Sheets of rain scour the quays of Toulon as lines of shackled convicts haul a storm-battered man-of-war toward the dry dock in Les Misérables’ opening scene—rope-scarred hands, crashing surf, and the unforgiving drill of empire. Victor Hugo laboured on the novel for nearly seventeen years before its 1862 release, and a fresh look at Bermuda’s Royal Naval Dockyard reveals a striking parallel. Though the two empires were often at odds, the imagery aligns seamlessly with Hugo’s searing critique of nineteenth-century society, exposing how poverty, inequality, and draconian laws crushed the powerless beneath imperial ambition.
While Victor Hugo’s scene is set in 1815, the hard-labour chorus it evokes would soon echo across the Atlantic. Less than a decade after the fictional Jean Valjean shouldered those straining hawsers, Britain began using thousands of real convicts to carve an ambitious naval bastion out of Bermuda limestone. Six years before Les Miserables’ publication, the arrival of a floating dock in Bermuda firmly entrenched Bermuda and the Royal Naval Dockyard as a key cog in the expanded maritime boundary of the British Empire.
When the American Revolution cost Britain its American mainland ports, Admiralty planners searched for a Mid-Atlantic redoubt that could maintain Britain’s maritime boundaries and monitor both North America and the Caribbean. Remote, reef-protected Bermuda was the answer. In 1809, the Admiralty acquired Ireland Island and began construction on the Royal Naval Dockyard, establishing it as the new headquarters for the North America & West Indies Station at Bermuda’s western tip.
The plan was colossal, a fortress with a victualling yard, ordnance depots, and long quays able to berth, refit and resupply the largest ships of the line. Initially started using local enslaved and free labour, the Admiralty eventually turned to convicts sent from England and Ireland. On January 5, 1824 HMS Antelope left Portsmouth with 300 prisoners, the first of some 9,000 who would toil in Bermuda over the next forty years. The smallest of the prison hulks, Thames, held an average of 223 convicts per year, while the largest, Medway, housed as many as 643. The others fell in between: Antelope averaged 263, Dromedary 331, Coromandel 310, Weymouth 231, and Tenedos 259. These moored hulks—once warships themselves—became floating prisons, their decks crowded with the labour force that built the foundations of Bermuda’s Dockyard.
Every dawn the men marched ashore in straw hats and numbered linen shirts, quarrying blinding-white limestone, hauling blocks, and erecting barracks, storehouses, and even Commissioner’s House. Glare-induced “moon blindness,” was common and disease and industrial accidents injured and claimed thousands of men over the 40 year period. The soundtrack was not Hugo’s chorus but the blasting of rock, the thud of mallets, scraping of chisels and chipping of pickaxes shaping the Dockyard’s massive masonry.
Convicts from the Medway hulk with guards, Bermuda, c.1860 — Dressed in straw hats and numbered linen uniforms, the men stand under guard, likely preparing to begin another day of punishing labour ashore. Image: “Four Convicts with Guards,” courtesy of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.
By the 1850s the Dockyard’s first phase was largely complete, yet a critical flaw remained. Bermuda’s porous limestone could not hold a deep, watertight basin, like the dry docks depicted in Hugo’s novel. With the rise of ironclad warships, the need for submerged hull repairs had become essential, something that couldn’t be done merely tied up at a quay. Lieutenant-Colonel Andrew Clarke, the Admiralty’s chief engineer, proposed a radical fix: build the dry dock itself as a floating vessel, tow it across the Atlantic, and let it submerge to lift warships clear of the sea. In July 1869, just seven years after the publication of Hugo’s Les Misérables, the massive floating dock completed its transatlantic journey and entered Grassy Bay, Bermuda.
Construction on HM Floating Dock Bermuda began in 1866, and—echoing the French backdrop of Les Misérables—a scale model of the immense vessel was unveiled at the following year’s Paris Exhibition, drawing crowds much as Victor Hugo’s story had captivated readers just a few years earlier.
The Floating Dock under construction at Blackwall Yard, North Woolwich, London, 1868 — Built by Messrs. Campbell, Johnson & Co. The National Archives, UK
Print/clipping from the Illustrated London News, September 12, 1868. Black-and-white print titled “The First Attempt to Launch the Bermuda Floating Dock at North Woolwich.”
Launched in 1868 at Campbell, Johnstone & Co. shipyard at North Woolwich, the U-shaped floating dock was the world’s largest of its type at the time. The design also “self-careened,” rolling on its side so crews could scrape barnacles and marine growth from its own bottom, a vital feature in warm waters. In June 1869 HMS Warrior and HMS Black Prince took the dock in tow. The paddle frigate HMS Terrible shepherded from astern while a sail between the side walls assisted propulsion. The convoy crept 2,400 nautical miles from Madeira to Bermuda. Once in Bermuda the reef-choked Narrows presented too big a challenge for Warrior and HMS Black Prince. To bring her in, five smaller vessels, HMS Terrible, tugboat Spitfire, gunboats Vixen and Viper, and HMS Lapwing took up positions around the dock. Twice-fouled hawsers and a sudden squall nearly wrecked the effort, but on July 31, 1869 the 381-foot dock moored safely in Grassy Bay—an engineering arrival as dramatic as any fictional docking scene.
