[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by Aliantha

What's wrong with admitting your country was also the destination of convicts?

Nothing. The fact is many of the people that came here were not criminals only because they got away before they could be apprehended.

My problem is with the numbers and the dubious claim that America was, or even contained, penal colonies.

Convicts were sent to nine of the American settlements. According to one estimate, about 2000 had been sent for many years annually. Dr. Lang, after comparing various estimates, concludes that the number sent might be about 50,000 altogether.”

Then you start getting into the evidence, actual happenings.

After the defeat of Charles II. at Worcester, his soldiers who were seized on that occasion were disposed of to merchants, and at least sixteen hundred were thus conveyed to America. The Parliamentary fleet in which they were transported sailed first to Barbadoes. . . . We have certain information of the arrival of only one hundred and fifty Scotch servants in the Colony when the fleet arrived in 1651.

They don't know if it was 1600 or 150? Or exactly which Country (colony) they went to? Plus the fact that they weren't criminals at all.

As Bristol, according to Macaulay, was specially infamous for kidnappers, so it shared largely in an allied branch of business, the traffic in convicts. Hunt, the historian of that city, remarks (p. 142), “Toward the end of the seventeenth century, Bristol aldermen and justices used to transport criminals and sell them as slaves or put them to work on their plantations in the West Indies.” A writer in Notes and Queries3 holds this Bristol industry to have arisen still earlier, saying, “When Cromwell [and William, as well] had conquered Ireland, the Irish officers sought safety on the continent, while the rank and file were pressed to enlist in foreign service. As many as 34,000 men were thus hurried into exile. Widows and orphans the government shipped wholesale to the West Indies — the boys for slaves — the women and girls for mistresses to the English sugar-planters. The merchants of Bristol — slave-dealers in the days of Strongbow — sent over their agents to hunt down and ensnare the wretched people. Orders were given them on the governors of jails and workhouses, for ‘boys who were of an age to labor and women who were marriageable, or not past breeding.’”4 In the foregoing notice of Bristol exports, the words “West Indies” probably mean the best American market, no matter where.

I don't see many criminals there.

After 1727 no printed notice of transports is known to the present writer till the Gentleman’s Magazine was started in 1731. The record there on Tuesday, March 9,1 is: “Upwards of a hundred convicts were removed from Newgate to be transported to America.” Other periodicals gave more particulars. Thus in the London Magazine of 1732 (I. 368) we read: “October 26, sixty-eight men and fifty women felons convict were taken from Newgate, and put on board a lighter to be carried down the river, to be shipped on board the Cæsar off Deptford, for transportation to Virginia.”

"Gentleman's Magazine" is their historical reference? Will future generations discover we were anally probed by aliens as reported in the National Inquirer?

Then there a scraps of information on individual groups of "convicts", a surprizingly (to me) large percentage of them women... breeders, I suppose. But most of these people were "convicted" of being poor or having a bad attitude.

There were certainly criminals deported because they could be sold as slaves for a profit rather than hanged at the crowns expense. But the percentage of real criminals was minicule. And more importantly, there were no penal colonies.:p