It is a melancholy sight. Some of the scholars are old bald-headed men, evidently agricultural labourers. There, amidst sharp-featured men, are dogged-looking youths, whom it is pitiful to behold so far astray, and so young. And now the clerk who read the prayers may be seen teaching the men; but it is evidently hard work, and few, it is to be feared, care for the school, further than for the physical repose it secures them.
The chaplain on the Bellerophon was a man called Edward Edwards. He had been chaplain of the Portland hulk in Langstone Harbour and had been transferred to the Bellerophon at the same time as the convicts. He remained the ship's chaplain for the next nine years. His twice-yearly reports to John Capper have a ponderous and self-satisfied air about them but he seems to have been exceedingly zealous in his determination to improve the minds and morals of his flock. Much of his time was spent in the composition of his Sunday sermons. Aware that many of the men were 'very ignorant as well as obdurate', he would address them in plain and strong language, making sure that his diction was clear and correct. He made himself available in the afternoons for any prisoner who wanted his advice. He attended the daily evening chapel and afterwards he would sometimes visit the prisoners below deck 'and if I see or hear any thing amiss or tending to immoralise, I instantly administer reproof, and report the offender or offenders to the Commanding Officer, whom I always find ready and active to co-operate in the promotion of virtue and in checking vice.'
If his reports are to be believed Mr Edwards made remarkably good progress in reforming and educating the prisoners. In his second report as chaplain of the Bellerophon he noted that four-fifths of the convicts on the ship conducted themselves in a very becoming manner, 'yea, I may say, very many of them in an exemplary manner ... I feel exquisite satisfaction in stating my conviction that many of them are sincere and reclaimed.' He noted that 230 men and boys attended the school on board and the boys in particular were improved beyond expectation. Twenty were able to repeat the Thirty- nine Articles from memory and many were able to read the proper lessons, epistle and gospel on Sunday services. The chaplain was particularly pleased with the observations of a local clergyman who took the service one Sunday and said, 'Well, I am astonished! I do not think that there is in all England a congregation who conduct themselves during Divine Worship so orderly, and apparently so devout as yours do.'
This rosy picture is echoed in the reports of Mr Capper. He confirmed that the schools were attended with much zeal, the state of the prisoners' health was very good, and that 800 prisoners from the two hulks at Sheerness had been employed daily in the dockyard 'in a very advantageous manner'. There is no doubt that the governors of each convict hulk maintained a highly disciplined regime and provided a useful supply of manual labourers for work in the dockyards. Indeed Capper's reports go out of their way to show how the earnings of the convicts helped to offset the expenses of running the hulk establishment. But other commentators were damning in their observations on the whole system of incarcerating convicts in prison ships.
Peter Bossy, who was the surgeon of the Warrior hulk moored off Woolwich, produced a devastating report in which he showed that, of the 638 convicts on board the hulk in 1841, no fewer than 400 had to be admitted to the hospital and 38 men died. He noted that most of the men who died were housed on the lower deck or the middle deck, both of which were permanently damp, poorly ventilated and evil-smelling. Men with scurvy, scrofula, ulcers and infectious diseases were cooped up together in the worst possible conditions. When cholera broke out on board one of the hulks the chaplain refused to bury the dead in person but ordered the coffins to be transported to the marshes for burial and read the burial service at a mile distant from the graves. Patients admitted to the convict hospital ships faced conditions which were often worse than the prison ships themselves. In the Unite hospital ship the majority of patients were infested with vermin and had no regular supply of clean bed linen. No towels or combs were provided for prisoners and 'the unwholesome odour from the imperfect and neglected state of the water-closets was almost insupportable'.
W. Hepworth Dixon, who published a book on London prisons in 1850, observed that the hulk system debased and corrupted the prisoners, was condemned by every impartial person who was competent to give an opinion on the matter, and was only maintained because the labour of the convicts on public works was useful and valuable to the government. A report by the Directors of Prisons on the management of the hulk establishment particularly condemned the rotten and dilapidated condition of the ships and strongly urged the government to replace them with properly built shore-based prisons with decent sleeping cells for all the prisoners.
One of the most scandalous aspects of the hulk establishment was that for many years it was the usual practice to imprison boys in the same ships and the same cells as adult males. Many of the boys were aged between ten and fifteen and a few were even younger. It has already been noted that the situation was at its worst in the early days of the convict hulks when the prisoners were simply locked below at night without any supervision. Of this period, the Victorian philanthropist Henry Mayhew wrote, 'The state of morality under such circumstances may be easily conceived - crimes impossible to be mentioned being commonly perpetrated.' When the second generation of convict ships, which included the Bellerophon, were divided into separate cells below decks, with a corridor running down the centre to allow a warder to patrol below decks at night, the situation was marginally improved but there were still eight or ten convicts in each cell and the men were still locked up with the boys.
In 1823 the system was belatedly changed. Mr Capper was ordered to separate the boys from the men and to provide separate accommodation for them. All the boys in the various convict hulks were moved to the Bellerophon and the adult prisoners on the ship were transferred to other ships in the convict fleet. In his report of 22 January 1824 Capper was able to record that 320 boys, most of whom were under fourteen years old, were now confined on board the Bellerophon, and that for the past eight months they had been employed in making clothing and other articles for the convict establishment. Capper had a low opinion of most of the boy convicts and was agreeably surprised by their behaviour under the new regime. Mr Edwards, the chaplain, thought that they generally conducted themselves in a becoming manner but found that all too many of them were illiterate, and had no ability to learn, 'and others are so depraved that they will not apply themselves.' He soon had them committing large chunks of the Bible to memory and within six months of their arrival on the Bellerophon was able to report that some of the boys had memorised 421 chapters of Holy Writ, with an average of twenty verses per chapter, and 131 boys were able to repeat the Church Catechism once a week.
For two and a half years the Bellerophon was a boys' prison. As if to hide this dark period in her life she was given another name. From 5 October 1824 she was officially called the Captivity hulk, though out of habit, or perhaps to avoid confusion, Mr Capper still referred to her as the Bellerophon in his reports. The daily regime was as rigid as it had always been but with the important difference that the boys were not taken ashore each day to do hard labour in the dockyard but spent all their time imprisoned on board the ship. Their days were a dreary round of prayers in chapel; inspections and punishments; washing down the ship; meals of gruel, bread and cheese (with the addition of boiled beef three or four times a week); and long hours spent in makeshift workshops. In spite of the oppressive conditions the boys seem to have been remarkably productive. In one year Mr Capper reported that they had made for the convict service more than 6,000 pairs of shoes, 15,500 garments, 'and various articles of cooperage and bedding'.