My future posts will, I promise, be shorter and less formal.
Overview & outline
Between 1788 and 1868, over 900 ships left Britain and Ireland with approximately 163,000 convicts bound for New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land and Western Australia. Despite Charles Bateson’s recognition that the ‘history of the conveyance of those prisoners is absorbingly interesting, full of the rich drama of human suffering and human endeavour’, strikingly little scholarly attention has been paid to these voyages. Indeed, half a century on, Bateson’s Convict Ships (1959) remains the sole scholarly monograph. This lacuna stands in contrast not only with the increasingly substantial literature on the experiences of transported convicts after their disembarkation but also with the rapidly developing secondary literature on the voyages of contemporaneous groups like emigrants, indentured servants and slaves and with the rapidly burgeoning interest in histories of the sea. This research project seeks to fill this gap: its aim is to write an experiential history of convict voyaging.
Research themes & questions
The project uses the term voyaging deliberately. Where ‘voyage’ tends to suggest a fixed, finite experience, a space- and time-bound journey from point-of-origin to point-of-destination, ‘voyaging’ evokes a more fluid, flexible and open experience. It speaks of process rather than event. Convict ships were designed and experienced as sites of coercion and constraint – increasingly so as time went on. Yet they were also sites of mobility and of the breaching, crossing and expansion of boundaries: geographical, physical, mental, emotional, cultural, social and more. Convicts were prisoners, but they were also travellers. They were constrained and confined, but in ways that made them move. This project explores three aspects of those movements: the multiple spaces and places through which convicts travelled; the attempts to render convicts into the ocean-going subjects of ship-board regimes designed to effect their mental and corporeal transformations; and the subjective and emotional journeys that convicts, their families and friendship networks had necessarily to make.
Part one, ‘Geographies of transportation’, examines the social, cultural, historical and geographical spaces through which convicts moved. Chapter one, ‘The museum’, considers the still popular idea of the convict ship as floating hell. It tells the story of the Success; the convict ship that never was and yet that also always is. The Success was originally a Calcutta-based trading ship, then an emigrant ship and finally a hulk. In 1893, it opened in Sydney as a floating museum and, complete with an ex-convict as its guide and various ‘instruments of torture’, it became ‘the convict ship’ from Australia. Over several decades, the Success embarked upon extended tours of Australasia, Britain, Ireland, Canada and the United States. Everywhere it went it promoted itself as ‘a relic of barbarism’. It consequently sailed into view as the symbol of a hierarchical and oppressive Old World, disrupting dominant narratives of empire as a vehicle of modernity and civilisation. Chapter one examines this cargo, asking questions about how the histories told by the Success were selected, constructed and narrated. It explores the shifting national, anti-imperial and social freight carried by the Success and examines the different meanings that the ship acquired as it moved across time and place.
Chapter two, ‘The ship’, considers official attempts to fashion convict ships into certain types of space. It begins with the departure of the Bencoolen from Cork in April 1819 and with Surgeon-Superintendent William Evans’s announcement that the ship was to be the site of an experiment in prisoner democracy. Drawing on his belief that ‘all bodies of men … are best pleased with regulations framed and adopted by themselves’, Evans invited the convicts to form themselves into committees of twelve to write the regulations and settle disputes. No corporal punishment, Evans announced on arrival at Sydney, had been necessary, because the convicts had behaved with ‘decency and propriety’. This chapter asks whether, instead of ‘Old World’ vessels, convict ships are better approached as sites of innovation and idea-generation. It considers whether the potential for them to act as ‘laboratories of modernity’ was partly born of practical considerations: ships were relatively easy spaces to convert and ideas could be tried out more cheaply, more spontaneously and in a more contained fashion than in stone-constructed penitentiaries. It also explores the multiple influences upon the convict ship by broadening the analysis beyond the new penology to consider the long-overlooked input of the Navy in particular. Faced with the biggest ever state-organised movement of people across the oceans, the Navy looked to bodies of knowledge generated by other long-distance voyagers including troops, sailors, slaves and emigrants. The chapter considers whether this knowledge exchange blurred the boundaries between otherwise discreet categories of subject. Given the global scope of these voyagers and of convicts, the chapter also critically re-assesses the Western/Eurocentric character of histories of penal reform.
