A hulk is a ship that is afloat, but incapable of going to sea. Hulk may be used to describe a ship that has been launched but not completed, an abandoned wreck or shell, or to refer to a ship whose propulsion system is no longer maintained or has been removed altogether. The word hulk also may be used as a verb: a ship is "hulked" to convert it to a hulk. The verb was also applied to crews of Royal Navy ships in dock, who were sent to the receiving ship for accommodation, or "hulked".[1] Hulks have a variety of uses such as housing, prisons, salvage pontoons, gambling sites, naval training, or cargo storage.
In the age of sail, many hulls served longer as hulks than they did as functional ships. Wooden ships were often hulked when the hull structure became too old and weak to withstand the stresses of sailing.
More recently, ships have been hulked when they become obsolete or when they become uneconomical to operate.
Sheer hulk
A sheer hulk (or shear hulk) was used in shipbuilding and repair as a floating crane in the days of sailing ships, primarily to place the lower masts of a ship under construction or repair. Booms known as sheers were attached to the base of a hulk's lower masts or beam, supported from the top of those masts. Blocks and tackle were then used in such tasks as placing or removing the lower masts of a vessel under construction or repair. These lower masts were the largest and most massive single timbers aboard a ship, and erecting them without the assistance of either a sheer hulk or land-based masting sheer was extremely difficult.
The concept of sheer hulks originated with the Royal Navy in the 1690s, and persisted in Britain until the early nineteenth century. Most sheer hulks were decommissioned warships; Chatham, built in 1694, was the first of only three purpose-built vessels.[2] There were at least six sheer hulks in service in Britain at any time throughout the 1700s. The concept spread to France in the 1740s with the commissioning of a sheer hulk at the port of Rochefort.[3]
By 1807 the Royal Navy had standardised sheer hulk crew numbers to comprise a Boatswain, mate and six seamen, with larger numbers coming aboard only when the sheers were in use.[3]
Historical depictions of hulks
Portsmouth Harbour with prison hulks
A fleet of ships and hulks in Portsmouth harbour
Sheer hulk at Sheerness Dockyard positioned to make a lift
The Grassy Bay anchorage seen from the Royal Naval Dockyard in Bermuda in 1865, with the hulk of HMS Medway tied to the wharf and another hulk anchored at Grassy Bay.
An accommodation hulk is a hulk used as housing, generally when there is a lack of quarters available ashore. An operational ship may be used for accommodation, but a hulk can accommodate more personnel than the same hull would accommodate as a functional ship. For this role, the hulk is often extensively modified to improve living conditions. Receiving hulks and prison hulks are specialized types of accommodation hulks. During World War II, purpose-built barracks ships were used in this role.
Receiving hulk
The American receiving ship C. W. Morse during World War I
A receiving ship is a ship used in harbour to house newly recruited sailors before they are assigned to a ship's crew.[4]
During the wars of the 18th and 19th century, almost every nation's navy suffered from a lack of volunteers[5][6] and had to rely on some form of forced recruitment.[7][8][9] The receiving ship partly solved the problem of unwilling recruits escaping; it was difficult to get off the ship without being detected, and most seamen of the era did not know how to swim.[10]
Receiving ships were typically older vessels that could still be kept afloat, but were obsolete or no longer seaworthy. The practice was especially common in the age of wooden ships, since the old hulls would remain afloat for many years in relatively still waters after they had become too weak to withstand the rigors of the open ocean.[citation needed]
Receiving ships often served as floating hospitals as many were assigned in locations without shore-based station hospitals. Often the afloat surgeon would take up station on the receiving ship.[citation needed]
A prison hulk was a hulk used as a floating prison. They were used extensively in Great Britain, the Royal Navy producing a steady supply of ships too worn-out to use in combat, but still afloat. Their widespread use was a result of the large number of French sailors captured during the Seven Years' War, and continued throughout the Napoleonic and French Revolutionary Wars a half-century later. By 1814, there were eighteen prison hulks operating at Portsmouth, sixteen at Plymouth and ten at Chatham.[3]
Prison hulks were also convenient for holding civilian prisoners, commencing in Britain in 1776 when the American Revolution prevented the sending of convicts to North America. Instead, increasingly large numbers of British convicts were held aboard hulks in the major seaports and landed ashore in daylight hours for manual labour such as harbor dredging.[3] From 1786, prison hulks were also used as temporary gaols (jails) for convicts being transported to Australia.
