Chapter 4 - Transportation to America Before 1776

Summary

The Transportation System

We have already seen that some of Bunyan’s companions were pardoned on condition that they were transported, and also that some had their departure delayed or put off altogether. A. E. Smith has said of the early years of transportation: ‘Various testimonies indicate that in fact the procedure did not work very well; that great numbers of convicts were never transported at all; that the sheriffs and especially the jailers were careless in their duties, and more interested in receiving fees than in attending to the safe departure of their charges’.

In 1664 some of the judges ordered, ‘that such prisoners as are reprieved with intent to be transported be not sent away as perpetual slaves, but upon indentures’. One of those judges was Sir John Kelyng, Bunyan’s judge, and it is from his series of law reports that we know of this ruling. Soon after this both Virginia and Maryland, which had been accepting transported prisoners, prohibited their entry, so that only the West Indies were used for a while. Despite this restriction, during the last twenty years of the seventeenth century some 4,500 convicts were sent to various colonies from England.

The eighteenth century brought with it a rapid expansion of the transportation system. The increased availability of the plea of clergy led to a large number of felons receiving the relatively mild punishment of branding plus one year’s imprisonment. Parliament responded by providing transportation as an alternative penalty for the less serious offences which remained clergyable. Some felonies continued non-clergyable, and so the death penalty was still passed for convictions of such offences, but increasingly this penalty was commuted on condition that the offender was transported. In short, an increasing number of prisoners were transported in the eighteenth century: either because of an original sentence of transportation, or because of a commuted death sentence.