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  Penal Colonies

 

North America was Britain's first penal colony, [long before Australia] simply because the shorter distances involved in travelling the Atlantic rather than the Pacific, made it much more efficient for the authorities.

It primarily served as way of populating ‘the colonies’ as it was proving very difficult to get voluntary settlers, the risks involved in the ocean crossing and from the hostility of the indigenous people, if they did eventually make it, made it a very difficult and unattractive prospect.

 

Many thousands of men, women and children from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland were sentenced to transportation in the 17^th and 18^th centuries for the most trivial of offences.

Although the sentences were usually only for 7 or 14 years, many would never be able to return home.

Some political offenders in the eighteenth century were, no doubt, sold into a longer or shorter American servitude.

 

The Gentleman’s Magazine states, on May 31, 1747, that “430 rebel prisoners from the jails of Lancaster, Carlisle, Chester, York, and Lincoln were transported this month from Liverpool to the plantations.

Eight of them were drowned by a boat over-setting, not being able to swim because handcuffed. This number, with the rest, makes above a thousand rebels transported

Child emigration began in England in the early 17^th century, when the London Common Council sent out 100 vagrant children to the first permanent English settlement in North America.

This was at Jamestown in Virginia in 1619.  More vagrant and poor children were sent out following the Privy Council's authorisation of child migration in 1620 with, for example, a 100 vagrant children being sent out amongst the reinforcements following the Indian Massacre of the settlers in Virginia in 1622.

‘All this is a rehash of all the emigration schemes, voluntary or coerced, as a form of hope or as a form of punishment — both leading to redemption, I am sure, in Protestant thinking — which began in Liverpool in 1648 when the mayor made a contract with local shipowners to rid the city streets of its orphaned child-beggars by transplanting them to the American colonies.’  Professor François Poirier – University of Paris

 

 Transportation to America ended ( and transportation to Australia began) with the American War of Independence in 1776.