It’s No Wonder They Were Called ‘Hell Ships’

Google the term ‘hell ship’ and you’ll find that it has come to be applied to the Japanese transport of American and Allied prisoners-of-war for slave labour in the home islands during the last two years of the Second World War.

But the term goes back much longer than the mid-1940s.

All the way back to the American Revolution, in 1776, in fact, when the British rather than the Japanese were the villains. Old ships’ hulks, no longer seaworthy, made cheap and easy to guard floating jails for prisoners-of-war in America and for convicted criminals in the Mother Country.

But, between the 1760s and right up into the 20th century, ‘Hell Ship’ was a term used time and again in newspapers of the Pacific Northwest in reference to ships whose masters and mates brutalized their crews.

It was accepted internationally that a ship’s captain was little short of God—he was to be obeyed instantly and without question, period. Some masters, a minority, happily, ran not only a ‘tight’ ship but became notorious for enforcing their orders with anything that came to hand—a belaying pin, brass knuckles, a whip, even a gun.

Upon such aptly-named hell ships reaching port, Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle and San Francisco newspapers reported harrowing tales of shipboard brutality that sometimes made it to a courtroom where the odds and the law favoured the accused master or mates.

As if going to sea before the mast wasn’t life-challenging enough, to find yourself in effect a captive aboard a ship with a sadistic master or mate with no chance of relief or escape must indeed have been hell afloat.

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PHOTO: This prison ship is transporting British felons to Australia. Stealing a loaf of bread to survive could earn you deportation for life.—www.Pinterest.com