A powder hulk was a hulk used to store gunpowder. The hulk was a floating warehouse which could be moved as needed to simplify the transfer of gunpowder to warships. Its location, away from land, also reduced the possible damage from an explosion.
Service as a coal hulk was usually, but not always, a ship's last.
Of the fate of the fast and elegant clipper ships, William L. Carothers wrote, "Clippers functioned well as barges; their fine ends made for little resistance when under tow ... The ultimate degradation awaited a barge. There was no way up, only down-- down to the category of coal hulks ... Having strong solid bottoms ... they could handle the great weight of bulk coal which filled their holds. It was a grimy, untidy, unglamorous end for any vessel which had seen the glory days."[11]
The famed clipper Red Jacket ended her days as a coaling hulk in the Cape Verde Islands.
One by one these old Champions of the Seas disappeared. The Young America was last seen lying off Gibraltar as a coal hulk; and that superb old greyhound of the ocean, the Flying Cloud suffered a similar ignominious ending. She was not even spared the humiliation of concealing her tragic end from the eyes of her former envious rivals, but was condemned to end her days as a New Haven scow towed up the Sound with a load of brick and concrete behind a stuck up parvenu tug. Ever and anon as if to emphasize her newly acquired importance, the tug would bury the old-time square-rigged beauty in a cloud of filthy smoke. Imagine the feelings of an ex-Cape Horner under such conditions! There should have been a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Old Clippers. Everybody who knows anything about ships, knows that they have feelings just the same as anybody else.[12]
—Henry Collins Brown, (1919), The Clipper Ships of Old New York, Valentine's Manual of Old New York, Issue 3, p. 94-95
Salvage pontoon
Illustration from a treatise on salvaging from 1734, showing the traditional method of raising a wreck with the help of anchors and hulks as pontoons
Hulks were used in pairs during salvage operations. By passing heavy cables under a wreck and connecting them to two hulks, a wreck could be raised using the lifting force of the tide or by changing the buoyancy of the hulks.
Several of the largest former oil tankers have been converted to floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) units, effectively very large floating oil storage tanks. Knock Nevis, by some measures the largest ship ever built, served in this capacity from 2004 until 2010. In 2009 and 2010, two of the four TI-class supertankers, then the largest ships afloat, TI Asia and TI Africa, were converted to FPSOs.
When lumber schooner Johanna Smith, "one of only two Pacific Coast steam schooners to be powered by steam turbines,"[15] was hulked in 1928, she was moored off Long Beach, California and used as a gambling ship until destroyed by a fire of unknown cause.
One vessel rescued from this ignominious end was the barquePolly Woodside, now a museum ship in Melbourne, Australia. Another is the barque James Craig, rescued from Recherche Bay in Tasmania, now restored and regularly sailing from Sydney, Australia.
A brig is a type of sailing vessel defined by its rig: two masts which are both square-rigged. Brigs originated in the second half of the 18th century and were a common type of smaller merchant vessel or warship from then until the latter part of the 19th century. In commercial use, they were gradually replaced by fore-and-aft rigged vessels such as schooners, as owners sought to reduce crew costs by having rigs that could be handled by fewer men. In Royal Navy use, brigs were retained for training use when the battle fleets consisted almost entirely of iron-hulled steamships.
HMS Warrior is a 40-gun steam-powered armoured frigate built for the Royal Navy in 1859–1861. She was the name ship of the Warrior-class ironclads. Warrior and her sister ship HMS Black Prince were the first armour-plated, iron-hulled warships, and were built in response to France's launching in 1859 of the first ocean-going ironclad warship, the wooden-hulled Gloire. Warrior conducted a publicity tour of Great Britain in 1863 and spent her active career with the Channel Squadron. Obsolescent following the 1873 commissioning of the mastless and more capable HMS Devastation, she was placed in reserve in 1875, and was "paid off" – decommissioned – in 1883.
The first HMS Shah was a nineteenth-century unarmoured iron hulled, wooden sheathed frigate of Britain's Royal Navy designed by Sir Edward Reed. She was originally to be named HMS Blonde but was renamed following the visit of the Shah of Persia in 1873.
Blackadder was a clipper, a sister ship to Hallowe'en, built in 1870 by Maudslay, Sons & Field at Greenwich for Jock Willis & Sons.
A Baltimore clipper is a fast sailing ship historically built on the mid-Atlantic seaboard of the United States, especially at the port of Baltimore, Maryland. An early form of clipper, the name is most commonly applied to two-masted schooners and brigantines. These vessels may also be referred to as Baltimore Flyers.
