A Commonwealth of Thieves Read Free Page A

naked, with only a few filthy rags, almost alive and in motion with vermin, their bodies rotting with the bad distemper, and covered with itch, scorbutic and venereal ulcers.” Many insane prisoners added to the spectacle for the sightseers.
    Despite all the criminal and capital statutes, the prison populations had gone on growing before, during, and after the American War, and crimes abounded. The legendary Irish pickpocket Barrington could boast that “in and about London more pickpockets succeed in making a comfortable living than in the whole of the rest of Europe.”
    But the Revolutionary War in America meant less transportation occurred even though more were sentenced to it. And so, the 1780 Act having failed to relieve the gaols, a further Act of Parliament passed in 1783 allowed the removal of convicts from the gaols on land to the dismasted hulks of old men-of-war moored in the Thames, and at Portsmouth and Plymouth, where they could do labour around the river pending their transportation. The British government, prevented by rebellious Virginians and vocal Nova Scotians from offloading its dross, was restricted to transporting fallen souls a few miles by rowboat rather than across the Atlantic. During their confinement on the prison decks of the hulks, prisoners were allowed to save their wages. The time of their detention here was to be deemed part of the term of transportation.
    The hulks, an eyesore detested by respectable London and unpopular with convicts, were both a phenomenon and an enterprise. Duncan Campbell, the hulk-master, was a highly interesting Georgian figure, a reputable man and a good Presbyterian Scot. He had begun in the convict-transporting business in 1758, carrying felons to Virginia and Maryland. Since then Campbell had seen a great change in the penal-maritime business, and not only because of the war in America. In April and May 1776, even before the American colonies were lost, an end was enacted to the good old practice of placing “the property and the service of the body of the convict” for sale on American auction blocks. Now the convict and his labour belonged wholly to the Crown. Nor could wealthy convicts buy themselves out of servitude anymore.
    On top of that, the revolution in America threw the affairs of Campbell and others “into dramatic disarray.” The amounts lost by British creditors in America, when Americans refused to pay British merchants' bills, meant that Campbell had a dizzying fortune of over £38,000 owing to him from gentlemen in Virginia and Maryland. But in modest ways the war in America also compensated Campbell. He continued to receive in his hulks more of the convicts sentenced to transportation. His initial contract, worth £3,560 a year, was for a dismasted hulk (he named it
Justitia
) of at least 240 tons to house 120 prisoners, mainly from Newgate, with necessary tools and six lighters for the convicts to work from, as well as medicines and vinegar as a scurvy cure, and the means to wash and fumigate the vessel. By 1780 he had accommodation for 510 convicts, and had purchased a French frigate, the
Censor,
and “an old Indiaman” which he named
Justitia II.
He had a receiving ship, the
Reception,
and a hospital ship, the converted
Justitia I.
On Campbell's receiving ship, the prisoner was stripped of the vermin-infested clothes he had worn in Newgate or elsewhere in the kingdom, bathed, and held for four days while being inspected for infection by three efficient surgeons employed. The high death rate on Campbell's ships, and also on the less well administered hulks moored in Portsmouth and Plymouth by other contractors, was partially the result of diseases prisoners had contracted originally in the common wards of city and county gaols. “The ships at Woolwich are as sweet as any parlour in the kingdom,” Campbell asserted with some pride.
    Many of the prisoners aboard the flotilla in the distant Southern Ocean in 1788 had less enthusiastic