Privies on Convict Ships

Toilets are one of the quotidian aspects of convict transportation that are little discussed, but in piecing together how the system worked, and in trying to understand the convict experience, it is useful to learn what we can about them.

Passengers and crew members could use the chains, platforms which extended along the sides of the upper deck, or ‘seats of easement’ fitted at the head of the ship. Convicts who were not kept in irons (and, except in cases of misbehaviour, female convicts never were) could also make their way on deck.

There were dangers with this. A female convict fell overboard from the head of the Lady Penrhyn while the First Fleet was at the Cape: it was a calm day, and she was saved by two men who jumped overboard after her. The second mate of the Friendship drowned the same day after falling over the head of the ship drunk, having gone there to relieve himself.

Where the convicts were kept in irons on the lower deck, there was no alternative but to install half barrels down one end of the prison. It was inevitable that there would be spillages, and no matter how well these tubs were scrubbed, the convicts who were berthed close to the ‘dirt buckets’ suffered from the noxious odours.

In 1797, ‘night chairs’ were installed on the Barwell, the first time that they are mentioned on a convict transport. These were elsewhere described as ‘close stools’, and they resembled the wooden seats and metal holding pans widely used throughout Australia until the 1950s.

Water closets first seem to have been used on the Canada, the Minorca and the Nile, which sailed in 1801. Instructions issued to the masters and surgeons of those ships included the following:

"You are in the most particular manner to attend to and prevent the detention, even for a minute, of ordure or fetid matter of any sort, whether in the hospitals or privies (those being properly constructed if their frequent cleansing is attended to by the tubes from the cisterns)."[1]

A plan of the Atlas, which sailed the following year, shows a privy located part way among the lower deck, in the middle of the convict berths.

These drained to the ocean through a hole in the side of the ship, and they had obvious problems in stormy weather. They had to be frequently scrubbed, and convicts were assigned as ‘cistern fillers’. Where cisterns were not installed, buckets would be kept filled with sea water, which would be be tossed down the basin to keep it ‘clean and sweet’.

The drains often became blocked because the lead or leather pipes were too small, the convicts stuffed refuse down them, or the scuppers failed, and the cisterns often leaked, but they were vastly superior to the pails and pots that had been used in early years. It was presumably because of these difficulties that water closets were temporarily abandoned in 1830 and ‘large iron buckets with loosely-fitted lids’ were introduced. But these ‘disgusting and beastly soil pans’ were soon replaced with water closets again, and they would continue to be used for the remaining years of the transportation system.
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[1] ‘Instructions for the Masters and Surgeons of the Canada, Minorca and Nile, Convict Ships, at the Request of the Under Secretary of State, by Order of Lord Pelham’, 10 June 1801, The UK National Archives (TNA) CO201/20/239-243a.