The Beginnings of the settlement in Australia were both doctrinaire and sordid. The world had a spare continent. The Dutch had first claim to it, but saw no profit in it. The claim next in validity was England's, founded on the voyage of the Roebuck. She showed no signs of wanting the country either. Cook's discovery and accurate charting of the east coast brought the continent into focus. It ceased to be legendary, it was real, England had her navy's word for it. Cook, to be on the safe side, had formally taken possession of half the continent in the name of the Crown. Everything was shipshape and Bristol fashion, but still England found no use for her large and distant possession. It was a pity to waste it, but what could she do with it?

There were theorists who answered the question. As early as 1748, when only the west coast was known, John Campbell proposed a colony from which, drawing on his imagination and exaggerating the proximity of the Spice Islands, he expected great advantages. No one was impressed. In 1756 a Frenchman, Charles de Brosses, in one of those "instructive and entertaining" volumes of voyages so much the fashion in the eighteenth century, outlined with admirable logic a settlement on the Australian coast that would rid France of her felons, her foundlings, her beggars, vagabonds, and all other enemies of society. They would, he opined, support themselves in the new land and at home the worthy citizens would be unhampered by the expense and depredations of their useless or criminal brethren.

John Callander translated de Brosses into English and added some touches of his own. He moved the locale of the Colony of Disgracefuls to New Britain as handier for the spice trade. Where these visionaries found evidence to support their theory that successful and profitable colonies could be founded by social misfits on a coast that all reports, except one, had described as barren, waterless, and dangerous, it is difficult to conceive.

A slightly more credible plan was put forward in 1783 by James Maria Matra, who had been a midshipman in Endeavour with Cook. He at least had seen the east coast of the continent and his scheme was supported by Sir Joseph Banks. Matra belonged to a loyalist American family and conceived the idea of finding a new home in Australia for British subjects driven out by the War of Independence. He gilded his theme:

By the discoveries and enterprise of our officers many new countries have been found which know no sovereign, and that hold out the most enticing allurements to European adventurers. None are more inviting than New South Wales. . . . The climate and soil are so happily adapted to produce every various and valuable production of Europe, and of both the Indies, that with good management and a few settlers, in twenty or thirty years they might cause a revolution in the whole system of European commerce and secure to England a monopoly of some part of it, and a very large share in the whole.

One senses here a certain jealous of the Dutch. For good measure and to popularize his plan, Matra threw in flax of such exquisite delicacy that it could resemble cambric or silk, a trade in woollen goods with Japan, a depot for furs from China and Russia, and an outlet for convicts who, with Chinese and Otaheitans, would provide the labour necessary for the new plantation state. Expense he airily waved aside, tools could be drawn from Ordnance stores, the Navy had to keep ships in commission in any case, and they could pay for the voyages by picking up timber in New Zealand for spars. The plentiful soil would do the rest. Three thousand pounds would cover the whole expense. He also pointed out that it would be better for migrants to go to a British possession than to America. The only paragraph of all these that appealed to Lord Sydney at the Home Office to whom it was addressed was that regarding convicts. "Give them," wrote Matra, "a few acres of ground as soon as they arrive in New South Wales, in absolute property, with what assistance they may want to till them. Let it be here remarked that they cannot fly from the country, that they have no temptation to theft, and that they must work or starve." This sank into the official mind and can be traced in future policy.

Captain (later Admiral) Sir George Young also had a plan, like but less restricted than Matra's because he had never visited Australia. Judging from size and position, he took it for granted that New South Wales would produce "all kinds of spice . . . fine oriental cotton, indigo, coffee, tobacco, with every species of the sugar-cane, also tea, silk, and madder". Flax, of course, there would be to supply the current scarcity; convicts could be taken out as ballast in East Indiamen on their way to China and labour could also be brought in from China and the Friendly Islands. "The very heavy expence Government is annually put to for transporting and otherwise punishing the felons, together with the facility of their return, are evils long and much lamented." (You are telling me!--or words to that effect--remarked that dry and precise man, Lord Sydney.)

"Here is an asylum open that will considerably reduce the first and for ever prevent the latter." Again Lord Sydney was only interested in the disposal of convicts, but he absorbed the idea of using East Indiamen (by the Company's Charter New South Wales was within its sphere of trade monopoly) and, in an edited form, the importation of Friendly Islanders.

