transportation

transportation. The Cromwellian regime of the 1650s dispatched several thousand prisoners of war, priests, vagrants, and other dangerous persons to servitude in the West Indies. From the 1660s transportation both to the Caribbean and to the North American colonies began to be routinely used, first for those reprieved after sentence of death, then, from the early 18th century, for non‐capital offenders. On arrival transportees were disposed of as unfree labourers, generally required to serve for periods of seven years, fourteen years, or life, the proceeds being used to defray the cost of shipping. Following the American Revolution, new penal colonies for transported convicts were established in Australia, at Botany Bay (1788) and Van Diemen's Land (1803).

Fragmentary records for the years 1737–43 suggest that the average number of persons transported from Ireland (excluding as probably untypical the famine years of 1741–2) was around 227 per year. Just under half of these had been convicted of criminal offences. The remainder were vagrants unable to provide security for their good behaviour, whom an act of 1707 had also made liable to transportation, although recent research indicates that many of this latter group were persons recently acquitted on criminal charges. The number of Irish convicts shipped to Australia between 1788 and the abolition of transportation in 1868 was about 40,000, around a quarter of the total so transported.