Why The Convicts Were Sent To Australia

From the 17th century until the 19th century, almost twelve million Africans were brought to the New World against their will to perform back-breaking labour under terrible conditions. The rationalizations and defences given for slavery and the slave trade were absurd and self-serving. Slavery was a truly barbaric, and those who think that they can control what another group of people eat, where they sleep, whether they are to live or die, or even whether they are to be bought or sold, are acting on a totally inhumane level.

The Slave Ship by Marcus Rediker is a great fiction novel that describes the horrifying experiences of Africans, seamen, and captains on their journey through the Middle Passage. The Middle Passage marked the water way in the Atlantic Ocean between Africa and the Americas. The use of slaves provided a great economy for the European countries due to the fact that these African slaves provided free labor while cultivating sugar cane in the Caribbean and America. Rediker describes the slave migration by saying, “There exists no account of the mechanism for history’s greatest forced migration, which was in many ways the key to an entire phase of globalization” (10). This tells us that African enslavement to the Americas causes a complete

It was a hard life for most people that were on the first fleet going to Australia. Convicts could either start a new life or leave back to there home. Officers could leave whenever they want or they could stay and the aborigines had no choice, but to move or be killed. The settlement of Australia was both a beginning and end for convicts.

The slave trade in the North American colonies began to grow in the 1600s. The African slave trade sourced their slaves from many different West African villages and countries. The business of slavery was a growing and profitable field, not only for the slavers, but also for the slaveholders. With the decrease of indentured servants, settlers in the English colonies looked for a new source of labor to satisfy their growing labor demands. The next source was Africa. “By the 1690s slaves outnumbered indentured servants four to one” (45). Europeans largely disregarded the ethical dilemma posed by slavery due to the European view of Africans and their culture as uncivilized, foreign, and heathen (44). The largest forced migration in history (44)

In the United States, slavery had an overwhelming impact on their political, social, and economical. Jamestown, Virginia in 1619, the first African slaves were brought into the United States. Reasons were because the tobacco, sugar, rice, and coffee fields were expanding which led to increasing the demand for labor. The Atlantic slave trade was an inhuman systematic importation of slaves between the African traders, American planters, and the European merchants bargaining over human lives which led to the Middle Passage. 1675-1775, the slaves were the backbone of monoculture labor and so it was put into law to keep the Africans as slaves. “So prevalent was this Italian-operated slave trade that the word “slave” was derived from the word “Slav,” name for people from Slavic countries” (Williams 3). In both seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the African-American slaves helped build the economic foundations of the new nation.

An estimated seventeen million men, women, and children were enslaved and transported from Africa to the West Indies by Europeans between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Before these individuals became slaves, there were indentured servants. Between the colonial era and Revolutionary War many changes in the practice of labor were made. Expansion of slavery throughout America brought about different conditions of slave life and Paternalism. Slavery in America was very different before and after the year 1790; these changes greatly affected the conditions in which these individuals lived and are worth analyzing.

To really show the horrendous conditions that the slaves endured, the author includes a 1787 replication drawing of the slave ship Brooks. Built in 1781 with a lower deck intended to accommodate 294 slaves, giving each slave a space comparable to the size of a coffin. Adult males were allocated a space six feet long and fifteen inches wide and allowing even less space for adult women, boys, and girls. The height of the same area was just five feet, and did not include any toilet facilities for the slaves. In most cases, the captains would load double the number of slaves their ships were designed for leading to even worse conditions onboard with more mouths to feed but not enough provisions to compensate. Those slaves who died during the journey through the Middle Passage were simply thrown overboard, where their bodies were eaten by ravenous sharks.

