00:00The smell of the Thames in the 18th century was a mixture of salt water, D.A.M.P. wood,
00:06coal smoke, and something far more disturbing, the slow, rotting stench of hopelessness.
00:12If you stood on the riverbank at dawn, when the fog hung low and the gulls circled silently,
00:17you might have seen them, massive wooden ships with broken masts, stripped rigging, and blackened hulls.
00:23They did not sail, they did not move, they simply drifted, like ghosts chained to the shoreline.
00:30These were the British prison hulks, the floating nightmares of the empire.
00:34Ships, once built for glory, now turned into cages for the abandoned, the damned, and the forgotten.
00:40And what happened inside their dark decks would become one of the most horrifying chapters in Britain's criminal history.
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00:48It began with a crisis.
00:50By the late 1700s, British prisons were overflowing.
00:54Crime was rising, cities were growing, and punishments that once terrified thieves,
00:59like public hangings, were losing their power.
01:02The government needed space.
01:04Space to punish.
01:05Space to contain.
01:07Space to make examples of those who dared defy the crown.
01:10But building new prisons was expensive, slow, and unpopular.
01:14Yet, right there, anchored in harbors from London to Portsmouth, lay the solution.
01:19Decommissioned the naval warships, too old or too damaged, to sail, but still strong enough to hold human lives inside their wooden ribs.
01:30And so, the hulks were born.
01:32At first, the idea sounded simple.
01:35Put prisoners on old ships.
01:37Keep them there.
01:38Make them work.
01:39Discipline them.
01:40Reform them.
01:41But nothing about the hulks remained simple for long.
01:44Within months, they transformed into floating hells.
01:47Places where thousands of men suffered, starved, sickened, and died sometimes within weeks of arriving.
01:53Imagine this.
01:54You are 15 years old.
01:56Sentenced to 7 years for stealing bread to feed your mother.
01:59A small crime.
02:00A desperate crime.
02:01But the judge sends you not to prison, but to the hulks.
02:05Shackles are clamped around your ankles.
02:07A guard drags you down a creaking wooden ramp toward a ship blackened with mold, its windows sealed, its lower decks dripping with filth.
02:15As you step inside, the smell hits you.
02:17Sweat, sickness, sewage, and death.
02:20You have entered a world that does not care if you ever leave.
02:23Life on the hulks was a daily fight against disease.
02:27The decks were overcrowded.
02:28Men slept chained together, lying on damp straw that crawled with lice.
02:33Rats scurried freely, sometimes eating the leather straps of the prisoners' shoes, and sometimes eating worse.
02:39The smell of unwashed bodies mixed with rotting food created air so thick that even the guards covered their faces.
02:47But disease was only half the horror.
02:49The other half was punishment.
02:51The British believed the hulks were not just prisons.
02:54They were lessons.
02:55Every prisoner was a warning to the rest of society.
02:59This is what happens if you step out of line.
03:01Corporal punishment was constant.
03:04Whipping was common.
03:05The kato nine tails, with its barbed ends, ripped open skin, and left wounds that rarely healed in the damp, infected air.
03:14Guards patrolled the decks with clubs, striking anyone who moved too slowly or who dared to speak out of turn.
03:20Men who disobeyed could be chained to the hull in freezing water for hours.
03:25Some were starved.
03:26Some were locked inside coffin-like boxes.
03:28Others were hung by their wrists until their shoulders cracked.
03:32And yet, these punishments were considered normal.
03:35But perhaps the cruelest act was that prisoners were forced each day to row ashore like chained animals.
03:41Forced to labor for the very government that condemned them,
03:44they dredged rivers,
03:46hauled stones,
03:47dug canals,
03:48and cleared filth,
03:50all under the eye of armed guards.
03:52Villagers who watched often turned their faces away.
03:55The sight was too painful to bear,
03:57as one British observer wrote,
03:59Their faces are pale,
04:01their bodies thin,
04:02their eyes hollow.
04:04They look less like men,
04:05more like shadows,
04:06waiting to fade.
04:08Death came quickly on the hulks.
04:10Kallara spread through the cramped decks like wildfire.
04:13Typhus thrived in the filth.
