The Way to Botany Bay: Sentenced to Transportation

From 1821 English courts began to sentence convicted criminals to penal servitude in Australia, for a set term or for life. Most never returned to England, becoming settlers of different kinds in the colony. On this walk we follow the documented story of two Islington teenagers who in 1825 were caught thieving from a shop on the Goswell Road. They were sent to Newgate Pr*son, tried at the Old Bailey, convicted and sentenced to death. In Newgate they would have met Pr*son-reformer Elizabeth Fry.

After three months their sentence was commuted to transportation for life, and they were taken in a cart to Blackfriars Stairs to board a lighter to the ship Grenada anchored at Woolwich. There they waited 60 days before setting off for Botany Bay on a journey that took another three months.

Convict ships were required to carry a naval surgeon to keep conditions minimally hygienic, but what did these passengers do all day? What happened in storms and when ships stopped in ports?

Our teenagers survived the voyage and disembarked. Many poor folks were eager at the opportunity to start a new life, even in a penal colony, and numerous who were transported made good and helped build the new colony. Nowadays Australians are proud to be able to say their ancestors were convicts.

We walk on streets not so different from those the thieves would have known: past handsome houses, prisons of Clerkenwell and Newgate and backstreets of the City before reaching the river that took them to their ship.

Laura Agustín is an historian and anthropologist interested in illuminating the lives of unnamed people in history - the 'ordinary folk'.

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