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The Business of Convict Transportation: Francis March and the Brief Experiment

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Note: This post is part of a series on Convict Transportation to the American colonies.

Before passage of the Transportation Act of 1718, the British government conducted an experiment by contracting out the transportation of some of its convicts to a West Indies merchant, Francis March. On December 7, 1716, March received a government contract to transfer convicts to the colonies at 40 shillings per head to cover freighting costs, with the Treasury supplying one pair of iron handcuffs and one pair of feet irons for every felon.

Shortly thereafter, on December 16, March took control of 54 felons who had been pardoned on condition that they serve 8 years on plantations overseas, and he set sail for Jamaica. The Treasury not only paid March ₤108 for his service, but it also paid William Pitt, Esq., the Keeper of Newgate Prison, ₤170.1.3 for the cost of “passing a Pardon,” removing the irons from the convicts, and conveying the felons to the ship. Pitt’s itemized expenses included the following:

  • ₤4.1.0. for bread, beef, beer, brandy, cheese, etc. sent with 30 of the prisoners and their guard.
  • ₤0.10.0. given to those prisoners who were almost naked.
  • ₤32.8.0. for 54 hand and feet irons @ 12s. a head.
  • ₤36.0.0. fees to the Clerk of the Peace for 54 persons @ 13s.4d. each.
  • ₤40.1.0. fees to the Keeper @ 14s.10d. each.
  • ₤10.15.0. for my own trouble and attendance four days in passing the pardon and 2 days and 2 nights in passing the prisoners. (Quoted in Coldham, Emigrants in Chains.)

Later, on September 1, 1718, the Governor of Jamaica wrote a letter to the Lordships of Trade and Plantations to report on the fates of the transported felons. He claimed that almost all of the convicts sent to his colony continued their evil ways. Most of them had either joined pirates or had left the island for Spanish Cuba along with several runaway African slaves. Those who remained, the Governor continued, were “wicked, lazy, and indolent.”

This brief experiment with convict transportation would have long-term repercussions for how the business of transporting convicts would develop, and it would prove more costly to the British government than the ₤278 it shelled out to remove these 54 convicts from the country’s borders.

Resources for this article:

Learn More About Convict Transportation

Learn more about convict transportation to colonial America by reading my book, Bound with an Iron Chain: The Untold Story of How the British Transported 50,000 Convicts to Colonial America.

Amazon.com: Paperback ($16.99) and Kindle ($4.99).

Smashwords: All e-book formats ($4.99).

Most people know that England shipped thousands of convicts to Australia, but few are aware that colonial America was the original destination for Britain’s unwanted criminals. In the 18th century, thousands of British convicts were separated from their families, chained together in the hold of a ship, and carried off to America, sometimes for the theft of a mere handkerchief.

What happened to these convicts once they arrived in America? Did they prosper in an environment of unlimited opportunity, or were they ostracized by the other colonists? Anthony Vaver tells the stories of the petty thieves and professional criminals who were punished by being sent across the ocean to work on plantations. In bringing to life this forgotten chapter in American history, he challenges the way we think about immigration to early America.

The book also includes an appendix with helpful tips for researching individual convicts who were transported to America.

Visit Pickpocket Publishing for more details.

Filed in 3. Business of Transportation | Tagged | Comments (1)

The Business of Convict Transportation: Overview

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Note: This post is part of a series on Convict Transportation to the American colonies.

Before passage of the Transportation Act in 1718, convict transportation was a haphazard process, mainly because convicts were generally responsible for making their own arrangements for leaving the country. After passage of the Act, convict transportation became an official business. The Act codified the practice of convict transportation by establishing rules and procedures that needed to be followed in the removal of convicts from the country, and the British government was now required to oversee the mechanisms of this process.

