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
Convicts in Australia heavily in Patrick White's take on the Eliza Fraser story, the 1976 novel "A Fringe of Leaves". Convictism is canvassed in Bryce Courtenay's "Australian trilogy": "The Potato Factory" (1995), "Tommo & Hawk" (1997) and "Solomon's Song" (1999). The title character of Peter Carey's 1997 novel "Jack Maggs" is a reworking of Dickens' Magwitch character. Many modern works of Tasmanian Gothic focus on the state's convict past, including "Gould's Book of Fish" (2001) by Richard Flanagan, a fictionalised account of convict artist William Buelow Gould's imprisonment at Macquarie Harbour. Kate Grenville based the novel "The Secret River" (2005) on the life