Penal Transportation to Australia 1700s-1800s
Transportation, Convicts and Settlers
Transportation was used as a punishment for serious and petty crimes in Great Britain and Ireland from the 1700s into the 19th century. It was seen as a more humane alternative to execution and necessary in order to prevent Britain's gaols from overflowing. Until the American Revolution in the 1780s the majority of convicts were sent to the British colonies in North America, but after the war and the loss of the American colonies the British government was obliged to look elsewhere. In 1787 the government announced that the new place of disposal was to be Australia, and the first wave of convicts were sent to the grim environment of the Australian prison colonies.
Prison Hulks
To relieve overcrowding in the gaols, the government also decided to house those convicts waiting to be transported in old warships known as 'hulks' moored on the Thames. Prisoners remained inside the hulks until a space could be found for them on a transport ship to Australia. Conditions aboard these floating prisons were dreadful, with little sanitation or proper medical attention, and diseases such as dysentery and gaol fever spread quickly among the convicts aboard. The result was an appalling mortality rate, with around one in three convicts dying before they even began the journey to Australia.
Many of the convicts that survived the hulks took their diseases onto the transportation vessels, leading to outbreaks of such lethal diseases as typhoid and cholera. Living conditions aboard the ships heading to Australia were not so much better than the hulks, with cramped spaces for the convicts, who were required to sleep in chains, and had barely enough room to stand up. Meanwhile the officers commanding the vessels lived in roomy cabins in the stern.
The First Fleet at Botany Bay
Despite sickness and privation several hundred convicts survived the journey of the first transportation fleet to arrive in Australia. This was the First Fleet that arrived in Botany Bay on 22 January 1788, and this is now considered a landmark event in the colonial history of Australia. Among the 548 male and 188 female convicts aboard the First Fleet were four Welshmen and two Welsh women, and the initial prison colony they were part of came to be known as New South Wales. It may be that the colony received its name from the Welsh convicts as a symbol of their arrival in an alien land, though another theory is that it was named so by Captain Cook when he noticed that the area's coastline looks similar to that of the Glamorgan Coast in South Wales.
Indentured Labour
From the 1800s the use of transportation as a punishment became more widespread as government legislation made it increasingly possible for undesirable sections of the population to be sent abroad. The penal system required convicts to work as virtual slaves in the colonies. Some could work off their sentences as indentured servants for periods between 7-14 years, but all experienced back-breaking labour working on constructing roads, building and mining projects, or were farmed out to individuals as expendable cheap labour. Life was no easier for women, who were put to work as domestic servants or as farm labourers. A convict who had served part of his or her sentence could apply for a ticket of leave that permitted them some limited freedoms such as the right to marry and raise a family.
“The Eden where all beauty lies
My heart breaks as with flaming sword
They drive me now from paradise”
This poem, named 'Threnody' by its author, must have expressed the feelings of many convicts as they contemplated being sent into the unknown.
The 1850s Gold Rush
Over the years life in the colonies became, if not more relaxed, then at least tolerable. Initial discoveries of copper deposits in South Australia at Kapunda in 1843 and Burra in 1845 attracted many people from Britain, and then the discovery of major amounts of gold in the area of Victoria in the early 1850s drew large numbers of hopeful prospectors to Australia, dramatically increasing the population.
By the late 1860s transportation as a punishment was becoming increasingly rare, and in 1868 it was officially ended. By this time the waves of convicts and emigrants had created a new society within the old prison colonies, and one that had maintained their old language and culture. By the turn of the century the Australian provinces could boast thousands of settlers of British descent, and it was clear that the settlers had overcome the dangers and trials of the early prison colonies and emerged as a thriving section of Australian society.
Sources:
“Bound for America. The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718-1775” by A. Roger Ekirch.
McConville, S, “A History of English Prison Administration: Volume I 1750-1877 “(London, Boston & Henley: 1981)
Online Research Guides at The National Archives
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