Contractors

One of the procedures necessitated by the Act was the appointment of official contractors who specialized in efficiently transporting convicts overseas. Merchants involved in the African slave trade were a natural choice, since they had experience moving large numbers of people across the ocean and had pre-established connections in the American colonies. Contracting out the punishment of convicted felons to private enterprise was a radical step for the British government. As one historian of convict transportation put it, the “transatlantic market for British convict labor was essentially a vast experiment in privatizing post-trial criminal justice.”

The transportation of convicts across the Atlantic was mainly organized by a few merchant firms centered in London and Bristol. From 1727 to 1773, the British government paid ₤5 sterling for every convict transported from London and the Home Counties to a single contractor. Other shippers throughout the kingdom could still transport convicts, but they would not receive a subsidy to do so from the government. These other firms would have to rely solely on the profit they could extract from selling the labor of the convicts they transported to America.

Merchant firms that transported convicts were required to secure the convicts from prison to ship to shore and to obtain arrival certificates from officials in the colonies to ensure that the convicts arrived at their destination. These arrival certificates were then presented by the contracted merchant to the Treasury, which entered the names of each convict into the Treasury Money Books and authorized payment to cover the expense of feeding, clothing, and transporting the convicts. While serving as Lord of the Treasury, Robert Walpole, the future Prime Minister of Great Britain, authorized and signed many such petitions for payment.

His Majesty’s Seven-Year Passengers

Transported convicts became colloquially known as “His Majesty’s Seven-Year Passengers,” since most of them were sentenced to serve out seven-year terms of laboring in America. Almost all of them were from the lower orders of society and around 80 percent were male. By far, the most prevalent offense for which a criminal was transported was for the theft of a handkerchief–most likely committed out of economic necessity–although murderers, highwaymen, and professional thieves were also sent overseas. From this perspective, transportation was a harsh punishment. It involved waiting in jail before being transferred to a crowded, airless ship, enduring the long journey in these conditions to America, and being sold to a planter for seven years, where the convict could be subject to harsh treatment and back-breaking work.

Practically every county in England sent their criminals to the colonies, with over 30,000 felons being shipped from England alone between 1718 and 1775. Convicts transported from all of Great Britain totaled 50,000 between these years. With the passage of the Transportation Act, convict transportation became big business, with great profits going to those who carried felons overseas and to those who purchased their labor in America.

Resources for this article:

  • —. Emigrants in Chains: A Social History of Forced Emigration to the Americas of Felons, Destitute Children, Political and Religious Non-conformists, Vagabonds, Beggars and Other Undesirables, 1607-1776. Baltimore, Md.: Genealogical Pub. Co., 1992.
  • Ekirch, A. Roger. “Bound for America: A Profile of British Convicts Transported to the Colonies.” The William and Mary Quarterly 42.2 (1985): 184-200.
  • Grubb, Farley. “The Transatlantic Market for British Convict Labor.” The Journal of Economic History 60.1 (2000): 94-122.
  • Kaminkow, Marion J., and Jack Kaminkow. Original Lists of Emigrants in Bondage from London to the American Colonies, 1719-1744. Baltimore, MD: Magna Carta Book Co., 1967.
  • Morgan, Kenneth. “Convict Transportation to Colonial America (Review of A. Roger Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718-1775).” Reviews in American History 17.1 (1989): 29-34.
  • —. “The Organization of the Convict Trade to Maryland: Stevenson, Randolph and Cheston, 1768-1775.” The William and Mary Quarterly 42.2 (1985): 201-27.

Learn More About Convict Transportation

Learn more about convict transportation to colonial America by reading my book, Bound with an Iron Chain: The Untold Story of How the British Transported 50,000 Convicts to Colonial America.

Amazon.com: Paperback ($16.99) and Kindle ($4.99).

Smashwords: All e-book formats ($4.99).

Most people know that England shipped thousands of convicts to Australia, but few are aware that colonial America was the original destination for Britain’s unwanted criminals. In the 18th century, thousands of British convicts were separated from their families, chained together in the hold of a ship, and carried off to America, sometimes for the theft of a mere handkerchief.

