|
The arrival of the ROYAL GEORGE in Port Phillip Bay in 1844
with 21 exiles on board marked the beginning of a new experiment in the handling of
convict transportees. Growing unrest from free settlers in New South Wales towards the
convict system and changing attitudes in England had been under way for many years.
Even though Lord Earl Grey only assumed the role of Secretary
of State for the Colonies in July 1846, as early as 1837 he was suggesting to the
Molesworth Committee on transportation a new concept in the processing of transportees.
He suggested that the convicts should be punished in England with a definite number of
years imprisonment and then banished to New South Wales and placed under the surveillance
of the police in a similar manner to the ticket-of-leave convicts.
The exiles were the first convicts to arrive in Port Phillip
Bay since the abortive attempt at a convict settlement back in 1803. They had all served
terms in Pentonville, the new penitentiary in Britain, and were soon referred to as
"Pentonvillians".
The first 21 exiles were eagerly engaged by labour-hungry
settlers and their request for more labour was met with another eight boat-loads between
1845 and 1849 by which time the number of free settlers arriving in Port Phillip was
satisfying the demand for labour. So much so, in fact, that three other ships which
arrived in the colony were turned away and landed their cargo of exiles in Sydney.
Between 1845 and 1846 the settlers in Melbourne and Geelong in
the Port Phillip settlement took delivery of 517 exiled "Pentonvillians" followed by a
further 536 in 1847, 455 in 1848 and a final 198 in 1849. The exiles were assigned to
settlers until they obtained passes and virtually all of them had served time in the new
prison establishments at Pentonville in north London or at Millbank, a gloomy penitentiary
built near the Thames in London.
While Eastern Australia dismantled its convict system, a new one
was being established in Western Australia and the Pentonvillian system continued to
flourish from 1850 to 1868 in the Swan River Colony. That period of transportation saw
the shippment of another 9,700 or so convicts and has been allocated its own section of
this site.
As the exile experiment progressed the number of English prisons
increased and in 1857 the system was tightened up with each prisoner serving nine months
in solitary confinement (separate confinement) and a further period in jail before
transportation - one year for a man with a three year sentence, 18 months for a five year
sentence and five years for a fifteen year sentence.
A strict list was drawn up setting out the period they would
have to serve before their probation ended, but in practice nearly half were given free
pardons within 16 months of arrival, regardless of their actual terms.
The thirteen convict passenger lists covered in this series of
web-pages were made available by Graeme Fowles and were
compiled and placed in the public domain by his late cousin, Keith Holden, a former
supervisor of the convict indexes at the Genealogical Society of Victoria. Keith also escorted
tours to Norfolk Island and took a group to Western Australia.
The ships are listed in chronological order with the first
one, the Blundell, being destined for Norfolk Island soon after the resumption of
direct transportation to that settlement in 1843. The others include the eight ships
which took convicts directly to the Port Phillip settlement in what was to later become
Victoria, and two ships which had to take their convicts on to Sydney after settlers
in Port Phillip objected to their arrival.
Often the passenger lists record the names of all the convicts who
embarked on each voyage regardless of where they left the various ships, whether in it was in
Hobart, Port Phillip or any other port. Three surnames in the series erroneously appear as
numbers.
The passengers on the Mount Stewart Elphinstone are proving
to be a bit of a mystery as Keith Holden gave their arrival date as March 10, 1849. The
only record of the ship leaving England with convicts in 1849 seems to be a departure
from Spithead on May 31 and that journey went via Cork in Ireland and Sydney where it
was given final orders to land her cargo of convicts in the settlement at Moreton Bay,
the forerunner of modern-day Queensland.
The numbers shown beside the convicts' names do not seem to
resemble convict numbers as they are not in a numerical order which would indicate
assignment on arrival. The source information seems to resemble records held in Victoria
- even for the voyages which were destined for Norfolk Island, Sydney and Moreton Bay.
| 
www.convictcentral.com