These schemes, however influential their source, would have fallen on stony ground but for a most uncomfortable by-product of the American War of Independence. In the days of the Old Dominion England had got rid of her felons very easily and inexpensively by shipping them off to the plantations of Virginia. At first the Government paid contractors 5 a head to carry them across the Atlantic. Later it made a better bargain. The contractors made their profit at the American end. The services of a skilled man for the term of his punishment were sold for from £15 to £20. Women brought from £8 to £10 each. This showed a good profit, although the death-rate on the journey was heavy. There was no supervision either of the contractors (that is, the ship-owners) or of the masters. The convicts were slaves in all but name. Once they were handed over to the contractor the Government took no further interest in them, save devoutly to hope that they would never return. In the seventeenth century, as a matter of indulgence and to meet a scarcity of labour, prisoners might be pardoned on condition that they worked for five years in some of the King's plantations. At the end of that time they would be granted land, again on a condition, this time that they did not return to England without the King's licence. This more humane form of banishment was still on the Statute Book in 1718 when an Act of Parliament (4 Geo. I, c. 2) entitled "An Act for the further preventing robbery, burglary, and other felonies, and for the more effectual transportation of felons and unlawful exporters of wool etc." superseded it. The "effectualness" of this lay in the complete handing over of the convict to the ship-owner who undertook to take him out of the country. The land grant was quietly forgotten, the embargo on return was left to take care of itself as it was sufficiently difficult of achievement to prevent it from being an issue.

Everything was nicely settled when the American War of Independence ruined the contractors' business and left England with a fast accumulating number of felons on her hands. Prisoners had been sent to America at the rate of about a thousand a year. These, added to the short-term offenders, soon filled English jails to overflowing. In 1775 hulks (that is, ships no longer seaworthy) moored in the Thames were put into commission as prisons. They were even more unhealthy and depressing than the prisons on land. In that year, too, and in the next 746 convicts were transported to Gambia in West Africa as an experiment. It was an immediate and terrible failure; 334 died, 271 deserted and most probably perished, and of the remainder the Home Office had no record. These figures, being made public, aroused even the callous conscience of the day.

The nuisance continued to grow, public health was threatened by jail-fever and other maladies, the moral health of the community was also threatened by the depravity of prisoners released at the end of their sentence. Public opinion demanded that something be done. It was wrong that the just should suffer on account of the unjust. Hardened rogues must be sent out of the country, but not to equatorial Africa. That was murder, and a justice-loving people could not condone it. In March 1786 the Mayor and Corporation of London were petitioning the King for relief from this evil. They represented public opinion in general when they wrote:

That your petitioners humbly conceive that this dreadful accumulation [about 4000 habitual criminals] is alone sufficient to account for all the evils that are so heavily felt and so justly complained of, both as to the overcrowded state of the gaols and the increase of crimes and of offenders.

To what extent the mischiefs that are so severely felt already, and the fatal consequences so justly apprehended, may be carried by a longer continuance of so rapid and alarming an accumulation of convicts within the kingdom, no human wisdom can foresee.

William Eden, Lord Auckland, in his scholarly Discourse on Banishment ( 1787) enunciated the legal principles behind transportation and revealed unconsciously the general social attitude towards the criminal. He was an outlaw and, having offended society, could expect no mercy. Punishment was a mixture of vengeance with a forlorn hope of deterring other potential criminals. Any idea of reform was only a pious gesture. Lord Auckland himself was not altogether in favour of transportation. He thought felons could be used more usefully at home, in the salt works and in mines, on dangerous enterprises when it would be wasteful to expend a valuable citizen, for experiments involving risk or to exchange them in Tunis and Algiers for the redemption of Christian slaves.

. . . every effect of banishment, as practiced in England [he wrote] is often beneficial to the criminal, and always injurious to the community. The kingdom is deprived of a subject and renounces all the emoluments of his future existence. He is merely transferred to a new country; distant indeed, but as fertile, as happy, as civilized, and in general as healthy as that which he hath offended.

It is not clear what country Lord Auckland had in mind, possibly the Riviera. It could not have been New South Wales. There was actually nowhere left, unpossessed, distant, reasonably healthy, except in the Pacific.

Lord Auckland's Discourse is particularly interesting in that it illustrates the prevailing eighteenth-century attitude not only towards criminals but in general. There is a dry and polished hardness about it, a touch of cant as when he refers to "the devoted convict", an eye to the main chance in his so reasonable contention that a man who has put himself outside the pale by breaking the law should be turned somehow or other to profit. All the schemes for colonization of New South Wales already quoted have a neat, often unreasonably reasonable, profit motif, supported by deductions that smack of medieval dialectic. . .