Convict Transportation

"Scurvy is a deficiency disorder caused by a lack of fresh fruit and vegetables in the diet and specifically by insufficient vitamin C (ascorbic acid). It is not infectious and results from a combination of psycho-social and environmental stress. The symptoms of scurvy include bleeding gums, loose teeth, bad breath, diarrhoea, dysentery, stiffening of the joints and blackening of the skin. Scurvy is of interest for what it reveals about the intersection of medical knowledge and the development of systems of ensuring the supply of an adequate quantity and quality of food for the population.

This paper considers the evidence for the occurrence of scurvy on convict and emigrant ships to Australia during the period 1837-1839."

Examines convict life when Singapore was a penal colony between 1825 and 1873 and the unusual convict system where prisoners were their own warders. The magnificent buildings and construction that still stand today are a legacy of their enduring contributions.

Madness stalked the colony of New South Wales, and tracing its wild path changes the way we look at our history. Bedlam at Botany Bay is a series of stories about what happened when people went mad in this place, told through the magnificent correspondence of tireless colonial secretaries, the cautious and brazen language of lawyers and judges and firebrand politicians, and by siblings, parents, friends, and the mad themselves. It is not a history of the miserable institutions built for the mad, or those within them, or the people in charge of them. These stories of madness are woven together into a narrative about freedom and possibilities, and collapse and unravelling. It is a new story of colonial Australia, cast as neither a grim and fatal shore nor an antipodean paradise, but a place where the full range of humanity wrestled with the challenges of colonisation. They were divorced from those held dear and from familiar environments, enjoyed spectacular freedoms, and laboured under the burden of their ambitions. They faced the bleakness of failure, the effects of their violence, and the strangeness of life amidst an exiled majority and the structures put in place to discipline them – surrounded by the clank of pickaxes and leg irons, the voices of the poor and uneducated, and the self-righteous chattering of those who ‘came free’.

France’s decision to introduce penal transportation in 1854 at precisely the moment that Britain was winding it back is a striking and curious fact of history. While the Australian experiment of penal colonization was not considered a model for direct imitation, it did nonetheless provide a foundational reference point for France and indeed other European powers well after its demise, serving as a yardstick (whether positive or negative) for subsequent discussions about the utility of transportation as a method of controlling crime. The ultimate fate of the Australian experiment raised questions in later decades about the utility, sustainability and primary purpose of penal transportation. Drawing on the records of both French and international penal reform organizations, this paper reflects on the legacy that the British experiment was seen to provide in the decades after convict transportation to Australia ended, while French transportation took off. In so doing, it casts light onto the expectations of and rationale for penal colonization held by its practitioners—past, present, and aspiring. Even if penologists saw penal transportation as serving some useful role in tackling crime, the experience of the British in Australia seemed to indicate the strictly limited practicability of the method in terms of controlling crime. Far from a self-sustaining system, penal colonization was premised on an inherent and insurmountable contradiction; namely, that the realization of the colonizing side of the project depended on the eradication of its penal aspect.

"Crime, as Michael Ignatieff suggests, was one means by which the poor rebelled against the constraints of the existing social order. In recent years histroians have extensively examined crime and punishment which has proved to be a rich subject area in which to conduct analysis which reflects on modern European society's experimentation with methods of social control. One approach believed that incarceration was insufficient and that British society needed to be permanently rid of the criminal element, preferably as far away as was geographically possible.

This paper will examine aspects of the living conditions experienced by female convicts during their voyages to Van Diemen's Land(VDL) in the period 1818 to 1853 and will discuss the qualifications and experience of the male surgeon-superintendents who were responsible for both the care, as well as the control, of these women."

Emanuel Charles Greene was an extra-ordinary character: A creole who served as an officer under Napoleon at Waterloo, (unlike the British Army, the French did commission “people of colour”). Later remanded into Newgate Gaol, Greene was convicted following a high profile case, during which he conducted his own defence. Transported to Van Dieman’s Land, Greene married into the Anglo-Irish gentry, and lived the life of an officer and a gentleman, whilst acting as a thorn in the side of authority.
The story below is true. Everything can be supported by contemporary documents. My only question is was Emanuel Charles Green an Officer and a Gentleman, or “no regular bred Frenchman”?

