An 'injurious' population: Caribbean-Australian penal transportation and imperial racial politics

Cultural and Social History

Volumn 5, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 449-464

  Paton, Diana ^a  

^a NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Australian; Caribbean; Penal transportation; Punishment; Racism

Indexed keywords

EID: 59849119377     PISSN: 14780038     EISSN: 14780046     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2752/147800408X341659     Document Type: Article

References (92)

1. The State Library of Queensland published a series of online Convict Transportation Registers shortly before this article went to press, available at http://www.slq.qld.gov.au/info/fh/convicts. These registers reveal a substantial number of additional individuals convicted in the West Indies and transported to Australia. I would like to thank Gemma Romain for drawing these registers to my attention. It has not been possible to incorporate this new evidence in this article.
2. Most of the information in this and the next paragraph on Bonner's case is drawn from The National Archives, PRO CO 137/205 Sligo to Glenelg No. 232, 13 Dec. 1835. Hereafter documents in The National Archives (UK) are identified as BT (Board of Trade), CO (Colonial Office) or WO (War Office), respectively. Bonner's African birthplace is from Ian Duffield, 'From Slave Colonies to Penal Colonies: The West Indian Convict Transportees to Australia', Slavery and Abolition, 1 (1986), p. 34.
3. Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, NJ, 1991);
4. Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998);
5. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London, 2000);
6. Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston, 2006);
7. Julius Sherrard Scott III, 'The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution', unpublished PhD dissertation, Duke University, 1986.
8. A few transportees came from the non-sugar Caribbean colonies of the Bahamas, Bermuda (not strictly speaking in the Caribbean) and British Honduras (now Belize), but a large majority were from sugar-growing areas.
9. Duffield, 'From Slave Colonies', p. 26.
10. Mimi Sheller, Democracy after Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica (London, 2000), p. 6.
11. On attacks on transportation see J. B. Hirst, Convict Society and Its Enemies: A History of Early New South Wales (Sydney, 1983);
12. Jan Kociumbas, The Oxford History of Australia: Volume 2, 1770-1860: Possessions (Melbourne, 1992), pp. 169-77. The question, derived from the politics of the 1830s, of whether convict labour in Australia was a form of slavery has been extraordinarily influential in the historiography of transportation. This work has, however, sometimes suffered from historians' limited familiarity with the historiography of slave societies, which frequently amounts only to knowledge of scholarship on the antebellum US.
13. For a careful discussion of the structural similarities and differences between enslavement and penal labour, see Raymond Evans and William Thorpe, 'Power, Punishment and Penal Labour: Convict Workers and Moreton Bay', Australian Historical Studies, 25 (1992), pp. 90-111.
14. 'Copy of the Record Book of the slave trials of St. Andrew Jamaica from 17 March 1746 to 16 Dec. 1782', enc. in CO 137/248 Metcalfe to Russell No. 51, 5 April 1840.
15. For analysis of this source see Diana Paton, 'Punishment, Crime, and the Bodies of Slaves in Eighteenth-century Jamaica', Journal of Social History, 34 (2001), pp. 923-54.
16. David Barry Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels: A Study of Master-Slave Relations in Antigua: With Implications for Colonial British America (Baltimore, MD, 1985), pp. 34-7. These sentences of banishment, which led to transportation to Spanish colonies, were unusual for Antigua and may have been unique. In addition to these sentences, eighty-eight enslaved people were executed.
17. On the transportation of British convicts to the American colonies see John Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England 1660-1800 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 470-83, 500-13;
18. A. Roger Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718-1775 (Oxford, 1987);
19. Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton, Eighteenth-century Criminal Transportation: The Formation of the Criminal Atlantic (Basingstoke, 2004).
20. British convicts went primarily to Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania, but some were sent to the Caribbean, including Jamaica, Barbados and Antigua (Morgan and Rushton, Eighteenthcentury Criminal Transportation, p. 13).
21. William Beckford, Remarks Upon the Situation of the Negroes in Jamaica, Impartially Made, from a Local Experience of Nearly Thirteen Years in That Island (London, 1788), pp. 95-6.
22. CO 139/47 Jamaican Consolidated Slave Act 1792.
23. See also CO 139/65 Jamaican Consolidated Slave Act 1826.
24. John Savage, 'Unwanted Slaves: The Punishment of Transportation and the Making of Legal Subjects in Early Nineteenth-century Martinique', Citizenship Studies, 10, (2006), pp. 35-53;
