Mutiny, mayhem and murder

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.

Among other inconveniences, however, the American Revolution more or less put the kibosh on that racket. So with London’s jails overflowing, and prison hulks offering an agreeably inhumane but essentially limited solution, His Majesty’s Government started casting around for somewhere else to send its undesirables.

As we all know, it finally settled — and with some success — on Australia. Emma Christopher, however, turns her attention to Britain’s abortive first attempt: a series of experiments in the second half of the 18th century with sending convicts to West Africa. Initially, they went as soldiers — in the form of the 101st and 102nd Independent Companies — and later there were schemes to send them as labourers or colonists.