Bound for Botany Bay

BY AWAKE! WRITER IN AUSTRALIA

“I FOUND the book lying on the path,” pleaded young Job. This freckle-faced 19-year-old was arrested while crossing a London street, accused of stealing the book. Its value? Eighty cents! Unimpressed by the young man’s defense, the judge sentenced him to seven years in a penal colony.

On the other side of the globe, in an area now known as Quebec, Canada, a gentleman by the name of François-Maurice Lepailleur was captured. Because of taking part in a failed armed uprising against the British government, he was condemned to death. However, the court decided upon an alternative form of punishment for him.

These two young men had more in common than finding themselves on the wrong side of British law. Both found themselves on boat rides to a place called Australia and a fledgling penal colony known as Botany Bay.

What was it like to be a convict in Australia? How many were sent there? And why did these two young men end up so far from home?

Why Australia?

In 1718 the British government decided to lessen their burgeoning prison population by exporting their criminals. By 1770 they were shipping prisoners out at the rate of a thousand a year, mostly to their colonies in Maryland and Virginia. By 1783 the British had lost these colonies as a destination for their felons because of the Revolutionary War in North America. By this time, though, they had already sent more than 50,000 convicts there.

The alternative destination was an arid land at the far side of the globe. Its east coast had been mapped and claimed for Britain 13 years earlier by a naval officer named James Cook. Joseph Banks was a fellow explorer on that voyage, and he suggested that this land would be an ideal destination for undesirable subjects of the British Empire. Thus, in May 1787 the first fleet of 11 little ships started their 16,000-mile [26,000 km] voyage toward Botany Bay. Over the next 80 years, until 1868, a total of 158,829 convicts were sent to Australia.

An Epic Ocean Voyage

In 1833 young Job and his 300 shipmates arrived at Sydney Cove, in Port Jackson. Although the colony was known as Botany Bay,  the landmark that bears that name is actually a few miles south of where the settlement was finally established.

For some the journey itself was a severe punishment. An excerpt from François Lepailleur’s diary gives a glimpse of life on board ship: “In 1840 we were passing by the Cape of Good Hope [South Africa] in the hold of the Buffalo, which was the most horrible, because of the constant darkness, the strict rules that had to be obeyed, and the vermin which continually devoured us and the heat, and to crown our misery, hunger.”

Ironically, the convict ships ended up with one of the best health and safety records for sea travel at the time. Because of incentives put in place by the British government, their total mortality rate from 1788 to 1868 was less than 1.8 percent. In contrast, from 1712 to 1777, between 3 percent and 36 percent of the hapless passengers of slave ships perished en route. Why, even the ships carrying free emigrants from Europe to America had a worse mortality rate than the convict ships!

A Mixed Bag

One of the key reasons for this high survival rate was the youthfulness of the convict population. François was in his mid-30’s, relatively old for a convict. The majority were between 16 and 25 years of age, with some as young as 11. By a ratio of more than 6 to 1, convict men outnumbered convict women.

The majority of the people transported were from the United Kingdom. More than half were English, a third were from Ireland, and Scotland contributed a few thousand felons. Some, like François, came from such far reaches of the British Empire as the places now known as Canada, India, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and even the tiny island of Malta.

These involuntary immigrants brought with them an impressive array of talents and skills. Among them were butchers, boilermakers, brass founders, carpenters, cooks, hatters, tailors, and weavers. A thousand separate occupations are identified in official records, reflecting a cross section of the British work force.

It seems that the convicts were often better educated than the working class left at home. Three quarters of those who arrived in New South Wales could read and write. In comparison, only a little more than half the population back in Britain had the ability to sign the marriage register.

Kidnapping, murder, and sedition could earn one a ticket to Botany Bay, but the qualifications for transportation were far more liberal than that. Opening a place of amusement on Sunday, stealing a handkerchief, or simply holding a debate on Holy Scripture could result in a trip to the Southern Hemisphere.

Life in the New Land

Harsh beatings, constant cruelty, and a subhuman existence are the most popular images of early convict life in Australia. For some this was reality, but many ended up better off than they were in the land they had left behind.

A system evolved in which convicts could be assigned to work for free settlers and officers or even for themselves. Thus, in place of being chained to a road gang for their entire sentence, they could work at their trade or learn a new one. For example, Job was assigned to work for a wealthy but kind landowner and learned to be a stockman on one of the landowner’s properties on the outskirts of Sydney.