25. Philip Schwarz, 'The Transportation of Slaves from Virginia, 1801-1865', Slavery and Abolition, 7 (1986), pp. 215-40.
26. Morrison to Bathurst, 28 January 1813, Parliamentary Papers (hereafter PP) 1814-15 (478) VII includes records giving details of transportation from four parishes which between them transported 134 people between 1802 and 1812.
27. Criminal records from twenty Jamaican parishes from 1814-18 include 424 transportees (CO 137/147). CO 140/112 Votes of the House of Assembly of Jamaica, 1825, Appendix 58 and 59, 30 November 1825, lists 133 enslaved men and women sentenced to transportation for capital crimes in twelve Jamaican parishes between 1821 and 1825.
28. On compensation see David Barry Gaspar, '"To Bring Their Offending Slaves to Justice": Compensation and Slave Resistance in Antigua, 1669-1773', Caribbean Quarterly, 30 (1984), pp. 45-59.
29. Report of the Commissioners of Enquiry into the Administration of Criminal and Civil Justice in the West Indies. First Report (Barbados, Tobago, Grenada), PP 1825 (157) XV, pp. 208-9;
30. Third Report (Honduras and Bahamas), PP 1829 (334) XXIV, pp. 70, 121;
31. Third Report (Antigua, Montserrat, Nevis, St. Christopher's, Virgin Islands), PP 1826-27 (36) XXIV, Appendix, pp. 91, 137 (Tortola).
32. BT 6/10 'Copies of Certain of the Evidence submitted to the Committee of Council for Trade and Plantations in the Course of their Enquiry into the State of the African Slave Trade', f. 6.
33. Adam Ferguson to Hugh Hamilton, 23 June 1805, Hamilton of Pinmore Muniments, GD 142/35/2, National Archives of Scotland.
34. PP 1829 (334) XXIV, pp. 70, 121.
35. PP 1826-7 (36) XXIV, Appendix, pp. 91, 137. Savage, 'Unwanted Slaves', p. 44.
36. PP 1826-7 (559) XXIV, pp. 80, 261. See also CO 137/167 Keane to Huskisson No. 50, 27 May 1828.
37. Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848 (London, 1988), pp. 349-50;
38. Aline Helg, Liberty and Equality in Caribbean Colombia, 1770-1835 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004), pp. 169-70.
39. CO 138/53 Goderich to Belmore No. 13, 31 Jan. 1831.
40. On trans-shipment of slaves from the British Caribbean to Spanish colonies, especially Louisiana, see Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill, NC, 2005), pp. 69-76.
41. PP 1830 (673) XXI, 'List of Persons confined in Gaols and Workhouses of Jamaica, 1829'. This document includes details of prisoners in fifteen of Jamaica's twenty workhouses.
42. CO 137/172 Belmore to Murray No. 69, 15 Oct. 1830.
43. CO 854/1 Circular to Colonial Governors, 12 Sept. 1822.
44. PP 1826-7 (559) XXIV, pp. 97, 125, 171.
45. C. F. E. Hollis Hallett, Forty Years of Convict Labour: Bermuda, 1823-1863 (Pembroke, Bermuda, 1999), p. 106.
46. Hallett also notes one case in which two soldiers convicted at a court martial in Barbados were sent to Bermuda to serve their sentence. Ibid., pp. 46-7.
47. CO 138/53 Goderich to Belmore No. 25, 2 April 1831, and Goderich to Belmore No. 26, 4 April 1831.
48. For examples of these discussions see CO 138/53 Goderich to Belmore No. 26, 4 April 1831; CO 138/62 Russell to Metcalfe No. 46, 16 Jan. 1840; CO 137/255 Metcalfe to Russell No. 203, 11 March 1841; CO 137/297 Grey to Grey No. 83, 7 Oct. 1848; CO 137/332 Bell to Labouchere No. 32, 9 Sept. 1856.
49. CO 854/1 Circular to Governors, 2 March 1835.
50. Duffield, 'From Slave Colonies', pp. 32-4;
51. Ian Duffield, '"Stated This Offence": High-density Convict Micro-narratives', in Lucy Frost and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart (eds), Chain Letters: Narrating Convict Lives (Melbourne, 2001), p. 127.
52. These were not the first convicts of African descent to arrive in Australia. The first and second fleets to New South Wales included several African and African-American individuals who had been convicted of crimes in Britain. See Ian Duffield, 'The Life and Death of "Black" John Goff: Aspects of the Black Convict Contribution to Resistance Patterns during the Transportation Era in Eastern Australia', Australian Journal of Politics and History, 33, 1 (1987), pp. 30-44;
53. Cassandra Pybus, Black Founders: The Unknown Story of Australia's First Black Settlers (Sydney, 2006);
54. Pybus, Epic Journeys.
55. CO 137/181 Belmore to Goderich No. 177, 22 March 1832.
56. See Appendix 1 to this article, and Duffield, 'From Slave Colonies';
57. Duffield, '"Stated This Offence"'.
58. Calculated by combining Duffield's list with the additional convicts I have found. These are minimum numbers.
59. The best study of the rebellion remains Mary Turner, Slaves and Missionaries: The Disintegration of Jamaican Slave Society, 1787-1834 (Urbana, IL, 1982).
60. Duffield, 'From Slave Colonies', p. 26, provides a list of ten definite and four possible transportees who were rebels. Of the four individuals Duffield identifies as possible rebels, William Buchanan was involved in the rebellion but Robert Stewart, Richard Lambert and Thomas Butler Bonner were not. CO 137/205 Sligo to Glenelg No. 232, 13 Dec. 1835.
61. Thomas August, 'Rebels with a Cause: The St. Joseph Mutiny of 1837', Slavery and Abolition, 12, 2 (1991), pp. 73-91. Torrence's trial record, along with the official letter requesting commutation of his sentence, is in WO 71/299.
