David Andrew Roberts, University of New England, with transcriptions by Chris Bedford

This is the beginnings of an attempt to identify and code non-British convict voyages to Australia in the early-colonial period. By that we mean convict voyages that embarked from ports outside of the United Kingdom and Ireland.

This endeavour may be considered as related to, but separate from, the exploration of non-British convicts more broadly. It is only concerned with identifying voyages that involved the shipment of convicts sentenced to transportation, and the return of convict runaways from New South Wales and Van Diemens Land, rather than the volume of shipping more generally.

It is well-known that many British convicts (mostly soldiers) as well as non-British or non-white convicts were transported from jurisdictions outside of the United Kingdom and Ireland. Indeed, British territories and foreign theatres of war— in South Africa, India, South East Asia, the Mediterranean, the West Indies, and elsewhere — were a rich source of Australian convict colonists.

But by and large, those individuals sentenced in local/external jurisdictions were returned to England and from there joined the convicts being loaded onto British voyages embarking from Portsmouth, Plymouth, Gravesend etc, bound for New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. For example, between 1821 and 1843, at least 176 prisoners from Jamaica were lodged on the Justitia, Leviathan, Ganymede, Fortitude and other prison hulks. Most of these were white soldiers, under sentence of transportation for desertion or mutiny. Others were civilians sentenced for transportable crimes like stock-theft, housebreaking and receiving, including ‘men of colour’ (grooms, stockmen, carpenters, painters), sometimes convicted for ‘seditious language’ and ‘rebellion’. At least 135 (76%) of these (96 soldiers and 38 civilians) were ultimately transported to New South Wales or Van Diemen’s Land.

The current study, however, concerns convicts, soldiers and civilians, white and non-white, who were sent directly to the Australian colonies on what we call (for convenience rather than accuracy) ‘non-British convict voyages’.

The history of this practice requires greater scrutiny, for it appears to have evolved as a convenience and custom rather than one grounded in policy or attention to law.  That study would begin by considering the evolving and uneven manner in which English law was transplanted across the seas, paving the way for the introduction and practice of criminal transportation in foreign parts. While that requires a separate study, in the meantime the work of Clare Anderson (University of Leicester) provides the best starting point for context and analysis of the global and multi-jurisdictional history of convict transportation.

The first convicts sent to Australia under sentence from external or local jurisdictions were from the Cape colony, and that was simply because individuals were loaded onto British convict voyages that called at Cape Town on their passage to Sydney or Hobart Town. There are early and isolated examples of this dating back as far as 1797 when two court martialed soldiers, reprieved from death sentences at the Cape (one for coining, the other for murder) arrived in Sydney on the Ganges, although neither was listed in the surviving idents or passenger lists for that vessel. The Cape colony was a major source of convicts from a ‘foreign’ jurisdiction, although they are not the concern of this study because they were embarked on British voyages.

Rather, our attempt to identify ‘non-British convict voyages’ centres on arrivals from two places – India, especially Bengal, and the Isle de France, or Mauritius, which became a British possession following the 1814 Treaty of Paris. In both cases, the shipping of convicts directly to Australia, rather than via England, appears to have arisen from the frequency and volume of commercial and military shipping between these two colonies and New South Wales.

The extent of trade and movement between Sydney/Hobart and India was prolific and critical from the earliest days. The first vessel known to have brought convicts was the Duchess of York which arrived in Sydney on 23 April 1807, conveying two men who had been sentenced in Madras and Bombay some years earlier. Vessels from India in this period brought a great range of commercial commodities, and also wheat (especially when the colony succumbed to drought in mid-1814), livestock, and Bengal rum (after Macquarie permitted the mass importation of spirits in arrangements to assist the building of Sydney’s public hospital). The vessels appear to have returned with troops and coal, although more somberly the Mary in 1819 sailed with ‘thirty five miserable natives of Bengal’, eleven of them women, ordered by local magistrates to be withdrawn from the service of merchant William Brown on account of being ‘brutally and inhumanely treated’ in his service.