The Trans-Atlantic slave trade was “responsible for the forced migration of between 12 - 15 million people from Africa to the Western Hemisphere from the middle of the 15th century to the end of the 19th century.” (Edser). Slaves from Africa, that were transported through the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, were captured or purchased, held in confinement for months, and then shipped on large cargo vessels, where they ran the risk of acquiring multiple diseases, scurvy, and malnutrition. These people were not treated like humans, but instead animals. They were naked, shackled together with chains, stored on the floors with little to no room to move because of the stuffed conditions. With these horrid conditions, which lasted a few months, there would be no surprise that when their freedom became lessened, their natural reaction was to

From 1619 to 1640 the slaves that were sold in Jamestown earned their freedom by working for the European settlers. These slaves were able to have some of the freedoms and liberties that the new settlers had. These slaves were taken from their homeland and were brought over were smaller in number, but in 1650 as plantations began to develop, the demand for slaves grew. “Many of the slaves taken in the transatlantic trade were from the states on or near the west coast of Africa.” With the demand for slavery increasing the chiefs and traders began raiding small towns and villages taking people at will. Millions of Africans were torn from their families and deported to the America and sold as slaves. (Portcities Bristol)

The Atlantic Slave Trade lasted between 1450 and 1750 and drastically impacted the lives of both European and African people. During this time, the Europeans, such as the British, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Dutch, traveled to Africa in search of labor workers. In total, over twelve million slaves were taken, mainly because they workers to make money, but it also had to do with their race, religion – as they were not Christian – and to civilize them because the Europeans did not believe that they were humans. Due to these European beliefs, the Europeans saw themselves as the most powerful group and viewed slave trade as a business. The Africans, on the other hand, had a harder time transitioning into slavery. Many of them were taken from their homes and forced to accept a new life working as a slave. These events did not come without many sacrifices from the African people. One of the major reasons the slave trade was so expansive is due to the low life expectancy of the slaves after their capture. While the Europeans believed that they were helping the African culture, as well as themselves, the African society as a whole suffered the most.

Most of all Australians living in Australia today have once been apart of the movement of people, some may have migrated here some may have moved here millions of years ago but one fascinating area of study is the movement of convicts. Convicts that adventured out to Australia in 1978 to 1798 was a British idea to colonies Australia and fixed the problem’s in England at the time. These issues were brought upon by the Industrial revolution, as rising prison population led to the government at the time resolving it, by the transportation of criminals to Australia. This is were the story of colonization of our great country begins. So welcome to the Convicts exhibition were we will look at primary and secondary sources that pushed and pulled

Convicts that had education were put into jobs where they could use their minds or work for the government whereas convicts who didn’t have the access to education were put into jobs where they took part in building bridges, hospitals and other public facilities. (These people were usually men)

Until 1782, English convicts were transported to America to work. However, in 1783 the American War of Independence ended. America refused to accept any more convicts so England had to find somewhere else to send their prisoners. Transportation to New South Wales was the solution. Thefts such as theft of one shilling (the average day's pay of a working person) were punished by being shipped to New South Wales

The Atlantic slave trade was a historical period that started in the 15th century and the slave trade was abolished in the year 1807. The nature of the Atlantic slave trade could be described as brutal because of the conditions that the captured Africans were forced to endure both during the journey from Africa to the Americas and their time on the plantations. During the journey from Africa to the Americas the captured Africans were put into the ship’s hold and kept on small shelves with no ventilation or anywhere to defecate.

Slavery was thought to be a solution to the British Colonial Empire due to Europeans’ history in enslaving people for centuries. Additionally, the Bible also played an influential role since slavery was approved in it. This all led to slavery first transpiring in the New World when African immigrants were brought as captives to the colonies (Jamestown being the first) to work on tobacco plantations. In fact, Virginia was the first British colony that legally authorized the practice of slavery, in 1661. However, this was linked to the development of the Atlantic Slave Trade, or the Triangular Trade, when the most valuable trades involved enslaved people and products of slave labor. The lion's share of hijacked Africans weren't at that point slaves in Africa. They were free individuals who were seized to give the work that the European forces required to maintain colonies in the Americas. Transoceanic slave exchange included the transportation between 10 million and 12 million subjugated Africans over the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. It was the second of three phases of the triangular exchange. Many also Africans brought with them their languages, art, music, and other imperative components of their culture. At this point in time, there was a large growth in enslaved Africans. Slavery