Chapter three, ‘The mutiny’, opens with the 1799 trial and execution of French sailor-boy Jean Prevôt for the murder of James Wilcox, Captain of the Lady Shore. In 1797, the Lady Shore was the site of the only successful mutiny on an Australia-bound convict ship. The mutiny occurred when the armed guard joined with the sailors and convict women to take the ship and head for Rio de Janeiro. Although various surviving officers eventually related their version of events Prevôt was the only mutineer ever to be captured. Claiming to have little English, he, however, said next-to-nothing at his trial. These kinds of archival silences are not unique to the Lady Shore but characterise many conspiracies and rebellions on convict ships. This chapter argues that it is nevertheless possible to reconstruct some of the alternative visions that inspired mutinous voyagers. Courtroom statements delivered by sailors provide one invaluable source. While convict rebels were often summarily tried and even executed en-route, the sailors with whom they combined were more likely to be taken to Sydney or London for trial. The chapter also draws on the official journals produced by surgeons and captains to chart at what point in voyages, and also where, rebellious acts occurred. These same sources also allow us to examine the everyday incidents that preceded mutinies and the dynamics between these acts and more open forms of rebellion. Finally, the chapter considers whether mutinies also offer insights into the mindsets of officers and free passengers on convict ships. It explores whether some mutinies were more imagined than real and asks questions about the kinds of convicts (including political offenders, women, and the Irish) whose shipboard presence was most likely to spark such fears.
Chapter four, ‘The meeting place’, examines the convict voyage as an encounter space or contact zone. Transportation was a simultaneously isolating and yet socialising process. Departure in particular was frequently experienced as a point of rupture: a sudden, forced unmaking of the self. A variety of sources ranging from personal letters to acts of suicide and self-harm speak to the numerous challenges many convicts faced in imagining a future far from family, friends and the familiar. The forging of new identities, relationships, friendships and communities was nevertheless also integral to the process. As sites of a wide range of social and cultural activities including singing, storytelling, crossing-the-line ceremonies, religious practices and more, convict ships provided opportunities for new forms and forums of socialisation and they consequently functioned as important crucibles of identity re-formation. Shipboard relationships sometimes developed when convicts from the same villages, towns and counties or from pre-existing language communities clustered together. However, rather than being frozen in time and place, these ties were instead transformed as convict ships took them from the local to the global. Voyaging also took convicts far beyond existing identities, affiliations and communities and not least because convict ships were socially and culturally diverse places. Numerous free passengers ranging from elite men like colonial governors to soldiers, surgeons, matrons and missionaries as well as aboriginal and Maori visitors returning from Britain travelled out within their bows. Interactions between the frequently multi-national and multi-racial crews and convicts were also important and often acquired a more intimate, face-to-face quality. The chapter concludes by taking convict voyaging one final stage further. It does so by travelling beyond the convict ship into the multiple illegal encounter zones created by convicts who became sea-going runaways, sailors, pirates and beachcombers, many of whom ‘went native’ in new worlds beyond the bounds of empire.
Chapter five, ‘The return’, considers the epic voyage of convict Mary Bryant who, in 1791, escaped from Sydney in an open boat along with her convict husband William, their infant children and seven male convicts. Thousands of miles and many weeks later they were captured and sent to London to stand trial. There, Mary in particular became a cause celebre when James Boswell, among other notables, launched a campaign for her pardon. Bryant’s fellow escapee James Martin also attracted attention when he provided Jeremy Bentham with a narrative of their sufferings. This chapter explores the circulation and reception of their stories and their deployment of a language of public pity and sympathy. It sets their tale against the backdrop of the 1791 Old Bailey trial of Donald Trail and William Ellerington, Captain and Chief Mate of the Neptune, for the murder of convicts on the ill-fated Second Fleet. The fact that these abuses had taken place on ships that had previously been used in the slave trade added further heat to debates about whether all Britons, including transported convicts, enjoyed certain rights. This connection was further underlined because Trail and Ellerington were tried immediately after the high-profile prosecution of Captain John Kimber for the murder of a girl on the slave-ship Recovery. Bryant’s return consequently fuelled a broader ongoing debate about whether Britons should ever, ever be slaves. Bryant’s case also established a rough model that played itself out on numerous other occasions over the decades that followed. By examining the multiple tales that other returned convicts told in courtrooms, newspapers, cheap pamphlets, street ballads and more the chapter asks questions about the impact of return voyaging on public sentiment and political opinion in Britain, Ireland and beyond.