62. Draft answer filed with CO 101/82 Beckles to Glenelg No. 4, 17 Sept. 1836.
63. CO 138/61 Glenelg to Smith No. 95, 23 May 1837. For the letter to the Governor of Trinidad see answer filed with CO 295/114 Hill to Glenelg No. 18, 25 Feb. 1837. See also CO 138/61 Glenelg to Smith No. 70, 30 March 1837.
64. Glenelg to the Governors of the West India Colonies, 25 May 1387, PP 521-I 1837, pp. 19-20. My emphasis. On the dispatch to the Cape governor, see V. C. Malherbe, 'Khoikhoi and the Question of Convict Transportation from the Cape Colony', South African Historical Journal, 17 (1986), p. 31.
65. For analysis of this idea see Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830-1867 (Cambridge, 2002);
66. Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938 (Baltimore, MD, 1992).
67. CO 138/61 Glenelg to Smith No. 140, 15 Sept. 1837.
68. A. G. L. Shaw, Convicts and the Colonies: A Study of Penal Transportation from Great Britain and Ireland to Australia and Other Parts of the British Empire (London, 1966), pp. 351-8.
69. Mackenzie toMontagu, Colonial Secretary, 22 July 1837, CSO 5/56/1222, Archives Office of Tasmania, and other letters in this folder. Thanks to Clare Anderson for these references.
70. Duffield, 'From Slave Colonies', p. 30.
71. Given the long history of what David N. Livingstone calls 'moral climatology', comments connecting climate and race cannot be read as straightforward factual statements. See David N. Livingstone, 'Race, Space and Moral Climatology: Notes toward a Genealogy', Journal of Historical Geography, 28, 2 (2002), pp. 159-80.
72. The comments here are unusual in focusing on the health problems faced by black people in temperate climates; of more frequent concern was the fate of white bodies in 'the tropics'. See, among many others, David Arnold, The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and European Expansion (Oxford, 1996), pp. 150-55;
73. Mark Harrison, '"The Tender Frame of Man": Disease, Climate, and Racial Difference in India and the West Indies, 1760-1860', Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 70, (1996), pp. 68-93.
74. Report of Captain J. W. Pringle on prisons in the West Indies, Part I, Jamaica. PP 1837-8 (596) XL, p. 12.
75. CO 884/1 No. III, Henry Taylor, Memorandum on the Course to be Taken with the West Indian Assemblies, 19 January 1839, Appendix 1, Resolutions of the Assembly of Jamaica, passed on the 24th of March, 1838, on the subject of the objections made by HM Govt to Acts recently enacted.
76. Jamaica Despatch and New Courant, 20 Nov. 1837.
77. For further discussion of this shift see Diana Paton, No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780-1870 (Durham, 2004), pp. 147-55.
78. CO 137/240 Minute by 'JS', on Metcalfe to Russell No. 28, 5 Dec. 1839.
79. Russell Smandych, '"To Soften the Extreme Rigor of Their Bondage": James Stephen's Attempt to Reform the Criminal Slave Laws of the West Indies, 1813-1833', Law and History Review, 23 (2005), pp. 537-88.
80. The suspicion that racial thinking underlay the decision is strengthened by comparison with transportation from other colonies where the population was understood to be racially 'other', including India, Mauritius and Hong Kong. See Clare Anderson, 'The Genealogy of the Modern Subject: Indian Convicts in Mauritius, 1814-1853', in Ian Duffield and James Bradley (eds), Representing Convicts: New Perspectives on Convict Forced Labour Migration (London, 1997), pp. 164-82;
81. Clare Anderson, 'Unfree Labour and Its Discontents: Transportation from Mauritius to Australia, 1825-1845', Australian Studies, 13 (1998), p. 117;
82. Christopher Munn, 'The Transportation of Chinese Convicts from Hong Kong, 1844-1858', Journal of the Canadian Historical Association/ Revue de la Société Historique du Canada, 8 (1997), pp. 113-45.
83. Such subsidies were, however, acceptable to the imperial government for compensating slaveholders, and for supporting the importation of indentured workers from Asia.
84. Catherine Hall, for instance, contrasts the 1830s, 'when the universal family of man looked as if it might be an achievable reality', with a later period characterized by 'a loss of confidence in the language of negro brotherhood and sisterhood... and an increasing turn to the language of race'. Hall, Civilising Subjects, p. 338.
85. See also Christine Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race (London, 1971);
86. Douglas A. Lorimer, Colour, Class, and the Victorians: English Attitudes to the Negro in the Mid-nineteenth Century (New York, 1978);
87. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York, 1995).
88. Phillippa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York, 2003), p. 3.
89. As V. C. Malherbe concludes, with regard to a similar decision relating to transportation from the Cape Colony, 'the idea seems to have been held that Australia should be the preserve of white settlement'. Malherbe, 'Khoikhoi', p. 35.
90. David Day, Claiming a Continent: A History of Australia (Sydney, 1996);
91. Kociumbas, The Oxford History of Australia: Volume 2, 1770-1860: Possessions, pp. 311-13.
92. Holt, Problem of Freedom.