Bound for America: A Profile of British Convicts Transported to the Colonies, 1718-1775

D-8. URING the eighteenth century, transportation became Great Britain's foremost criminal punishment. At a time when men felt their lives and property to be threatened daily by crime, the idea of exiling felons to the American colonies carried enormous appeal. Criminals had been banished from time to time during the seventeenth century, but after Parliament passed the Transportation Act in I 7I8, assize and quarter sessions courts made banishment the leading penalty for property offenses, the most common variety of crime. In some jurisdictions over half of all convicted criminals drew sentences of transportation. At the Old Bailey, London's chief criminal court, more than two-thirds of all felons from I7i8 to I775 were ordered for exile. By contrast, only about one in every six received the death penalty. Consigned to merchants, most transports were shipped to Maryland and Virginia and sold as servants. Draining the Nation of its offensive Rubbish, without taking away their Lives, was how a I 7 3 I pamphleteer characterized the primary aim of British penal policy. Transportation, noted another, entailed sending annually abroad certain people, who only hurt society at home.' The English were not alone in trying to purge society of threatening