Part two, ‘Ocean-going subjects’, examines the voyages as transformative space. It considers the imposition of particular types of shipboard regime on specific convict subjects and it explores convict responses to these. Chapter six, ‘The boy’, opens with the story of fourteen-year old Thomas Hall, a “spare habit little mulatto boy”, transported in 1831 on the convict ship Southworth. Originally from Philadelphia, Hall was aged just eight when he was sentenced at the Old Bailey to seven years’ transportation for picking pockets. From 1825-31, he was confined on the Euryalus hulk at Chatham, Kent, one of the earliest exclusively boy reformatories. The early 1830s represent a mid-way point in the transformation of shipboard regimes for juveniles: Thomas’s story therefore provides us with an illuminating snapshot in time. On the Southworth, the boys were segregated from the men, they were issued with special food and clothing, and daily classes as well as occupational training was organised for them. Had Thomas been transported a decade earlier, he would have travelled alongside adult males and few special provisions would have been made for him. A decade later he would have found himself on a boys-only ship and exposed to a regime systematically devised for juveniles. In addition, he would likely have first spent time at Parkhurst Prison and, on disembarkation in the colonies, would probably have been sent to a penal station for boys. By this point the ship was just one link in a longer juvenile convict chain. This chapter charts how and why these shifts in shipboard regimes for juveniles occurred. It asks why measures were developed for boy convicts but never for girls. And, it explores the extent of cross-fertilisation between transportation and other measures for criminal and delinquent children including emigration and reformatory ships as well as ongoing debates about sending juveniles into the merchant marine.
Chapter seven, ‘The woman’, considers female convicts as voyagers. Convict women aboard ship tended to be seen in three main ways: as prostitutes who would do anything to establish relations with the sailors and therefore as potent sources of rebellion; as dirty, diseased and backward-looking; and as naughty, child-like characters who required paternal-style vigilance and discipline. For all these reasons, they were regarded as particularly problematic voyagers and attempts to spatially re-organise convict ships, to enhance security and increase discipline, were consequently often initially trialled on vessels carrying women. The chapter explores the development of these systems, evaluating, among other things, the role played by philanthropists. Like chapter 5, it asks questions about the cross-fertilisation of ideas between ship and shore. While shipboard innovations were certainly shaped by the conviction that women required special care, the chapter also explores the significance of the fact that new measures were often driven by official desires to keep sailors and convicts apart. Although acknowledging that female convicts aboard ship could be sexually vulnerable, the chapter foregrounds the roles played by convict women themselves in these shipboard relationships. It also asks questions about the meanings of these relationships in a period when officers and sailors were increasingly in conflict over attempts to re-structure and re-structure gender and sexual relations at sea by keeping lower-class women ashore.
