Convicts’ last journey Down Under

TRANSPORTATION was a common form of penal punishment by the Westminister government for centuries, usually to the West Indies or the American colonies.
After American independence, a new destination was needed and Australia was chosen. Transportation of convicts was a lucrative business and one of those entrepreneurs was a gentleman named Duncan Dunbar. Dunbar entered the convict transportation trade in the 1840s and he owned almost a third of the ships sailing to Australia. One of his ships was named the Hougoumont, which had a very varied life. Built in Burma in 1852, it was named after a chateau overlooking the site of the battle of Waterloo. That name was temporarily changed when it was hired by France to act as a troop carrier for the Crimean War. Once that war ended it reverted to its former name and business.
Between 1790 and 1853 – the last year of direct transportation from Ireland – 30,000 men and 9,000 women were shipped to Australia for a minimum sentence of seven years. Many others followed family members to start a new life and some even deliberately committed crime in order to be transported.
Transportation directly from Ireland ended in effect in 1853. The sentence was abolished in 1857 but convicts sentenced to penal servitude could still be sent “beyond the seas”. While direct transportation from Ireland was ended Irish people who were in prison in England to be transported from there. This is what happened to a group of 63 Fenian prisoners in 1868. Following the Fenian rising of 1867, they were convicted in Ireland but jailed in England. They were among the group of convicts to be sent to Australia on board the ship the Hougoumont in October 1867. The ship carried a total of 279 convicts and 108 passengers and that was the last time that convicts were sent to Australia.
The passengers included soldiers and guards with their families together with regular emigrants.
There was an agreement in place between Britain and Western Australia that, after 1867, there would be no further shipments of convicts so the colonists where looking forward to the ship, not because of those it carried but because it would mark the end of the transportation of convicts.
The Irish men on board had been sentenced mainly for treason or mutinous activity and were transported for terms varying from five to 10 years. One gentleman, 24-year-old Thomas Fennell had been sentenced in July 1867 at the Clare Assizes in “Innis” to a term of 10 years for treason.
Many of the Fenian prisoners were highly educated so a number of records of the voyage still exist especially those of Fennell together with Denis Cashman, John Casey and John Boyle O’Reilly. O’Reilly later escaped from Australia and became a newspaper editor in Boston. They also published seven editions of a ships newspaper called The Wild Goose, which are still available.
When the transportation of convicts ended, the Hougoumont still sailed and was used for carrying regular passengers to Australia. Its most famous voyage, carrying the last group of convicts transported to Australia ended when it docked at Freemantle, Western Australia on January 9, 1868 – 144 years ago this week.