Nicolas Battis, a man of colour, and a Private in the band of the 13th Light Dragoons, lived a life that included service at the battle of Waterloo and transportation to Australia as a convict.
In May 2023 Nicolas Batise’s (sic) place of enlistment was identified: According to the Edinburgh, Scotland, Army Attestation Registers, 1796-1857 on ancestry.co.uk Nicolas Batise, a labourer born in Guadeloupe enlisted in the ‘Loyal Macleod Fencibles’ at Edinburgh in November 1798. On enlistment he had a black complexion, very dark eyes, black hair, was 20 years of age and 5/7” tall.

This short article is part of a special issue of the french heritage journal "monumental", dedicated to the "patrimoine de l'enfermement", the "heritage of incarceration". It concludes a chapter, p. 52-78, focusing on the french colonial penitentiary facilities (mainly French Guiana and New Caledonia). It explores how archaeological excavation can help us understand the elements of daily life in the penitentiaries, and also questions the integration of these sites in the local cultural heritage.

NB: the downloadable article is an almost finished version, and might contain minor errors.

A ticket of leave was the third stage of servitude for convicts sent to Western Australia, following periods of separate confinement (in Britain) and hard labour (in Britain or the colony). Unlike other convicts, ticket-of-leave men were allowed to enter the colonial workforce, earn a wage and acquire property, although they remained subject to police surveillance and faced legal disadvantages. Despite the fact that most Western Australian convicts spent longer on ticket of leave than in colonial gaols or prisoner work parties, few historians have examined the ticket-of-leave experience in detail. Many have focussed on the freedoms of ticket-of-leave life described in convict department reports, reaffirming official assurances that 'ticketers' were treated more or less as free men. This article challenges these representations, providing a long overdue systematic exploration of ticket-of-leave standards of living. Through analysis of ticket-of-leave wage rates, living costs and mortality data, it shows that the 'freedoms' ticketers were afforded rarely translated into favourable living standards or work conditions. Not only were most ticket-of-leave holders disadvantaged in comparison to free men, but a considerable proportion were scarcely better off (in terms of living and labour conditions) than incarcerated convicts.

Between 1847 and 1853, Charles Brentani was a noticeable character around Melbourne. Today, few have heard of him. There are occasional references, usually in relation to an 1849 gold discovery, or to silverware supplied by his retail jewellery business, but none gives comprehensive details of his life. He was one of those extraordinary ‘ordinary men’ whose story is lost in a history that tends to concentrate on ‘big people’. In telling Brentani’s story, this article supports the vision of the Royal Historical Society of Victoria that ‘knowing the individual stories of past inhabitants gives present and future generations, links with local place and local community, bolstering a sense of identity and belonging, and enriching our cultural heritage’.

An examination into the lives of Joseph, William, and John Smith broadens our understanding of the colonial Chesapeake while deepening our knowledge of Gypsy history. Doing so allows Gypsies to be written into the historical narrative as discrete actors, rather than mythologized into a timeless landscape. It also provides a fuller picture of the population living in the late colonial Chesapeake. Though sources about these men are scant, contextualizing their experiences reveals their lives and decisions as convict servants to have been fairly typical for the time and place. However, a deeper reading of their runaway advertisement suggests that the local population must have had plenty of experience with either real or imagined Gypsies to have created their own assumptions of what it meant to be Gypsy.

Edward White's statement, given in 1830 regarding what has become known as the 'Risdon Cove Massacre' is preferred over that of Lt. William Moore and Dr. Jacob Mountgarrett, as the likely 'truth' as to what exactly happened on the 3rd of May 1804.
For the first time, his statement is presented without the well published 'error' and more attention payed to not only what he stated, but what he didn't state. White's statement formed the basis, the foundation if you like, of the argument for the historic site of Risdon Cove to be 'handed back' to the Tasmania Aboriginal community nearly 20 years ago. This was done to aid reconciliation, many would argue though, it did quite the opposite.