Voyaging between Sydney and Mauritius can be dated back at least to the early 1800s, when the French presence in the Indian Ocean generated much reflection on the need for local defences. By 1813, a little over two years after Mauritius was taken by the British, vessels like the Argo began arriving in Sydney with teas, sugar rice, and other coveted goods, including spirits. The first convicts from that island (two young court-martialled soldiers) arrived on the Eliza in 1815. Two years later, five convicts (four English sailors and an Irish soldier) arrived on the schooner Jeune Ferdinand in December 1817, which also brought news of horrendous fires on the island. Edward Duyker (1988) estimates that at least forty-one ships sailed from Mauritius with convicts over the next three decades. The graph below shows that in the period we are studying, there were only three voyages from Mauritius, greatly outnumbered by voyages carrying convicts from India.

In the context of all convict voyages to Australia, the shipment of usually very small numbers of convicts from India and Mauritius was occasional and irregular, and was, like the transmission of mail, very much an appendage to the core business of shipping goods and troops. In fact, these were hardly ‘convict voyages’ as such, and the vessels were not referred to as ‘convict ships’ in the same way as the British voyages were. And unlike the British voyages, which as noted also carried convicts from the Cape, the documentation (including Indents) for the Indian and Mauritian arrivals is less fulsome and secure. The following marks the beginnings of an attempt to amalgamate and synthesise the records on non-British convict voyages.

At this stage, three principal documents have been consulted, covering the years 1807 to 1826. The most comprehensive is from State Records New South Wales, with accession number 4/4003A. It is bundled with the regular Convict Indents, although it was clearly compiled retrospectively, from sources unknown at this stage, rather than at the time of the arrival and mustering of the particular vessels. The ‘Musters and other papers relating to convict ships, 1790-1849’ is a vast series of papers covering most convict voyages, including a sample of those from ports outside of England and Ireland. The other document (two identical lists, here treated as one), is in the records of the Colonial Office, now in the National Archives on England (CO201-218), being lists of ‘Convicts from the East Indies, Isle of France and the Cape of Good Hope’, compiled for John Thomas Bigge during his Royal Commission of Inquiry into the state of New South Wales between 1819 and 1821.

• [SRNSW 4/4003A: 104-111] Lists of Convicts transported from places other than the United Kingdom c.1807-1826
• [SRNSW 2/8260, 2/8262, 2/8277, 2/8250] ‘‘Musters and other papers relating to convict ships, 1790-1849’.
• [CO201-218: 116-121] List of Convicts from the East Indies, Isle of France and the Cape of Good Hope 1812–1818, and 1819-1820

The first list is the most comprehensive, referring to thirty-seven non-British convict voyages and listing a combined 159 individual convicts, all males. With ‘Musters and Papers’ we have only drawn on the vessels for which the paperwork included some type of passenger list comparable to the Indents (so the number of ships included is small, although the details provided tend to be more extensive). The third list, from the Commissioner’s papers, covers a shorter time span and captures 22 voyages.

The Indents document 4/4003A also lists 20 convicts arriving on British voyages, having been picked up en route at Cape Town. Commissioner Bigge’s list in CO201-118 also has convicts from Cape Town arriving on British Voyages, including 12 on the voyage of the Atlas I, which was not covered in 4/4003A. Those are not included in our list of non-British convict voyages. More information on British Voyages can be found here.

There are inconsistencies in the documents. Commissioner Bigge’s list did not account for the Union, which in April 1815 arrived with two ‘Hindoos’ convicted in Ceylon in April 1812, and a former soldier, Henry Boyle, convicted in Madras in 1813. Bigge’s document also named three prisoners convicted in Colombo in 1815, without noting their ship or time of arrival, but the Indents identify them as arriving on the Hunter. The Commissioner’s list also missed the convict Joseph Jones, who was convicted in Colombo in 1812 and is known to have arrived safely on the Eliza in 1813 (he was soon after sent to Newcastle when reprieved of a local death sentence for stealing government cattle).

Further, the Commissioner’s lists are less reliable in accounting for individuals like James Smith, convicted on Prince of Wales Island (Penang), who was supposed to be on the Hayeston in 1816 but escaped before he was embarked. We also know from other records that there were individuals, like a William Honeyman on the Amboyna, who died on the passage and were not recorded in either list; although others, like William Powell, who succumbed to dysentery on the same voyage, and Guy Cunningham on the Britannia who ‘died on the passage of a disease supposed to be venereal’, where recorded in the Indents. Four of the five prisoners on the Phatasalam in 1821 died after the vessel was wrecked in Bass Strait. The survivor, William Thomas, is noted (as in the illustration above) to have been ‘landed at Port Dalrymple’ in Van Diemen’s Land (he was soon after transferred to Sydney).