H.M.S. Warrior and H.M.S. Black Prince towing at Dockyard Bermuda, Deryck Foster. Kind permission of Denise Foster & Centennial Bermuda Foundation
Floating Dock Bermuda en route to Bermuda with HMS Terrible astern, 1869. The National Archives UK
The new dock changed everything. For the first time, Britain had a forward maintenance hub which could heave-out its biggest iron and composite steamers in the North America & West Indies Squadron, cementing Bermuda’s nickname “Gibraltar of the West.”
HMS Urgent in the Floating Dock, circa 1870-1890. National Archives UK.
Psyche in HM Floating Dock Bermuda.
Careening allowed the underside of the dock to be exposed and regularly cleaned of barnacles and marine growth, ensuring its continued operation and seaworthiness.
The Floating Dock careened in the northeast corner of the basin, c. 1870–1890. The National Archives, UK
Ironically, the dock’s triumph coincided with the end of convict labour. Political unease and the rising tide of humanitarian reform led Britain to close the Bermuda convict establishment in 1864. In an era when the ships of Empire demanded frequent overhauls and barnacles could sap a warship’s speed, the dock turned Bermuda into an indispensable refitting station, shortening repair times from months to days and tightening the Royal Navy’s grip on the western Atlantic ocean. Yet this marvel’s own voyage ended ignominiously.
After almost four decades of hauling ships out of the Atlantic, the original leviathan HM Floating Dock Bermuda, so vital in transforming the Island into the Royal Navy’s Atlantic repair hub was finally decommissioned and run aground at Spanish Point in 1908. There, fragments of its rusted hull remain to this day, quiet but stubborn reminders of an era when empire floated on iron and steam.
The floating dock grounded at Stovell Bay, Spanish Point, 1912. From the photograph album of F. R. Gruger, Bermuda Archives Collections.
Successive docks followed. Admiralty Floating Dock (AFD) 1 arrived in 1902, lifting warships like HMS Dominion and serving tirelessly through the early 20th century.
Testing the new Bermuda floating dock (AFD no. 1) in the Medway, 14th June 1902, with pre-dreadnought battleship HMS Sans Pareil aboard.
Then came AFD 28 in 1941, which was tragically lost at sea in 1946 on the voyage back to the US; and AFD 5, which arrived just after the war in 1946. That dock—larger, stronger, forged of steel—became a vital tool in the Royal Navy’s postwar presence, and her story lives on through personal histories like that of Bill Bendall, a shipwright who served as leading hand on AFD 5 from her arrival in 1948. His son, Roger Bendall, submitted this memory and a crew photograph to the Dockyard Memories project, preserving the lived experience behind the machinery.
Bill (seated center, front row) with the AFD 5 crew, November 1948 — Taken shortly after the Floating Dock was successfully positioned dockside. Submitted to the Dockyard Memories project by Roger Bendall.
In 1951, after the closure of the Royal Navy Dockyard, AFD 5 was towed to Falmouth, England, marking the beginning of the end. The final dock, AFD 48, operated until 1972 before being scuttled off Bermuda’s West End.
Together, these colossal floating docks—maritime giants of the 19th and early 20th centuries, some still resting quietly in Bermuda’s waters, others vanished into distant seas—chart the Island’s transformation from a convict-hewn outpost into a vital artery of the British Empire: a place where warships were hauled from the ocean, repaired, and dispatched once more to command the waves.
The spectacle that began with Hugo’s convict chain gang pulling a ship to dock thus found its real-world epilogue in the rise, fall, and silent grave of Bermuda’s floating dry docks. Today, the Dockyard welcomes a new breed of leviathan, massive cruise ships that eclipse the warships of the past, mooring where hammers once rang, coal dust hung in the air, and swarms of shipwrights, carpenters, apprentices, and crew refitted and resupplied one of the world’s most powerful navies.
Cruise ships moored along the North Arm, Dockyard
Aerial of Stovell’s Bay, Spanish Point, Pembroke, showing remains of HM Floating Dock Bermuda, July 2007. The rusting remains of HM Floating Dock Bermuda lie just below the surface, a submerged marine hazard that boaters must still navigate.
This era was defined by sweeping revolutions, groundbreaking advances in engineering and manufacturing, the global upheaval of the 19th-century conflicts and the two World Wars of the 20th century, as well as major reforms in labor practices and the prison system. These once-mighty floating dry docks, now lost to time and submerged beneath the waves, stand as silent monuments to an empire built from iron, coal, and limestone. They tell the story of a British stronghold in the North Atlantic, forged amid revolution, upheaval, and imperial conflict. It is a chapter of history that still resonates today, reminding us how technological advancements and global events continue to shape the world we navigate in our own uncertain times.
Further reading:
Floating docks for a century, by Dr. Edward Harris, The Royal Gazette, July 20, 2007
The ‘Dock’ is wedded to the ‘Yard’, by Dr Edward Harris, The Royal Gazette April 28, 2012
Free and Unfree Labour: Who built Bermuda’s Dockyards?, by Dr. Anna McKay, Royal Museums Greenwich, June 7, 2018
The arrival of the Bermuda floating dock, July 1869, by Graham Thompson, Royal Museums Greenwich, August 21, 2019