This article features a connected history of punitive relocations in the Spanish Empire, from the independence of Spanish America to the " loss " of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines in 1898. Three levels of entanglement are highlighted here: the article looks simultaneously at punitive flows stemming from the colonies and from the metropole; it brings together the study of penal transportation, administrative deportation, and military deportation; and it discusses the relationship between punitive relocations and imprisonment. As part of this special issue, fore-grounding " perspectives from the colonies " , I start with an analysis of the punitive flows that stemmed from the overseas provinces. I then address punishment in the metropole through the colonial lens, before highlighting the entanglements of penal transportation and deportation in the nineteenth-century Spanish Empire as a whole.

On 15 March 1817 the convict ship the Chapman departed from Cork with 200 male prisoners on board. When it dropped anchor off Sydney Cove four months later, its prison doors opened to reveal 160 gaunt and brutalised men. Twelve were dead and twenty-eight lay wounded in the hospital below deck. As officials pieced together the horrors of the voyage many questions arose. Why did Michael Collins claim that his fellow convicts conspired to take the ship? Why was Captain Drake unable to rein in the violent and sadistic Third Mate Baxter? Was there really an attempted mutiny on the Chapman? Or was this cold-blooded murder? Using daily journals from the crew, detailed testimony from several convicts and official colonial government correspondence, this book unravels what happened during those four months at sea. Tarnished by intrigue, suspicion and mutual hatred, this is the story of one of the darkest episodes in the history of penal transportation between Ireland and Australia.

The story of the convict ship Hashemy arriving at Sydney in June 1849 after being turned away from Melbourne has been repeated by many professional, amateur and popular historians. The arrival of the Hashemy, and subsequent anti-convict protest meetings in Sydney, not only became a turning point in the anti-transportation movement in Australia, but also added to an already existing antagonism on the part of Sydney towards its colonial rival, Port Phillip, or Melbourne.

This presentation will demonstrate that the story of the Hashemy being turned away from Port Phillip is based upon a fallacy; investigates how that fallacy developed and was perpetuated over a period of 160 years; and demonstrates that politicians and historians encouraged this false interpretation of history, effectively extending the Intercolonial discontent that began in the 1840s, into the 20th century and beyond.

Brief biographies of twenty-one convict women from places on the edges of the British Empire, who were transported to Van Diemens Land and New South Wales during the 19th Century.
Research notes in preparation of an online Dictionary of Biography launched in May 2016.
Please note that subsequent research may have added new details and corrected some errors in these biographies.

Introduction
From the settlement of Van Diemen’s Land in 1803, to the cessation of convict transportation in 1853, over 69,000 male and female convicts were dumped on the colony’s shores. At any one time, thousands of convicts were incarcerated or laboured across the length and breadth of the colony. Of these, it was inevitable that a certain number died whilst still under sentence. Accidents, diseases, murders, suicides and old age all took a toll, leaving the authorities with bodies requiring burial. Focusing on the colony of Van Diemen’s Land, it is the intention of this study to shed light on the treatment of convicts post mortem: how many individuals died under sentence, how their bodies were treated and where they were interred. Seemingly simple questions, this article hopes to highlight that, until now, little comprehensive research has been conducted into the treatment of Van Diemen’s Land’s convict dead.

This paper will provide an institutional narrative of British prison hulks during wartime, tracking the shift in private to state control between the period 1776-1820. It will be divided into two halves; the first section will examine the methods used by the Admiralty to house prisoners of war, and the effectiveness of the intermediaries employed as agents in dealing with issues concerning prisoner welfare. The second half will ask questions about the efficiency of the first overseer of convict hulks at Woolwich, Duncan Campbell, a private merchant who previously held the contract for transporting felons to North America. In 1815, prisoners of war returned home and Admiralty hulks were disbanded. However, the convict hulk system moved under direct Home Office control in 1820 and was plagued with difficulties until it finally ended in 1857.

