While convict transportation was part of the UK’s criminal law system, it also sits in the continuum of forced human movement, which was extensive and shaped global economies in the recent past several centuries.
Slavery is the one we usually immediately think of, or Nazi resettlement, but many nations used versions of penal exile or deportation to their own colonies to provide a ‘free’ labour source, like the Soviet gulag system. Despite that, they were qualitatively different, and Australian convicts had very good odds of being alive at the end of their official sentence, although many experienced brutality on the way.
" It is therefore Our Will and Pleasure that you do immediately upon your landing […] proceed to the
Cultivation of the Land, distributing the Convicts for that purpose in such manner, and under
such Inspectors or Overseers and under such Regulations as may appear to You to be necessary
and best calculated for procuring Supplies of Grain and Ground Provisions. "
(Instructions for Governor Phillip)
My understanding is that transportation to NSW was regulated under the Transportation Act of 1717, which had been suspended on the American revolution in 1776, but not repealed. Under the 1717 act, people got convict labor in return for paying for the transportation. That, I think, replaced an earlier ad-hoc system where people could be given exile as an alternative to death, paying for their own transport.
When the UK government created a penal colony in NSW, they took over the transport cost and convict labor under the 1717 act.
I could be wrong about all this: I’m only a resident, not a historian or lawyer.
And seven long years is your sentence, you’re going to Van Diemen’s land, ♪ far away from your friends and relations… Bad luck to the black velvet band! ♫
-Irish Rovers
I think we have a mistaken view of crime and punishment in the “good old days”. They didn’t have prisons and prison sentences. VIP prisoners may have been kept under lock and key in a Tower room but that was usually to keep them out of circulation and to prevent them from being a rally point for rebellion etc. (And execution would have been provocative, or there were no grounds they could trump up for execution) For the average peasant there was no extended incarceration. In the middle ages and after, simply feeding someone let alone paying for guards was expensive. (As it is today) They either worked for their keep as a slave (the traditional Roman “working in the salt mines”) or old-timey punishments had assorted ways to keep order- fines, branding, mutilation, and hanging (or assorted other ways to die). They key to all of these was they were quick and cheap compared to incarceration. Transportation was a simple way to unload the social problems on somewhere else as society became somewhat less vicious.
In the period between the cessation of American transportation and the start of Australian transportation, prisoners were stashed in “hulks” and other prisons. So 1776-1787 (11 years) was a period when imprisonment was the standard punishment.
The 1717 act claimed to be a reaction to recidivism and short sentences, not a reaction to vicious punishment.
I think that “Modern” punishment (penitence) started in the USA pre-revolution, and spread to the UK in the mid 1800’s, (the UK, characteristically, held on to a breeding-based idea of convicts and the indelible stain) but it was a development of existing forms of punishment, not a sudden radical replacement of mutilation and hanging.
58 escaped hanging, and were sent to Australia after the 1837-1838 rebellions in Lower Canada (now the province of Quebec). One died during the voyage. They spent most of their time building roads in/near Sydney. They were offered their freedom in 1844. Two had died in the meantime, and all returned home - except Joseph Marceau (he had remarried, while still having a wife back home), whose descendants are scattered around Australia. Places in Sydney such as Canada Bay and Exile Bay commemorate these exiles.
One guy kept a diary during his stay, which became a book:
JOURNAL D’UN PATRIOTE EXILÉ EN AUSTRALIE (1839-1845), François-Maurice Lepailleur, texte établi avec introduction et notes par Georges Aubin. Éditions du Septentrion, Sillery, 1996, 412 pages.
The concept of prison as a punishment in itself is a fairly recent one. Until the 19th c. it was a place where you were held until something else happened (trial/transported/paid your debts that you owed) and commonly an unhealthy one (“jail fever”). Transportation was seen as a (relatively) humane improvement in the penal system, supposedly allowing the criminal a chance to start again, away from his/her old temptations and criminal associates. It also exported problem people instead of trying, and usually failing, to make them reform.
As mentioned above, until quite recently it was considered a disgrace to have a convicted transport in your family tree, and many people went to considerable lengths to conceal it.
“Penitence” was not a reason for Transportation to Australia. This was:
The English idea of a “convict” in the 1700 and 1800’s was that it was a permanent condition, even after any imprisonment and exile was over. In the 1700’s, ‘convicts’ couldn’t own land, and couldn’t leave anything to their children. And since the British believed in “breeding” rather than just “race”, the convict stain was biological as well as legal.
On a related note, in 1859 Charles Darwin published his book “The Origin of Species”, which promoted the original idea that the origin of species was in breeding. It was wildly popular with the English upper classes (note plural), who already believed in evolution, and already believed in breeding, and had never before put the two together.
And in 1897, Kipling wrote “Recessional”, containing the phrase “Lesser breeds without the law”. Americans typically consider that phrase to be “racist”. Another reading is that it refers to the Germans – not another race, but another breed. In either case, it emphasizes what the English thought was important – not color, but the breeding which it represents.
Right now, at this very minute, listening to an ABC [Australia’s BBC] broadcast by a historian who has looked at the detailed bios of thousands of convicts sent to Australia, comparing with them with their British counterparts [sometimes one brother sent away, one remaining in the British system] and using Biggish Data to see what outcomes were of different punishment systems.