Wapsi Square Forum

Yeah, i knew about that.

The article i linked has numbers of people convicted and rough numbers for hangings and transportation

I hadn't realized that in the beginning, under British law, transportation was not actually a sentence for a crime.

Rather, the offender was given a different sentence... typically, death by hanging... the law as written then didn't give the judge much flexibility in choosing a sentence. The condemned was then offered a royal pardon ("by mercy of the King"), and accepting terms of transportation for some number of years (or for life) was a condition of the pardon.

This changed later, when direct sentences of transportation were added to the law. But, for a while there, you actually had to agree to be kicked out of the country of your birth.

I suppose that's better than being drawn and quartered, or hanged by the neck, or shot out of a cannon, or tied down and forced to binge-watch Gilligan's Island marathons. Still seems a sucky outcome of having gone begging without a permit.

I didn't know that either, though it does explain some things . . .

--FreeFlier

Another thing that happened was that when Britain first started transporting criminals (and "criminals") to Australia, the Crown paid ship captains to take them from England.

After some years, an untoward number of complaints, and an investigation, they changed that: instead, the Governor-General paid ship captains to deliver them to Australia.

The death rate in transit pretty much collapsed, as did the rate of complaints of abusive treatment aboard the ships.