Chapter 8, ‘The patient’, explores the significance of medical power on convict ships. By comparison with other long-distance sea-voyagers, convicts were remarkably healthy and mortality rates on the ships were relatively low. This was the result of a sustained official focus on convict health that was generated by three overlapping concerns: firstly, the belief that high death rates would subvert the rule of law by turning transportation into an effective capital sentence; secondly, the conviction that physical and moral reform, body and mind were integrally interlinked; and thirdly, colonial economic concerns about the physical wellbeing and capacity of incoming convict labour. From 1815 onwards, a naval doctor managed every convict ship. The duties of this surgeon-superintendent extended far beyond the care of the sick to include the daily rationing of convicts, their order, discipline, clothing and cleanliness as well as their moral reform, religious instruction and education. The surgeons therefore exercised considerable medical-moral authority, enjoying forms of shipboard power that at times even outstretched the captain. As a result, the rise of the surgeon-superintendent can, in many ways, be contained within a now well-established Foucaldian paradigm structured around discourses of bio-politics and power/knowledge. However, while conceding that the power-laden interactions between numerous surgeon-superintendents and numerous convicts slot easily enough into this kind of interpretive model, this chapter nevertheless argues for a more multi-layered and contested history. Firstly, it charts the markedly liminal character of many surgeons and argues that they were more often acting from the margins than the centre. Surgeon-superintendents came disproportionately, for instance, from rural Ireland and Scotland and were often at most lower middle-class in social origin. Many believed (not always correctly) that the navy would act as a stepping-stone to improved qualifications, a profession, an increased income and a more stable family life. Yet, throughout these years, they continued to be embroiled in fraught battles within the navy over their status, pay and conditions. Secondly, the chapter considers whether the rise of the surgeon-superintendent created space for new forms of convict self-expression, agency and autonomy. It explores the attempts made by numerous convicts to avoid or delay transportation by feigning illness or madness or by acts of self-mutilation. It likewise asks questions about the ability of some convicts to talk their way round the doctor and into the relative ease and greater dietary abundance of the ship’s hospital. It examines the impact of the holistic approach adopted by surgeon-superintendents who believed that emotional wellbeing could affect convict health as much as physical condition and environment. These men consequently took time to talk with convicts, to consider their feelings and views and even to chart their conversations. Finally, the chapter asks how convicts responded to this unique care. For most British and Irish working-class men and women in this period, medical care on the scale provided for convicts was unthinkable and unknown. Consequently, for many convicts, admission to the ship’s hospital and to the surgeon’s often painstakingly attentive care must have been like travelling into a new world where their bodies suddenly seemed to matter.
Part 3, ‘Placing the heart at sea’, examines the subjective and emotional impact of voyaging on convicts, their families and friends. It argues that rather than abruptly ending relationships transportation instead often re-worked and trans-nationalised them. Chapter 9, ‘The petition’, opens with the case of convict James Grove: a skilled engraver who was sentenced to death for forgery and then, on appeal, to transportation for life. Determined to avoid the imminent break-up of their family, Grove and his wife Susannah begged the Home Office for further clemency. They also wrote repeatedly to their friends and patrons for help. The resulting correspondence file includes numerous written representations, petitions from James and Susannah, and a collective petition from Grove’s native Birmingham. It consequently speaks to numerous facets of James and Susannah’s lives including: James’s palpable grief at the loss of his family; his contrition and desire to make amends; Susannah’s representation of herself as wife and mother; and the community’s view of the Grove family’s character. The chapter argues that these multi-vocal and multi-layered qualities make petitions more generally a trove of rich insights into how convicts saw themselves and also how they were seen by a range of significant others including parents, friends, neighbours, employers and more. Petitions consequently present us with a unique vantage-point: not only of the ‘place’ from which convicts embarked but also of the shifting significance of that ‘place’ as departures grew closer and voyaging began. The chapter thus approaches the petition as one of several symbolic anchors at the end of a long and complex sea-going chain.
Chapter 10, ‘The token’, begins in Rotherham, Yorkshire in 1861 with Mrya Sykes, wife of convict William Sykes, gathering gifts and tokens for her soon-to-depart husband from among their network of family and friends. Spice loaves, a mince pie, some money, a testament and tract, two books, tobacco, a packet of needles, a ‘good shut knife’ and a ‘few postage stamps’ were among the objects that Myra sent William to take on the ship. Over the years Myra kept in touch by letter and sent on other keepsakes including a miniature painting of their children. In Western Australia, William kept these letters in a leather pouch worn on a string around his neck, under his shirt and next to his skin. The chapter asks questions about the symbolic meanings as well as practical uses of a range of different types of tokens exchanged by convicts, their family and friends. Newspaper and journal descriptions of ship departures provide one source. They indicate that gift-giving practices were widespread and also provide information on the kinds of gifts that were exchanged. Letters from convicts prior to their departure, as well as official lists of cargo, are likewise revealing about the kinds of goods to which convicts, and their families, were materially, emotionally and symbolically attached. The chapter examines this material economy of affect. It explores the ways in which it was shaped by gender (female convicts gave and received different kinds of gifts), it considers how objects helped to place people at sea, and it asks what these exchanges reveal about the dynamic between the emotional and material domains in these rapidly trans-nationalising working-class families.
