CHAPTER IV
THE PLAN OF A COLONY IN BOTANY BAY
Australian colonization was penal in origin.
The
American t colonies were substitutes for prison ;
In 1 78 1 a Frenchman named N * * * wrote that Captain Cook had sailed to the Pacific in order that the loss of an English empire in one hemisphere might be retrieved by the discovery in the other hemisphere of men tame enough to bear the English yoke ! 1 Nothing was further from our thoughts at that date. When the war with America (1775-83) was over, and America was lost, faint echoes of this idea may be traced ; but this idea was not even the decisive motive of the expedition to Botany Bay in 1787. If we may judge by the literature, debates, and dispatches of the time, that expedition had only one motive, which was to punish criminals in the way in which they had been punished for the last 170 years, and it was organized by the Home Secretary in his capacity of chief jailor.
In Tudor times work was looked on as a cure for crime ; and the galleys were tried and banishment threatened. 2 In Stuart times vagrants and felons were sent as serfs to our American colonies by way of penalty or of ' conditional pardon'. This system began in 1618; 3 and in 1664 and 1665 the judges directed that in order that such persons might not be ' perpetual slaves ' indentures should be made whereby they should work for four years as pure serfs ; for three years as serfs for wages, and then be free, but might not return. 4 Sometimes land was offered in lieu of wages.
1 N * * *, Oeuvres Posthumes (1781), vol. i. La Découverte Australe, P- iL •
2 39 Eliz., c. 4, s. 4; Camden Soc. Pub., vol. xii. (1840) p. 116.
3 John A. Doyle, English in America (1882), ch. xiii.
4 Sir J. Kelyng's Reports, pp. 4, 45.