While we are reasonably confident that these are the only non-British convict voyages in this period, it cannot be guaranteed. We have not yet, for example, located the voyage of the Eagle which supposedly conveyed a convict named George Clydesdale or Clysdale who appears on various convict musters for Hobart Town in the late 1810s, said to have been tried in Madras in 1807 or 1808. Similarly, there is no record of the arrival of a James Campbell, who by his own account was transported on the Eagle for seven years for cutting off a black woman’s fingers with a sword during an argument while soldiering for the East India Company army in Bengal (an 1811 muster gives him as having been tried in Calcutta in 1811). Campbell referred also to two other transported with him, Hosely and Grant, who cannot be located in the colonial records. We know also that these voyages brought free settlers, at least one of whom – Abraham Cullen per Frederick 1817 – was convicted by the local Criminal Court and sent to the Port Macquarie penal station.

A key flaw in the indents, and the Commissioner’s lists, is that they do not all necessarily record the names and number of escaped convicts who were being returned to New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land from India. That information is best captured in the lists and associated documents in the ‘Musters and Papers’ series. Those papers tell us, for example, that John Exile was returned on the Hayeston in 1816, and that William Brash, who escaped New South Wales on the Greenock in 1824, was returned on the Caudry from india in 1826 (he told the authorities he ‘had no particular object in leaving New South Wales but merely wanted to get his liberty’).

But even the Musters and Papers do not, apparently, account for all the convicts being returned by these non-British voyages. Indeed, consulting a fourth source, the Colonial Secretary’s Papers, reveals numerous other runaways returned on these voyages who were not named in Indents, musters or the Commissioner’s list. For example, the Hunter in 1817 brought, in addition to men convicted in Bengal and Kanpur, listed in the Indents, a Theophilus Barker who had escaped in the ship Baring (he was sent to Newcastle where he later drowned). We only know that from a letter from the Colonial Secretary’s Office to the authorities at Fort William in Calcutta, acknowledging the man’s arrival.

Similarly, Indents for the St Michael in 1820 lists 6 men convicted in Bombay, Madras and Bangalore. But a ‘list of the convicts shipped on board the St Michael’ in 1820, written in the Colonial Secretary’s Office and dated 12 June 1820, lists an additional 5 men who were ‘left at the Derwent’ (they being ‘runaway pirates who escaped from this settlement when under sentence of transportation’, as well as a woman landed in Sydney (her identity and status are unknown), and also a Cavean Reardon who was ‘lost overboard’ on the voyage between Hobart Town and Sydney.

Further, we know from the Indents that the Greyhound (to Sydney via Hobart Town) in 1818 brought seven new prisoners, recently convicted in Secunderabad, Madras, Calcutta and Meerut. But correspondence in the Colonial Secretary’s papers notes that the vessel brought in adition eight men who were being returned as runaways, some of them having left the colony in contravention to the terms of their Conditional Pardons.

The same vessel the following year returned the escapees John Daniels and John Watson, who on arrival in Sydney they were flogged and sent to Newcastle penal settlement. The St Michael in 1819 returned two runaways to Van Diemen’s Land and four to NSW, but another two men who were put on the ship managed to escape at Penang Island in the Strait of Malacca when the ship stopped to repair a leak.

In sum, 4 convicts were listed in the Musters and Papers as being returned as runaways on these non-British voyages (they were not listed in the Indents, or in Commissioner Bigge’s lists). Another 16 have so far been identified through the Colonial Secretary’s correspondence. They have all been added to the database here and given unqiue IDs nos. based on the voyage which brought them back to Australia, although they will be ultimately associated with the British voyages which brought to Australia initially (their BV unique IDs are provided in a separate column, wherever one has been assigned, to date). If more research reveals other runaways returned to Australia on these voyages, or on others from India in this period they will be added to the present database.

The searchable database below contains 182 individuals – 162 convcted in India and Mauritius, and 20 runaways returned.

Following the UNE method, a unique ID is applied to each individual, based on the voyage upon which they arrived. Basic details on their trial and identity is provided, based on the information contaned in the Indents, the Commissioner’s lists, and the Musters and Papers series. The ‘notes’ to the right are remarks contained in the documents themselves (in quotation marks) or notes (in square parenthesis) derived from other papers. On the far are references to the documents which identify that particular individual.