04:15Malnutrition weakened bodies until they could not stand.
04:18Some prisoners drowned while trying to escape their chains.
04:21Others simply died in the night.
04:23Their bodies were taken ashore at dawn,
04:25and buried in unmarked graves,
04:27forgotten as soon as the dirt covered them.
04:30And yet,
04:30the hulks continued to fill.
04:32They became the dumping grounds for the empire's unwanted petty thieves.
04:36Debtors,
04:37vagrants,
04:38rebels,
04:38even children.
04:39Some boys,
04:40as young as nine,
04:41were sentenced to years aboard these floating prisons.
04:45Their crimes were often no more than hunger.
04:48But not everyone on the hulks was guilty.
04:50Many were awaiting trial.
04:51Some were wrongly convicted.
04:52A few were political prisoners.
04:55Irish rebels,
04:56radicals,
04:58men who spoke against the government.
05:00To the British,
05:01justice was efficiency.
05:03To the prisoners,
05:04it was despair.
05:05By the early 1800s,
05:07the hulks had grown into a massive system.
05:09Hundreds of ships along British coasts,
05:12held thousands of inmates.
05:14The government insisted they were improving society.
05:16In reality,
05:17the hulks were killing men faster than courts could condemn them.
05:20And then came the most shocking part of all,
05:24the hulks' connection to transportation.
05:26Britain had long exiled prisoners to America,
05:29and later to Australia.
05:30But the hulks acted as holding cells for those waiting to be shipped across oceans.
05:35Prisoners sat for months,
05:36sometimes years,
05:38in darkness,
05:39before being marched onto transport ships.
05:41Many arrived in Australia so weak and sick,
05:44that they died within days.
05:45And the people living in those colonies knew exactly where these men had come from.
05:50The floating coffins of England.
05:51But if the hulks were so horrible,
05:54why did they last so long?
05:55Because they were cheap.
05:57Brutally,
05:58brutally cheap.
05:59It cost the government almost nothing to convert an old worship into a prison.
06:03Guards were poorly paid,
06:05discipline was absolute,
06:06and the prisoners had no rights.
06:09The hulks made punishment efficient.
06:11They made suffering convenient.
06:13They kept crime visible.
06:15We must never forget,
06:16they were designed to be seen.
06:18The government wanted people to look at them.
06:21The hulks were warnings,
06:22floating warnings.
06:24Yet,
06:24as the years passed,
06:26voices began to rise against them.
06:27Religious groups,
06:29doctors,
06:30journalists,
06:30and even some politicians began to expose the horrors.
06:33Reports leaked,
06:35describing conditions so dreadful,
06:37that even hardened sailors were shocked.
06:39One investigator wrote,
06:41This is not a place of punishment.
06:43This is a place of death.
06:45Another called the hulks,
06:46the shame of the empire.
06:49Slowly,
06:49public pressure grew.
06:51By the mid-1800s,
06:52a movement began to demand the hulks be closed forever.
06:56But even then,
06:56the British government resisted.
06:58Removing the hulks,
06:59meant spending money,
07:01and admitting they were wrong.
07:02In the end,
07:03it wasn't morality that defeated the hulks.
07:06It was disease.
07:07A cholera outbreak linked directly to a hulkship,
07:10forced the government to act.
07:12Slowly,
07:13one by one,
07:14the hulks were emptied.
07:16Some were burned.
07:17Some were dismantled.
07:19Others were left to rot,
07:20until the sea swallowed them.
07:21When the last hulk closed in the mid-1800s,
07:24the nightmare was finally over.
07:26But the damage was permanent.
07:28Tens of thousands had passed through the hulks.
07:31Many died nameless.
07:32Many survived but were scarred for life.
07:34Some worshipped to Australia,
07:36and became ancestors of modern families.
07:39Some disappeared into history entirely.
07:42And today,
07:43most people have never heard their story.
07:45But the rivers of Britain remember.
07:47The harbors remember.
07:48The sea remembers the cries that echoed inside those wooden walls.
07:52And now,
07:53so do we.
07:54The floating prisons of the British Empire were not just ships.
07:57There were warnings carved into the water.
07:59Reminders that societies can drift into cruelty without even noticing.
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