Transportation 1788-1868 :: Free Essays Online

Transportation 1788-1868The process of transporting convicted criminals to Australia came about as a result of Britains defeat in the American War of Independence. With the loss of this colony, Britain similarly 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 less-traveled policy and so, in 1787, a British fleet set brush to build a penal colony at Botany request in New South Wales - seventeen years after jam Cook had landed there. Robert Hughes, in his study The Fatal Shore, describes this undertaking as a new colonial experiment, never tried before, not repeated since. An undiscovered continent would become a jail.The choice of New South Wales was an grotesque one, for Cook had described it as barren, and A.G.L. Shaw notes in Convicts and the Colonies that it seemed wholly useless for trade. It would fall out that all the British government requ ired was a place to convulse of its criminal classes and subsequently forget about them, ignoring commercial considerations. The inhospitable disposition of the place seemed ideal for neer-do-wells, and its distant location meant that few were likely to decease. many an(prenominal) crimes, from petty theft to murder, were deemed worthy of fare, and there seems to have been little differentiation made between types of criminal, which concerned social reformers of the time. Household Words express concern that hardened ruffians of the deepest dye were chained hand to hand, during a six calendar month voyage, with simple country poachers, pickpockets of tender age, and sailor smugglers. All prisoners were treated alike, and conditions were tart appalling living conditions, disease, hunger, floggings and general neglect were prevalent and many convicts died en route or upon arrival.However there was hope on the view for some prisoners those who behaved well were hired out to emi grant farmers to become, like Dickens Magwitch, sheep farmer(s), line of products breeder(s) and other trades besides. Thus convicts could make some sort of return to respectability. not only that those who had completed their terms were granted small plots of land, with the aim of boosting the local anesthetic economy and ensuring that these undesirable - regardless of whether their crimes were worked out and paid 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 great blessing by the criminal classes, rather than as a deterrent.