I saw the reference in a book review of Victorian era punishment of “Seven years of Transportation”. What was “Seven years of Transportation”? I found one place that says it was equivalent of two years of separate imprisonment which rather begs the question what is separate imprisonment?
Transportation to a penal colony, such as Australia, for a period of seven years.
“Separate imprisonment” sounds like another way of saying solitary confinement.
For the record, it wasn’t unknown during the Victorian period but it was much more common prior to 1820 (and banned entirely in 1868). It began with the Piracy Act of 1717.
Seperate imprisonment was a form of solitary confinement that was popular in the 19th century. Prisoners were kept in isolated cells and had minimal contact not only with other prisoners but even with guards and visitors.
Transportation was being sent to a penal colony, as other posters noted.
Which, for some people who were sentenced, effectively meant “for life,” because getting back was often expensive and difficult.
Spot on, plus a lot of them left pretty crappy lives back int he ol’ blighty and were more then happy to stay in a large warm country.
It was a way of populating the colonies.
***Black Velvet Band ***- the Irish Rovers
*… Next morning before judge and jury
For a trial I had to appear
And the judge, he said, “You young fellows…
The case against you is quite clear
And seven long years is your sentence
You’re going to Van Dieman’s Land
Far away from your friends and relations
To follow the black velvet band.”
*
Export of prisoners to Australia… perhaps that explains some things.
I often argue I would rather be in a country founded by convicts than one founded by puritans…
The sentence of “Transportation” (to Australia) figured in the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Gloria Scott.
Robert Heinlein offered an updated take on the theme in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, in which convicts are sent to a penal colony on the moon. After a period of time there, their muscles are too degenerated for them ever to return to Earth, so any sentence is effectively a life sentence. And that goes for the guards assigned there too. Once free, the convicts can live in a free person’s colony on moon instead of in prison, but they are stuck on the moon. The guards assigned there, knowing that they will be similarly stuck there, spend their time being in a really bad mood. They all conspire to revolt and become independent of Earth.
Transportation figured, indirectly, in the early history of California, circa mid-1800’s.
Australia, having been populated largely by convicts, was a rough Wild-Wild-West sort of place. They had a nasty gang there called the Sydney Ducks. Some of these saw an opportunity to set up their gangland business in California during the Gold Rush and early statehood days.
Official government in the San Francisco area being primitive in those days, not to mention incompetent and corrupt, the forces of law and order were not very effective. Thus, people in San Francisco formed vigilance committees, which caught a few Ducks, held a few kangaroo courts, strung up a few, and sent the rest fleeing for their lives. A lot of them just went up the river to Sacramento and set up shop there instead.
The only reason we had to start using Australia for transportation of undesirables was because the place we’d been sending them too until then became unavailable to us sometime around 1776.
(although this is, more or less, true)
OB
Georgia (of Scarlett O’Hara fame, not the country) started out as a penal colony.
In Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, the heroine is sentenced to Transportation and is sent to Virginia.
Not true.
This is a long-standing historical myth, probably arising out of the fact that Georgia’s primary founder, James Edward Oglethorpe, and the other Trustees of the colony expressed some interest in making Georgia a refuge for debtors removed or freed from English debtor prisons.
There has been debate, going back many years, among some historians about the extent to which Georgia was ever even primarily a colony of debtors. Most have concluded that it was not, and that the vast majority of colonists were free men who were chosen because they had the characteristics of honesty and industriousness that the Trustees wanted. Many were poor, argue the historians, and the Trustees made clear that providing new opportunities for the hard-working poor was an issue for them, but they were not criminals or debtors, for the most part.
Probably the most famous article on the debtor issue was written way back in 1940. British historian Albert Saye wrote an article, “Was Georgia a Debtor Colony?” Georgia Historical Quarterly 24 (December 1940): 323-41. Saye concluded that it was not, and in the half century after Saye’s article most scholars tended to accept his conclusion that there were, in fact, very few debtors in Georgia. A common figure bandied about was “about a dozen.”
