The
reasons for transportation to Australia
Life
in 18th century England
In
the eighteenth century (sometimes called the 1700s), the gap between
rich and poor was huge. In England,
King George III (cf. image on the left) lived in his palace
on the rich side of London, while in
the east of the city most people were poor and hungry.
People began
their working lives at the age of six, labouring long hours in
factories for small wages.
Men had to live
close to their workplaces, so hundreds of families would be crowded
into just a few streets near butcher’s shops and tanneries, where
leather was made. The waste from these places,
as well as sewerage from the houses,
often ran openly in the street. Disease was very common in these
slums. Nobody thought that life would get any
better, so men and women tried to
forget their troubles by getting drunk on cheap alcohol.
Crime
London’s
population doubled between 1750 and 1770. This rapidly rising
birth-rate meant that suddenly England
had a workforce made up of very young people
who had no hope for the future. There weren’t enough jobs to go
round, and the only way people could
survive was to steal.
More and more
people were turning to crime, and there seemed to be no way to
stop them.
Capital punishment
The government began
sentencing criminals to death for almost any offence.
They hoped that
capital punishment would frighten people enough to make them
think twice before committing a crime. A murderer, a thief, or
someone who cut down another person’s
shrubbery, could all get the same sentence.
Thousands of
people were hanged for crimes that would only get them a fine
today.
It was too expensive to build more
jails, and the English upper class didn’t want to have to see
people suffering in chain gangs. Everyone wanted to get rid of the
problem. The best idea seemed to be to take the prisoners to another
country where England owned land, and leave them there. This was
called transportation.
Transportation
Transportation had been used since
the beginning of the eighteenth century to rid the English of their
prisoners. Usually, convicts were taken to the British colony of
America, but the American War of Independence (1775–1783) changed
all that forever. The Americans no longer wanted to be a part of the
British Empire, and were willing to fight for the right to govern
themselves.
America won the war, and its new
government told Britain not to send any more white convicts. The
Americans preferred to use black African slaves to do the work.
The prison hulks
England
had to do something soon about the overcrowded jails. A short-term
solution was found. There were some old, disused ships known as
hulks moored in the Thames River that flows through London, and at
sea-ports on the south coast of England. It was decided that these
would become floating jails. Convicts would eat and sleep on the
hulks, and be taken to work on the land every day.
While the hulks steadily filled with
prisoners, the government tried to decide which of Britain’s
colonies could support a penal settlement, which is an
isolatedcommunity of convicts set up especially for the purpose of
punishment.
The west coast of Africa was a
possibility. So was Australia: the great southernland that no one
knew very much about. West Africa was the favourite option. Because
it was closer to England it would be cheaper to transport people
there. The site was explored, but it was found to be unsuitable.
By 1785, living conditions on board
the hulks were getting worse. Almost a thousand more convicts were
being added to the floating jails each year. In 1786 there was a
rebellion on one prison hulk — eight convicts were shot dead and
46 wounded. Lord Sydney, the Home Office Secretary, made the final
decision. A penal colony would be established at Botany Bay.
The
convicts' lives and crimes
What kind of criminal
came to Australia?
The First Fleet
carried 736 criminals. They were all thieves. Over a hundred had
used violence in carrying out their crimes (there were 31 muggers
and 71 highway robbers on board), but none was transported for a
violent crime, like murder. These first
convicts were not naturally dangerous or violent. There was
no Social Security in England at this time, and unemployment was
even more of a problem than it is
today. They were mostly hungry people who could not
support themselves without stealing.
Painting of original first fleet
leaving England in 1787 (Jonathan King)
|
The Original Fleet 1787-88
The original First Fleet of convicts left England just before first light on 13 May 1787, in the seventeenth year of the reign of King George III. The fleet of eleven small wooden sailing vessels weighed anchor off Portsmouth and sailed down the Solent Water heading for New South Wales, discovered by
Captain James Cook in 1770.