This paper will examine the frameworks of both the Sick and Hurt and Transport Boards (National Archives and National Maritime Museum, Greenwich) in relation to prisoners of war on board hulks, through a close examination of Admiralty correspondence. It will also examine the administration of convict hulks and their progression from Treasury to Home Office control by using National Archives records and ‘Convict transportation & the Metropolis’, the letterbooks and papers of private contractor of the prison hulks, Duncan Campbell (1726-1803) sourced from the State Library of New South Wales. The source materials will be approached qualitatively.

Many contemporary Australians have convict forebears, though their families may not know it. While transportation to New South Wales ended in 1840, Van Diemen’s Land continued to serve as a secondary place of confinement, with prisoners shipped from the mainland colonies as well as from Britain. James Boyce estimates that the number of convicts still under sentence in Tasmania rose to a high of more than 30,000 in 1847, with three-quarters of the adult male population being convict or ex-convict. Nicholas Stanley, a Cornwall tanner, was transported to Hobart in 1837 for 14 years for receiving stolen livestock. This paper traces the remarkable number of written records about him, now available through Trove and the digitised Tasmanian convict records. It pieces together aspects of his long life in Tasmania and considers whether his life was typical of convict experience, and speculates about the ease with which the story of his imprisonment could be kept from subsequent generations.

Over the last three decades the convict as worker has
become an increasingly studied aspect of the Australian
transportation experience. With their insight into the
landscapes and material culture of the convict experience,
historical archaeologists have had—and continue to have—
an important role to play in such research. This paper draws
upon previously published studies of the archaeology and
history of convict labour, considering the use of such labour
in the colonies which received convicts between 1788–1868:
primarily Van Diemen’s Land, New South Wales and Western
Australia. Focusing on the use of convicts by the government,
it finds that there is a distinct group of settings within which
convict labour was deployed. In addition, the paper discusses
the key determinants that resulted in the formation and evolution of the places of convict labour. Whilst not intended
as a restrictive model, this synthesis of convict labour settings
and their formative factors provides a contextual framework
and classificatory system for future research.

"Introduction
This article was written with the intent of placing the timber-getting operations of the Cascades convict probation station within the wider contexts of the Tasman Peninsula and the colony of VanDiemen's Land. Established in late 1841, Cascades was one of the first stations settled as a result of the shift from the Assignment to the Probation system of convict administration. With a design and demography that mirrored the management ideals of the new system, Cascades provides a unique opportunity to study a successful probation station in operation. This paper seeks to discuss and test a number of questions, chief among them being the following. How did Cascades fit into the wider dynamics of the peninsula? How did the convicts extract the timber resource? How did the officials combine the need for reformative labour with the necessities of economy? And how did the station respond to shifts in the convict administrative system both within the peninsula and beyond it?"

The essays in this volume provide a new perspective on the history of convicts and penal colonies. They demonstrate that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were a critical period in the reconfiguration of empires, imperial govern-mentality, and punishment, including through extensive punitive relocation and associated extractive labour. Ranging across the global contexts of Africa, Asia, Australasia, Japan, the Americas, the Pacific, Russia, and Europe, and exploring issues of criminalization, political repression, and convict management alongside those of race, gender, space, and circulation, this collection offers a perspective from the colonies that radically transforms accepted narratives of the history of empire and the history of punishment. In this introduction, we argue that a colony-centred perspective reveals that, during a critical period in world history, convicts and penal colonies created new spatial hierarchies, enabled the incorporation of territories into

In 1850, settlers in the Cape Colony celebrated their victory over plans to land convicts from Britain and Ireland on their shores. Similar celebrations were held in Tasmania in 1853 upon news that convict transportation would finally end. The anti-transportation movement is familiar to Australian historians, yet comparing celebrations in the Cape Colony reveals more starkly the purpose pageantry held in creating myths of settler triumph. Foremost was the validation of the family, extending the reproductive vision of settler expansion, civilisation and responsible government through the centrality of youth on display, which in turn silenced the uncomfortable racial realities of the past.