What happened to these convicts once they arrived in America? Did they prosper in an environment of unlimited opportunity, or were they ostracized by the other colonists? Anthony Vaver tells the stories of the petty thieves and professional criminals who were punished by being sent across the ocean to work on plantations. In bringing to life this forgotten chapter in American history, he challenges the way we think about immigration to early America.

The book also includes an appendix with helpful tips for researching individual convicts who were transported to America.

Visit Pickpocket Publishing for more details.

Filed in 3. Business of Transportation | Tagged | Comments (0)

The Need for a New Punishment: The Sentencing of Criminals after 1718

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Note: This post is part of a series on Convict Transportation to the American colonies.

With the passage of the Transportation Act in 1718, Britain became the only European country after 1700 to transport convicts as part of a major governmental policy. The sentence of transportation was popular among judges and quickly became the preferred punishment for crime, since mass executions were considered too barbaric, long-term imprisonment in the absence of penitentiaries was too expensive, and the punishment was seen as a more effective deterrent to recidivism than corporal punishment.

The punishment of transportation to the American colonies was often used in cases of petty theft, but even offenses that normally called for the death penalty, such as murder and theft of anything over ₤2, were often commuted to transportation as well. Between the years 1718 and 1775, more than two-thirds of all felons were sentenced to transportation at the Old Bailey–which was where criminal cases from the City of London and the county of Middlesex were tried–while only one-sixth received the death penalty. Convicts transported from England during this period accounted for half of all emigrants to the American colonies, and about 20 percent of these convicts were women.

The novelty of convict transportation as a punishment caught the attention of the press as well. Reports of trials that ended with transportation as a verdict were circulated in the coffee houses, especially those that were particularly sensational. Newspapers even reported on the loading of convicts aboard ships and their departure for the American colonies.

Transportation and Jonathan Wild

Even though the Transportation Act contained a provision specifically aimed at curtailing the business of Jonathan Wild, the Act had the unintended consequence of actually helping to strengthen Wild’s hold on those who helped form his criminal empire. Convicts who had returned to England early from transportation now made ideal candidates for his criminal network.

Under the Transportation Act, returning before the term of transportation had expired was an act punishable by death. Once Wild learned of convicts who had returned early to England, he could now quickly and easily bring them into his fold by threatening to reveal their identity to the authorities. Since the Transportation Act also made it a crime to collect a reward for returning stolen goods without turning in the perpetrator as well, Wild used transported convicts to return the stolen goods that he had acquired and to collect the reward. These convicts not only provided him with protection from this provision in the Transportation Act, but if they ever tried to turn against Wild, he could easily turn them in for a large reward, and they would receive an automatic death sentence.

Wild was a master at manipulating the law in order to keep those working in his criminal empire under his tight control, but eventually the law caught up to him. In 1725, Wild was arrested for theft and receiving stolen goods. After his arrest, William Thomson, the architect of the Transportation Act, drew up a warrant to keep Wild in custody, citing 11 articles that provided details about the operation of Wild’s criminal empire. Wild was found guilty and was executed in front of a large and enthusiastic crowd on May 24, 1725. After this execution of the “Thief-Taker General,” the number of criminals apprehended and convicted fell sharply.

The Fates of Richard Wood and Edward Higgins

Even though Richard Wood and Edward Higgins were tried and sentenced just before the passage of the Transportation Act, they both felt its effects. Higgins, who was convicted of stealing two coach cushions, was subject to Benefit of Clergy and was sent back on the streets after being branded on the thumb with a “T” for theft. Wood, on the other hand, was originally sentenced to death for pick-pocketing.

The Transportation Act, however, allowed the punishment of transportation to be retroactively applied to those who were sentenced before the Act’s passage. Under this provision, Wood’s death sentence was changed to transportation to the American colonies for 14 years. On August 28, 1718, Wood boarded the Eagle, a ship originally used in the slave trade, and along with 106 other convicts was the first to be transported to America under the Transportation Act. The ship’s initial destination was Maryland or Virginia, but after a run-in with a pirate, the ship was rerouted to Charles Town, South Carolina. With its arrival Wood completed his narrow escape from execution.