There were also debates over whether the source of any Georgia debtors had actually been prisoners, or simply insolvent, or merely debtors. In 1943, Saye claimed that “not more than a dozen imprisoned debtors ever came to the Colony.” A bunch of other historians over the following decades accepted Saye’s conclusions.
In a more recent article, from 1993, Rodney Baine argued in the same journal as Saye, the Georgia Historical Quarterly, that debtors might have been more significant in the early years of the colony than Saye and others believed. Baine notes that the Trustees placed considerable priority on the very poor and the indigent as potential settlers, and that this arose out of their concern at the problems faced by debtors, and by those released from debtors’ prisons in England. He notes the difficulty of arriving at a completely accurate picture, especially since the records of English debtor prisons are often absent or unreliable. He concludes, though, that:
He notes early in his piece, however, that:
One American history textbook i have here on my desk describes Georgia as being founded as “a refuge for poor people from England,” and another uses almost identical language, describing the colony as “a refuge for Britain’s poor.” A third text notes that “The Trustees did not, as legend has it, empty England’s debtors’ prisons to populate Georgia.” A fourth textbook, published in 2005, does buck the trend, referring to Georgia as “a haven for English debtors, who would be released from confinement if they agreed to relocate to the colony.”
None of the literature that i can find, whether scholarly articles or college-level textbooks, ever refers to Georgia as a penal colony.
Which is true, but it needs to be said that Australia wasn’t founded by convicts, it was founded by jailers.
I’ve seen, right here on the SD, Americans who apparently sincerely believe that the Brits just sailed into Sydney Harbour, dropped off shipments of convicts, and left them to it.
One of the main reasons why the system of transportation started was that by the 1770s it was clear that slavery in the American colonies was a terrible idea and that public sentiment in the UK would very soon lead to the end of slavery in the British Empire (which it did).
The convicts that were transported to Australia were generally young and healthy, and generally not serious criminals (serious crimes got you hung in Georgian Britain). The most common crime that led to sentence of transportation was what we now call shoplifting. These were mostly poor people stealing items to sell so that they could eat. There were some hardened criminals in the mix, but they were a minority.
The point being that transported convicts were free labour. They were transported in chains (in some cases on former slave ships crewed by former slavers) and they were subject to discipline that was often cruel beyond belief. Transported convicts were the new slaves.
Anyway, the colonies that later became Australia were not all penal colonies, some were free. After the first decade or so the free settlers outnumbered the convicts, and later influxes of settlers outnumbered the convicts many times over. Very few current Australians have any convict ancestry, the estimates I’ve seen are that less than 2% of living Australians have convict ancestry.
So, no, Australia wasn’t founded by convicts any more than the US was founded by African slaves.
Oh, come on. Conditions on the London Underground aren’t *that *bad.
Well, I guess I am one of the 2%. That figure is surprisingly low to me.
Me, too. (On both counts). I think the number would be higher.
Since the question’s been answered, I’ll add that in his article ‘Riding the Rays’ (which concerns a visit to Australia,) Douglas Adams points out that he knew a bridge in England which still had a sign on it saying that the penalty for defacing the bridge was “Transportation to Australia.”
“Now England can be a pleasant place, but it surprises me that that bridge is still standing.” 
I’m sort of having some difficulty with a few points in Shakesters post (Just disagreeing that is all).
The First Fleet certainly had far more convicts than free people. The second fleet had a lot of convicts and I would be surprised if there were more guards. A quarter of the convicts died during the voyage and another 10% died soon after arrival from their privatations. They were a drain on the community rather than a help.
As for transported in chains, well that was true for the second fleet but I’m not sure it applied to all- if they were in chains it is unlikely they arrived healthy. Depending on the era, there were a lot of women sent out - such as prostitutes from Dublin- and although they were constrained they weren’t in chains.
I think the transportation era was so long it is difficult to make generalisations. Certainly the poor convicts suffered a hell of a lot during the trip but I don’t think it was a picnic for the free settlers or marines who came out.