25/04/2004
History of New South Wales From the Records
VOLUME 1 - GOVERNOR PHILLIP 1783-1789G. B. Barton - 1889
PART I
Transportation to America
TRANSPORTATION to the American plantations is said to have become a common sentence in the English Criminal Courts about the time of the Restoration - 1660 (1). Cromwell sent large numbers of his royalist prisoners to the West Indies (2); but although many convicts of all classes were afterwards sent there, they were few in comparison with the numbers sent to America. The extent to which transportation to that country was carried may be gathered from many casual references in the pages of contemporary writers. When, for instance, Bacon wrote in his Essays that "it is a shameful and unblessed thing to take the scum of people and wicked condemned men to be the people with whom you plant," he was evidently pointing to Virginia. He was a shareholder in the trading Company formed by London merchants and others for the purpose of colonising that country, and which, in 1608 - the second edition of the Essays was published in 1612 - sent out an expedition of nine ships with five hundred settlers on board. These men "were for the most part the very scum of the earth - men sent out to the New World because they were unfit to live in the Old (3)." Speaking of a later period, the same authority says:- "Most of the colonists were no better than criminals; indeed, the colony had got so evil a name in England that few respectable men would go out." De Foe, whose pictures of contemporary life are none the less reliable because they were used for the purposes of fiction, has left some remarkably graphic sketches of the transportation system, of the traffic in indented servants, and of the kidnapping practices to which it gave rise (4). Not only were the gaols cleared from time to time by the removal of their inmates to the ships employed in carrying them over to the plantations, but the very streets of London and other large cities were swept by kidnappers in search of their prey. The method of dealing with the convicts and indented servants, who were shipped to the plantations in the West Indies as well as to those in America, is described by a historian of Jamaica, whose work was written and published at a time when information on the subject might be readily gathered from men's mouths, instead of being laboriously compiled from dusty records (4). The author, seeking to justify the planters from the charge of cruelty to their slaves so often alleged against them, asserts that the cruelty was not practised by the planters but by their overseers, who were sent out to the plantations from England. The colonists were thus made to suffer in reputation for the vicious brutality of men thrust upon them by the English Government; and incidentally he remarks - "America has been made the very common sewer and dungyard to Britain." Similar language seems to have been frequently applied to the West Indies (5). Perhaps the truth could hardly be better expressed than it is by Bancroft:- "The history of our colonisation is the history of the crimes of Europe."
Owing, however, to the absence of statistics on the subject, there are no very accurate means in the present day of ascertaining the extent to which transportation to America was carried during the period of one hundred and twenty years - say from 1650 to 1775 - in which it may be said to have flourished. According to an official estimate (6), written in 1787, the average annual number transported during the seven years from 1769 to 1775 was about 1,100. If we take the average number at 1,000 throughout the whole period, the result would be a total of 120,000. That estimate is probably within the mark, because it takes no account of the large numbers who were sent out for political offences after the rebellions of 1685, 1715, and 1745. Nor does it take any account of the offenders who were allowed to transport themselves - a privilege frequently granted in the case of men arrested on suspicion but not brought to trial, as well as in cases of conviction. In any case, therefore, it might be fairly assumed that while the total number of convicts of all classes transported to America could not have been less than 120,000, it was probably far larger. Dr. Lang mentions (6), in his Transportation and Colonisation, that according to an estimate which Lord Auckland caused to be prepared in connection with the work entitled Governor Phillip's Voyage, the average number of convicts annually sent out to America amounted to 2,000. His own calculation is that the number did not exceed 500 annually, or a total of 50,000 altogether. But this estimate appears to be as much below the mark as Lord Auckland's seemed to him above it.
