While the use of decommissioned ships as prison ships or prison hulks, has been practised by many nations over the years, it was widespread in Great Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when, after the defeat in The American War of Independence, and subsequently the loss of a colony for the deportation of felons, penitentiaries became full to overflowing. The intention was to use Prison ships for a short period, but eighty years later they were still being used. Will Roberts has created a story that vividly describes the conditions that existed on these extremely crowded prison ships, and, as is the norm with Will Roberts' novels, takes the reader back to the era in which the story is set, on this occasion, the mid-nineteenth century.