Transportation
From
Doug Laidlaw@21:1/5 to
All on Tue Dec 3 10:43:39 2019
I often wondered what England did with her convicts between 1776 and 1788.
Browsing through the records at the Old Bailey, I read that several men sentenced to death had been reprieved and seven years transportation to
Africa was substituted. I thought "Huh?"
From Googling, I learned that during that interim period, among other
schemes, convicts were transported to West Africa to staff the slave
forts there. The idea had been mooted in 1771; the first convicts were
sent in 1781. They were given the status of soldiers, with one of them
as commanding officer. The venture ran into difficulties from the
beginning; one review calls it a "Disaster." The commanding officer
died soon after they arrived, and his substitute was only 21, and not as
good a commander. The slave traders were worried at having thieves as supervisors. The sources are PDF pages, and so far, I have not read
them closely.
Doug.
[Copied with additions from a message sent to the Google Group "wikitree-australia-projects." For those who don't know Wikitree, it is
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