The reticence of American writers on this subject renders it difficult to obtain any exact information with respect to it. A curious instance of national sensitiveness may be seen in a statement made by Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, who was Governor of Virginia from 1779 to 1781, Minister at the Court of France from 1784 to 1789, and President of the United States from 1801 to 1809. In a note written for the information of the author on the Etats Unis in the Encyclopédie Méthodique, he stated that "the malefactors sent to America were not sufficient in number to merit enumeration, as one class out of three which peopled America." And he added: "It was at a late period of their history that this practice began. I have no book by me which enables me to point out the date of its commencement. But I do not think the whole number sent out would amount to 2,000; and being principally men eaten up with disease, they married seldom and propagated little. I do not suppose that themselves and their descendants are at present 4,000, which is little more than one-thousandth part of the whole inhabitants (7)."
It is not easy to reconcile this estimate - which bears no date, but was written about 1785 - with that of the official charged with the transportation of convicts to America, whose letter on the subject has been already referred to. Jefferson's calculation was not based on any statistical or official information, and is evidently at variance with the facts as they appear in the records.
Later writers of American history would appear to have adopted the great President's views on this subject. Their pages may be searched in vain for any account of the transportation system, although it formed so conspicuous a chapter in the annals of American colonisation. The convict element in the composition of early American society has long since dropped out of sight; so much so, indeed, that it is difficult now to find even an allusion to it in the literature of the present century (8). The explanation is not difficult. The convicts, scattered over the immense territory of the plantations, were so rapidly absorbed in the general population that all traces of their identity were soon lost in the crowd; a result largely owing to the means of reformation afforded them by free grants of land and assistance in the work of cultivation.
Transportation to New South Wales ceased in 1841, and the total number of convicts sent out to the colony up to that date is estimated at 83, 000 (9). Of this portion of its population it may be said that the process of absorption which took place in the American colonies has been witnessed here - largely accelerated by the great gold discoveries which began ten years after the system was discontinued. Thoose discoveries may be said to have dispersed the scattered remnants of the old convict days, as effectually, if not as rapidly, as bush fires have consumed the decayed vegetation of a forest.
Transportation to Van Diemen's Land and Norfolk Island ceased in 1853, and to Western Australia in 1867. For mearly eighty years, in face of all the accumulated evidence against it, this system was carried out as resolutely under one form of government as another - with the same faith in its equity under Lord John Russell in 1840 as under Lord Sydney over half a century before; and but for the determined resistance of the colonies to its continuance, it would probably have been in existence at the present day. So little do merely moral considerations avail, when weighed in the balance against political convenience.
NOTES:
(1) Kelynge's Reports, p. 45:- "It having been lately used that for felonies within clergy, if the prisoner desire it, not to give book, but procure a conditional pardon from the King, and send him beyond sea to serve five years in some of the King's plantations, and then to have land there assigned to him, according to the use in those plantations for servants after their time expired; with a condition in the pardon, to be void if they do not go, or if they return into England during seven years or after without the King's license." Kelynge was appointed Lord Chief Justice in 1665.
(2) Post, p. 455.
(3) Doyle, History of America, pp. 45-6.
(4) Post, pp. 458-9. 460.
(5) "Yet there are authors who affect to describe the inhabitants of all the West Indies as a herd of criminals and convicts." - Edwards, History of the West Indies, vol. ii, p. 7. It was the fashion among English writers of the eighteenth century, when alluding to colonists generally, to describe them in a manner complained of by Edwards.
(6) Post, pp. 461-2.
(7) Jefferson, Works, vol ix, p. 254.
(8) Some indication of the difficulty of obtaining authentic information on this sibject may be agthered from the fact that a correspondent's letter published in Notes and Queries for November 10, 1869, p. 369, asking for "trustworthy sources of information respecting the old system of transportation, as it existed prior to the American War of Independence," met with no reply. Another letter, requesting information as to what extent prisoners had been transported to the United States, appeared in the same periodical for December 11, 1886 (vol. ii, p. 476), to which several replies were sent; see vol. iii, pp. 58, 114, 193; vol. iv, pp. 134, 394; vol. v, p. 196.
(9) Post, p. 463.
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