The convicts were assigned to work for five and a half days, or 56 hours, each week. Remarkably, this was less than what most factory workers in Britain had to endure at the time, laboring from sunrise to sunset each day. Convicts could charge for any work they did beyond this prescribed length of time, and they often ran small after-hours businesses, such as selling cut grass for livestock fodder.

While the whip was used liberally, one study shows that 66 percent of convicts in New South Wales received no beatings or only one during their sentence. This meant that their  floggings were no more frequent than those given men serving in the British Army or Navy.

These facts, combined with the prospect that convicts could receive their own land at the end of their sentence, made transportation desirable to some. In 1835, W. Cope, governor of the infamous Newgate Prison in London, reported concerning inmates threatened with transportation: “Nineteen out of twenty are glad to go.” And the overseer of another prison said of his prisoners: “Ninety-nine out of a hundred are very desirous of going.”

The Darker Side

For those who continued to flout the law, life could be very miserable. One report said: “Transportation is not a simple punishment, but rather a series of punishments, embracing every degree of human suffering.” The treadmill was one such punishment. François described one this way: “It is a mill which grinds grain and is moved by the convicts. 18 men continually go up a wheel and their weight makes the wheel and the mill go. Often these men have only one pair of irons on their feet, often they have up to three or four pairs on their feet, and they are forced to do their work like the others or, if not, they are flogged without mercy.”

Convict women who behaved badly were made to wear a collar iron. This device was an iron collar for the neck with two projections, each at least a foot long, extending from it. These heavy monstrosities were considered the only means of keeping the women in order.

Penal institutions such as Port Arthur, east of Hobart in Tasmania, were designed as a place of severe punishment for reconvicted criminals. The harshness of these places can be gauged by an official report that indicated: “Some convicts . . . preferred death to continued imprisonment, and committed crimes so as to be executed.”

For some banished prisoners, the worst was the separation from their families. François wrote: “My dear family whom I love so tenderly, is it to be that exile will keep me away from you, from all I love, for a long time to come? Oh, the separation is sad and wrenching! To separate from a tender wife and young children who haven’t known the tenderness of a loving father! Dear family, I often raise my spirit and my heart to Heaven so that God may break the chains that bind me to this place and put an end to my exile and so allow me to return to my dear family, to all that my heart desires.”

The Convicts’ Contribution

In 1837, Governor Bourke said: “In New South Wales, by the aid of convict labour, the industrious and skillful settlers have, within a period of fifty years, converted a wilderness into a fine and flourishing colony.” By this time more than two thirds of the male work force was convict or ex-convict, helping the remaining population of free immigrants to accomplish this extraordinary task. Through choice or circumstance, more than 90 percent of all convicts made Australia their home.

Young Job also became one of these permanent residents, for when he gained his freedom, he married, settled down, and eventually became the forefather of hundreds of inhabitants of Australia and New Zealand. François, on the other hand, was one of the few who on their release were able to return to their homeland and their beloved families.

The pace of change continued to accelerate from those early days, and within just three overlapping generations, the “fine and flourishing colony” grew into a multicultural nation. Each year now, thousands from Asia, Canada, and Europe, including Britain, voluntarily visit Australia or apply to stay here. When they arrive, they find towering concrete buildings covering the ground that the convicts cleared and great paved highways following the tracks that the convicts carved. Yet, even among the bustle of Australia’s modern streets, old stone buildings still bear witness to the labors of those reluctant pioneers who found themselves bound for Botany Bay.

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BOTANY BAY

[Pictures]

JAMES COOK

JOSEPH BANKS

[Credit Lines]

Cook: Painting by John Weber/Dictionary of American Portraits/Dover; Banks: Dickinson, W. Portrait of Sir Joseph Banks when Mr. Banks. Rex Nan Kivell Collection; NK10667. By permission of the National Library of Australia; bay scene: Fittler, James. Sydney, New South Wales, with entrance into Port Jackson. By permission of the National Library of Australia

 [Picture on page 23]

(Top) Sydney’s Central Business District has grown on the site of what was once known as the Botany Bay penal colony

[Picture on page 23]

Old Sydney Hospital, now the State Mint Museum, was built by convict labor

[Credit Line]

Image Library, State Library of New South Wales

[Picture on page 23]

Hyde Park Barracks, a prison designed and built by convicts

[Credit Line]

Hyde Park Barracks Museum (1817). Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

[Picture on page 23]

The Great North Road. Convicts carved this 164-mile [264-kilometer] highway through sandstone hills by hand. It connected Sydney and the Hunter Valley, near Newcastle. It was one of the most important civil engineering feats of the colony

[Credit Line]

Managed by the National Parks and Wildlife Service, N.S.W.