Higgins, on the other hand, confirmed just what the authorities generally feared when they originally passed the Transportation Act. Higgins evidently did not learn his lesson from his first brush with the law, for two years later he was once again caught stealing 3 coach seats. This time, the court was not so lenient and sentenced him to transportation. He was turned over to Capt. Darby Lux and placed on board the Gilbert, which set off for Annapolis, Maryland in October, 1720. Higgins did not appear on the Gilbert’s landing certificate, so it is very possible that the man who initially received Benefit of Clergy for his first offense died during his passage to America for his second.

Resources for this article:

Learn More About Convict Transportation

Learn more about convict transportation to colonial America by reading my book, Bound with an Iron Chain: The Untold Story of How the British Transported 50,000 Convicts to Colonial America.

Amazon.com: Paperback ($16.99) and Kindle ($4.99).

Smashwords: All e-book formats ($4.99).

Most people know that England shipped thousands of convicts to Australia, but few are aware that colonial America was the original destination for Britain’s unwanted criminals. In the 18th century, thousands of British convicts were separated from their families, chained together in the hold of a ship, and carried off to America, sometimes for the theft of a mere handkerchief.

What happened to these convicts once they arrived in America? Did they prosper in an environment of unlimited opportunity, or were they ostracized by the other colonists? Anthony Vaver tells the stories of the petty thieves and professional criminals who were punished by being sent across the ocean to work on plantations. In bringing to life this forgotten chapter in American history, he challenges the way we think about immigration to early America.

The book also includes an appendix with helpful tips for researching individual convicts who were transported to America.

Visit Pickpocket Publishing for more details.

Filed in 2. A New Punishment | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

The Need for a New Punishment: The Transportation Act of 1718

Friday, October 24, 2008

Note: This post is part of a series on Convict Transportation to the American colonies.

As stories of crime and criminals captured the attention of the eighteenth-century reading public and English jails continued to fill beyond capacity, the need to find a new form of institutionalized punishment grew. Citing the fact that current punishments had failed to deter people from committing crimes such as robbery, burglary, and larceny, and that there was a great need for labor in the American colonies, the British parliament passed “An Act (4 Geo. I, Cap. XI) For the Further Preventing of Robbery, Burglary and Other Felonies, and For the More Effectual Transportation of Felons, and Unlawful Exporters of Wool; and For the Declaring the Law upon Some Points Relating to Pirates,” better known as the Transportation Act of 1718.

Two Birds with One Stone

With the passage of the Transportation Act, judges could now sentence convicted felons of certain crimes to transportation overseas to a British colony. This new act gave judges the option of removing convicted felons from the streets and jails without having to take away their lives in the process. Furthermore, the Act seemed to offer help with the American colonies’ desperate need for cheap labor. Anyone who had sufficient means to make the trip overseas from Great Britain to start a new business in America had no intention of working for anyone else. Many settlers to America, then, faced the problem of securing labor at a price cheap enough for them to grow their businesses, and transported convicts could help fill this labor vacuum. In the eyes of the British government, convict transportation killed two birds with one stone.

The Transportation Act applied to two categories of offenses. For offenses where criminals would normally receive Benefit of Clergy, the judge could now directly sentence the guilty party to transportation for 7 years in lieu of branding or whipping, which were the only possible punishments for such offenses before passage of the act. The second category of offense covered by the Transportation Act was non-clergyable offenses, more serious felonies where execution was the normal punishment. After being handed a formal sentence of death, the offender could receive mercy from the Crown and be pardoned on condition of transportation for 14 years or some other determined period, including life. Convicts who had been sentenced to transportation and returned before finishing their term were liable to an automatic death sentence.

