ABANDON SHIP!

Dramatic stories of escape attempts from prison hulks

A SHOT AT FREEDOM

In 1811, The Times reported that 37 convicts had escaped together from a vessel at Woolwich. Using makeshift tools and saws stolen from the dockyards, the men “cut through the ceiling and timbers of the hulk just under her bends =and? made a hole sufficiently large for a man to creep out”. Taking advantage of a low tide leaving the ship beached on mudflats, the men waded through the mire to the shore and headed south of Woolwich in the direction of Shooter’s Hill, a place commonly associated with highway robberies. Fifteen of the men were recaptured.

HORROR STORY

The testimony of Michael Cashmin highlights the horrors of the floating prisons. In April 1778, Cashmin escaped a hulk at Woolwich but was apprehended near Tottenham Court Road, still sporting part of a fetter on each leg. According to the Newgate Calendar, Cashmin was sent back to the hulks for a further 14 years, despite arguing at the Old Bailey that: “I was almost starved to death when I was there; there is never a man there but would escape from that place if he could: I would rather be hanged than be there.”

SPADES AND AXES

In 1778, a large uprising erupted in the dockyards at Woolwich during a planned mass escape. Late one afternoon, some 150 men (of 250 convicts working on the Thames at the time) abandoned their wheelbarrows and grabbed pikes from a nearby ship. Having armed themselves, the mob took up spades and carpenters’ axes, proceeding to the waterside to attempt escape via the sea wall. There they hurled showers of stones at the 20 armed militiamen who tried to stop them, and who eventually subdued the would-be escapees.

SUSPICIOUS CLOTHING

Newspapers printed detailed descriptions of fugitives to alert the public. After John Mason escaped the Justitia in 1836, the Morning Post labelled him a “notorious and desperate burglar”. Describing him as stoutly built, with “scars on the right side of his head and on the back of his hand”, the newspaper advised civilians to look out for a man in the “grey dress of the hulks, with a piece of iron on one of his legs”.

Prison uniforms stood out, so many escapees donned disguises. Michael Brothers, who escaped the Defence in 1856, disguised himself with a stolen hat and long overcoat – but his trousers, hastily sewn together from old bedding, aroused suspicion and he was soon recaptured.

A GREAT ESCAPE

Perhaps the most famous convict to abscond from the hulks was fictional.

In Charles Dickens’ novel Great Expectations, serialised from 1860, the protagonist, Pip, helps convict Magwitch to escape. This “fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg… who limped, and shivered, and glared, and growled” was recaptured on the Kent marshes and returned to the hulks, which Pip called “wicked Noah’s arks”.