Transportation

So they unearthed some of the foundations of the building and they discovered all sorts of stuff, including ratacombs, or places rats had hollowed out for their dens. They're on display in the first room in the museum, along with my bic biro, which I accidentally dropped onto the exhibit.

Bugger.

Anyway, on with the story. We had loads of convicts in Britain, some were proper criminals (you know, murderers) and some were petty thieves stealing hunks of meat to feed their families in the manner of a black Richard Curtis comedy. They were all treated the same, sentenced to prison hulks moored on the Thames and in Portsmouth and Plymouth or else sent to the colonies in North America.

Then we lost the American war of independence, so we needed a new colony, preferable somewhere strategic, close to the trade routes and whaling seas of Asia. Hence Australia, or New South Wales was proposed and we started sending our convicts to Botany Bay.

(Australia, you know, that famous Terra Nullius (empty land) as the first explorers labelled it. Empty, except for a sophisticated indiginous population. I suppose you could say we stole it from them, making us the biggest load of thieves in the running).

The painting is a 1790's caricature of what the middle classes thought convicts looked like. You know, all wonky eyes and crabby legs. Come to think of it, some of the Aussies do look a bit like this, especially once you get away from the cities. The bloke who painted it later nicked a load of stuff from one of the big galleries in London, but got off on a technicality so avoided transportation himself.

Hmm

It took about 250 days for the first fleet to sail from Portsmouth to Port Jackson (Sydney Harbour), including 60 days in stopovers, during which they filled up on fruit, Captain Arthur Phillip, commander of the fleet, being keen for the convicts to get some proper food down their necks because the British government was paying him a bonus for every man delivered alive and well to the new colony.