A hulk was a prison ship moored in the UK and used to hold prisoners before transportation. I suppose having no hulk report means the prisoner was well behaved whilst waiting to be transported?
If you follow the Last Night of the Proms, one of the sea songs is "Tom Bowling", which is full of nautical alliteration. The first line is "Here a sheer hulk lies poor Tom Bowling, the darling of our crew". A hulk is a decommisioned ship, just lying around being used for something else - storage of goods or prisoners. The SS Great Britain was a hulk in the Falkland Islands for nearly 100 years before being salvaged.
Prior to transportation, convicts were often imprisoned in the hulks of many famous old warships which had been moored in the Thames Estuary or Plymouth Harbour. Conditions on board those floating gaols were apalling and the standards of hygiene were so poor that disease spread quickly. As mentioned in the section on English prisons, although there was a strong lobby movement regarding the living conditions on the hulks, the English government delayed building new gaols and preferred to search for new places to send her convicts instead. Many of the convicts sent to New South Wales in the early years were already disease ridden when they departed and a huge loss of life through typhoid and cholera epidemics was the result.
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