Transportation 1788-1868 :: Free Essays Online

Transportation 1788-1868The process of transporting convicted miserables to Australia came nigh as a result of Britains defeat in the American warfare of Independence. With the loss of this colony, Britain also lost its primary depository for its surplus criminal population and, for a time, these excess numbers were housed in floating jails - hulks - moored on the Thames. This proved an unpopular policy and so, in 1787, a British choke set sail to build a penal colony at Botany Bay in raw(a) South Wales - seventeen old age after James Cook had landed there. Robert Hughes, in his study The pitch-dark Shore, describes this undertaking as a new colonial experiment, never tried before, not repeated since. An unexplored continent would become a jail.The choice of New South Wales was an unusual peerless, for Cook had described it as barren, and A.G.L. Shaw notes in Convicts and the Colonies that it seemed only useless for trade. It would appear that all the British government requi red was a place to dispose of its criminal classes and subsequently forget about them, ignoring technical considerations. The inhospitable nature of the place seemed ideal for neer-do-wells, and its distant location meant that some were likely to return.Many crimes, from petty theft to murder, were deemed worthy of transportation, and there seems to charter been little distinction made between types of criminal, which concerned social reformers of the time. family unit Words expressed concern that hardened ruffians of the deepest dye were chained hand to hand, during a six month voyage, with simple country poachers, pickpockets of tender age, and sailor smugglers. only prisoners were treated alike, and conditions were harsh appalling living conditions, disease, hunger, floggings and general neglect were commonplace and many convicts died en route or upon arrival.However there was look forward to on the horizon for some prisoners those who behaved well were hired out to outgo er farmers to become, like Dickens Magwitch, sheep farmer(s), stock breeder(s) and other trades besides. Thus convicts could make some elucidate of return to respectability. Not only that those who had completed their terms were granted downcast plots of land, with the aim of boosting the local economy and ensuring that these undesirable - regardless of whether their crimes were worked out and gainful for - did not return to British shores.The response from the metropolitan centre to these emancipist settlers who flourished was one of outrage they feared that transportation would be perceived as a majuscule blessing by the criminal classes, rather than as a deterrent.