HMS Vixen was an armoured composite gunboat, the only ship of her class, and the third ship of the Royal Navy to bear the name. She was the first Royal Navy vessel to have twin propellers.
HMS Arrogant was a 74-gun third rate ship of the line of the Royal Navy, built of Suffolk oak by John Barnard and launched on 22 January 1761 at King's Yard Harwich. She was the first of the Arrogant-class ships of the line, designed by Sir Thomas Slade.
HMS Fortitude was a 74-gun third-rate ship of the line of the Royal Navy, built by John Randall & Co. and launched on 23 March 1780 at Rotherhithe.
HMS Impregnable was a 104-gun first rate three-decker ship of the line of the Royal Navy, launched on 1 August 1810 at Chatham. She was designed by Sir William Rule, and was the only ship built to her draught.
A collier is a bulk cargo ship designed or used to carry coal. Early evidence of coal being transported by sea includes use of coal in London in 1306. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, coal was shipped from the River Tyne to London and other destinations. Other ports also exported coal – for instance the Old Quay in Whitehaven harbour was built in 1634 for the loading of coal. London became highly reliant on the delivery of coal by sea – Samuel Pepys expressed concern in the winter of 1666–67 that war with the Dutch would prevent a fleet of 200 colliers getting through. In 1795, 4,395 cargoes of coal were delivered to London. By 1824, this number had risen to about 7,000; by 1839, it was over 9,000. The trade continued to the end of the twentieth century, with the last cargo of coal leaving the Port of Tyne in February, 2021.
HMS Marlborough was a first-rate three-decker 131-gun screw ship built for the Royal Navy in 1855. She was begun as a sailing ship of the line, but was completed to a modified design and converted to steam on the stocks, and launched as a wooden steam battleship.
HMS Sans Pareil("Without Equal") was an 80-gun third rate ship of the line of the Royal Navy. She was formerly the French ship Sans Pareil, but was captured in 1794 and spent the rest of her career in service with the British.
HMS Undaunted was a wooden screw frigate, the fifth ship of the name to serve in the Royal Navy.
Eight ships of the Royal Navy have been named HMS Firm or Firme.
Kelat was an 1894 gross ton iron hulled fully rigged three masted sailing ship built in Stockton-on-Tees, England in 1881. She was requisitioned by the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) in 1941 and sank as a result of damage suffered during the Japanese air raid on Darwin on 19 February 1942.
HMS Champion was one of nine Comus-class corvettes of the Royal Navy, built in the late 1870s and early 1880s to a design by Nathaniel Barnaby. Champion was one of three in the class built by J. Elder & Co., Govan, Scotland and was launched on 1 July 1878. She was the third vessel under this name in the Royal Navy.
↑ Lavery, Brian (2012). Nelson's Navy: The Ships, Men and Organisation 1793-1815. Conway Maritime Press. p.289. ISBN9781591146124.
↑ Roger, N. A. M. (1986). The Wooden World - An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy. London: Fontana Press. p.145. ISBN978-0-00-686152-2.
↑ Lavery, Brian (2012). Nelson's Navy: The Ships, Men and Organisation 1793-1815. Conway Maritime Press. pp.281, 284. ISBN9781591146124.
↑ Lambert, Andrew (2000). War at Sea in the Age of Sail. Strand, London.: Cassell. p.46. ISBN0-304-35246-2.
↑ Roger, N. A. M. (1986). The Wooden World - An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy. London: Fontana Press. p.149. ISBN978-0-00-686152-2.
↑ Lavery, Brian (2012). Nelson's Navy: The Ships, Men and Organisation 1793-1815. Conway Maritime Press. pp.144, 189. ISBN9781591146124.
↑ Crothers, William L (1997). The American-built clipper ship, 1850-1856: characteristics, construction, and details. Camden, ME: International Marine. ISBN0-07-014501-6.
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Portsmouth Harbour with prison hulks
A fleet of ships and hulks in Portsmouth harbour
Sheer hulk at Sheerness Dockyard positioned to make a lift
Model of the decommissioned 50-gun ship Entreprenant, formerly in the collection of Duhamel du Monceau and now on display at the Musée national de la Marine in Paris
The Grassy Bay anchorage seen from the Royal Naval Dockyard in Bermuda in 1865, with the hulk of HMS Medway tied to the wharf and another hulk anchored at Grassy Bay.
