Prison ship ships at sea, claiming legal authority to do so. In 2009 the US Navy converted the main deck aboard the supply ship into a brig to hold pirates captured off the coast of Somalia until they could be transferred to Kenya for prosecution. The brig was capable of holding up to twenty-six prisoners and was operated by a detachment of Marines from the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit. Charles Dickens' novel "Great Expectations" opens in 1812 with the escape of the convict Abel Magwitch from a hulk moored in the Thames Estuary. In fact, the prison ships were largely moored off
Racism in the work of Charles Dickens For example, in his novel "Bleak House" Dickens mocks Mrs. Jellyby, who neglects her children for the natives of a fictional African country. The disjunction between Dickens' criticism of slavery and his crude caricatures of other races has also been noted by Patrick Brantlinger in his "A Companion to the Victorian Novel". He cites Dickens' description of an Irish colony in America's Catskill mountains a mess of pigs, pots, and dunghills. Dickens views them as a "racially repellent" group. Jane Smiley writing in the Penguin Lives bio of Dickens writes "we should not interpret him as the kind of left-liberal