16. Convicts could be sentenced to the galleys as late as the early nineteenth century
Galleys served the state as seagoing prisons for centuries, including the Phoenician, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Greek, and Roman Empires, and continued to do so in the European empires up to and including that of Napoleon. Charles IX of France decreed that sentences to the galleys could not be for a period of less than ten years, as part of his expansion of his fleet in 1564. Prisoners condemned to the galleys were branded, marking them permanently as a galley slave even after a sentence was completed, though completion of sentence was academic. Nobody on board of the vessel kept track of the time served, other than the prisoner himself, and most never left the galleys.
In the latter half of the 18th century oars mostly disappeared from ships, though some smaller vessels still retained oars known as sweeps. Under French law, sentencing to the galleys continued when there were no galleys. The French navy continued to receive the prisoners, keeping them in dungeons ashore or on prison hulks in the harbors of Brest, Toulon and Marseille, using them for the heavy labor of the ports. They were fed the same rations as the navy allotted its crews, salt pork and beef, ship’s biscuit, and water. Most of the galley prisoners were kept shackled to one another as they worked, and few survived their sentence. Many of the prisoners which were sent by the French to the Devil’s Island penal colony were originally galley slaves, which the French navy wanted to rid itself of, due to the expense of retaining them.