Sam Leith Sam Leith

Mutiny, mayhem and murder

Before the establishment of penal settlements in Australia, British convicts were transported to brutal slave garrisons on the West African coast. Sam Leith describes this disastrous experiment

issue 30 July 2011

Nothing more gladdens this reader’s heart than a book that opens up an interesting and underexplored historical byway. Well, perhaps one thing: a book that opens up a historical byway that turns out to be a complete catastrophe. On that count, A Merciless Place more than delivers. Here is one of the great colonial cock-ups.

It all started with a question that resonates to this day. When your jails are overcrowded academies of crime, and the respectable public lives in fear of what it imagines to be a violent criminal underclass, what do you do with your surplus convicts? Ken Clarke not yet having been thought of, conventional opinion in the 18th century was: ship them overseas and let them be somebody else’s problem. Yes, it hurt. Yes, it worked. For years, Britain had been cheerfully exporting to America such criminals as it didn’t care to imprison and couldn’t quite bear to hang.

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