I am only vaguely familiar with this. I am curious as to the whole subject of exiles. What were the trems of the exile. What could they expect once they landed? Were any laws in force? How quickly did they restart a more civilized version of a society. Were the outcomes usually good or poor? Long term, and short term. Anything someone might know about this.
Are you talking about exile, or penal colonies? Exile is “get out of here, we don’t care where you go, anywhere but here”. Penal colonies are “We’re throwing you on a ship and dumping you in this specific place”.
Penal colonies, I couldn’t think of the word.
AKA Australia. 
The official term of sentence is “transportation”. Before Britain discovered Australia, transportation meant a trip to a wasteland south of French Canada.
Penal colonies, at least for the UK, weren’t a matter of just dumping inconvenient people in the middle of nowhere. They were part of a planned colonisation, so, yes, there was law issued from London, albeit handed to a pretty well omnipotent governor to enforce and expand, and supplies were sent with them where necessary.
You could look at Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore about the early years of European settlement in Australia, and there must be plenty of similar works on the West Indies, for example. I’m guessing that those transported to America before independence were assigned to already-existing farms and businesses rather than creating a whole new colony.
The French began using French Guiana as a penal colony beginning in the 1850s and continued to do so into the 1950s. The complex at Devil’s Island had a particular reputation for brutality and mortality, with a death rate of 75% at its worst.
New England?
Pretty much all of British North America.
Okay. I could see thinking of New England as a wasteland; it still is.
I can’t say for sure, but I believe that one time when I was in the hospital I asked a nurse if she could find me something to read, and this it was she gave me. It was very interesting, to the point where I seriously considered trying to smuggle it out so I could finish it.
Transportation to Australia meant either:
(a) Working on a government-run work party, usually building infrastructure like roads, bridges, barracks or (for women prisonsers) working in a laundry or a fabric mill; living in a convict barracks; or
(b) Being assigned to a free settler, often a farmer, as agricultural, factory or domestic labour; living in accommodation provided by the employer; or
(c) starting out in a goverment work party, and when your relative trustworthiness has been established, being “promoted” to assigned labour.
Both those in work parties and those in assigned labour were subject to brutalisation, sexual exploitatation, etc, and had little remedy for them. Ultimately a convict would hope to obtain ticket-of-leave, which meant you were free to take any job you could find, and live where you wanted, but you couldn’t leave the colony until the expiry of your sentence (which, if you were sentenced to transportation for life, meant never) and you were liable to re-confinement (in even more savage conditions) if you were not of good conduct. Colonial Australia had a more or less permanent labour shortage so convicts given ticket-of-leave could generally find a job without difficulty, often paying as much or more as they might have expected to earn for similar work in the UK. Convicts who had a particular skill or a trade could usually find work in that line, and enjoyed the higher wages that it could attract.
I immediately thought of Edward Everett Hale’s story “The Man Without A Country” (1863). Many people thought it was true story because Hale provided reasonable names and dates. I’m not aware of any parallel situations IRL.
When I read the title it made me think of the scene in Spartacus where Laurence Olivier is forced to exile his protege, played by John Dall. “He is to be denied food, shelter, and fire for a distance of 100 miles from Rome”
So what would it be like today?
“He is to be denied gas, recharger access, and WiFi for a day’s journey from here. And no Chicken McNuggets or Big Macs”
I have often heard people say they should just take a big place out in the desert and put all the criminals there. No guards, give them access to guns, drugs anything they wanted. I bet they would start forming a government in less than a week.
Other than the “desert” part, there’s been a couple of documentaries.
Also “Coventry” by Robert A. Heinlein.
The protagonist, David MacKinnon, is a romantic idealist who has been convicted of assault, and the court determines he is a substantial risk to commit violence in the future. He must accept treatment to remove his violent tendency, or be exiled to “Coventry”, the area allocated to those who reject the Covenant or commit crimes and refuse psychological treatment, enclosed by an impassable electric field (the “Barrier”).
MacKinnon chooses to emigrate to escape what he sees as the boredom of a too-civilized society. But he discovers that Coventry is not the peaceful anarchy he envisioned. It is actually a bleak dystopia split into three separate “countries”
Hughes’ The Fatal Shore - a great book, indeed - is honest and explicit about the horrors that the transported went through at the hands of the British. The transported outnumbered the Brits - who were living a life that amounted to exile and weren’t all that happy themselves - and so the British governors ruled by terror. The accounts of the whippings are as bad if not worse than what I’ve read of slave whippings in America.
The British weren’t sending a pack of insane murderers out of a Batman comics. Most were accused of petty crimes, stealing a loaf of bread being the least, or maybe being a political prisoner was ever lesser. Women were not prostitutes in England but were often driven to it to survive. Stories of rape on shipboard are common.
None of the skills that allowed to stay alive in London were of much use when they were ordered to build their own homes and farm their own food. Many in the First Fleet (1787) died of starvation. The Second Fleet (1790) was supposed to bring relief. Instead it brought sick and dying. Probably two-thirds of the convicts were dead within a year.
You can’t do justice to the subject in a post. It’s like being dropped in a parallel Earth; a whole book barely suffices to get at the alien thinking and experiences.
You give a good glimpse into what it would be like. I wonder how something like this would be managed today if exile to a penal colony was still an option.
I’d imagine you’d have to go to North Korea, but you probably wouldn’t get back to tell the tale.