The following data is taken from the lists of Irish convicts transported to NSW in the 1810s, contained in the extensive bundles of ‘Musters and other papers relating to convict ships, 1790-1849’. It is transcribed by Chris Bedford, matched to the convict indents, provided by Denise Adamson, and with visualisations by Mark Mclean. We are using this data to help test the DHT Criminal Coding scheme, before it is advanced as a universal system. All crimes have been assigned to 1 of 5 Major Class, and within that 1 of a range of Sub-Classes.

These musters are believed to have been taken on board the transports. It is not clear whether they were compiled at the point of departure or disembarkation, although there are some notations indicating incidences of deaths during the voyage. The lists are comparable, and in many respects very similar to the convict indents. The key and exciting exception is that where the indents recorded trade, these musters (from the mid-1810s) recorded convict offences.

So, here we are not only able to extract a partial snapshot of crime in Ireland in the 1810s, across the different counties, but also, by matching the musters and indents together we can begin to align offences and trades. Here we do so for a sample of just over 2,600 Irish convicts who arrived on 17 voyages between 1815 and 1821. This a period of severe climate abnormalities and widespread deaths caused famine and typhus, and a time of unrest promoted by Ribbonism.

THE VOYAGES

The voyages have been selected more or less randomly from the [how many?] Irish voyages during the Macquarie-era (1810-1821). The contingent of the Almorah (2) in 1820 also included 37 prisoners sentenced to transportation at Newgate between May and July 1820, all of whom were Irish.

Voyages in this dataset FRANCIS & ELIZA 1815 ALEXANDER II 1816 GUILDFORD (2) 1816 SURREY I (2) 1816 CANADA (4) 1817 CHAPMAN (1) 1817 EARL ST. VINCENT (1) 1818 ELIZABETH I (2) 1818 BENCOOLEN 1819 DAPHNE 1819 MARY I 1819 MINERVA I (2) 1819 TYNE 1819 ALMORAH (2) 1820 CASTLE FORBES (1) 1820 DOROTHY 1820 PRINCE REGENT II (1) 1821

LOCATING THE CRIMES

The transcription here is verbatim, although there has been some cleaning and standardisation of the place of trial: City of Dublin, for example, is given as Dublin City; County of Antrim is Antrim Co. This assists analysis of trials in a county versus a city jurisdiction, although the distinction is not always apparent in these records. The data is however sufficient to gain some idea of the spatial distribution of crimes in this period. Note that Queen’s County is now, of course, County Laois. King’s County is now Offaly.

The interactive map below uses the Folium framework to allow for spatial exploration of the data. You can pan around the map by clicking and sliding and you can also zoom using the plus and minus icons or mouse wheel. By clicking on each cluster (or simply zoom right in) you can see individual convictions. Clicking on an icon will show you summary information for each person including name, year of conviction, crime committed and sentence. For convenience, each marker indicates gender and is coloured by conviction class.

Note that the allotted location does not represent the physical location of an offence. In the source data, places of conviction are located generically within a town or county, so in the map, convicts are randomly allocated a location within 600m of a centroid position that represents this town or county. This has been done so that individual icons do not stack on top of each other and are easier to differentiate.

THE OFFENCES

A cursory analysis highlights the preponderance of the offences of ‘robbery and stealing from the person’, and of housebreaking and unspecified forms of larceny. These are followed by convictions for cattle and sheep stealing, which account for just under 1 in every 5 convictions in this period. The large percentage of convictions for assault evoke the violent reputation of the Irish in this period, although there are records for only 8 convictions for murder (because, obviously, murderers were rarely reprieved on condition of transportation).

There are an equal number of convictions for horse-stealing and vagrancy, and a very small but notable number of convictions for bigamy, infanticide and rape. of great interest will be the number of offences categorised (perhaps problematically) as ‘Conspiracy’ – amounting to only about 4% of convictions, some of these were described as being offences under the Insurrection Act of 1796, which by now imposed penalties of transportation rather than death. Other convictions under this category were described as being for “seditious & treasonable practices”, for being a “riotous, seditious & disorderly person” or for “taking an illegal oath”.

Graph showing the distribution of offences by county, broken into major crime classes as per the DHT Criminal Coding scheme

Class I: Offences against the Person; Class II: Offences against Property; Class III: Forgery and Offences against the Currency; Class IV: Offences against Good Order; Class V: Offences not Included in Preceding Classes; Class VI: Military Offences; Class VII: Not Classified Elsewhere

THE DATA

The database below is searchable, and the arrows in the heading row can be used to sort the entries. The ship name accords with our ‘Bateson System’ for labelling convict voyages to Australia, including the unique voyage ID, explained here.In the centre of the table is the statement of the crime, preceded by our classification codes for that crime. See here for an explanation of the DHT Criminal Coding scheme. That is followed by the unique ID number [une-uid] we have assigned to each individual, and our summary statement used to identify that individual [for example: “KAVENAGH MICHAEL per ALMORAH (2) 1820, life”]. Sometime it is noted that a convict has been removed from New South Wales (usually to Van Diemen’s Land).

To the right is a statement of the trade of each convict, as given in their respective Indents, and a standard code for that trade, as per the Historical International Standard Classification of Occupations (HISCO) scheme.