wound with soap until it became septic. Others would claim to have fallen down a ship ladder, but in fact had let ‘the edge of the table drop upon [their arms] and break them in two’ or had other boys do it for them.21
Another put pins in his hand to gain admittance, which further upset the bullies who ‘pricked my eyes with needles…and jagged the needle three or four times in each eye.’ He knew they would do it, the boy said, ‘because they told me overnight they would put my eyes out in the morning…I did not care what had become of me then…because I used to be so ill-used’.22
Ill-use included sodomy, the silent currency of the Royal Navy, prisons and prison hulks. Social reformer and jurist Jeremy Bentham reported that hulk prisoners were raped as a matter of course: ‘An initiation of this sort stands in the place of garnish and is exacted with equal rigor.’ When the Euryalus chaplain complained that boys ought to be better separated ‘for the better ensuring the improvement of their morals’23 he was replaced by a more accommodating chaplain. One hulk convict said sodomy ‘rages so shamefully…that the surgeon and myself have been more than once threatened with assassination for straining to put a stop to it…[it] is in no way discountenanced by those in command’.24 As a dismissive Sir John Carter, mayor of the convict shipping centre of Portsmouth, declared: ‘such things ever must be.’25
The Euryalus’ management of boy convicts was ripe for condemnation. Thomas Wontner declared, ‘If there be any regular and established schools for teaching crime, the ship Euryalus is the place,’26 and William Miles put to Parliament that, ‘however criminal they might have been before their commitments…previous to their imprisonment in that accursed hulk…they were comparatively innocent.’27
Edward Brenton, a former naval captain turned philanthropist who wrote the Naval History of Great Britain, denounced the Euryalus as ‘cruel and vindictive, and I challenge any man to come forward and justify it’. He described a regime where ‘children [are] in iron cages, who should have been in a nursery garden; children pining in misery, where the stench was intolerable; where the human mind is more rapidly brutalized, and where every feeling of humanity is more speedily destroyed, than could be done by any other process whatever’.28
An MP with a strong interest in crime and punishment reform, George Holford, who oversaw the design and construction of Millbank, similarly complained that hulks saw young offenders listen ‘with amazement’ to the sins and outrages of others, ‘but soon familiar grows with every crime’. ‘Let justice rather strike her victim dead,’ he wrote in verse, than send them to a hulk which hardened and corrupted the heart. ‘’t’were better doom him the lion’s den than to this curs’d abode of [the] wicked.’29
But as with Houses of Correction and Millbank, those in charge of the hulks continued to dutifully, and self-servingly, report complete ‘satisfaction’ in a chain of superiors all the way to Whitehall. By the time Campbell and Sparkes were leaving the hulk, chaplain Henry John Dawes was pleased to report to John Henry Capper, Esq., the Superintendent in Charge of Ships and Vessels Employed for the Confinement of Offenders under the Sentence of Transportation, that, ‘the boys continue to behave remarkably well’, lauded their ‘orderly conduct and attention in the Chapel’ and cited the ‘excellent conditions’ provided by the ship’s commandant. Capper in turn duly reported to his Home Department secretary, Marquess of Normanby Constantine Henry Phipps, that the boys ‘have conducted themselves properly and been instructed and employed at those trades as the limited means on board a ship will admit of being put into effect’.30
Despite officials’ best efforts, the truth of Euryalus was becoming clear. It was only teaching boys ‘to curse more bitterly that country which gave them birth, and to whose laws they owe their ruin’ 31 and when Naval historian Captain Brenton asked those running Euryalus whether any boy was likely to be reformed: ‘I am told none ever have been, and I infer that none ever will be.’32
Hospital nurse Thomas Dexter was unequivocal. Asked whether any boy on Euryalus had been reformed, he replied with feeling:
I should most certainly say not; and frequently when I have seen it in a Newspaper that a Judge has sentenced a Boy out of Mercy to him to the Hulks, I have made the Observation that was it a Child of mine I would rather see him dead at my Feet than see him sent to that Place.33
Pioneering social and economic reformers Sidney and Beatrice Webb, founders of the London School of Economics and Political Science, described the hulks as ‘the most brutalising, the most demoralising, the most horrible’ of all places of confinement in British history.34 Even in Hobart Town, on the other side of the
