Daisy's Blog

In the eighteenth century, England had a very serious problem, prisons were overcrowded as the difficult economic situation forced many hungry people to steal food just to fill their stomachs. There were also many bad criminal acts committed too and consequently too many hangings took place.

The government tried to solve the problem by putting these people into tugs on the Thames so that they could work and bring about improvements on the river but this wasn’t sufficient. Then they hit upon a ‘brilliant’ solution: send the people sentenced to hanging or prison to the British colonies as servants, farm hands or factory workers often for seven years or so, or even for the rest of their lives, without ever earning a penny.

So in the seventeenth century many thousands of men and women criminals were sent to the New World, – and later when there weren’t English colonies any more, to Australia, to serve several years bondage.

These ‘criminals’ were often political dissidents and Quakers, Irish people, sometimes young girls of even fifteen who had stolen something, a nine-year old chimney sweep is also recorded, as are a girl of thirteen and a seventy-year-old woman. People were accused of vagrancy, pig, sheep and cow stealing, burglary, swearing false statements and also for violence, robbery and prostitution.

Also, unemployed people, farmers and others who found no jobs could become indentured servants – and be sent away to work in the New World. They had to fulfil the period of servitude and in return had food and accomodation.

Some of the lucky ones who managed to survive the lack of decent food and illnesses and diseases on the long sea journey could then work the period of servitude and, after that, they might even be given a plot of land, marry and have families. Indeed, many of their descendants made good in the New World and certainly in Australia!

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