Chapter 11, ‘The pen’, begins with a letter from Thomas Harrison to his parents. Written in April 1841 as the convict ship Layton passed Tenerife, Harrison proffered his amends by promising to trust God and to ‘try all that lies in my power’ to learn from the Layton’s surgeon-superintendent and its ‘scool-master’ [sic]. Fortified by these thoughts, he looked forward to a future in which ‘I shall learn to read my bible’, listen more carefully to maternal advice and ‘take no notice of no body but my self’. He would, he promised, ‘wright to you’ again ‘as soon as we get settled’. Harrison’s gaol record reveals that he was illiterate on his arrest: his ability to write home, and thus to maintain as well as necessarily re-orientate his sense of himself and his relations with his family, were newly acquired and valuable skills. He was far from the only convict to acquire or enhance these skills as part of the experience of voyaging. Reformers increasingly regarded literacy as a crucial weapon in the battle against criminal immorality and barbarity. Steps were therefore taken to establish shipboard schools and missionary societies, philanthropists and others collected funds to provide convicts with Bibles and religious and moral tracts - as well as practical items like spectacles – prior to their departure. The chapter explores the impact of these schools and libraries on convict identities and modes of self-expression as well as upon their abilities to re-inscribe and re-shape their place within their family and friendship networks. In addition to analysing a number of shipboard letters, the chapter focuses on two other main textual forms. Firstly, it examines a range of journals and narratives produced by convicts during and after the voyage, including several shipboard diaries. Secondly, it analyses a series of shipboard newspapers written, edited and printed by convicts. These newspapers featured reports on the ship and its passengers as well as essays reflecting on the writer’s convict condition, poems, stories and other creative pieces. Together, these forms illuminate some of the many ways in which convicts used the pen to write themselves once more into place.
Chapter 12, ‘The left behind’, opens with an examination of personal letters between convicts in the colonies and their families in Britain and Ireland. These deal with numerous issues including personal loss, emotional strain, convict guilt, family shame, parental concern, household developments and colonial living standards. Many also contain attempts by convicts to provide guidance for their younger siblings and their children by enclosing instructions on schooling, moral development and occupational training. The letters powerfully dramatise the survival of some familial relationships despite transportation as well as illuminating how these relationships, and the many individuals that they embraced, were necessarily re-located and re-worked. The chapter moves on from there to consider poor law correspondence. Families, and particularly wives with young children, were often left vulnerable by transportation. Surviving registers reveal that a significant proportion moved address. While some travelled to live with family and friends, others were forcibly moved on by parish authorities under the Settlement Laws. Transportation created chain reactions: launching numerous additional acts of voyaging beyond those undertaken by the convicts themselves. It also created a myriad of displacement effects: rendering many women in particular out-of-place and forcing them to re-negotiate their personal, familial and social relationships and also their position vis-à-vis local, national and colonial states. To further illuminate those processes of displacement and re-placement, the chapter explores numerous applications sent by convicts and their families to the Home Office seeking colonial reunion via a free passage on a convict ship. Often sent years after departure, these applications are revealing on the one hand of the web of relationships and local patronage systems with which families surrounded themselves and, on the other hand, of the ways in which convicts, writing home and often enclosing testimonials from colonial clergy, employers and police, sought over time to re-construct and re-locate themselves. Like pre-transportation petitions, reunion applications were thus multi-vocal and multi-situational in character. They also consequently promise to reveal much about the shifting manifold subjective and symbolic moorings created by convict voyaging.