Criminals had been banished before from the British Isles and transported overseas during the 16th and 17th centuries, but such cases were generally the result of a conditional pardon handed down from the Crown, and the criminals were usually responsible for removing themselves from the country’s borders, which they often neglected to do. The Transportation Act of 1718 formally institutionalized this type of punishment, made the British government responsible for actively transporting convicts out of the country, and gave judges the authority to pass a sentence of transportation for first-time offenders.

William Thomson and Jonathan Wild

William Thomson, a prominent lawyer who became the sentencing officer at the Old Bailey, was mainly responsible for the passage of the Transportation Act. He had long sought more flexible sentencing provisions for judges and saw transportation as an effective means of dealing with persistent offenders who could not support themselves and would likely return to crime again and again.

In writing the Transportation Act, Thomson also included a provision aimed specifically at curtailing the organized criminal activities of Jonathan Wild, the notorious thief-taker and receiver of stolen goods. This provision made it a crime for anyone to take a reward for returning stolen goods to their owner without at the same time capturing and giving evidence against the thief. Failure to turn in the criminal could subject the person taking the reward to the same punishment as the offender, if he or she were ever caught. This provision was so clearly aimed at Wild that it became known as “The Jonathan Wild Act.”

Despite this obvious attempt to curtail his illicit activities, Wild continued his trade for many years afterward. He knew that if he carefully covered his tracks and received payment indirectly from his clients, it was virtually impossible to secure a conviction against him.

A Preferred Form of Punishment

Transportation quickly became the preferred form of punishment for lesser felonies. At the Old Bailey session on April 23, 1718–the one immediately following passage of the Transportation Act–27 of the 51 people convicted of crimes were sentenced to transportation. They would be the first of the roughly 50,000 who were transported to America under the Transportation Act and who together represented a quarter of all British emigrants to this country during the eighteenth century. Transportation no longer involved simply banishing a criminal offender from England’s borders: it now became an institutionalized practice of emptying jails and forcibly ridding the country of undesirable elements, and the way it was carried out made it a unique American phenomenon.

Resources for this article:

Learn More About Convict Transportation

Learn more about convict transportation to colonial America by reading my book, Bound with an Iron Chain: The Untold Story of How the British Transported 50,000 Convicts to Colonial America.

Amazon.com: Paperback ($16.99) and Kindle ($4.99).

Smashwords: All e-book formats ($4.99).

Most people know that England shipped thousands of convicts to Australia, but few are aware that colonial America was the original destination for Britain’s unwanted criminals. In the 18th century, thousands of British convicts were separated from their families, chained together in the hold of a ship, and carried off to America, sometimes for the theft of a mere handkerchief.

What happened to these convicts once they arrived in America? Did they prosper in an environment of unlimited opportunity, or were they ostracized by the other colonists? Anthony Vaver tells the stories of the petty thieves and professional criminals who were punished by being sent across the ocean to work on plantations. In bringing to life this forgotten chapter in American history, he challenges the way we think about immigration to early America.

The book also includes an appendix with helpful tips for researching individual convicts who were transported to America.

Visit Pickpocket Publishing for more details.

Filed in 2. A New Punishment | Tagged , | Comments (0)

The Need for a New Punishment: Early Uses of Convict Transportation

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Note: This post is part of a series on Convict Transportation to the American colonies.

Before 1718, England’s criminal justice system provided only two sentencing options for criminals convicted of capital crimes: “Benefit of Clergy” for first-time offenders, which sent criminals back out on the streets after receiving some form of corporal punishment, or death. Officially, there was no middle punishment for offenders who seemed to deserve punishment beyond a mere brand on the thumb, but did not deserve death either. However, there was a third possible provision for sentencing a convicted criminal and that was convict transportation, although it technically fell outside the control of judges and juries. Under this provision, criminals could receive royal pardons on condition that they remove themselves from the realm for a defined period of time.

