Convictism in Australia - Reasons For Transportation

Reasons For Transportation

Poverty, social injustice, child labor, harsh and dirty living conditions and long working hours were prevalent in 19th-century Britain. Dickens' novels perhaps best illustrate this; even some government officials were horrified by what they saw. Only in 1833 and 1844 were the first general laws against child labor (the Factory Acts) passed in the United Kingdom.

According to Robert Hughes in The Fatal Shore, the population of England and Wales, which had remained steady at 6 million from 1700 to 1740, rose dramatically after 1740. By the time of the revolt of the American colonies, London was overcrowded, filled with the unemployed, and flooded with cheap gin. Crime had become a major problem. In 1784 a French observer noted that "from sunset to dawn the environs of London became the patrimony of brigands for twenty miles around."

Each parish had a watchman, but Britain did not then have a police force as we know it. Jeremy Bentham avidly promoted the idea of a circular prison, but the penitentiary was seen by many government officials as a peculiarly American concept. Virtually all malefactors were caught by informers or denounced to the local court by their victims.

Due to the Bloody Code, by the 1770s, there were 222 crimes in Britain which carried the death penalty, almost all of them for crimes against property. Many even included offences such as the stealing of goods worth over 5 shillings, the cutting down of a tree, stealing an animal or stealing from a rabbit warren. The Bloody Code died out in the 1800s because judges and juries thought that punishments were too harsh. Since the law makers still wanted punishments to scare potential criminals, but needed them to become less harsh, transportation became the more common punishment.

The Industrial Revolution saw an increase in petty crime in Europe due to the displacement of much of the population, leading to pressures on the government to find an alternative to confinement in overcrowded gaols. The situation in Britain was so dire in fact, that hulks left over from the Seven Years War were used as makeshift floating prisons.

Transportation was a common punishment handed out for both major and petty crimes in Britain from the seventeenth century until well into the nineteenth century. At the time it was seen as a more humane alternative to execution. Around 60,000 convicts were transported to the British colonies in North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. When the American Revolutionary War brought an end to that means of disposal, the British Government was forced to look elsewhere. After Captain Cook's famous voyage to the South Pacific in which he visited and mapped the Eastern coast of Australia in the name of the British Empire, he reported Botany Bay, a bay in modern day Sydney, as being the ideal place to establish a settlement. By 1788, the First Fleet arrived and the first British colony in Australia was established.