A sentence carried out by sea
Britain began sending convicts to Australia in 1788 and sent the last ship in 1868. Before that, transportation to the North American colonies had taken many convicts across the Atlantic until the American Revolution closed that outlet in the 1770s. Overcrowded prisons and old warships used as floating prisons, known as hulks, added pressure to find another destination, and the east coast of Australia, charted by Captain Cook in 1770, was chosen. Historians usually estimate that something like 160,000 convicts were eventually transported to the Australian colonies.
The ships involved were seldom purpose-built. The government normally contracted private shipowners to carry convicts, and many of the vessels were ordinary merchant ships of a few hundred tons. After delivering their human cargo, they often loaded goods elsewhere, for example in India or China, before returning to Britain. In that way convict shipping was tied into the wider pattern of company and merchant trade described under maritime trading companies.
The First Fleet
The First Fleet left Portsmouth in May 1787 and reached Botany Bay in January 1788, before moving to Sydney Cove. It consisted of eleven vessels: six convict transports, three store ships and two Royal Navy escorts, HMS Sirius and the tender Supply. The roughly 750 convicts on board, together with marines, officers and some families, made the voyage of about eight months by way of Tenerife, Rio de Janeiro and the Cape of Good Hope. The fact that most of those on board survived is often noted as a notable achievement for the period, though the settlement itself faced severe hunger in its early years.
The Second and Third Fleets
The Second Fleet, which arrived in 1790, is remembered as a disaster. Contractors who were paid for the number of convicts loaded, rather than the number landed alive, were widely criticised, and a large share of those embarked died on the passage or soon after arrival. Ships including Neptune, Scarborough and Surprize are named in accounts of this voyage. The Third Fleet of 1791 also saw considerable illness, though the death rate was lower.
These experiences led to reforms. Over time the government changed payment terms so that contractors had an incentive to deliver healthy convicts, and from the early nineteenth century each ship carried a naval surgeon-superintendent who was responsible for health and discipline. Mortality fell markedly in later decades compared with the first fleets, although the exact figures vary between voyages and sources.
Life aboard a transport
Convicts were housed below deck, often in tiers of sleeping spaces divided by bulkheads from the guard. They were usually allowed on deck for exercise in good weather, and ironing practices varied over time and between ships. Rations were fixed by regulations and typically included salted meat, biscuit, peas and some provision against scurvy at sea, such as lemon juice or vegetables, in later years. Outbreaks of fever and dysentery were the main medical threats, and the work of ship surgeons and medicine afloat was central to whether a voyage went well.
Not everyone on board was male. Dedicated women’s convict ships ran throughout the period, and some women were accompanied by children. Guards were commonly soldiers or marines, with sailors working the ship as they would on any merchant vessel. The routine, discipline and crowding had much in common with daily life aboard sailing ships, though with a captive population and extra security measures.
Routes and duration
The standard route ran south through the Atlantic, called at ports such as Rio de Janeiro or Cape Town for water and supplies, and then crossed the southern Indian Ocean to Van Diemen’s Land or New South Wales. Ships benefited from the strong westerly winds of high southern latitudes, a pattern also exploited by merchant vessels on the Cape route. Early voyages took around eight months; by the middle of the nineteenth century, with better ships and more direct sailing, a typical passage was often closer to four months. Ships bound for Western Australia, where convicts were received from 1850 to 1868, followed a similar course.
An end to transportation
Transportation to New South Wales was stopped in 1840, and to Van Diemen’s Land in 1853, as free settlers grew more numerous and opposition to the system increased in the colonies. Western Australia, which asked for convict labour to meet its own shortages, received the last ship, Hougoumont, in January 1868. By then the voyages had become one chapter in a larger flow of people to Australia, which later included emigrant steerage passengers on very different ships.
Reading the evidence
Records from these voyages are unusually rich: ship’s musters, surgeons’ journals, convict indents and diaries survive for many sailings. They allow historians to study individual ships and the people on them, and they also show the system’s harshness. Modern accounts treat transportation as a complicated mix of punishment, colonisation and labour supply, and they pay attention to the experience of the convicts themselves as well as to the policy decisions made in London.