The woman known in Australian Convict Records as Sarah Payne was born in Portugal around 1812. She worked as a silk weaver in the Spitalfields district of London and it was there that she and her accomplice were caught stealing fabric. They were transported to New South Wales. This is Sarah Payne's story.

This bibliographic essay seeks to contribute to the understanding of convict labour from a global and long-term perspective. First the conditions conducive to the emergence and transformation of convict labour are addressed by framing this coercive labour form within broader classifications of labour relations and by discussing its connection with the problem of governmentality. Subsequently, an overview of the literature is undertaken in the form of a journey across time, space, and different regimes of punishment. Finally, the limitations of the available literature are discussed, the possibility of a longer-term (pre-1500) and global history of convict labour is considered, and some theoretical and methodological approaches are suggested that could favour this task.Dans cet essai bibliographique, les auteurs tentent d'approfondir les connaissances sur le travail des prisonniers dans une perspective mondiale et sur une longue durée. D'abord, les conditions propices à la naissance et la transformation du travail des prisonniers sont évoquées, en définissant cette forme de travail coercitif à l'intérieur de classifications élargies de relation de travail, et en discutant son lien avec le problème de la gouvernementalité. Ensuite, un panorama de la littérature spécialisée est esquissé sous la forme d'un voyage dans le temps, dans l'espace et sous différents régimes de peines. Enfin, les limites de la littérature disponible sont examinées, la possibilité d'une histoire sur une longue durée (remontant à avant l'an 1500) et mondiale du travail des prisonniers est considérée, et diverses approches théoriques et méthodologiques propres à favoriser cette tâche sont suggérées.Traduction: Christine Krätke-Plard Dieser bibliographische Aufsatz versucht, aus globaler und langfristiger Sicht einen Beitrag zum Verständnis der Sträflingsarbeit zu leisten. Zunächst werden die Bedingungen angesprochen, die die Entstehung und Veränderung der Sträflingsarbeit begünstigen, in dem diese Form von Zwangsarbeit in den Kontext weitreichenderer Klassifizierungen der Arbeitsverhältnisse gestellt und ihre Beziehung zum Problem der Gouvernementalität diskutiert wird. Anschließend wird ein Überblick über die Literatur geboten, in Form einer Reise durch Zeit und Raum sowie durch verschiedene Strafregimes. Schließlich werden die Grenzen der vorliegenden Literatur diskutiert; die Möglichkeit einer langfristiger angelegten (vor 1500 ansetzenden) Globalgeschichte der Sträflingsarbeit wird ins Auge gefasst und es werden einige theoretische und methodologische Ansätze vorgeschlagen, die diesem Vorhaben dienlich sein könnten.Übersetzung: Max Henninger Este ensayo bibliográfico aspira a ser una contribución a la comprensión del trabajo cautivo desde una pespectiva global y de larga duración. Comienza por situar las condiciones que conducen a la emergencia y transformación del trabajo cautivo en un marco más amplio de clasificación de las relaciones laborales y se dialoga sobre su conexión con la cuestión de la gubernamentalidad. A continuación se lleva a cabo una panorámica de la literatura existente sobre el tema como si se tratara de un viaje a través del tiempo, del espacio y de los diferentes regímenes de castigo. Por último, se analizan las limitaciones de las obras a disposición del investigador, considerando la posiblidad de introducir una visión de mayor duración temporal (anterior a 1500), proponiendo una historia global del trabajo cautivo y se sugieren algunas cuestiones teóricas y metodológicas que puedan ir en esa dirección.Traducción: Vicent Sanz Rozalén

Follows after discussion, a list of owners of convict ships to Australia, 160 names of which only about 60 can be researched, which is hardly good enough. Other discussion follows at list's end. This file is intended to updated from time to time.