Program Information

With the loss of its North American colonies, Great Britain had to find another place to send its convicts. It chose the uninhabited eastern region of New South Wales, destination: Botany Bay.

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Transcript

Lead: With the loss of its North American colonies, Great Britain had to find another place to send its convicts. It chose the uninhabited eastern region of New South Wales, destination: Botany Bay.

Intro: A Moment In Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: One of the important means by which England assisted in the development of America was a steady supply of convict labor in the 1600s and 1700s. For a fee, contractors would ship surplus convicts to employers in the colonies, particularly Georgia and Maryland. There they would augment the free and slave labor supply, work off their sentence and usually remain to bolster the population of the colonies. This so-called transportation trickled to a stop and died after 1776.

With prisons bursting at the seams, authorities in Britain began to seek alternative ways of disposing of what many considered human detritus. Housing the prisoners in old ships called prison hulks anchored in the nation's harbors proved only a temporary measure. They filled up too. Das Voltas Bay on the southwest coast of Africa was considered, but in the end it was determined that Botany Bay, claimed in the early 1770s by James Cook, would be the new repository of England's convicts as well as a source of raw materials such as flax and naval stores.

Indigenous aboriginal people had settled terra australis incognita, unknown southern land, for 40,000 years, probably after migrating down the East Asian archipelago. There is evidence of Arab and Chinese contact, but the first Europeans to land in Australia were Dutch sailors en route from South Africa to Java who accidentally sailed too far east in 1611. Botany Bay seemed the perfect solution and the first fleet of 1000 convicts and their handlers sailed in May 1787. Next time: Convictism.

Research assistance by Carol Hassert and Pamela Bergin. The producer of A Moment In Time is Steve Clark. At the University of Richmond, this is Dan Roberts.

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