Criticised and condemned by the few who knew about them, 1,350 seamen, marines and convicts set sail for an utterly unknown continent on the other side of the world, to found a new nation in which no European had ever before lived. By midday all the ships had passed the Needles and the afternoon saw them in the English Channel sailing before a moderate southeasterly breeze.
They sailed to New South Wales via Tenerife in the Canary Islands, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Cape Town, South Africa. The voyage took eight months and one week after which they anchored in Port Jackson, where they founded a settlement they called Sydney.
The First Fleet of 1787 was the greatest migratory voyage attempted by man. It travelled further than any other migratory passage, it carried more people, and it went to a land about which the voyagers' ignorance was total. What is more, it was successful.
The ships were also very small with the smallest just a little over 21 metres. The flagship, HMS Sirius, was only half the size of an average merchant ship of the East India Company—and not one of them had been designed to transport convicts or stores on a voyage of this length—yet they all arrived at Botany Bay within three days of each other after eight months at sea.
Yet only 48 people died during the voyage, an amazing achievement in an age of malnutrition, appalling living conditions, medical ignorance, and low value on human life (the expression "may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb" comes from these times when theft of livestock was a capital offence).
By contrast the Second Fleet—which sailed from England at the end of 1789—lost 267 people. The settlement that the First Fleet established at Port Jackson survived to spread and grow—ultimately into the modern Commonwealth of Australia.
Taken From: Webster's History of Australia. Published by Webster Publishing, 1997. Copyright Webster Publishing, and/or contributors. |
Where did they come
from and how old were they?
Most of the
First Fleet convicts were citizens of London. On later fleets many
Irish people were transported.
The average age
of a convict was around twenty-seven years. The oldest male
was Joseph Owen, who was in his early sixties; the youngest was a
nine-year-old chimney sweep called John
Hudson, transported for seven years for
stealing some clothes and a pistol. The youngest female was
Elizabeth Hayward, a clog-maker who
stole a linen dress and a silk bonnet. She was thirteen. The
oldest woman was Dorothy Handland, who hanged herself from a gum
tree at Sydney Cove in 1789 at the age of eighty-four.
What did they look like?
Two hundred years ago, poor people
were a lot shorter and scrawnier than the average person is today.
This was because during the important growing years of childhood,
their food had not been very nutritious or plentiful. Most of the
male convicts were under 173 cm. Many of them were only about 160
cm, which nowadays is quite short even for a woman.
The children that the convicts gave
birth to later in Australia looked very different to their fathers
and mothers. With a better diet and climate, they tended to grow up
tall and broad, and were not as pale and hollow-cheeked as their
parents.
What did they steal?
Most people stole food, or things
they could sell easily.
John Price stole a goose; twenty-two
year old Elizabeth Powley took some bacon, flour, raisins and butter
from a kitchen; and West Indian Thomas Chaddick raided a kitchen
garden for some cucumbers. Fifteen year old John Wisehammer stole
some snuff (powdered tobacco that was sniffed, not smoked), and
William Douglas picked a silver watch from a gentleman’s pocket.
All of these people were driven to
petty crimes by hunger. All were transported to Australia.
The government men
In
general, the unluckiest convicts were considered to be those who
were kept in government service. If you
were a government man, you had the highest chance
of ending up in the terrible chain gangs that slaved at the worst
tasks, such as rock hewing and road
building. Although conditions in many private posts
were dreadful, at least the assignment system offered you a slim
chance of a better life.
Flogging
Being
sent to Australia was only the first punishment for the
transportees.There were many more to greet them once they’d
arrived.
The punishment most popular
with officials was flogging, and the threat of the lash
hung over the everyday lives of the convicts.
And
the very best website for more information:
Convicts
More
than 160,000 convicts were transported to Australia between 1788 and
1868. 
However,
Western Australia (WA) only started receiving convicts in 1850 and
continued to 1868. 9,700 convicts were sent to WA to help its very
small population to build public buildings. There were no female prisoners
transported to Western Australia. No convicts were sent to
South Australia (SA).
E-Mail
WWW
CD-ROMs
WWW-Links
Englischunterricht in der
Informationsgesellschaft