The Origins of Convict Transportation

Portugal, Spain, and France had all used criminals and vagrants to help populate their colonies in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but the Elizabethan explorer and geographer Richard Hakluyt was probably the first Englishman to come up with the idea of transporting English criminals to the colonies. In 1584, while discussing “the multitude of idle and mutinous persons within the realm . . . whereby all the prisons are stuffed full,” Hakluyt wrote that “the pety theves might be employed for certain years in the western parts in sawing and felling of timber and in planting of sugar canes” (Discourse Concerning Western Planting).

Hakluyt’s idea was not acted upon, but the first official act sanctioning the transportation of rogues and vagabonds was later passed under Queen Elizabeth I in 1597, making it at least possible for reprieved felons to work the fields in Virginia during its earliest settlement. The 1597 statute, however, did not provide for forced labor in the colonies, merely deportation, so once again Hakluyt’s idea of using convict labor for colonization failed to take hold.

In 1611, the colony of Virginia was desperately struggling. Disappointed with the crew that came over with him to help the colony, Governor Dale asked King James I to send across the Atlantic all the convicts from the prisons who were sentenced to die in order to furnish his colony with able men. The British government was slow to act on Dale’s request, but on January 23, 1615, the Privy Council finally issued a warrant that enacted forced labor in the colonies as punishment for idleness or misdemeanors and created a system of transporting convicts by granting reprieves on condition that the felons remove themselves to one of the colonies.

An Act of Leniency

According to common law and the Habeas Corpus Act, it was still illegal for judges to sentence convicts to transportation, but under the new provision passed by James I it was not illegal to pardon felons on condition that they leave the country for a specified amount of time. Transportation could now be used as a means of exacting leniency on those who would otherwise be executed, but felons first had to be sentenced to death before being pardoned. Those who received the pardon were essentially free, so long as they remained abroad for the required term, which could have been for life. One of the benefits of this system was that the Crown could now appear to demonstrate mercy on those who might otherwise be executed, yet still rid itself of this criminal element.

In the 1660’s, judges found a way to use the system of conditional pardon against first-time offenders, who ordinarily would have been back out on the streets under benefit of clergy. Once a judge heard a series of trials, he would identify criminals who he thought deserved transportation and forced them into failing the literacy test that was required to receive benefit of clergy. Rather than sentence this group to death, the judge sent the criminals back to jail, where they waited for the possibility of receiving a conditional pardon from the king. Criminals who refused the pardon were hanged. This practice, though, began to fall out of use in the 1690’s, and a third, middle-ground alternative to letting convicted criminals back out on the streets or executing them continued to elude the authorities.

Around five or six thousand convicts were transported out of Great Britain from the time of the first settlement in North America until 1718. This number may seem large, but with the passage of the Transportation Act of 1718, it was about to grow exponentially.

Resources for this article:

Learn More About Convict Transportation

Learn more about convict transportation to colonial America by reading my book, Bound with an Iron Chain: The Untold Story of How the British Transported 50,000 Convicts to Colonial America.

Amazon.com: Paperback ($16.99) and Kindle ($4.99).

Smashwords: All e-book formats ($4.99).

Most people know that England shipped thousands of convicts to Australia, but few are aware that colonial America was the original destination for Britain’s unwanted criminals. In the 18th century, thousands of British convicts were separated from their families, chained together in the hold of a ship, and carried off to America, sometimes for the theft of a mere handkerchief.

What happened to these convicts once they arrived in America? Did they prosper in an environment of unlimited opportunity, or were they ostracized by the other colonists? Anthony Vaver tells the stories of the petty thieves and professional criminals who were punished by being sent across the ocean to work on plantations. In bringing to life this forgotten chapter in American history, he challenges the way we think about immigration to early America.

The book also includes an appendix with helpful tips for researching individual convicts who were transported to America.

Visit Pickpocket Publishing for more details.

Filed in 2. A New Punishment | Tagged , , | Comments (6)